The Pillow Fight

by Nicholas Monsarrat

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I feel it.’

  ‘Then you’d better feel again.’ This was my particular hobbyhorse, and I gave it a touch of the whip. ‘The people in this room, and people like them in other towns, run this country. They run the mines, the politics, the banks, the business world, the newspapers. They count tremendously, because they’re on top, and if they’re clever enough, they’re going to stay there, till you and I are old and grey.’ I hadn’t intended to link myself in that or any other way with Jonathan Steele, and I went on swiftly: ‘If you leave them out of a book on South Africa, the book will be only half true.’

  But he caught up the point I hadn’t wanted to make. ‘When you and I are old and grey,’ he said, smiling more easily, ‘South Africa may be a very different country.’

  ‘But these people are here, now.’

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘They’re here, now.’ He gave the last word a slightly satirical emphasis, neatly reversing the sense of my remark. ‘I’m looking for something more enduring.’

  ‘It’s right here, under your nose.’

  ‘Let’s disagree,’ he said suddenly. My mother would have approved of the courteous withdrawal. ‘This is much too good a party to spoil … What happens afterwards?’

  ‘We move on somewhere else.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘The stayers, and the people I like.’

  ‘Can I be a stayer?’

  ‘Among all these worthless characters?’

  ‘I want to keep them under my nose.’

  I had to agree that this was a laudable idea, and we left it like that. I hoped that he would forget, or find something better to do. Certainly I myself had lots of better things to do, than listen to half baked criticism from this wandering, myopic scribe, peering through pre-set spectacles at something he would never comprehend.

  Not on that night, nor on any night thereafter, did I know for certain whether or not Jonathan Steele was drunk. Clearly he must have had a lot to drink; but it did not show in his manner, nor in his speech, and the crude clash which took place later that evening might well have been a habit with him, or a way of attracting my attention, or simply an expression of violent disagreement with his surroundings. It certainly made its mark on a number of my friends.

  By midnight, we were reduced to a party of five: Steele and myself, Bruno van Thaal, Lord Muddley (who had attached himself unshakeably to my entourage), and Gerald Thyssen. In any list of the ten richest men in South Africa, Gerald Thyssen always figured; my father, I know, was prepared to shorten such a list to five, and still keep Gerald in. He was a youngish mining man, chairman of his own company which had extensive interests in the Free State; most of his wealth was inherited from an intensely hard-working German grandfather, but Gerald himself was sufficiently capable to have doubled that fortune, at a time when cramped investment and political unpopularity had made South Africa no paradise for money-spinners.

  Intermittently, he was one of my suitors; now and again, when I was tired, or overworked, or depressed at the mink-less, chinchilla-less, diamond-less state of my wardrobe, I toyed with the idea of sinking back into the state of cushioned respectability which a community-property interest in twenty million pounds seemed likely to ensure.

  But it hadn’t happened yet, and Gerald Thyssen stayed as he was one of the world’s most eligible men, the target and the despair of hordes of mothers in London, Paris, New York, Italy and South Africa, and (rare among the very rich) a thoroughly nice man who gave heartening significance to the word ‘generosity’.

  Midnight found us at the Cascade, a small restaurant-nightclub with nothing at all to commend it except that it was in the centre of town, and could be relied on to stay open forever, until the last drunk had broken his last leg on the last flight of steps. We were eating Polish eggs, an agreeable form of blotting paper, and drinking whisky. I danced once with Bruno, who was full of gossip and waspish comment about the party, and then, returning to the queue of three other men who probably didn’t want to dance at all, I said: ‘Gentlemen, my feet are killing me – I’d much rather talk,’ and we settled down in the twilight of our table again.

  I had Gerald Thyssen on one side, Muddley on the other. Jonathan Steele, looking rather grim and withdrawn, was at the farther end of the table.

  It was Lord Muddley who sparked the scene. I must admit that we had all found him rather trying; he had a fruity, ecclesiastical pontificating tone, coupled with an absolute lack of experience in any field save country-gentlemanship, which made him very hard to take. He lectured Bruno on how to make money in real estate; he instructed Jonathan Steele how to write books, and myself how to make good in advertising. It was while he was telling Gerald Thyssen how to run his gold mines that the balloon went up.

  ‘South Africa,’ proclaimed Muddley, in that high-pitched gargling voice which must have declared many a Conservative fête well and truly opened, ‘should really do very well, if the cost-price structure remains constant. In your particular field, Thyssen, you have only to make sure that the wage costs of your labour force are pegged at their present level, and that the supply of labour itself–’

  ‘What you really mean,’ said Jonathan Steele, breaking in on a harsh, rather strained note, ‘is that the gold mines will continue to make lots of money if they have an inexhaustible supply of slave labour, labour that isn’t allowed to strike and for whom there’s no alternative employment.’

  There was a moment of surprised silence. Then: ‘I don’t mean anything of the sort,’ said Lord Muddley, speaking over his shoulder in a way I would have found infuriating. ‘Those of us with experience in the management field–’

  ‘You couldn’t manage an automatic sewage farm,’ said Steele crudely. ‘Major contributor though you are.’

  It was rather too rude to be acceptably funny, but I smiled in spite of myself, and Bruno laughed out loud. Steele seemed to find this even more infuriating.

  ‘You’re all the same, you people,’ he said, with extreme bitterness. ‘Everything in South Africa is either a joke or a racket. You bleat about wage costs and the supply of labour, but you never think of those things in human terms at all. You don’t see, behind the words, millions of wretched natives sweating their guts out, cooped up in this stinking squirrel’s cage–’ his voice tailed off, as if he were going to cry.

  Gerald Thyssen, a gentle yet authoritative man, tried to intervene in a situation which, even for a Johannesburg nightclub, was somewhat embarrassing.

  ‘I wouldn’t say things were exactly like that.’

  ‘You wouldn’t say,’ said Jonathan Steele rudely.

  Gerald smiled. ‘Yes, I wouldn’t say. We certainly couldn’t run our mines properly if we kept our mine-boys, how did you put it? – cooped up in a stinking squirrel’s cage. We try to do a lot better for them than that.’

  Gerald Thyssen was, I knew, personally on very strong ground there. No one in the modern mining industry had done more for his mine-workers; apart from special safety gear in the shafts themselves, his compounds, with their married quarters and recreation halls, and spotless cafeterias, were probably the finest in Africa, a showpiece which the Nationalist Government (not strikingly intent on cherishing its humblest citizens) were constantly inspecting, chivvying, complaining about, and trying subtly to sabotage.

  ‘What do you do for them,’ asked Jonathan Steele, ‘that’s so different from anyone else?’

  ‘It’s not so very different from anyone else,’ answered Gerald, still equable, ‘though we like to think that we have the best-run mines in the country. To begin with, we spent nearly a million pounds last year on housing, improved diet, hospitals, medical care and welfare generally.’

  ‘Princely,’ said Lord Muddley. ‘Positively princely.’

  ‘Bunk!’ said Jonathan Steele. ‘It’s j
ust to keep your work-people in prime condition.’ And to Lord Muddley: ‘You do the same for your pigs, don’t you?’

  ‘Darling,’ said Bruno to me, in an undertone, ‘I have a feeling that this is going to end in tears.’

  ‘Pigs?’ repeated Lord Muddley, his jaw dropping. ‘What on earth do you mean, pigs? We’re talking about gold-mining.’

  ‘We’re talking about the pig aspect of gold-mining,’ said Steele, ‘and all the other aspects of life in South Africa that make pigs out of men.’

  It now occurred to me that he was drunk, although it was not apparent in his speech; and I wondered (as a girl does) what form it usually took with him – whether he remained a talking drunk, or graduated to a fighting drunk, or a crying drunk, and if he threw lampshades and felled waiters, or just knocked over tables and crumpled to the ground. The present situation bore many of the classic earmarks of a nightclub brawl, the only difference being that nowadays this sort of thing very seldom happened to me.

  It became apparent that Steele was a talker; and, truth to tell, I was never too sure about the ‘drunk’ part of it, since his enunciation remained embarrassingly clear.

  Now: ‘Pigs out of men?’ repeated Lord Muddley, who made a good, if slow, straight man. ‘Upon my soul, I don’t know what you’re talking about!’

  ‘I’m talking about race relations,’ said Jonathan Steele, ‘and a system which keeps millions of people permanently poor, and a few thousands rich.’

  ‘Here we go!’ said Bruno. ‘London School of Economics.’

  ‘There’ll always be rich and poor,’ said Lord Muddley.

  ‘Very likely,’ said Steele. ‘But in most parts of the modern world they won’t always be the same lot of people, permanently anchored in one class or the other. Even the British Conservative party,’ he said, ironically, ‘endorses a system of private enterprise, by which a man can rise from the bottom to the top, if he works hard enough.’

  Lord Muddley said: ‘Quite,’ expressing, I had no doubt, a limited allegiance to this view.

  ‘You can’t do that in South Africa,’ said Jonathan Steele. ‘There’s a line between the Negro and the white man, and the Negro can’t cross it. There’s a wage level dividing the Negro and the white man, and the Negro can’t rise above it. There’s an educational barrier between the Negro and the white man, and the Negro can’t climb it. You’ve got the poor bastards hamstrung, and you’re going to keep them that way.’

  ‘And a bloody good idea, too!’ said Bruno van Thaal, who had his own notion of paradise, and was not ashamed of it.

  ‘Of course it’s a good idea, from your point of view,’ said Steele, ‘but I’m talking about real people … That means that you have a permanent slave colony in South Africa, something unique in the twentieth century. Do you wonder that the rest of the world thinks of you as barbarians?’

  Gerald Thyssen shook his head. I think he shared my view that this could be an explosive occasion, and didn’t want to touch it off; but he had his own personal convictions as well.

  ‘I wouldn’t call it a slave economy,’ he said reasonably. ‘We’re lucky to have a large labour force, with a relatively low standard of living. All sorts of countries have that – England is one of them, the United States is another.’ He raised his hand as Jonathan Steele, who had been taking a deep draught of whisky-and-soda, made as if to break in. ‘Just a minute … I know that there are opportunities of rising from one class to another, in both those countries, and that those opportunities don’t exist in South Africa, though they may do so in the future. But the net result now, after less than a hundred years of industrial development from very crude beginnings, is a prosperous country, based largely on gold, diamonds and uranium, but with substantial industries as well, which supports twelve million people.’

  ‘The net result is a criminal mess!’ Jonathan Steele burst out. ‘Good God, don’t any of you use your eyes as you walk about? You’re living on top of the worst ghetto in the world … It wouldn’t be so bad, in a way, if you made something worthwhile out of your slave-state, like Athens did, or Rome – something handsome, creative, cultured, to justify all the misery at the lower levels. But all you make is money.’

  ‘That’s bad?’ asked Bruno sarcastically.

  But Steele couldn’t be bothered with the fleas on the body politic. ‘The same goes for women,’ he said, though not looking at me. ‘Here they are, with unlimited servants, unlimited leisure, unlimited opportunity to make something out of their lives. What do they do with it all? – just bridge teas, gossip, triviality, love affairs, a six-hour siesta every day. They’re the laziest, most expensive harlots in the world.’

  ‘Come on, Steele,’ I said suddenly, edgily. ‘You haven’t said a damned thing yet … What else don’t you like about us?’

  His eyes came round to mine, very straight, very direct; I decided that he wasn’t drunk at all, just explosively keyed up, bursting with things he had wanted to say for a long time, to the people he thought deserved them.

  ‘The way you treat your natives,’ he said, as if reciting from some inner rubric. ‘The way you just don’t see them, on the street or in a room … The way old natives can be barred from using the lifts, and have to walk up eleven flights of stairs … The way servants, regardless of sex, are herded together in the sleeping quarters at the backs of houses, like a kennel full of mongrels … The “Whites Only” labels on benches, trains, lavatories, shop counters … The brutality of the most degraded poor whites, tramps, the sherry-gang type, towards any black man, regardless of his worth … The way the police treat a native when they stop him in the street, or pick him up for forgetting his pass … Johannesburg, especially, is just an appalling square mile of jungle, surrounded by black civilization.’

  Gerald Thyssen burst out laughing. ‘Now I’ve heard everything.’

  ‘You’ve heard it,’ said Jonathan Steele, ‘but you haven’t listened to it.’

  Lord Muddley expelled a deep breath. ‘The fellow’s just a communist!’

  Thinking to lower the temperature: ‘Are you a communist, fellow?’ I asked.

  ‘Not yet. If I stayed here I would be.’

  ‘Then don’t stay here,’ said Bruno.

  ‘I suppose you want us all to be the same,’ said Muddley.

  Steele looked at him, and answered: ‘God forbid!’

  My irritation returned. ‘But if you feel like this, what are you doing here? Why aren’t you out in the streets, binding up the wounds and throwing open the ghettos? I notice all these classy ideas haven’t stopped you spending nearly six hours with us top-flight barbarians, accepting our hospitality on a fairly extensive scale.’

  Steele smiled, not humorously. ‘I’ve always had a weakness for the expense-account aristocracy.’

  It was a very rude remark indeed, and it brought Gerald Thyssen to life.

  ‘I think you ought to apologise for that,’ he said, very much the chairman of companies with scores of men jumping whenever he told them to. ‘It was unforgivably rude.’

  After an uncomfortable pause: ‘I’m sorry,’ said Jonathan Steele. ‘I didn’t mean to be personal.’

  ‘Forget it,’ I told him.

  ‘But it does seem to be true that–’

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ exploded Bruno van Thaal. ‘Can’t you leave it alone?’

  ‘–that if you ignore politics and race relations, you’re just running in blinkers,’ Steele went on, as though Bruno had not spoken. ‘It’s almost as if there were parts of South Africa you were afraid to look at.’

  I knew he was needling me again, but I took it up anyway. ‘Such as?’

  ‘Well, have you ever been round a native location in Johannesburg?’

  ‘No. But I’m not afraid to.’

  ‘Come with me tomorrow, then.’

  ‘I have
to work.’

  ‘Ah, well …’

  One of these days, I thought, Jonathan Steele was going to get a knife in the back, and I envied, in advance, the man or woman who would wield it.

  ‘Which location?’ I asked.

  ‘Teroka.’

  ‘Don’t go, Kate,’ said Bruno crossly. ‘It’ll be grisly.’

  ‘Don’t you have to have a permit?’

  ‘I’m meeting Father Shillingford. He can fix it.’

  ‘Oh, God!’ said Bruno. ‘I knew it. That monstrous man!’

  The others were watching me – Muddley somewhat mystified, Gerald Thyssen uneasy, and still prickly-tempered on my behalf.

  ‘I’ve never met Father Shillingford,’ I said.

  ‘He’s a very remarkable person,’ answered Steele.

  ‘What time?’

  ‘Ten o’clock.’

  ‘God damn it!’ I said, half angry, half amused. ‘It’s a deal … And now I want a really big whisky-and-soda.’

  Chapter Three

  I was not at my sunniest next morning, and if it had not been for a cast-iron rule never to break appointments, either personal or professional, I would have left a message for Jonathan Steele, and forgotten the whole thing. Joel Sachs and I had a ton of office work to get through; I had lots of people to see, and a good many other ways of passing the time; the very last thing I wanted to do was to throw away the morning in trudging through a native location which I knew in advance would be dirty, mean and depressing.

  Moreover, looking back on it in cool sober daylight, I could appreciate the weapons by which I had been bounced into making the trip; a combination of argumentative blackmail, induced irritation, and a mood of anything-for-a-quiet-life which the unedifying scene at the Cascade had promoted. Whether intentional or not, Jonathan Steele had done an adroit job, and I had long graduated from such haphazard pressures.

  Nor was I at all enamoured of the idea of meeting Father Shillingford, who had hitherto been only a name to me, as to most of my friends. He ran a mission in Teroka, one of the native locations; he was always figuring in the headlines as coming into collision with the authorities, preaching a near-the-knuckle sermon, defying the apartheid laws, joining protest marches, and peddling his particular brand of fraternal saccharine.