Solitaire

by Masterton, Graham

  She opened her thighs for him without question, and guided him towards her parted lips. He felt as if the inside of his head were crackling with electricity, like one of those windy frightening mornings on the Drakensberg. Her desire for him was so unexpected and so aggressive that he was aroused more than at any time he could ever remember in his whole life. To be attacked in bed by a slut was one thing; to be savaged by a girl who was proper enough never to say ‘mantelpiece’ and to consider that name-cards at a dinner-table were rather ‘low’ was quite another. She gasped his name over and over again, until he shivered, and reached a climax of three distinct and intensive ejaculations. Yet she wanted more; and as he rolled over on to his back, she rolled on top of him, and gripped him with sticky hands, and whispered words in his ear which even an Australian digger might have coughed at.

  ‘Barney,’ she cooed, ‘we must be the most marvellous lovers that ever were.’

  Barney said nothing. He was too intoxicated by her eager submissiveness and her lewd whispers. It seemed like a dream in which even the most buried of all erotic desires had suddenly become possible. He turned her on to her stomach on the bed, and she raised her bottom urgently towards him, her thighs stretched as wide apart as she could. Barney pushed himself into her, gripping the soft flesh of her hips, until he could push no deeper. He felt extraordinary, dreaming, praying, or drunk.

  He did not hear the door open one single inch. Nor did he see Sara, her dark hair spread wildly over the pillow, her face flushed, turn her head towards the doorway and stare with eyes that were incongruously calm and thoughtful at her Indian amah Nareez, who stood in the darkness of the hallway like one of the ancient and mystical Rakshasas, the night-stalkers.

  Sara lay awake until dawn, listening to Barney breathing and murmuring in his sleep. She felt ashamed of herself, in one way for her lustful lovemaking; but in another way she felt far more settled, and more decided about the course which her life was now going to have to follow. She was sure, particularly now that the tensions of her body had been spent, that she did not really love Barney at all, not in the way in which her mother had loved her father, or in which she believed a woman ought to adore and respect her spouse.

  Barney had attracted Sara right from the very first day she had met him. He had a beautiful slow masculinity about him which she still found disturbing. She had often watched his profile in the gilded evening sun and been unable to take her eyes away. But he did not understand her at all, nor did he have any real grasp of what was important to her, and why. Because of that, he plainly saw her abrupt changes of mood as unpredictable and unsettling swings in her character, whereas in truth everything that Sara did and said conformed to the great logic of the British colonial daughter.

  It was not Barney’s fault. He didn’t have any experience at all of the ordered and ritualistic society of the English Abroad. He was an American, and a Jew, and so he was doubly handicapped in his comprehension of God, Queen and Country; of the Raj-like protocol of what to wear, and how to behave, and where to be, at what particular season; of the extraordinary complexities of visiting, and why it was so desperately embarrassing actually to come face to face with the person at whose house you were leaving your visiting-card.

  Barney would never know what a burra mem was (a phrase that Sara’s mother, a true burra mem, had fondly borrowed from India); and he would never be able to penetrate the mind of a girl who had been brought up in a world of clubs and polo and flannel underwear and formal picnics, a world of native servants and annual gymkhanas; a world where the rivalry between the Collector’s wife and the Colonel’s wife could have a whole city quivering for weeks; and where a man who was forgetful enough to put on a solar topee after sundown was generally considered to be guilty of ghastly bad form.

  Sara had been swept away by Barney’s dramatic proposal, and impressed by his wealth. She had felt passionate about him, too, and still did, although not so completely. After all, it was not only protocol and charm that characterised upper-class English ladies in the colonies, it was also that fierce Hot Weather carnality which had led one old hand to describe their lives as a perfect circle of tea-parties, durbas, picnics, and adultery. In one way, it was only the strictness of their self-imposed etiquette which kept their isolated and outdated world from collapsing into a stew of drunkenness, moral breakdowns, and despair. It was not done to take a drink before the sun went down, nor to continue to drink after dinner. Neither was it done to fornicate so brazenly that anyone (especially one’s husband) actually knew. Conforming rigidly to what was done saved many of the Empire’s finest ladies from coming catastrophically undone.

  But out here in Kimberley, none of this mannered society in which Sara had been raised existed at all, moral or immoral; and although she had believed at first that she could survive without it, she had quickly discovered that she could not, and it was a severe handicap to the possible success of their marriage that Barney was unable even to imagine what it was that she missed.

  But – Sara had decided – she was not going to mope over it. The greatest quality of the burra mem, apart from her exact social tone and her overwhelming feminine instincts, was her resilience under Trying Conditions. She would do her best to be a good wife to Barney; she would love him whenever she felt she could; she would seek his body when she needed it. But she could never lose sight of her ambition to be socially glittering, the belle of South Africa, and she would take whatever opportunities to achieve her ambition that offered themselves to her.

  She began to feel inside, still half-developed, a capability for ruthlessness that would have given Barney nightmares, had he guessed that it was there. This was the only child that she would bear him.

  Joel stayed in his bedroom throughout Shabbes, and through most of Sunday. He kept the door locked and asked only for a little chicken broth to be left outside on the landing. Barney went upstairs to speak to him two or three times, but until late on Sunday Joel refused to let him in.

  When he finally did open the door, Barney found that the room was gloomy, with all the drapes drawn tight, and that there was an unpleasant smell around, as if Joel had not been washing. Joel was wearing his dark blue bathrobe, and sitting in his upright armchair, reading a book about country houses in New York State and Long Island.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Barney asked him. ‘Do you want me to open the window?’

  Joel shrugged, as if to say that he did not mind one way or the other. Barney drew back one of the drapes, and pushed open the window that overlooked the back of the house. A cool flow of fresh air flowed into the room, and ruffled an untidy sheaf of paper that had been strewn across Joel’s desk. Barney picked one of the papers up and saw that it was covered in sketches of a large imposing house, with a pillared portico and formal gardens.

  ‘Are you thinking up more ideas for laying out Vogel Vlei?’ he asked. ‘I’m glad that you’re interested.’

  Joel said nothing, but leaned forward to pluck the paper out of Barney’s hand, and tuck it down the side of his armchair. Barney stared at him for a minute or so, and then sat on the end of the bed with his hands clasped in front of him, the way a parent addresses himself to a schoolboy who has just been caught behind the orangery, doing something embarrassing.

  ‘Joel,’ he said, ‘I believe you found a diamond, and I also believe that you still have it hidden someplace.’

  ‘You do, hunh?’ said Joel, turning the page of his book.

  ‘Joel – listen, we’re fifty-fifty partners in this diamond-mining business, aren’t we? If you have found a diamond, and it’s really worth a million pounds, then you’ll still get five hundred thousand. You’re going to turn up your nose at five hundred thousand?’

  Joel closed his book, and looked back at Barney challengingly. ‘What diamond?’ he demanded.

  ‘The diamond that Harold told me about, and that Mooi Klip told me about, and that Gentleman Jack is too damned frightened to tell me about. You know damned well what diamon
d!’

  ‘Did you find such a diamond, when you searched the house? Under the floorboards, maybe? In the soap? Why don’t you look up my ass, and see if I’m hiding it there?’

  ‘If I don’t find it by the time you leave for Capetown, I intend to. And don’t think I’m joking.’

  ‘God forbid I should ever think you’re joking, Barney. God forbid! Trying to get humour out of you is like cupping a corpse.’

  Barney stood up. ‘I want that diamond, Joel. That’s all I’m going to say.’

  ‘Diamond, diamond, diamond! You’re driving me mad with your tsutcheppenish about this diamond!’

  Resignedly, Barney left Joel’s bedroom, closing the door behind him with quiet emphasis. Click. That’s it. If that’s the way you want it. Then he went quickly downstairs and called Michael to make the carriage ready: he was going to Kimberley to talk to Harold.

  Harold was sitting on the verandah of his bungalow, rocking backwards and forwards in a cane rocker, and dozing. His French assistant, slim-wristed and pretty in a Parisian way, with plaited hair and unplucked eyebrows, was embroidering a cushion, and she called out to Barney as he stepped down from his carriage, ‘Bonjour, Monsieur Bleats!’

  ‘This is unexpected,’ said Harold, waving Barney towards a small wicker armchair. ‘What brings you chez Feinberg on a day like this? Would you care for a drink? Or a cup of tea? How about a latke?’

  ‘I’ve come to pick those brains of yours,’ Barney told him, crossing his legs to reveal his loud yellow and red Shetland socks. ‘You know that huge diamond we were talking about the other day?’

  ‘Yes?’ asked Harold, suspiciously.

  ‘Well, just supposing it was real, okay? And just supposing that a fellow was trying to smuggle it out of Kimberley, and off to the coast. And just supposing this fellow was under pretty close scrutiny, so he couldn’t simply carry it in his pocket, or hidden in his luggage. Now, what do you think he might do?’

  Harold rocked backwards and forwards and thought about the matter carefully. Then he said, ‘First of all, there are plenty of traditional hiding-places which you could rule out straight away, because of the sheer size of this stone. It’s as big as that, right – as big as the gap between a finger and a thumb, and that’s big. So you couldn’t swallow it, and you couldn’t hide it in your hair. You might be able to tape it under your armpit, but of course that would lay you open to immediate discovery, if you were stripped. The Mogul emperor Mohammed Shah hid the Koh-i-Noor for fifty-eight days in the folds of his turban after he was conquered by the Persian shah Nadir, in 1739. But a harem girl gave Mohammed’s secret away; and the next time Nadir invited him to a feast, Nadir insisted that they observe the age-old custom of exchanging turbans. Mohammed couldn’t refuse, could he? So Nadir rushed back to his tent, and unwound the turban, and there it was. “It’s a mountain of light,” he said, and that’s what they’ve called it ever since. “Koh-i-noor.” ’

  ‘That’s all very interesting,’ said Barney, ‘but nobody in Kimberley wears a turban. Nobody that I know of.’

  ‘I’m going through all the hiding-places I can think of,’ protested Harold. ‘You want hiding-places, I’ll tell you hiding-places.’

  ‘All right, go on. Where else do you think someone could hide a diamond?’

  ‘Well, when it passed to the Afghan princes, the Koh-i-noor was hidden for years in the plaster of Shah Zaman’s cell wall, when he was imprisoned and blinded by his brother Shuja.’

  ‘That’s a possibility – buried in a plaster wall.’

  ‘It could be,’ said Harold, ‘except that this fellow you’re asking about, he’s trying to get it out of Kimberley, right, to sell it? He’s not really interested in hiding it away for a year or two.’

  ‘That’s right,’ nodded Barney.

  ‘The Regent diamond, which Marie Antoinette used to wear in a black velvet hat, that was hidden in a hole in a beam in somebody’s garret, after it was taken from the treasury during the French Revolution. Have you tried beams?’

  ‘I’ve taken up floorboards.’

  ‘Well, try beams. Try anything that you can dig a hole in. A mattress, perhaps; or a pillow.’

  The French girl came up, and said, ‘Would you like some tea, Monsieur Bleats? I will make some, if you like.’

  ‘I’d like that,’ said Barney.

  Harold said, ‘Remember the story I told you about the way the Regent was first discovered, and how it was smuggled out of the Parteal Mine?’

  Barney’s attention had been briefly distracted by a tall Hottentot girl passing with a clay pot balanced on top of her head, and a baby hanging between her breasts in a loose scarf. ‘What did you say?’ he asked Harold. ‘The Parteal Mine?’

  ‘That’s right. A slave came across the Regent diamond on the Kistna River, and cut a hole in his leg so that he could smuggle it out without being detected. A little extreme, wasn’t it? But a slave like that would have a lot to gain and nothing to lose.’

  ‘I remember you telling us about that,’ nodded Barney. ‘I remember Joel remarking that a man would have to be mad to do a thing like that.’

  Barney was about to say something else, but then he paused, thinking. Joel had heard that story, too; and if Joel had been thinking of ways to smuggle the diamond out of Kimberley, wouldn’t that story have crossed his mind? Joel limped already, from his old fractures. Supposing he wanted the diamond so much that he was prepared to –

  That would account for his sudden worsening on Friday night, wouldn’t it? And the way in which he had kept himself locked away in his room for the past twenty-four hours? And if he had actually mimicked that poor desperate slave at Parteal – if he had actually dug a hole in his leg that was deep enough to accommodate a 350-carat diamond, wouldn’t that also account for the strange stench in his room – the stench of dried-out blood and infected bandages?

  ‘Riboyne Shel O’lem,’ he said, under his breath.

  ‘What did you say?’ asked Harold.

  ‘Nothing. But I have a terrible feeling that I know where I can find that diamond.’

  Barney sat staring into space while the French girl brought tea. The cups were Minton, gold and green, and the tea was purest Darjeeling. Harold’s fortunes were improving these days, and he was thinking of opening another office at Bultfontein. He did badly want an heir, though: and perhaps that was why he was being so attentive to this girl whom Edward Nork called ‘Harry’s little froggy’.

  ‘If you do find the diamond,’ said Harold, carefully, ‘why don’t you come and tell me first. We don’t want to upset the market, do we? It wouldn’t be good for anyone, least of all you. I’m too old and too sick to take another downturn in world prices. I want to leave something behind me, a thriving business. Feinberg and Son.’

  ‘Or Daughter,’ suggested Barney.

  ‘If that’s what God wills. But, excuse me.’

  While Harold went inside to the lavatory, Barney talked for a while to his ‘froggy’. Her name was Annette, he learned, and she had been educated in music in Paris, but when she was only sixteen she had run away and lived with an extraordinary eccentric in Navarre, the man who had first fired her interest in precious stones. He had taken her on a voyage to Capetown; but halfway there he had suddenly and for no accountable reason thrown himself overboard. She had been left in Capetown with hardly any money, and nothing but a small talent for playing the piccolo. In despair, she had taken a job as a maid; but later she had found employment as an assistant for a large Capetown diamond dealer, and she had made it her business to learn whatever she could about diamonds.

  ‘Do you think that you and Harold will ever have children?’ Barney asked her. ‘It means a lot to him, you know, having someone to pass his business down to.’

  The girl slowly shook her head. ‘I know Harold wants children, but a child would kill me. Maybe not really kill, but destroy my liberty. I will never have children, you can be sure of that.’

  Barney shrugged. No girl
that he had ever come across had been quite so sure that she would not conceive, although he knew that Dr Tuter had a reputation for providing cheap, ir erratic, abortions.

  ‘Each month, I push diamonds into ma matrice,’ whispered the girl. ‘Five gemstones, one carat each. They are enough to keep me from conceiving.’

  Barney opened his mouth to answer her, but at that moment Harold reappeared with his shirt tail protruding from his unbuttoned trousers. He sat down with a smile, and picked up his cup of tea. ‘Let’s drink a toast in good Indian tea,’ he said. ‘Let’s wish you wealth and happiness, and let’s look forward to the day when I can invite you to a circumcision.’

  The French girl looked at Barney and smiled; and Barney knew for Harold’s sake that he would never give her secret away. He doubted, quite honestly, whether the practice of pushing diamonds into her womb would have any effect on her ability to conceive. Diamonds had always been attributed with the oddest of medicinal properties: the Hindus had crushed them up and drunk them, to give them strength, while the czar Ivan the Terrible had been quite sure that they were deadly poison. All Barney knew was that Harold’s heart was unsteady, and that if he found out that he was being deceived, the unhappiness of it could kill him.

  ‘What are you going to do about this monster diamond?’ asked Harold, when they had finished their tea.

  ‘Right now, nothing,’ said Barney. ‘If I’m right about it – if it really is where I think it is – then I believe that it will make itself known soon enough.’

  ‘You sound peculiarly vengeful,’ said Harold, laying his hand on the French girl’s arm with proprietorial absent-mindedness.