Solitaire

by Masterton, Graham

  ‘You want only a fifth share in Blitz Brothers? And you’ll let me buy the French Company from you?’

  Rhodes nodded. ‘You’ve overestimated my greed, I think. You’ve also overestimated how much of a monopoly I’m after. As long as you and I control the price of diamonds between us, then what difference does it make? I just want the French Company to be out of it. They’ve been over-producing for years, and keeping the price down. What this business needs is careful control, and I’m sure that between us, you and I can exert it.’

  Barney sipped his tea, and then set the cup down on the table. ‘I’d have to talk to my accountants.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Rhodes. ‘But in principle?’

  Barney thought for a moment, and then nodded. ‘In principle,’ he said, ‘it seems to make sense.’

  Agnes caught the mood of relief from Rhodes, and the mood of cautious optimism from Barney. She leaned forward and said, ‘Would you care for another scone, Mr Rhodes?’

  Rhodes hesitated, and then took one. Barney watched him in silence as he pushed in into his mouth, devouring it in two or three bites, and then sucked the butter from his fingers with noisy relish.

  ‘It’s getting dark,’ said Barney. ‘I think, Agnes, you’d better instruct the servants to light the lamps.’

  It was nearly six months before Barney saw Rhodes again, and by that time the Blitzes had left London and returned to South Africa. They were breakfasting at their bedroom balcony at Vogel Vlei one morning in April when one of their sixty black servants brought Barney a sealed envelope embossed with the seal of the De Beers Mining Company.

  ‘It’s from Rhodes,’ said Barney, when Agnes raised her head. She had been embroidering a sun-bonnet for Naomi, their daughter, who had been born after twenty-three agonising hours of labour in early December last year. Agnes had sworn to God that after Naomi she would never have any more children. Not one. The pain and the humiliation had been too much.

  Barney opened the letter. He knew what it would contain. Rhodes wanted to meet him that evening at the Kimberley Club, to talk over business. What Rhodes really wanted to do, as Barney was quite aware, was to ask Barney to sell out.

  Since Barney had signed, late last year, the agreements that gave De Beers control of one-fifth of Blitz Brothers, Cecil had been working furiously to acquire even more Blitz shares. Rhodes had promised Barney’s shareholders a glittering future, a future of diamonds and gold, and he was prepared to pay anything up to £40 for a £15-share to demonstrate his confidence.

  At first, only a handful of shareholders had deserted Barney. But when Rhodes had increased his price to £45, and then at last to £50, there had been a mad scramble to sell out, and to take as much as possible before the price dropped again. By March, it was clear that despite Barney’s protests, now Rhodes owned a substantial proportion of Blitz Brothers mining – a proportion that was large enough for him to be able to call on Barney by messenger and have him drive all the way along Kimberley’s rutted high street at six o’clock in the evening to discuss what they were going to do about it.

  Barney felt hot, and there was a red rash under his collar, and by the time the carriage drew up outside the clubhouse, he felt so irritable that he almost wished that somebody would accidentally trip him up, or poke him with their umbrella, so that he would have some justification for punching them very hard. As it was, he had to be content with squeezing the palms of his hands really tightly, and controlling his breathing.

  The black coachman said, ‘You want me to wait here, Mr Two-Leg?’

  Barney said hoarsely, ‘Yes,’ and climbed the steps to the front door. The verandah below his feet was spread with a fine Indian carpet, and as he approached the entrance he was intercepted by a Persian doorman in a watered silk jacket and an amber silk turban.

  ‘Mr Blitz, sir, pleased to welcome you. Mr Rhodes is waiting for you upstairs.’

  His slippers squeaking on the polished floors, the Persian led Barney through the lobby to the main stairs, and then up to a small private room where Cecil Rhodes was sitting in a casual linen jacket, reading The Field and idly sipping a tall glass of brandy and seltzer. The shutters were wide open, because the Kimberley Club, for all its exclusiveness and all of its grandeur, still had nothing more than a corrugated-iron roof, and at this time of year it grew beastly hot.

  ‘Ah, Barney,’ said Rhodes, without getting up. ‘My dear chap. Do sit yourself down. Would you care for a drink?’

  ‘Tea,’ said Barney.

  ‘I can recommend the rum and hot milk,’ said Rhodes.

  ‘Very well then, I’ll have one of those,’ Barney assented.

  The Persian squeaked off again, and Rhodes and Barney were left alone. Rhodes lifted his glass and tinkled the ice in it reflectively. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we’ve been having quite a struggle, haven’t we, you and I?’

  ‘I shall outbid you in the end,’ said Barney.

  ‘Perhaps you will,’ Rhodes told him. ‘But outbidding is not necessarily the crucial factor in this little skirmish. You can offer your shareholders whatever you like, in terms of pound notes. But I can offer them something far more valuable. I can offer them a monopoly of the diamond business, and the control of diamond prices on the world market; and that, my dear Barney, will make them rich beyond anything you could ever hope to offer them.’

  Barney stared back at Rhodes, but said nothing. He was thinking of the day when Rhodes had first arrived in South Africa, like a plump and eager schoolboy, with his books and his cough lozenges.

  ‘I shall win the day, you know,’ said Rhodes. ‘I have the historic tide of the British Empire behind me. I would annex the planets if I could. I have often dreamed of that. I shall win the day because I am on the side of right.’

  ‘Well, that’s your opinion,’ said Barney. ‘But, meanwhile, I’m not going to sell.’

  ‘I knew you’d be stubborn,’ smiled Rhodes. ‘That’s why I asked you to come here in person. I want to make you an offer which will make all this far easier for you to swallow. I mean, you must accept that a monopoly will protect all of our interests. At the moment, while we’re still in competition, we’re each of us vulnerable to the quantity of diamonds that the other decides to unload on the market. If I were to release next month all of the roughs that I have in Amsterdam and London, the price would drop through the floor. You’d be ruined; and it would take even me several months to recover.’

  ‘I hope that isn’t a threat,’ said Barney.

  ‘You know it isn’t,’ said Rhodes. ‘Look, here’s your rum and milk. I always find rum and milk excellent when I’m hungry, and my spirits are low.’

  Barney took his drink from the black steward in the high-buttoned white jacket who had brought it up for him; and sipped it once before setting it down on the small brass table between them.

  ‘What’s your proposition?’ he said.

  Rhodes smiled. ‘I may be misjudging you,’ he said, ‘but I don’t think so.’ And with that remark, he reached into the pocket of his white linen jacket, and produced a small envelope of dark blue tissue paper. ‘Here,’ he said, handing it across the table to Barney. ‘Unwrap it. See what you think.’

  Barney hesitated, but then took the tissue-paper package, and weighed it cautiously in the palm of his hand.

  ‘Open it,’ urged Rhodes.

  Barney slowly unwrapped the tissue. He knew, with an intuition which made him tremble, what the package contained. It could not be, and yet he knew that it must be – otherwise Rhodes would never have offered it to him. It was the one single object on earth to which he was utterly susceptible.

  At last, all the tissue was folded back; and there, in Barney’s fingers, was a huge lilac-pink emerald-cut diamond, of at least 150 carats. It snapped at the evening light which bathed the room, as fiercely as a small dog, and turned the light into lances of orange flame.

  Rhodes watched Barney’s face with amusement. ‘You recognise it?’ he asked.

  B
arney nodded. ‘It’s been cut, of course. But there’s no question about the colour. It’s the Natalia Star.’

  ‘These days, it’s called the Rio Diamond.’

  ‘Where did you get it?’

  ‘It’s only on loan,’ said Rhodes. ‘At the moment it belongs to the South American Diamond Company, and it was supposed to have been discovered four years ago in Brazil.’

  ‘It’s the Natalia Star,’ whispered Barney.

  ‘That’s what I thought, when I first saw it,’ Rhodes agreed. ‘It has to be. There aren’t any records of a diamond of any size being discovered in Brazil, not for years. It’s 158·4 carats, and if you calculate what it must have weighed in the rough, you come out with a figure very close to the weight of the Natalia Star. I’m not frightfully enthusiastic about emerald cuts, but whoever did this one was a genius. In fact, there are only two people who could have done it. Only one, actually, and that’s Frederick Goldin, at de Pecq’s, in Antwerp.’

  Barney held the diamond up to the last ray of blood-red sunshine; and the facets of the diamond split the blood into light and fire. ‘Natalia,’ he said, scarcely moving his lips.

  Rhodes watched him, in satisfaction. ‘I had my agent in Antwerp talk to Goldin,’ he said. ‘Of course, Goldin denied that he had ever seen such a stone. But Goldin is living in a new house in a well-to-do district these days, and there are rumours in the trade that he made the money from a huge black-market stone.’

  Barney said, ‘Is this stone for sale?’

  ‘You’re rushing me,’ said Rhodes. ‘I was going to tell you that my agent undertook further investigations, and took around to de Pecq’s a picture which I had sent him. It was this picture, from the Cape Courier.’

  He handed Barney a small yellowed piece of paper. On it, was a blurred newsprint photograph of a frowning man, and the caption underneath read, ‘Mr Joel Blitz, of Kimberley.’

  Rhodes said, ‘A man who looked like this – a one-legged man who looked like this – visited de Pecq’s several times during 1881 and 1882.’

  Barney allowed his hands to close over the Rio Diamond, tightly and possessively. ‘Then this stone is mine,’ he said.

  ‘You can’t prove it,’ said Rhodes. ‘The South American Company have all the papers of provenance.’

  ‘Then how much is it?’

  ‘They’re going to auction it. It’s expected to fetch two million.’

  ‘Pounds?’

  Rhodes nodded.

  Barney understood at last the circle through which his destiny had turned. It was a destiny which he himself had determined, or, at least, which his passions had determined. His life had revolved around this stone, the Natalia Star, and around the woman from whom he had named it, Natalia Marneweck, Mooi Klip. The stone was the symbol of the woman, and the woman was the symbol of the stone, and both were symbolic of Barney’s hopes, and beliefs, and of his understanding of life and God. At last, with this diamond in his hand, he saw the pattern of his existence, as regular and as symmetrical as a well-cut diamond. The only trouble was, it was all too late. He had lost almost everything out of which the pattern was formed. The understanding was nothing without the substance.

  ‘How much will you pay me for the Blitz Brothers mine?’ Barney asked Rhodes.

  ‘One million six hundred thousand,’ said Rhodes, calmly. ‘As well as which, you can have a life governorship in De Beers mines; you will always be guaranteed the largest individual shareholding; and you can become a full member of the Kimberley Club.’

  ‘One million six hundred thousand?’ asked Barney.

  ‘The price of that stone,’ Rhodes told him, with a self-satisfied smile. ‘The South American Company have already agreed to sell it to me for that price, if I want it. All you have to do is say yes, and the stone’s yours.’

  Barney took the stone to the balcony, and held it up again, a star to the early stars.

  ‘And you can guarantee my election to the club?’

  Rhodes inclined his head, as if to say, you only have to ask.

  Barney knew that he was going to agree. There was no point in fighting for ambitions which had already died; for affections which had already faded; for prizes which had already been won, and spent, and tarnished. And somehow, the thought that he would be able to come down here to the Kimberley Club every evening for a drink – a simple social pleasure from which his Jewish background had always excluded him – that seemed more of a temptation than anything.

  Barney looked at the diamond in his hand. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I can stand in the way of history any longer.’

  Rhodes said, ‘Have another rum and milk.’

  *

  She was hanging up the bunting for St Julian’s Summer Fair when Mrs Cross came over and said that there was a gentleman waiting for her outside. She gave the end of her line of flags to Miss Hornchurch, and climbed as elegantly as she could down from the platform, her skirts and her petticoats raised just a little to reveal her white canvas summer boots, tiny and tightly-laced.

  ‘He’s in the lobby, Mrs Ransome,’ said Mrs Cross. Mrs Cross was looking hot, and the fruit and feathers on her hat were in their usual disarray. ‘Not an Englishman, though. A colonist, I’d say.’

  Natalia crossed the floor of the village hall until she reached the lobby doors. There was a small window of hammered glass in each of them, and before she opened them, she tried to peer through one of the windows to see who this unexpected gentleman might be. Not far away, at the top of his ladder, Mrs Unsworth was singing ‘The Old Hundredth’: ‘All people that on earth do dwell … Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice …’

  Natalia could just distinguish a dark and distorted figure through the glass, but she could not be sure who it was. So she opened the doors, and confronted the ‘gentleman’ with a polite nod of her head. ‘Good afternoon, sir. Mrs Cross said you were asking for me.’

  The man stood straight, his hands by his sides. He was wearing a grey morning-coat, and a wing-collar. He did not appear to have a hat; or, if he did, he had left it outside in his carriage.

  He said, ‘Mooi Klip.’

  Her heart bumped against her ribs. She stared at him in surprise and shock. And yet it was him. It was. He was older, and his hair was greyer, and he seemed to have put on more weight. But it was Barney Blitz, as handsome and solid as a prizefighter; as real as daylight.

  She could not speak; neither could she move. But her mouth tightened with happiness and grief, and her eyes filled up with tears.

  ‘Barney?’ she asked. ‘Is it really you?’

  ‘Natalia,’ he said, softly, and that was all it was necessary for him to say.

  They walked together, arm in arm, up the sun-dappled suburban avenue. Once or twice, Barney had to step off the pavement to allow nurses to come by with baby-carriages, fringed and embroidered and protected by parasols. There was a dusty smell of lime trees and dried horse manure, the smell of transpontine London, south of the river, in the late 1880s, when Chiswick was still a village and people still moved out to Notting Hill for the fields and the fresh air.

  Natalia said, ‘Are you here for long?’

  ‘I own a house at Barnes,’ he told her. ‘I’ve been here for a week, but I have to sail for New York on Friday.’

  ‘I read about you in Hugh’s newspapers,’ she said. ‘You’re quite a socialite now.’

  ‘Not really.’

  He looked at her in the hazy sunlight. The extraordinary thing was that in spite of the brown summer dress she wore, and her veil, and her bonnet, she was still Natalia Marneweck, still as dark and as beautiful as that day when he had brought Joel into the Griqua encampment for help and rest. The years in between might have fled. But they had not: and now he was Agnes’s husband, and she was Hugh’s, and all the nights they had shared in Kimberley were nothing more than a remembered taste of sweetness; a taste of flowers and honey that could never quite be recaptured.

  She said, ‘Why did you come?’r />
  ‘To make sure that you were happy.’

  ‘Well …’ she said, turning her face away. ‘I’m happy.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, Barney.’

  They had tea at a corner café, behind layers of net curtains, while outside the horses clip-clopped along the streets with drays and carriages. Barney did not even taste his tea. It seemed to be scalding hot and nothing else. But he remembered for years afterward the flypaper which hung from the ceiling, and the dead flies which clung to it.

  At last, Natalia said, ‘I have to go back. I can’t leave Miss Hornchurch to do everything. It’s our summer fair on Saturday.’

  ‘I wish I could come,’ said Barney, with a rueful smile. He held her hand on the tablecloth. It was a useless gesture, except as a sign of his affection for her, because it could never lead any further. They were both quite aware that he would never leave his Agnes; and that she would never betray her Hugh.

  ‘I’m running the cake stall,’ said Natalia. ‘We have home-made cakes for sale, and you have to guess how many sultanas there are in a large fruit cake.’

  Barney tried to smile, but he could not. God, he wanted to hold her in his arms. God, he wanted her. He loved Agnes. Agnes pleased him and excited him and took care of him. But Agnes could never be Mooi Klip, any more than £1,600,000 could ever replace the Natalia Star.

  He said, on the doorstep of the tearooms, ‘I have a small present for you. It’s only a keepsake. But you must promise me that you’ll accept it, and that you’ll keep it; and that you’ll pass it on to Peter.’

  Natalia said, ‘Barney … I can’t accept anything.’

  ‘I’m not asking you to compromise yourself. I’m not asking anything of you at all, except that you take this present.’

  He took out of his pocket a small leather-covered box.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  ‘Open it when you get home. It’s nothing exceptional. I just want you to promise me that you’ll keep it for always, and that you’ll pass it on to Peter.’

  ‘Very well,’ she said at last. She could sense how earnest he was. Then, ‘Very well,’ again, and she accepted the leather box, and put it without opening it into her purse.