Solitaire

by Masterton, Graham

  Kitty laid down her knife, wiped her hands on her apron, and went into the butler’s pantry to find it. Barney waited in the middle of the blue and white tiled kitchen floor, his shoulder muscles crowded with tension, while Gentleman Jack and John Gcumisa stood silently staring at him, their tea steaming in white enamel mugs, and all the paraphernalia of the private evening which Barney had so suddenly interrupted lying on the table all around them: buttons, thread, playing-cards, matches, and a blue paper packet of tobacco.

  ‘Here,’ said Kitty, laying the key in Barney’s hand. Barney looked at it, and then squeezed it in between tightly closed fingers.

  ‘Everything’s all right, Mr Blitz?’ asked Kitty, although she posed the question in such an oblique tone that anybody else would have thought it was a statement of simple fact.

  ‘Thank you, Kitty,’ said Barney. ‘Just – get on with what you have to do. You too, Jack.’

  ‘Yes, sir, Mr Blitzboss.’

  As Barney went to the door, Kitty said, gently, ‘I saw the Reverend Ransome this morning, Mr Blitz. I used to know him, when he first came to Klipdrift.’

  ‘Yes?’

  Kitty kept her head down, wrapped in its black and red scarf. Her gold hoop earrings swung in the lamplight. ‘He didn’t tell no tales, sir. But he explained to me why he came here. And he said he was very sorry that things worked out the way they did.’

  Barney laid his hand on Kitty’s shoulder. ‘I think I understand what you’re trying to tell me,’ he said. ‘But you know that I’ll appreciate it more if you keep it to yourself.’

  ‘Yes, sir, I know that.’

  Barney climbed the curved stairs to the upper landing again, holding the key to the bedroom door so tightly that it made a scarlet impression on his palm. Before he tried to open the door he looked down at his hand and thought: what would a palmist make of this? The key line? The line that showed which doors would open and which would close? Which doors would bring happiness and which would bring tears?

  The worst part of it was, he already suspected why Sara was refusing to let him in. If Nareez had overheard his conversation this morning with Mr Ransome, there was no question at all that she would have told Sara all about it. And if Sara had believed that he still loved a Griqua woman, a woman who had given birth to his only child, her English sense of moral indignation would already have been stirred beyond any hope of reasonable recovery. Sara had been brought up, like all good colonial girls, to be a brick in times of native attack or malaria, but a swooner and a locker of doors in times of marital difficulty.

  ‘Sara!’ Barney shouted. ‘I’ve got a key and I’m coming in!’

  He unlocked the door, and pushed it. Sara had wedged one of the bedroom chairs under the handle but not firmly enough; and Barney had only to tussle against it with his shoulder, grunting, and the chair fell away. Then he threw the door wide, and burst in.

  Sara was sitting up in bed, the sheets clutched to her breasts, her eyes wide with hysterical indignation and fright. Next to her sat Nareez, her hair wound up into a calico mobcap, equally wide-eyed, and equally frightened.

  ‘You’ve no right!’ shrilled Sara.

  ‘No right?’ Barney demanded. ‘I built this house out of my own sweat and blood. And you’re trying to tell me that I have no right?’

  ‘Not after what Nareez heard you saying today, no. You brought me heah under the falsest of pretences. You gave me to believe that you loved me. You lied to me. You tricked me. And I believed you.’

  ‘Oh, sure,’ said Barney. ‘It was all a practical joke. I travelled more than five hundred miles to Durban, and more than five hundred miles back, just to get a cheap laugh. You stun me sometimes, Sara. You stun me! Yesterday, you were arguing against our sleeping together. Today, you’re convinced that I was lying to you when I said that I loved you. What do you want? What do you want me to say? I thought I said it all already in the church, and in the temple. I said I wanted you for my wife, if you can remember, that I was going to love you and cherish you from this day forth. Cherish! What a promise that is! And now you’re trying to tell me that you don’t believe me? That you don’t think I actually meant it?’

  Sara, her voice shaky, said, ‘You told that clergyman that you were still in love with a woman called Natalia.’

  ‘Who told you that?’ snapped Barney.

  ‘Well,’ said Sara, petulantly, ‘Nareez.’

  ‘Nareez,’ Barney nodded. ‘The kibitzer from Bengal.’

  ‘She wanted to protect me, that’s all,’ Sara protested. ‘You can’t possibly blame her for that. She was passing the day-room, so she told me, and she couldn’t help overhearing.’

  Barney walked around the bed until he was only inches away from Nareez. The amah pulled the bedspread right up to her chin, and stared at him in hypnotised alarm.

  ‘I did know a woman called Natalia,’ said Barney, much more quietly, ‘and, a very long time ago, I did love her. Didn’t you have other loves? How about your old Etonian?’

  Sara looked across at him sharply, but then she flinched, and looked away. ‘I wasn’t to know that you would come back for me, was I? And I certainly wasn’t to know that poor Trevor would die.’

  ‘No, quite,’ said Barney. ‘But just like it was for you with Trevor, that’s the way it was for me with Natalia. Everything else you’ve heard about it is gossip. Eavesdropping, maliciously misreported.’

  ‘You can’t say that!’ babbled Nareez. ‘What you are saying is slander! What I heard was quite by accident, from open door. If you do not closet yourself in secrecy, then you must expect people to listen. This is open house.’

  ‘You think it’s an open house, do you?’ Barney demanded. ‘You think you can wander where you please, listening in to private conversations, and meddling in other people’s marriages?’

  ‘Miss Sara is not other people. Miss Sara is my charge.’

  ‘Don’t interrupt me, you fat Indian shtunk. Just get out of my bed and don’t let me catch you in here again.’

  ‘Barney, this is awful!’ Sara exclaimed. ‘Poor Nareez was only –’

  ‘Get the hell out of my bed!’ Barney bellowed. ‘Get your big fat smelly carcass out of my bed!’

  Nareez, incensed, threw back the covers, picked up her lopsided silk slippers, and pushed past Barney to the door. ‘You haven’t heard the very last of this, you devil!’ she cried, wagging her finger at him. ‘You certainly haven’t heard the last! I know what I heard in the day-room! I know what you said, about loving that girl! Well, Miss Sara is my charge! Ever since birth I have nursed Miss Sara, and not you nor anybody will hurt her! I’ll see to that!’

  Barney took a deep breath. ‘I want you to leave my bedroom, Nareez,’ he said, in a voice that trembled like a telegraph wire under gradually increasing tension. ‘I want you to leave my bedroom and I don’t want you ever – ever – to set foot in here again. And there’s something else, before you go. I never want you to call Mrs Blitz “Miss Sara” again. Her name, to you, is Mrs Blitz. And – wait – there’s one thing more. I want you to go downstairs and tell Kitty to come up here and change the sheets. Tell her they were inadvertently soiled.’

  Nareez glard at Barney with hatred. In her mob cap and her voluminous nightgown, with her long black braid hanging down her back, Barney thought that she looked like an enraged caliph out of the Arabian nights. She slammed the door behind her, and left Barney and Sara alone.

  Barney walked across to the bureau, unfastening his gold and diamond cufflinks.

  ‘You’re undressing?’ asked Sara, rather shrilly.

  ‘You prefer me to get into bed with my clothes on?’

  ‘I prefer you not to get into bed at all.’

  Barney made a deliberately patient performance of putting his cufflinks and collar-stud back in their red velvet box, and closing the drawer of the bureau. He could see Sara in the mirror, sitting upright in bed with her arms crossed over her breasts. The oil-lamp beside the bed lit her face in an odd
way, and made her look different. She could have been her own sister; or a stand-in from the theatre.

  ‘If you must know, Sara,’ said Barney, enunciating his words with exaggerated care, ‘I am extremely tired. I have been talking business most of the evening with Harold, and all I want to do right now is get into bed and sleep.’

  ‘Nareez was right, wasn’t she?’ asked Sara.

  ‘Right about what? Nareez is never right about anything. She’s a fussy, jealous, stupid, greedy, superstitious harridan.’

  ‘How can you say such a thing?’

  ‘I can say it because it’s self-evident. Ever since we’ve been married, she’s done nothing but interfere. She’s always trying to make me look as if I’m some kind of lustful monster, intent on ruining your virtue. And the worst of it is, you let her.’

  ‘I have to listen to her, Barney. She’s my amah. She loves me.’

  ‘Only children have amahs, Sara. You’re quite old enough to look after yourself, without the help of some ignorant platke-macher. If I had anything to do with it at all, I’d pack up her bags and send her back to Durban on the next waggon. Biryani and all.’

  Sara watched Barney as he unbuttoned his underwear with an expression that he could not quite understand. It was more concerned than remote, and yet Barney was not at all certain if the concern she was feeling was for herself, or for Nareez, or for him. There was also an almost imperceptible tightening of the muscles around her eyes that reminded him of the way a young child looks when she anticipates a smack.

  As he stepped out of his drawers and stood in front of her naked, it suddenly occurred to him that she might be afraid of him. Not afraid that he would hit her, or abuse her. But simply afraid of his ambition, and his Jewishness, and his growing self-assurance in a world which, to her, was unfamiliar and uncomfortable.

  He was partly right. Sara came from a family that had brought her up in the traditional English colonial manner, and while she had been excited at the thought of marrying a man who had trekked five hundred miles to find her, and of living in a grand mansion on the brink of a diamond mine, she was quickly discovering that her romantic fantasy had betrayed her. Life in Kimberley with Barney Blitz was not going to be anything but difficult, isolated, and deprived. Barney was rich, all right, but what on earth was the use of being rich when there were no luxuries to be bought, no theatres to go to, no smart parties, no hunts, and none of the feverish social intrigue that made colonial life so absorbing. What was life without five o’clock tea, and supper dances, and the regular arrival on one of Papa’s steamers of the season’s modes from London? How could she survive without coddled eggs, and opera? And how she missed those evening chats with her mother, over hot chocolate and mint cake!

  Her feeling of alienation from her new surroundings made her feel alienated from Barney, too. Watching him talk to heavyweight diamond dealers like Harold Feinberg and wild-eyed geologists like Edward Nork, seeing him barking out orders to the thirty mud-caked kaffirs who dug with picks and shovels at the Blitz Brothers’ diamond claims, all this placed him in a strange and rough environment which Sara felt she could never possibly enter.

  And what was more, as he stood naked in front of her, watching her with an expression which, to her, was just as incomprehensible as her expression was to him, there was the most significant symbol of his strangeness. His penis, with its bare, plum-coloured glans; the seal of God.

  ‘I think I’d rather sleep alone tonight,’ said Sara. ‘Please … if you don’t mind too much.’

  ‘You still believe that Nareez was right?’ Barney asked her.

  ‘I don’t know. I’m confused. I just want to lie here on my own and work it out for myself.’

  Barney sat down on the edge of the bed. Sara, keeping the covers tight under her arm, turned away from him.

  ‘Sara, there’s something wrong between us, isn’t there?’ asked Barney, his voice as soft as the shadows that surrounded them.

  ‘What could possibly be wrong?’

  ‘I don’t know. That’s what I want to find out. I’m beginning to believe that perhaps you don’t love me any more. Sometimes I find myself thinking that maybe you never loved me at all.’

  Sara whispered, ‘Do you love me?’

  ‘Of course I do. You know it.’

  ‘And you’re sure you don’t love anybody else? No girls called Natalia?’

  Barney laid his hand on her shoulder, but she resisted his attempt to pull her towards him. ‘You’re my wife, Sara, that’s the most important thing.’

  ‘Is it? None of the colonial staff seemed to let their wives get in their way when they went chasing black women in Durban.’

  ‘I’m not like that. And, in any case, I love you.’

  She sat up in bed and looked at him intensely. ‘Are you sure? You love me, and me alone?’

  ‘Would I lie to you?’

  ‘Make an oath,’ she told him. ‘Swear to me on the Bible that you love only me.’

  Barney lifted his hand and touched her hair. ‘Do you have to ask me to swear on the Bible to know whether I love you or not?’

  ‘If you really do love me, it’ll be easy.’

  The bedroom seemed suddenly airless to Barney, and sweltering hot. He could still smell jeera on the sheets, too, from that Bengali woman. He stood up, and went to the window to open the white-painted shutters out wider.

  ‘I took a solemn oath in church, and in the synagogue,’ he told Sara. ‘I’m not going to go through the rest of my married life being forced into reaffirming it. I love you, and that’s all you need to know.’

  ‘I see,’ said Sara, with unexpected crispness, as if she had just been told by a servant that he had taken two sacks of brown sugar home without permission. ‘In that case, Nareez wasn’t mistaken.’

  ‘For God’s sake!’ Barney flared up. ‘How much longer am I going to have to live under the regime of that sow of an amah of yours?’

  Sara thrashed her way out of the bed-covers, went to the wardrobe, and took down her long white robe with a rattle of clothes-hangers.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Barney shouted. ‘Just because I happen to object to having my marriage messed around by some –’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with that,’ Sara burst out, going to the door and opening it as furiously as Nareez had slammed it. ‘It’s all to do with love, and trust, and taking care of me. You don’t have the first idea, do you, how strange and horrible this place seems to me. I’m miserable already, and I’ve only been here two days. You haven’t done anything to comfort me, or make me feel at home. You’ve done nothing but shout at me, and shout at Nareez. Well, I think your behaviour has been utterly beastly and I’m not going to stay with you one moment longer!’

  ‘Sara –’

  ‘I won’t listen! You’re hateful!’ And with that, she ran off down the corridor on bare feet, mewling like a self-pitying ghost.

  Barney stood still for a moment, staring at the open door. Then he walked over with a tired sigh and closed it. For the first time in a long time, he felt like a drink. He sat down on the end of the bed, his chin propped on his hands, and wondered abstractedly how Mooi Klip was, and how much Pieter had grown since he had been away.

  He slept on Sara’s side of the bed, but he still slept badly. At five o’clock he woke up after dreaming a dream about Gentleman Jack tracking mud all over his new rugs, and climbed stiffly out of bed. He knelt in front of the window, while the incandescent rim of the sun came edging over his window-ledge from the other side of the world, and he said schachris, the morning prayer, with more entreaty in his voice than he had ever said it before.

  He was given the first hint by Harold Feinberg, two days later, early on Friday afternoon. They had met for three hours with the unctuous, stiff-collared lawyers of the Rose Innes Diamond Mining Company, negotiating the purchase of six more claims. Normally, Joel would have joined in the negotiations, too, but it was one of those odd days when the barometric pressure drops, and the
skies of north Cape Colony grow soft and grey, and fretful dust-storms whip up on the veld. On days like these, Joel would retreat to his private suite of rooms at the back of Vogel Vlei, and lie on his bed with the drapes drawn, his whole existence decaying with pain.

  On days like these, not even whiskey and morphia would help. The cramp in his bones seemed to attack him like a wild beast. When he heard that a kaffir had been attacked and mauled by a lioness, he simply laughed. ‘I’ve been eaten by lions a hundred times over.’

  Harold had looked tired during the meeting. He was several stones overweight these days, and he had been complaining that his heart had been slow-dancing like an elephant in a Hungarian ballet. ‘It’s the work,’ he complained, although Joel thought it had much more to do with the pretty young French girl from Natal, the girl he had once fancied himself, and who had recently been seen on Harold’s arm on Kimberley’s main street, and sharing supper with him at the Woodhouse Restaurant.

  By three o’clock, Barney had come to an arrangement with the Rose Innes lawyers that Blitz Brothers would purchase four of their claims for £75,000, and take out a two-week option on the remaining two. The lawyers offered handshakes that were as reticent and scaly as turkey claws, and then left. Harold went to the rolltop desk in the corner of his office, took out a bottle of brandy, and poured himself a large glassful.

  ‘You want some? Just to celebrate?’ he asked Barney.

  Barney, standing by the window, shook his head. Below him, in the street, he had just caught sight of Agnes Joy, née Knight, in the company of two tall young diggers. He recognised the diggers as Hugh Johnson and David Mackie, the successfull young owners of the Cape Star Diamond Company. Apart from Barney himself, Johnson and Mackie were two of the richest men in town. Agnes threw her head back in silent laughter, and Barney saw Mackie give her a quick, saucy squeeze.

  Harold joined Barney at the window, sipping his brandy. ‘That’s Agnes, isn’t it?’ he asked, and Barney nodded. ‘She ought to be more circumspect, that girl. She’s getting herself a reputation.’

  ‘What for? Walking along the street laughing?’