Solitaire

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Knight’s daughter?’

  ‘The blonde one. The pretty one. The one who married that thick-headed Aussie.’

  ‘Agnes Knight, hey?’ asked Joel. ‘Yes, I remember her. I thought she was going to leave Kimberley, and go to Capetown.’

  ‘Her husband was thinking of it, but in the end Agnes didn’t want to go. The story goes that she was having a little slap-and-tickle with the surface manager of the Beaconsfield Diamond Mining Company. She didn’t want to give him up.’

  ‘And her husband didn’t suspect?’ asked Joel.

  ‘He’s an Aussie. Aussies never suspect anything, not until they climb into bed one night, and try to put their arms around their wives, and another fellow’s voice says, “Hold on, chum, you’ve got to wait your turn!” ’

  Champagne Charlie burst out laughing in deep, breathy gusts, so that his yellow-cheked vest went in and out like the bellows of a home harmonium. Joel, leaning on his cane, allowed himself a dry smile, and waited until Champagne Charlie had finished. Then Joel said, ‘Barney used to be struck on Agnes Knight at one time, you know. I believe he would have married her, if he could have done.’

  ‘Knight wouldn’t have let his favourite daughter marry a Jew-boy.’

  ‘Well, that was exactly it. That was exactly why they didn’t get married. But if she’s playing a few games these days, maybe we can cajole her into helping us with Barney.’

  Champagne Charlie stopped laughing, and cleared his throat. ‘Don’t get you, old chap. What do you mean by “helping us with Barney”?’

  Joel slashed his cane around in an whistling arc, and lopped the top off one of the candles. Then he hit another one, and another one, until the dining-room began to grow shadowy and dark.

  ‘Have another drink,’ said Joel. ‘Have another drink. You’ll see what I mean when it happens. You’ll see!’

  *

  They sat in the rose drawing-room at Khotso taking tea. Gerald Sutter stood with his back to the fireplace, one hand cocked under his tailcoats, his other hand holding his teacup across his chest as rigidly as if he were the standard-bearer at a military church-parade. His wife sat on a small crinoline chair, looking a little tired from a recent headache, but as elegant as ever in a pewter-grey silk dress, and silk slippers.

  Sara, flushed, sat on the sofa next to Barney, her neck wound with pearls, her pale pink dress embroidered with flowers. The rose-coloured upholstery of the furniture and the pink moiré silk on the walls lent her even more lightness and grace. She made Barney, in his best black suit, feel as severe as a mortician.

  ‘You’re a surprise, you are,’ Gerald Sutter told Barney, loudly.

  ‘Isn’t he just!’ exclaimed Sara. ‘I do love surprises!’

  Mrs Sutter could not resist smiling, and she lifted her arm towards her husband as if she wanted him to take her hand; although he did not. He was too busy trying to compose a suitable response to Barney’s proposal.

  ‘Over the mountains you come,’ he said, with a tight wave of his teacup. ‘Cool as a cucumber. And, damn me!’

  ‘Gerald,’ protested Mrs Sutter, mildly.

  ‘Well, it’s true,’ argued Gerald Sutter. ‘You can’t say the fellow’s got anything but nerve. Damned, outright nerve!’

  ‘Gerald, my dear, you don’t have to curse to convey your feelings.’

  ‘Curse? If I were to say out loud all the curses that came into my head when this fellow knocked at the door and told me that he’d decided to marry Sara, the damned plaster would fall off the damned walls at the sound of it!’

  ‘You know that Sara was engaged to be married last year,’ said Mrs Sutter gently, inclining her head towards Barney.

  ‘She told me,’ Barney nodded.

  ‘It was so sad. A young boy from the Colonial Office. Tall, and straight. An Eton boy, actually. You wouldn’t have thought he had a care in the world, to look at him. Disease strikes so quickly!’

  Sara said, ‘Really, Mother, I didn’t love him. I was heart-broken when he died. But I didn’t truly love him.’

  ‘How can you say that?’ demanded Gerald Sutter.

  ‘Because it’s true, Papa. That’s how I can say it. He was good-looking and enormously polite. He could ride, and play bridge. He would have made a terribly suitable husband. But I didn’t love him, and that was that.’

  Gerald Sutter puffed out his cheeks. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if you didn’t love a chap with all of those qualifications, then I don’t know what love is.’

  His wife touched him again, with gentle fingers. ‘Of course you do, my darling. You could hardly stay in the saddle when I married you, and you could never concentrate at bridge. But I still loved you.’

  ‘The point is,’ said Gerald, ‘does Sara really love Barney? That is the point.’

  Sara turned towards Barney and took his hand. ‘I haven’t been able to forget him since I first met him,’ she said. ‘I fell in love with him then, and I love him still.’

  ‘It’s all very irregular,’ said Gerald Sutter. ‘Especially since he wants to marry you so damned quick.’

  ‘Papa – I’m twenty-four years old. That’s quite old enough to make up my mind, and very much too old to be still a maid.’

  Gerald Sutter looked as if he were going to say something, but then he pouted, and puffed, and jerked his shoulders in mute acceptance. He did not want to have Sara on his hands for the rest of his life, after all. And what if Barney’s proposal had been irregular, and sudden, and sprung on the family with all the abruptness of an opening cosmos flower – well, at least the chap had money, and at least he could ride, and at least Sara actually professed to love him.

  And who was he, Gerald Sutter, to stand without reason in the way of true love? Especially when it was going to save him the cost of Sara’s upkeep.

  ‘Well,’ he said, at length, ‘very well. I’ll agree to it. But against my usual principles.’

  Barney leaned across the sofa and kissed Sara’s cheek. ‘There,’ he told her. ‘I knew that he’d be reasonable.’

  ‘Reasonable!’ exclaimed Gerald Surter, in mock indignation, while Mrs Sutter raised her hands and laughed. ‘Damn me! Reasonable!’

  Barney’s proposal of marriage to Sara Sutter had come almost as much as a surprise to Barney as it had to the Sutter family. He had missed her painfully when he had left Durban six years ago to return to Kimberley, and he had often thought about her when he was kopje-walloping on Alsjeblieft. But he had always assumed that Sara would marry, and that somehow he would find a way to get back together with Mooi Klip; and after a year or two those rides by the shores of the Indian Ocean had become little more than restless images in the photograph-album of his mind. Sometimes he had woken in his bungalow and heard the desert wind, and thought it was the sea. Occasionally, a letter had arrived from Durban from a pump company, or a diamond-dealer, and he had thought for a fleeting moment before he opened it that it might be a letter from Sara. But love is unable to survive on memories alone, especially for a busy man, and the flowers that had been ruffled by the wind in the gardens of Khotso had long ago been dried and pressed between the pages of Pilgrim’s Progress, and forgotten.

  It was only when Barney had come to decorating Vogel Vlei that he had thought of Sara again. He had resisted the thought at first. He still believed that Mooi Klip might come back to him, and that there could somehow be a happy life for them together. But his sense of ambition told him that he would ever allow it to happen, not for real, not now. Mooi Klip would be nothing but an embarrassment, when it came to business. It was all right for a chap to have had a bit of black on the side, and quite acceptable to have sired a half-caste son. But to marry a darkie – well, that was something different. And from that excuse, it was an easy step to the next excuse, which was that he could not possibly marry Mooi Klip, in case he hurt her.

  He had given their love a last chance. He had asked Pieter to tell Mooi Klip that she was welcome at Vogel Vlei. He had waited and waited for an answer
. He had even pretended to himself that he needed to stay an extra week in Kimberley to make sure that the digging at the Belgian mines was going properly. But there had been no reply; and the date that he had set himself for leaving Kimberley had eventually arrived, as fresh and windy as any other winter day in north Cape Colony, and he had been obliged by his own pre-arranged plans to go.

  He had quite convinced himself when he first set off for Durban that he was going to do nothing more than refresh his memories of the Sutter house, and ask them where they had bought their furniture, and how they had arranged for their drapes and their carpets to be made up. Vogel Vlei’s whitewashed exterior was a conscious imitation of Khotso, and its rooms were in similar proportions, and all Barney needed now was the upholstery and furnishings that would turn it into an elegant yet friendly country house.

  But as he had ridden alone across the vast horizons of the north colony, under skies that dreamed with clouds, he had thought with increasing excitement of Sara, and their days together in the summer of 1872, against a remembered background of loss, and pain, and thundery monsoon clouds. He had been sure that she would have married. She had gone back to England, more than likely, and even as he rode eastwards across the plains of the Orange Free State towards his half-forgotten image of her, she was probably walking her terriers across the green and rounded Downs of Sussex, in her ribboned bonnet and her sensible boots. And yet, he could still think of her.

  Barney was richer now than he had ever been in his life before – richer than anyone he had ever known. But Mooi Klip’s continual refusals to consider marrying him, and his lonely, ramshackle life at Kimberley, had convinced him that now was the time to find a companion. He needed a wife, desperately; someone he could decorate with diamonds, and adore. Someone he could wake up next to, and with whom he could share his silliest and his most serious desires. He was twenty-eight, and he was wealthy, and he was also Jewish, despite his renunciation of the ideals of his faith. Twenty-eight and not married? he could hear his father saying. What’s wrong with the boy? He doesn’t like girls?

  What had happened with Mooi Klip stayed as a sad and complicated thought at the back of his mind; but what he had looked forward to more and more as he crossed the Drakensberg into Natal had been meeting Sara again. Sara was more than pretty; she was educated, and she was English. She would be an asset to him in the diamond business, as well as a good wife. And if she wasn’t there … well, he would face up to the bitterness of that when he came to it.

  She had opened the door, herself. She had looked six years older; more elegant, more self-assured. Her voice had been less clipped, as if she no longer felt the need to assert herself. And she had peered at him myopically for a moment the way a gardener peers at a caper spurge which has unexpectedly seeded itself in another part of the flowerbed.

  ‘Barney,’ she had said. ‘Barney.’

  He had hesitated on the doorstep, breathless. ‘I want you to tell me something,’ he had said, trying to keep the urgency out of his voice. ‘I want you to tell me if you’re married.’

  ‘No,’ she had told him, straight away, puzzled. ‘No, I’m not. But don’t just stand there, come in.’

  ‘Thank God,’ he had said. ‘Will you marry me?’

  She had blinked. ‘I’m sorreh?’

  ‘I said, will you marry me? I’ve just arrived here from Kimberley and I really think that’s all I want to know.’

  There had been a moment of strange hesitation. ‘What will you do if I turn you down?’ she had asked him. ‘Will you ride straight back again?’

  He had shaken his head. ‘I shall hammer on the door until you change your mind.’

  ‘Well,’ she had told him faintly. ‘I’m not sure. I mean yes, probably. But not on the doorstep. You’d better come in.’

  They had talked furiously for a while in the hallway, in whispers. Barney had been able to watch himself in a gilded Dutch mirror, and it had reminded him disconcertingly of van Eyck’s fifteenth-century portrait of a newly-married couple, all stiffness and piety. At last, Mrs Sutter had appeared, and looked at them as curiously as a peahen, her head on one side, and said, ‘If it isn’t Mr Blitz!’

  Now, over tea, it seemed as if they were actually engaged. It had been less than an hour since he had knocked at the front door, and a purplish calotype of Sara’s unfortunate Old Etonian still stood on the maplewood bureau by the window, smiling with brave inanity. But she was Barney’s now, and they would be married within the month, and Barney’s life would take on the style and the peace and the English elegance of Khotso. He had proposed marriage to more than a wife: he had proposed to a home, and a style of life, and parents-in-law who were prosperous and acceptable. If only his mother and father could have seen what a rich machuten he was going to have. Who needed the Kimberley Club?

  ‘I’ve built a house out at Kimberley,’ Barney explained to Gerald Sutter. ‘I call it Vogel Vlei, which is Afrikaans for “Bird Marsh”. It’s the grandest house for five hundred miles, and it’s all been built with diamonds.’

  ‘Prospecting for diamonds always seemed like rather a grubby game to me,’ remarked Gerald Sutter, laying down his teacup and patting the pockets of his coat to find his cigarettes. ‘All that shovelling, and sorting. And they’re an odd lot, aren’t they, the diggers? I hope you’ll keep Sara well away.’

  ‘Of course. Vogel Vlei is a good mile away from the mine itself.’

  ‘Glad to hear it. Healthy, is it, out there? No cholera?’

  ‘As healthy as anywhere else in Africa.’

  ‘Well, that’s not saying much. Have you finished your tea? I think I could do with a snort of whiskey, to tell you the truth. It’s not every day your daughter decides to get married. We must talk about a lobola, too, although I don’t suppose you’ve much use for ten head of cattle.’

  Barney grinned, ‘I thought I was supposed to pay you the lobola, for losing a daughter and a worker.’

  ‘A worker! My great-grandfather’s rear quarters! Only if you think that riding and spending money constitute work! That girl pays more for one silly hat than I pay my groom for the whole year, did you know that? Fifteen pounds for a hat, and there’s this poor fellow trying to bring up a family on twelve pounds six shillings a year. If it wasn’t just, it would be positively scandalous!’

  Later, after dinner, Barney sat with Sara on the patio overlooking the sloping lawns of Khotso. Peace, they called this house, and he felt that he might have found it. The diamond business was going well, the world price of gems was rising at last; and here he was with this tall, good-looking girl, about to be married.

  ‘You know, at the Passover Seder, Four Questions are asked,’ said Barney. ‘The first question is, “Mah nishtana ha-leila ha-zeh mikol ha-laillos?” and that means, “What makes this night special, compared with any other night?” If I were to ask that question tonight, then I’d know the answer.’

  ‘I was quite resigned to living the rest of my life as a wizened old maid,’ said Sara, leaning her dark hair against his shoulder. ‘I read my palms, you know, and my heart line was frightfully fragmented. As for my Lower Mars and my Mount of Venus … well, you only have to see for yourself.’

  She opened her hand and held it out to him. Barney took it, and stared at it for a while. Then he bent his head and kissed it. ‘I don’t know about palmistry,’ he told her, hoarsely. ‘All I know is that I should have proposed to you when I first met you.’

  ‘I missed you, when you left,’ Sara told him. ‘I suppose I shouldn’t admit it.’

  ‘I missed you, too. I’m not ashamed of that.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you come back sooner?’

  Barney held the open palm of her hand against his cheek, and kissed that part of her hand which she would have called her Upper Mars. ‘There were other things I had to take care of, apart from my diamond claims … I had old problems … difficulties that had to be taken care of, one way or another.’

  ‘And are they all taken ca
re of?’

  He looked towards the sea. It was too dark to make out anything but the dim white lines of the breakers, but he could hear it and smell it and feel its wind against his face. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They’re all taken care of.’

  ‘There’s good riding at Kimberley, I suppose? And a club?’

  ‘Well, the riding’s good. You can gallop flat-out for twenty miles and not see so much as a tree.’

  ‘What about social life?’

  ‘There’s a dramatic society. They put on a special play at Christmas.’

  ‘And a club?’

  Barney made a face, and nodded. ‘Sure, there’s a club.’

  ‘Well, that’s all right, then. Somewhere to ride, somewhere to meet one’s friends. A place to dance, and a house for entertaining in! I look forward to it!’

  Barney stood up, and walked across the springy, close-cropped lawn with his hands in his pockets. Sara watched him, her scarf fluttering in the evening breeze. ‘You’re very handsome, you know,’ she told him. He turned around. ‘You’re very beautiful,’ he answered.

  From inside the house came the steady, resonant sound of a Beethoven piano concerto, as Mrs Sutter began her practice. Sara left the garden seat and crossed the grass towards Barney and took his hand. In her evening slippers, she did not seem so tall, and she rested her forehead against him so that her hair blew against his face.

  ‘I will love you, and I will be devoted to you,’ she said. ‘I shall never forget how you came back to rescue me after all these years.’

  Gently, and yet not without confidence, Barney placed the outspread fingers of his left hand over her breast. She raised her head, and looked at him questioningly, as if she needed to know whether this was the correct thing to do. But he simply kissed her, twice, and nuzzled his face against hers; and in the shadows of the orange trees he eased down her light silk evening-gown, and then the cotton of her bodice, and held her warm heavy breast in his hand as if it were a prize, its crinkled nipple against his palm between his head line and his line of fortune, and caressed and squeezed it in time to the chords of Beethoven.