Solitaire

by Masterton, Graham

  ‘He doesn’t have any right to search me, or my luggage.’

  Gentleman Jack said warningly, ‘I don’t think Mr Barney’s going to be too concerned about that, sir. He knows there’s a fancy diamond around, sir, and he knows that it rightly belongs to him, and this time I don’t think you’re going to be able to put him off.’

  ‘A choleria on him.’

  ‘Sir,’ said Gentleman Jack, ‘you have to do something, sir. Maybe you should hand the diamond over, and say it was all a mistake. If Mr Barney finds that diamond hidden, sir, he’s going to have me hung.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. My brother doesn’t have the guts to hang anybody.’

  ‘Please,’ persisted Gentleman Jack. ‘I have people who depend on me, sir. And even if Mr Barney doesn’t have me hung, sir, or flogged, I’ll never be able to find good work again, sir.’

  ‘You should have thought about that when you were so insistent about getting your share of the tainted proceeds,’ Joel retorted. ‘You make me sick, you mission-school niggers, you really do. It takes more than a white collar and a tailored grey coat to turn a four-legged animal into a man. I should know, I used to be a tailor myself. So you speak like a white man, and know your letters, and believe in Jesus Christ? I could train a dog to do the same, Jack, and at least a dog wouldn’t come whining back to be sick on my rug, the way that you have, just because the meat got a little too rich for it.’

  He held up the gleaming diamond in front of Gentleman Jack’s wide-eyed face.

  ‘Jack,’ he said, ‘this is my diamond. That’s all I’m going to say. And if you breathe one word to Mr Barney about where it is, or where it’s going, or if you even so much as admit that it exists, then God help me I’m going to murder you, and I mean it.’

  Gentleman Jack gave an involuntary shiver. ‘Mr Blitzboss,’ he began, ‘I really wish you’d –’

  Joel whipped the diamond away, and clenched it in his fist, close to his chest. ‘Don’t say anything,’ he warned. ‘Don’t appeal to my better nature, because until I’ve got this diamond out of Kimberley and safely on its way to Capetown, I can’t afford to have one. Now, get out of here.’

  Gentleman Jack backed away to the door. He opened it an inch or two, peered through to make sure that nobody was about, and then slipped away on tip-toe. Joel closed the door behind him, and turned the key.

  The trouble was, Gentleman Jack was right. He could not hide the diamond inside the house, because no matter how clever he was, there was always a chance that Barney might actually find it; and if Barney found it, and took it away from him, Joel was not at all sure if he was going to be able to survive, physically or emotionally. The diamond promised endless luxury for the rest of his life; all the drugs he needed; all the comfort he craved; and freedom from Barney for ever. To lose it now would be unbearable. He might just as well blow his brains out and have done with it.

  He sat down in his armchair and held the diamond up in front of him. A new life, made out of fused carbon. Fiery and vivid and endlessly tantalising, like a glimpse of the future seen through an elaborate arrangement of rainbow prisms.

  He could not swallow it, like the kaffirs swallowed roughs out on the claims. It it did not choke him, or lodge permanently in his stomach, he would excrete it out within a day, and he would have to keep on swallowing it, again and again, until next Thursday, just before he left for Capetown. The very thought of it made him gag. He opened his mouth wide and tried to get the diamond inside, but it was impossible. It wedged against his teeth, and he knew that it would never go down his throat, not without suffocating him, or tearing his larynx to shreds.

  He could push it up inside his anus, he supposed, but that was another kaffir hiding-place that was too well known, and if Barney was really convinced that he was concealing it somewhere, Joel did not doubt that he would try a forcible body search.

  Joel stood up, and went to the mirror. He stared at his reflection as if he expected it to tell him what to do. But what ideas could anyone give him – let alone this tired, pain-racked man in the shadowy room beyond his bureau? He was alone, as long as he wanted to keep this diamond for himself. Friendless, loveless, and running from both his brother and the law. He stared at his unsmiling image and wondered what it was that had brought him here, to this final fatal collision of temperament and greed.

  The answer was probably his mother, whose problems were long since over but he could not think about her any more. There comes a time in everybody’s life when resentment finally crumbles and flakes away. A sort of forgiveness by default.

  Downstairs, Joel could hear voices, and clattering footsteps across the hall. Barney must be starting his search already, turning the house upside-down in a bustle of righteous possessiveness. God, that he should have been born into such a family. God, that he should have been born at all.

  He looked towards the half-open bathroom door, and then a thought occurred to him. He remembered an evening about two years ago, when Barney had invited Harold Feinberg around to the bungalow for dinner, and the stories that Harold had afterwards told about the lurid histories of several famous Indian diamonds. One of the stories had concerned the discovery of the Regent diamond, a huge 410-carat rough, in the Parteal Mine on the Kistna River, in 1701. It had been picked up by a slave, who had smuggled it out of the mine, and had then made his way to the coast, where he had tried to buy his passage out of India by offering half the value of the stone to a British sea-captain.

  It did not matter that the slave had been murdered by the sea-captain and his body flung overboard. What did matter was the way in which the slave had smuggled the diamond out of the Parteal Mine. He had inflicted a deep wound in his own leg, and tucked the diamond into his flesh.

  Joel turned back to the mirror, and his reflection turned to meet him. He had a limp already, from his bone-setting, so if he limped a little more, who would notice? especially if he said that his leg was playing him up. He always wore his left leg strapped in bandages, so a few more bandages would not attract any undue attention.

  My God, if he carried the diamond in his leg, then he could openly challenge Barney to search him all over, up his backside, anywhere he felt like it. You can even degrade yourself by combing through my shit, little brother. You won’t find what you’re looking for.

  He stood quite still for a moment, drumming his fingers on the rosewood veneer of the bureau. Then, taking his stick, he limped into the bathroom, where his cut-throat razor lay neatly on the shelf under the looking-glass, next to his shaving-brush. He picked the razor up, and opened it. He would have to strop the blade until it was sharper than ever, and sterilise it by passing it through a flame. He would have to have bandages ready, and a towel for the blood, and plenty of whiskey. He took a shallow breath, and made his way back into the bedroom.

  Outside his door, he could hear Michael and some of the other kaffirs running up and down the stairs, and Barney’s voice ordering them loudly to search the attic. Barney must have guessed that the diamond was in here, in Joel’s room, but he had to go through this whole showy performance just to frighten Joel into handing the diamond over voluntarily. That would be the ultimate humiliation for Joel: to have stolen the chance of a wealthy future, and to be obliged to surrender it like a small boy who had misbehaved himself.

  ‘Whiskey,’ Joel whispered to himself. He went across to his night-cabinet, and took out a full bottle of Scotch. He wrenched out the cork, and swallowed three or four mouthfulls straight from the neck. Then he set the bottle carefully upright, and began to unbutton his trousers.

  His preparations were careful and over-elaborate. This was partly because he refused to be rushed by the melodramatic searching noises that Barney was making all over the house; and partly because he was afraid of what he was going to have to do. But, after ten minutes or so, he was sitting on the end of the bed, with his china washbasin on the floor beneath his leg, and his trousers off, all prepared to begin his operation.

 
; He suddenly realised that he had left the diamond on top of the bureau, and he had to hop over and get it. Once he had dug a hole out of his leg large enough to take it, he probably would not have the strength or the inclination to hobble around the room looking for it. He took another large swig of straight whiskey, and decided he was ready.

  There was a crisp knock at the door.

  ‘Who is it?’ he asked, his razor poised above the white hairy skin of his left thigh.

  ‘It’s Barney.’

  ‘Go away, I’m tired. I’m trying to sleep. Go and annoy your wife for a change, instead of me.’

  ‘I want to talk to you.’

  ‘Well, you can’t. We’ve said enough already.’

  ‘This isn’t about that argument we had earlier. That’s forgotten. This is about something different.’

  Joel paused. Then he said, ‘Whatever it is, it can wait. I’m tired, and I’m drunk, and I don’t want to talk about anything.’

  ‘It won’t take more than a minute or two, I promise.’

  Joel looked down at the huge rough diamond lying on the bed. His hand, still holding the razor poised a quarter of an inch above the skin of his thigh, began to tremble. ‘We can talk about it later. Right now, I’m not in a very amenable mood. Now, go away.’

  He could hear Barney shuffling outside the door, and he closed his eyes in utter tension. Make him go away, O Lord, Make him go away.

  Eventually, though, Barney said, ‘All right. I’ll come back in an hour or two, when you’ve slept off that whiskey. But I’m going to talk to you then, Joel, I promise you, even if I have to break your door down to do it.’

  ‘I always told you that you were too violent,’ said Joel.

  Barney did not answer, but stayed outside the door for a moment before walking off down the landing, to the head of the stairs. ‘By the way,’ he called, in a challenging voice, ‘we’re having an early supper tonight, so we’ll expect you down at seven.’

  Joel did not answer, but waited until he heard Barney go down the stairs, and start talking to the kaffirs who were milling around in the hallway. It sounded like a circus down there, all shouting and whistling and shuffling feet. Joel smiled wryly, and cut into his thigh with the razor before he had fully realised what he doing.

  The razor was very sharp, so it sliced through the muscle and the fat without any trouble. It hardly hurt, but what made him shudder was the way the blade seemed to stick to his flesh, as if it wanted to carry on cutting him, all the way up; and the way the muscle of his thigh opened up like a bleeding and expressionless mouth. He laid the razor with trembling fingers on one of his hand-towels, pressed a handkerchief against his thigh to stem the bleeding, and quickly reached for his bottle of whiskey.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ he said to himself, trying not to look down at his leg. Then he guzzled at the bottle until his stomach burned with liquor.

  Gradually, he lifted the handkerchief away to see if the wound was deep enough to lodge the diamond inside. There was so much blood that it was difficult to say; so he was obliged to press the diamond against his sliced-open skin, and force it into the raw flesh as far as it would go. He bit his lips in anguish as he saw that only about a third of the diamond could actually be concealed inside his first incision. He would have to cut deeper.

  His next cut was shaky and uncontrolled, and he had to take the razor away and take five or six steadying breaths before he could bring himself to continue.

  ‘You’ve started it,’ he told himself, angrily, ‘you might as well finish it. You hear me? You’re going to have a scar anyway, so you might as well make it a useful scar.’

  Watching his own hand with horrified fascination, as if it belonged to somebody else, Joel saw the razor cut right into the wound until the tip of it touched his bare bone. Then the razor sliced quickly from side to side, cutting out pale and blood-stained pieces of muscle, until there was a huge and massively bloody hole.

  He dropped the razor on the floor. He was juddering and shaking now, like a man in the throes of a fit. Blood was running down his leg in uncontrollable streams, and into the china washbasin. He bundled up one of the hand-towels into a large padded bandage, and held it on top of the wound as hard as he could. It suddenly occurred to him that he was going to bleed to death, and that Barney would break the door down in an hour or so to find him lying on the floor as white as a kosher calf, and the diamond on the end of the bed.

  Pursing his mouth in pain, he grasped the whiskey bottle again, and swallowed a large mouthful. The rest of it he was going to use to clean out the wound. He lifted away the soaking red towel, and splashed scotch all over his thigh, letting it run right into the blood.

  That was the only time he actually cried out loud. He felt as if his leg was actually alight, as if the bone itself were burning. But within a minute or two, the pain had died down to a deep, excruciating numbness and he was able to open his eyes and look around him and realise that only a very short time had elapsed since Barney had come knocking at his door, and that nobody would be suspicious about what he was doing, not yet.

  Now he picked up the diamond, rubbed it all over in whiskey to clean it, and pushed in into his raw flesh. It created a lumpy bulge in his leg, but he tightly wrapped a hand-towel around it, and then bound the wound together with bandages.

  He sat for more than ten minutes without moving, trying to cope with the shock of what he had done to himself, and with the extraordinary sensation of having the huge diamond buried in his thigh. He thought for a while that he was going to go mad; that he might have gone mad already. But gradually his hysteria subsided, and he was able slowly to gather up the bloody towels and the basin, and clean the blade of his razor.

  Unsteadily, cursing as he went, he lurched into the bathroom and replaced the basin on top of the marble-topped toilet stand, and dumped the towels into the tub. He caught sight of his face in the bathroom mirror, and it seemed no different than before: no greyer, no more agonised, but no less ridiculous, either. He ran the taps so that he could rinse the blood out of the towels before they were too badly stained. He could always tell the servants that he had suffered a severe nose-bleed. He drank so much that he had them regularly.

  Then he dragged his throbbing leg back into the bedroom, to take another bottle of scotch out of his night-stand, and drink almost a third of it without taking a breath. Half of it came gushing back up out of his nostrils.

  Downstairs, he could hear laughter, as the servants searched through the coats and boots in the hall-cupboard. To think that there was still something in this world worth laughing about. To think that there was still something in this world worth living for. He jumped and shuffled across to his wardrobe, and opened it. He would have to dress himself for supper tonight: he did not want any of the servants to see the bloody bandages on his thigh. He wondered if he had the courage to be able to sit through the entire meal with the diamond buried in his leg, eating soup and game and sweet puddings, and pretending to listen to Sara’s inane conversation about the gels she had known in Durban. He wondered if he were going to be sick.

  The bedroom began to tilt sideways, and he had to sit down abruptly to stop himself from falling.

  When Sara came down for supper, she looked like a European princess. She wore a dress of pale cobalt-blue silk, and her dark hair was tied up with three strings of Indian Ocean pearls. Her bodice was cut surprisingly low, so that her breasts were bared right to the pink tinge at the edge of her nipples, and an emerald and diamond cross rested in her cleavage as if to suggest that here was buried treasure. Her perfume was rich and intoxicating, civet-oils and vetiver and verdigris, and her lips were painted red.

  Barney, in his tailcoat and black tie, put down his drink and stood up as she came into the drawing-room, and held out his arms. She came across to him willingly, and kissed him.

  ‘You look beautiful tonight,’ he told her, with undisguised admiration.

  ‘Don’t I always look beautiful?’

>   ‘Of course you do. But especially beautiful tonight.’

  She kissed him again, and then raised a blue-gloved hand to wipe the lip-colour away from his cheek. ‘I wanted to dress up for you. I think it’s the only way I can think of to tell you that I’m sorry.’

  ‘You don’t have to be sorry. If anybody should apologise, it’s me. I behaved like a gorilla.’

  Sara sat down on the sofa and spread out her gown. The edges were embroidered with silk braid, in a slightly darker blue, and dozens of seedpearls, stitched on like flowers. Her feet were bare, which Barney found unexpectedly provocative.

  ‘I think I expected too much from you,’ she said. ‘I certainly expected too much from Kimberley. It was rather a shock for a girl like me to find that there was no formal social life, except among a very few people from the London exploration companies; and that there was hardly anybody whom one might ask for five o’clock tea.’

  ‘There will be, sooner than you think,’ said Barney, with his back to the fluted marble fireplace. ‘Harold Feinberg says that the town is going to grow as big and as sophisticated as London’s West End, in a year or two. They you’ll have a social life that anybody in Durban can envy.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ Sara smiled. ‘But whatever happens, I always want to be your adoring wife. I’m sorry for all our silly arguments, and Nareez has asked me to say that she’s sorry, too, She knows that I’ve been afraid. This is rather a wild place, after all! And she’s only been trying to protect me. She’s protected me all her life.’

  Barney took Sara’s hand, and pressed it against his cheek. He looked her straight in the eyes, and the oppression that he had been feeling ever since he had talked to Mooi Klip began to lift. Perhaps Sara was going to turn out to be a happy choice for a wife after all. Perhaps all these wrangles had been caused by nothing more than home-sickness and belated wedding-night nerves.