Fay looked at him steadily. “Take my hands.”
She held them out. Barney frowned and took them, holding them tightly. He stared down at their clasped hands, unable to see them clearly in the darkness, not knowing the reason for the gesture, but pleased to be touching Fay. “What about them?”
“You talk about being ugly; they are ugly. I was ashamed of them. I was afraid you’d be ashamed of them, too, and I didn’t want that. I culled dirt at the mine the first two months we were here; I broke up the lumps with a pick and shovel while Pa dug; we couldn’t afford help. I make the soap I use to wash clothes and the lye burns holes in the skin. My hands are awful. I never thought about them until I saw you walk into the tent tonight. Then I didn’t want you to see them.”
“Fay—”
“I didn’t think I’d ever see you again,” she said quietly. “We’ve been two miles away from each other for over six months, and you never made any attempt to look me up, to see how I was, what I was doing…” Her voice was on the verge of breaking.
“Fay, you don’t understand—”
“What don’t I understand? I thought we were friends—”
Barney took a deep breath. “My brother… Remember I told you he’d hit it rich in Kimberley? I wasn’t bragging or lying; I thought he had. Well, he hadn’t hit it big at all. In fact, he’d gone stony. And I had twenty quid to me name in me kicks — twenty pounds in my pocket, I mean, when I got here, and thin prospects. I couldn’t come to see you like that—”
“Why not?” Fay’s voice was bitter. “You couldn’t come to see a friend? I didn’t know a soul. I didn’t have a friend in the world. I still don’t. And who are we to be proud? You couldn’t come to see me because you didn’t have any money?” She looked at him steadily a moment and then looked down at the road. “My pa traded our oxen and wagon for a claim that gave less than twenty carats in a month, after digging a month on a claim he’d rented that gave even less. If the diggers didn’t advance the money for the cloth, we wouldn’t even be in tailoring.” She kicked at the dirt in the road, shook her head, and then looked up again. “Ah, what’s the use? You’re the one who doesn’t understand, Barney Isaacs.”
Barney continued to hold her hands tightly. Suddenly he bent and kissed the back of one hand and then quickly straightened up, feeling his face get red. Fay made no motion to indicate approval or rejection.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and meant it. “You’re right. I didn’t understand.” There was the briefest of pauses while Barney tried to find the right words. “Can I come around Sunday? The mines are shut down. We can have a picnic. I’ll bring everything,” he added hastily.
“I go to church.”
“Can I come around after church?”
Fay suddenly made up her mind. “Come around before church,” she said. “Come early, very early. We’ll go for a ride in the country. Away from here.” She looked around as if she could see the squalor about them in the darkness. “As far away from here as possible!”
She tugged her hands free; Barney released them reluctantly. She walked to the tent and then turned, looking back at him. “Good night, Barney Isaacs,” she said without expression, and disappeared inside.
Barney slowly climbed into his cart, his mind whirling. Fay Bees didn’t dislike him; from the way she had talked she even liked him. Oh, it wasn’t anything like love, he knew that; she had certainly made that clear enough. But it was friendship, and that was something. That was a great deal, and he’d been a fool for not having come to see her months before. Fay had had a rough time of it, and he might have been able to help in some way — but the reason he hadn’t, of course, was because he had been working for her, although naturally she would never know that, nor should she. The man Fay eventually fell in love with and married, Barney knew, would be good-looking and tall and not wear spectacles, but that didn’t necessarily mean that he’d be successful; and if Fay ever needed anything, Barney intended to see that she got it, no matter how he arranged it. He considered himself very lucky that somebody hadn’t offered her help during the six months he had allowed to pass without trying to see her. He could scarcely have blamed her had she been forced to accept.
It was a thought Barney preferred not to dwell upon. It hadn’t happened so there was no need to think of it, even though the thought kept trying to interject itself in his mind. Instead, he let old Rhodes carry him back to the center of Kimberley, through the tent village of Bultfontein, along the deserted Dutoitspan Road, aware of the fragrance of the night once the odors of the tent village were behind him and the open country between Bultfontein and Kimberley proper was being traversed. He felt totally alive, aware of everything about him, as if he had wakened from a long sleep. He remembered the thrill of holding Fay’s hands — strong hands they were, and fine hands, much put upon by the demands of a father who didn’t deserve a daughter like that — and he hadn’t noticed any roughness since his own were so calloused he couldn’t have noticed if he’d wanted to. He thought of her putting her hands behind her so he couldn’t see or feel what she thought was ugliness, and he felt proud in being considered a friend to that extent. It was a warm feeling, a good feeling, but also a sad feeling, in knowing he would never possess those hands, that girl, her love…
They had their Sunday picnic on the banks of the River Vaal to the west; not the Orange River to the south with the grave of Emily Bees to cast a shadow over the carefree spirit of the day. Fay Bees never wanted to forget her mother as she remembered her in Simonstown, a beautiful, wonderful, active, spirited person. The sickly, coughing, fevered, spitting woman who finally succumbed to the pressures of the trek and died to leave her daughter all alone was certainly not her mother, nor did Fay ever want to see again the stone cairn that hid from sight that stranger.
They spoke of many things that day; their pasts, so different: a girl raised in a small town like Simonstown on the tip of South Africa; a boy brought up in the slums of London. A girl who was an only child and now an orphan; a boy from a large family, a father, a mother, a brother, and two sisters, with aunts, uncles, nephews, and cousins all over the place. They spoke of their schooling, hers a church school with rigid discipline, his the Jews’ Free School in Bell Lane in the East End, and the further education picked up in the streets. They spoke of the troubles each had gotten into as children, and Barney learned that despite the differences they had many things in common. They were, after all, still two teenagers, brought through the oddity of events to play the role of adults. And Barney did the entire final speech of Mathias from The Bells without the slightest trace of Cockney accent, while old Rhodes looked up from his grazing with eyebrows cocked to see his master posturing so oddly — and Barney, of course, did not admit that he had been practicing the speech ever since he had last seen her, and Fay clapped her hands and congratulated him, nor did she admit she still thought it very funny, even without the accent. And as they rode back to Kimberley in the afternoon, with the sun warm on their backs and their silence as intimate as their conversation had been, Barney suddenly broke that silence. “You’ll like my brother, Harry. We’ll stop by and you can meet him when we get back. He’s taller than me, and real good-looking.” It had occurred to Barney that Harry was a long way from that girl of his he had spoken of — if she really existed and Harry hadn’t invented her to make Barney feel better — and that Harry and Fay would make a great couple. If he couldn’t have her, and it was evident he never could, at least his brother was someone he knew, liked, and trusted. It was true that Harry had no great drive, no great ambitions to get ahead, but he, Barney, would be in the family and he had drive enough for both of them. And for a girl like Fay, maybe even Harry would begin to get ambitious.