Solitaire

by Graham Masterton

  ‘I just told you that I’m not selling.’

  ‘Then you’re a fool, my dear chap. Where else in the world would you get nearly one and a quarter million pounds in gold and notes, even for a flawless 350-carat diamond? This is the best offer you’re ever going to get, and I can promise you that if you don’t take it now, you’ll spend the rest of your natural life regretting it.’

  Barney reached across the green leather top of his desk, and picked up a small brass bell with an imp’s face on it. He tinkled the bell between his finger and his thumb, keeping his attention unwaveringly on Hunt.

  ‘I’m not selling,’ he repeated.

  Hunt sat where he was for a second, drumming his fingertips tautly on the arm of the chair. Then he stood up as quickly as an unfolded clasp-knife, picked up his cane and his gloves, and said, ‘Very well. If you’re not going to sell, then you’re not going to sell. It’s been nice talking to you again.’

  Horace opened the door, and said, ‘Yes, boss?’

  ‘You can show Mr Hunt to his carriage now, Horace.’

  ‘Yes, boss. This way, Mr Hunt, sir.’

  ‘Oh, Barney –’ said Hunt, as he reached the door. ‘There was one more thing I forgot to ask you.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Your brother Joel … well, I gather you must have located him, from what the report in the Colesberg Advertiser said.’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘They mentioned that he wasn’t well.’

  ‘He’s not. He had some kind of infection. He lost his left leg.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Hunt. ‘Does he still live here, with you?’

  ‘He has a suite of rooms upstairs. He keeps himself pretty well secluded these days, though. He plays a lot of chess. I hardly see him from one week to the next.’

  Hunt thought about that, still smiling, and then he said, ‘There was some suggestion, you know, that your brother found the stone first, and that he tried to keep it hidden from you.’

  ‘Was there?’ asked Barney.

  ‘Well, that’s the way the chaps over at De Beers tell the story. It could all be nonsense, of course.’

  ‘Then I expect that it is nonsense,’ said Barney, in a level voice. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m very busy. Are you staying in Kimberley long?’

  ‘A week or two. Just long enough to justify my scandalous expenses.’

  ‘You must come to dinner, then. I’ll speak to Sara about it.’

  ‘My dear chap,’ said Hunt. ‘You were always a gentleman. I’m most obliged.’

  After Hunt had left, Barney stood behind his desk, looking tall and grave in the diffuse oval of light that shone from his green-shaded lamp. He felt disturbed by dozens of inexpressible questions – questions about himself, about his happiness, and about his dim, grotesque world of manipulation and money into which his ownership of the huge lilac diamond was beginning to draw him. He remembered the rich people he had seen in New York, in their sleep top hats and their astrakhan-collared coats, sitting back on the seats of their phaetons with immaculately-groomed whiskers and faces as neutral as minor gods. Now he knew why they looked the way they did. They were groomed because they were rich, and could afford to keep servants; but the neutrality of their expression came from the uncertainty they felt that they deserved any of this attention and equally from their determination not to show it. Barney remembered thinking years ago that it must be wonderful to be wealthy: but the truth was, now that he actually was wealthy, in this stately library lined with thousands of unread books, that he felt off-balance and unsettled, and that his need for love and for family friendship was still as demanding as ever.

  He had no urge to return to Clinton Street, and the Lower East Side. He still preferred to be a diamond magnate, rather than a bespoke tailor. But he was beginning to feel again that excruciating loneliness that he had felt when he first crossed the Atlantic Ocean to Liverpool, and he realised that, apart from those months he had spent with Mooi Klip, it had never once left him.

  He left his desk, and walked across the library to the steel and cement Union safe which was installed under one of the bookshelves. He took out his keys, and unlocked the double doors. There, on the top shelf, wrapped up in soft gazelle-skin, was the diamond. He took it out, and carried it back to the lamplight, where he opened up the leather, and let the stone lie exposed and shining, an embodiment of pure fact.

  Several merchants had already approached him with offers for the diamond. Most of them had been acting on behalf of governments or wealthy collectors. The Russian court had been showing particularly enthusiastic interest, and had twice sent the Belgian dealers Leopold & Wavers around to see him with offers that were cautiously close to a million. But Harold Feinberg had advised caution. The diamond was so rare and enormous that it would be a political influence as well as a spectacular piece of personal property. It had been discovered on ground that the British were quite sure was theirs, and there had already been letters in The Times asking when the diamond was going to be seen in the country of its ownership. It would not help Blitz Brothers with the Board for the Protection of Mining Industries, nor with Government House, if Barney were to let the diamond go to the Czar, or to the Prussians, or worst of all, to the Dutch. There were too many Boer sympathisers among Amsterdam’s diamond merchants who might be tempted to restore it to the Orange Free State on a lease-land basis as a symbol of Boer independence, and what the Boer republic considered to be its rightful tide to the diamond mines.

  Barney had kept the diamond in his safe ever since his wedding-celebration party, although he had allowed Harold to come around to test it and inspect it. Harold had spent all day with it, only stopping for ten minutes to drink a cup of coffee and eat a plateful of beef sandwiches, and even then he had continued to stare at the diamond as if he were bewitched. At four o’clock, Barney had finished his paperwork and come into the conservatory to watch.

  ‘I’m almost finished,’ Harold had told him. ‘It has a few tiny inclusions on one side, but those will be lost when they cleave it. It’s a remarkable diamond. Just remarkable. I wish my old father could have seen it. It would have brought tears to his eyes.’

  ‘What tests have you made?’ Barney had asked him. ‘You’re sure that it’s a diamond? I mean, one hundred per cent sure?’

  ‘No question about it,’ Harold had said. ‘I tested it for hardness, by scratching another diamond with it. Also a sapphire. That’s not a test you should ever do with a polished diamond, because you can damage the edges. But there wasn’t any doubt about this one.’

  ‘I thought the standard test was to hit the diamond with a hammer,’ Barney had remarked.

  ‘They used to. But the trouble is, diamonds are brittle, as well as hard, and you could end up with more than a handful of smashed pieces. I know a couple of East End merchants who used to encourage diggers to test if their stones were genuine or not by banging them with a hammer, and when the stones were all broken up, and the diggers went away disappointed, all the merchants had to do was to scoop up the bits and sell them as industrials, or pointers, for shopgirls’ engagement-rings. They made themselves a small fortune.’

  Barney had picked up the diamond and turned it over. ‘What other tests have you done?’

  ‘Surface tension, although it’s difficult to get an accurate result with an uncut rough. If you leave a drop of water on the table of a diamond, it will stay there much longer than on any other kind of stone. And then there’s conductivity. You’ve already noticed how quickly this diamond warms up and cools down when you hold it in your hand, or leave it alone on the desk.’

  ‘What’s it worth?’ Barney had asked him. ‘Do you have any idea?’

  Harold had rolled down his sleeves and looked at Barney tiredly. ‘This diamond is worth as much as anyone in the world will pay for it. If I were you, I wouldn’t take less than a million pounds, in gold.’

  Now, in the library, Barney sat with his head in his
hands staring at the diamond and thinking. It was the most fabulous possession he had ever owned, clear and bright and so uncompromising that it was almost holy. If all the laws and truths of the Torah could be crystallised into an object that could be held in one hand, this is what they would look like. It was so enormous that it was worth far more than money. In fact, it was so enormous that Barney knew that it would be impossible to own it for very long: the financial and political claims that the outside world were making on it were too strong.

  But for the time being, and especially while he felt as lonely as he did, he found the diamond strangely consoling. He could stare at it for an hour at a time, turning it this way and that way to catch the different lights in the lilac-pink depths of its brilliant interior. For Joel, the diamond had represented dreams of luxury and riches and women. For Barney, it was more like a statement from God that He did exist, that here in the shape of a giant crystal was the adamant and irrefutable evidence, and that Barney had not been forgotten, for all of his desertions, for all of his doubts, and for all of his unsaid prayers.

  Under his breath, alone in his grand library, Barney recited the words of the Kol Nidre, the prayer that is recited on the eve of Yom Kippur. Then he turned down the wick of his desk-lamp so low that the massive diamond in front of him gleamed with an unearthly pink light. He did not cry. It was far too late for tears. And, besides, he had on his desk the most incredible symbol of man’s greed and God’s ingenuity that the world had ever seen.

  At nine o’clock, Barney went upstairs to see Joel. It was a reluctant duty, because ever since the wedding-party the two brothers had scarcely been able to speak to each other: Joel because of his shame at having been caught, and his chagrin at not having got away with the diamond after suffering so much, and Barney because he no longer trusted Joel to tell him the truth.

  Sara was in Joel’s bedroom when Barney knocked on the door. She was sitting on the end of the bed playing cards with him, for mint bon-bons. As usual, she was fashionably dressed, in a steel-grey satin tea-gown, with a diamond corsage garland strung beneath her breasts, and her hair was plaited and combed and studded with diamond clasps. All of her diamonds were presents from Barney: the corsage garland, which was valued at more than £22,500, Barney had given her the week after she had discovered that he was not a member of the Kimberley Club, and that being Jewish he probably never would be.

  Joel was looking almost rudely healthy. Since Dr Tuter had sawed off his left leg on the evening of the party, an operation in which both surgeon and patient had been almost incapably drunk, he was far fitter and more optimistic than he had ever been before: Dr Tuter had treated his amputation with boric acid ointment, which had prevented the further spread of gangrene, and Joel had slowly but steadily recovered. Once the pain of the operation had faded, Joel had found that the nagging agonies of his reset left leg had left him for ever; and although his hip still felt uncomfortable on stormy days, he slept better, and ate better, and even teased the florid-faced English nurse Betty whom Barney had brought in from Capetown that a lone-legged man could do things to a girl that a two-legged man would find impossible. The kaffir servants, of course, found that it was now far easier to distinguish between their two employers in their conversation. Their orders these days came either from ‘Mr One-Leg Blitzboss’ or ‘Mr Two-Leg Blitzboss’.

  ‘I came to see how you were,’ said Barney, standing uncomfortably at the door.

  ‘He’s losing badly at farmer’s joy, if that’s any indication of his health,’ said Sara.

  ‘I see,’ said Barney, with one of those smiles that came and went as quickly as a trick.

  ‘I enjoy losing to your lovely wife,’ said Joel, handing Sara three more mints. ‘I like to see her excited, for a change.’

  ‘Do you?’

  Barney went to the window and drew back the drapes with one hand. Outside, the sky was as black as plums, with only a single streak of red to show where the sun had gone.

  ‘You’re not pensive again, are you, my deah?’ asked Sara, shuffling the cards between sharp pink fingernails.

  ‘Mmh?’ asked Barney, turning around.

  ‘I said, “you’re not pensive again, are you?” You seem to spend all your time these days in a brown study.’ She dealt from the bottom of the deck, as rapidly and as efficiently as only an English colonial daughter knows how.

  ‘Either a brown study or a diamond-studded library,’ chuckled Joel; and Sara caught his eye and laughed.

  ‘I’ve had an offer for the diamond from a consortium of English colonial businessmen,’ said Barney.

  ‘I hope they offered more than those awful Belgians.’

  ‘They did. They said they could put up a million-two.’

  Joel looked up – first at Barney and then at Sara. ‘That’s a lot of money,’ he said. ‘Even half of it is a lot of money.’

  ‘Are you going to sell?’ asked Sara. ‘Joel, my darling – you can’t do that. That’s cheating.’

  ‘I enjoy cheating,’ said Joel. ‘Cheating is almost as good as drinking.’

  Sara collected two more bon-bons from him. ‘Cheating is only enjoyable if it’s undetectable, or if it’s only discovered when it’s far too late.’

  ‘I’m, uh, thinking about it,’ put in Barney. ‘The offer, I mean. The trouble is, they want the stone for political reasons as well as financial ones. Sir Barde Frere is intent on invading Zululand, apparently, and he wants to present the stone to Queen Victoria at the same time, to damp down any unpleasant reactions he might get from the cabinet.’

  ‘What a chozzer!’ Joel remarked. ‘Do you know what his nickname is? “Sir Bottled Beer!” ’

  ‘Do you have to use language like that?’ asked Barney irritably. ‘This is a house, not a pigsty.’

  Sara tittered. ‘I adore it when Joel speaks Yiddish. The words are so absolutely expressive. He taught me what pisher meant, this morning.’

  ‘Kimberley’s a rough place,’ said Barney, ‘there’s no need for either of you to make it any rougher.’

  ‘Oh, Barney,’ protested Sara. ‘You’re getting so stuffy these days!’

  ‘I’m not stuffy, Sara,’ Barney retorted. ‘I just don’t happen to like the sound of a woman using foul language, that’s all. Especially when it’s a woman who seems to regard herself as a doyenne of society.’

  ‘My dear Barney,’ said Sara, slapping down her cards, ‘I couldn’t regard myself as a doyenne of society in this ramshackle little town even if I wanted to, since my beloved husband doesn’t happen to belong to the only half-decent club for hundreds and hundreds of miles. The only party I have ever given was utterly ruined by his insistence on tearing open his brother’s gangrenous leg in front of all of my guests, and in any case I can’t afford to give any more parties because he’s invested all of his money in those ridiculous diamond mines and he won’t sell the only worthwhile asset he’s got, which is that stupid oversized diamond.’

  ‘I’m going to sell it, but I’m not going to sell it for the wrong reasons!’ snapped Barney. ‘And nobody is going to pressure me into selling it, either! I’ll sell it when I want to, and to whom I want to, and at the right price!’

  ‘By the time you get around to selling it, you’ll have worn it down to a half-pointer, just by staring at it!’ said Sara.

  ‘You don’t even understand, do you?’ Barney demanded. ‘I suppose you want the blood of Cetewayo’s Zulus all over your hands, just because you need a few thousand pounds for dresses, and for parties? They’re thinking of sending two thousand troops in, and you know what that’s going to mean? Well, you obviously don’t – a massacre!’

  Sara stood up, her fists clenched and her face distorted in utter fury. ‘How dare you say that to me! How dare you! Do you think I’m going to put up with year after year of this obscenely boring place with no money and no social life and no friends, just for the sake of a handful of black savages? And what other excuse are you going to find for keeping me short of money
, after the Zulus? The Hottentots, or the Xhosa? You’ve got to sell the diamond, and that’s all there is to it!’

  ‘I’m not selling,’ said Barney, quietly.

  ‘They’ll send the troops into Zululand anyway,’ said Joel, placidly gathering up the scattered cards and mint bon-bons on his quilted bedcover. ‘Whether you sell the diamond or not, there’s still going to be a massacre.’

  ‘At least I won’t be part of it,’ Barney declared.

  ‘Listen, Barney,’ Joel told him, ‘every diamond that was ever dug out of the ground has blood on it. It’s the way that diamonds are. This diamond has blood on it already – mine. You don’t think a few hundred dead Zulus are going to make any difference?’

  ‘That’s the way that people have talked for centuries about the Jews,’ said Barney, and his throat was thick with suppressed emotion. ‘What does it matter? A few hundred dead Jews aren’t going to make any difference! Well, let me tell you something, Joel. I don’t know very much about the Zulus, but I do know that they’re proud and that they’re independent and that they have a culture and a social life of their own. I also happen to know that Cetewayo has tried to keep the peace with the British. But what we’re talking about here is betrayal – deliberate betrayal – and deceit – and murder. And the Governor wants to use my diamond to lend his reputation a little spurious lustre, at a time when his reputation is going to be pretty well completely drowned in blood. You can think what you like. You can think I’m stuffy, and you can think that I’m ridiculous. But I’m not allowing that diamond to go to London as the Victoria Star.’

  Sara’s nostrils flared, like a mare, but she kept her peace. She sat down on the bed again, her back straight, and reached for Joel’s hand. ‘If you’re absolutely determined that you’re not going to sell it, then the least you can do to amuse me is to let me hold another party. Perhaps this time you’ll be able to resist the temptation to tear Joel’s trousers off, and display his stump to all of our guests.’

  ‘I think I can manage that,’ said Barney. ‘How about the last day of January?’