The Pillow Fight

by Nicholas Monsarrat

  ‘You’ve got me.’

  ‘Out of office hours?’

  ‘Just that … Mr Steele, how much more proof do you want that I’m wild about you?’

  ‘Give me some more at five this evening.’

  ‘At half past four.’

  ‘I’ll try to make that half-hour significant.’

  I was to remember that conversation months afterwards, as a distant signal I should have recognised, like a faint swinging lamp in a bank of fog. But that morning, it only seemed to reflect a rather endearing masculine tantrum, with a distinctly flattering basis … Jonathan spent the rest of the week at my flat, pottering about, going for walks, or scribbling notes, while I took up my own pattern again.

  It was odd to think of him installed at home, while I worked downtown; indeed, it took some getting used to. Julia thought it very odd … But it was fun to come back to a guaranteed loving welcome, and the nights of course were wonderful.

  Then, at the week’s end, we made another promised journey together, to see my father.

  Chapter Eight

  My father was still the wisest man I knew, and in many ways the most admirable. Psychiatrists customarily split their sides when a woman tells them this; it means, of course, the very worst. But in simple truth, he had been, and was, a great man; and lucky is the girl who has a great man for a father. Basically he was a mining man, of the older, tougher generation; family background had given him a running start, hard work and integrity had taken him to the very top.

  He would have been a great deal richer if, in the bad old days of not so very long ago, he had been a more accommodating character – in brief, if he had played it crooked. But he had played it straight, as a lifelong habit, and was now, alas, only a moderate millionaire.

  At the age of sixty-five, he was already in semi-retirement; he had no wish to be any richer, and my brother’s death had made most other pursuits and interests pointless. He spent a little time each year at Maraisgezicht, to enjoy the harvest; a little time in Johannesburg, where a dozen boards claimed his intermittent attention; in the autumn he shot buck and guineafowl, in the spring he watched his horses lose two or three of the top classics; the rest of his time he spent by the sea, and most of that in simply watching it.

  The house he had built for our family holidays was near Hermanus, a small fishing village now grown somewhat sophisticated, about eighty miles east of Cape Town. When we drove down on Friday night, it took about three hours, by a mountain road which gave us, in the early moonlight, a matchless view of the whole Cape Peninsula. Jonathan and I were very happy, as usual, and my father, bless him, was happy to see us.

  He came down the front steps as soon as he saw the lights of the car; a bluff square figure, a little shrunken now, the lamplight falling on a face deeply carved, full of thought, full of time. I had not seen him for four months; he seemed greyer, but not less commanding, not less dear. He must have been very good-looking as a young man; now it could only be traced by the eyes of faith and love; the bony symmetry had shed its flowering, leaving only a gaunt outline of the happy past.

  He knew already that Jonathan and I were lovers, since I had told him when I telephoned earlier; observant without being in the least inquisitive, he would have divined it anyway, and it seemed better manners on my part to volunteer the information. It also simplified the housekeeping. As an Afrikaner, he would have made Jonathan welcome in any case; since I was involved, however irregularly, and he loved and trusted me, he made a special effort of hospitality.

  After he had kissed me, and I had inhaled his admirable male blend of cigars, brandy, bay rum, and the aftershave lotion (by Gourielli) I had given him for his last birthday, he turned to Jonathan, holding out a firm hand.

  ‘Welcome to my house!’ he said. It was the old-fashioned, traditional phrase I had never known him leave unspoken, with any newly arrived guest. ‘Did you have a good drive?’

  ‘Yes, thank you, sir,’ answered Jonathan. In the half-light, he was looking at my father in the way that most young men did: impressed, slightly awed, ready to be dutiful and attentive. On the journey down, he had remarked, à propos of nothing: ‘I hope the old boy likes me.’ This was the proper evaluation of that somewhat offhand phrase.

  ‘You’ve not been here before?’

  ‘No, never. It looks beautiful.’

  ‘It was beautiful,’ corrected my father, an opponent of all progress which did not relate to deep-level mining. ‘Now it’s nothing but crowds, and new houses, and bottle-stores, and damned women playing bridge all day and night in mink coats. Hermanus used to be a simple place. Now it’s a resort!’

  He said the last word with special emphasis, as if it were his private synonym for hell.

  ‘You don’t see much of them, Daddy,’ I reassured him.

  ‘No, thank God! The best thing about this house is that it’s got twelve acres and a good high wall … Let’s go in. You must be ready for a drink.’

  Presently, at ease in the comfortable living-room, furnished seaside fashion with the shabby overflow from Maraisgezicht, he nursed his drink, and said: ‘I’ll call you Jonathan, if I may … Do you two want to fish tomorrow, or just do nothing?’

  ‘Fish, I think,’ I answered. ‘Has it been any good?’

  ‘The yellow-tail are running, I’m told. I’ve got you two gullies, anyway.’

  ‘I’m not getting up at the crack of dawn,’ I warned him.

  He smiled, looking from Jonathan to me. ‘I wasn’t expecting any enthusiasm for outdoor sport before ten o’clock, at the very earliest.’ But he said it without undue innuendo; it was part of his enormous capacity for strength and comfort that he never offered advice unless it was asked for, nor passed judgement until the appropriate curtain fell.

  He knew that I had had lovers before; face to face with Jonathan, the incumbent, he might well have been discomforted, or disapproving of an idea scarcely conceivable to his own generation. But it did not show now, and it would never show unless, some time in the shadowy future, I perhaps asked him: ‘What did you really think? …’

  It amused me to see that, of the three of us, only Jonathan was embarrassed by this exchange. Indeed, on the pretext of looking at the view, he now wandered out onto the stoep, from where, I knew, the track of the moon on the water would be like a broad silver arrow pointing at the house.

  ‘An Englishman, eh?’ said my father in a gruff voice.

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘Your poor mother …’ But he was smiling. ‘Be happy, girl! Life doesn’t go on forever.’

  I kissed the top of his head. ‘I am happy. Will you come fishing with us tomorrow?’

  ‘You don’t want me hanging around playing gooseberry.’

  ‘But of course we do!’

  ‘I always knew there was something wrong with Englishmen,’ he grumbled. But he was pleased. ‘I’ll see … I’m getting a bit old for scrambling about the rocks.’ He heaved himself out of his chair. ‘Now I’m off to bed. Don’t stay up too late.’

  ‘We won’t.’

  He winked, and said: ‘I don’t expect you will, somehow.’

  ‘He’s wonderful, Daddy,’ I said, in necessary extenuation.

  ‘He’d better be,’ retorted my father, and stumped off to his room.

  Punctually on cue, Jonathan wandered in from the balcony. ‘It’s a heavenly night,’ he said. ‘The moon is enormous.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I told him. ‘He likes you terribly.’

  ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘If he didn’t, he’d still be here, just to annoy you … He once sat up for four hours, until my current young man lost heart and went home. I was furious.’

  ‘Is that meant to make me jealous?’ asked Jonathan, putting an arm round my waist.

  ‘Yes.’
>
  ‘It has succeeded.’

  ‘What happens when you’re jealous?’

  ‘The same as when I’m not jealous … I love you, Kate.’

  ‘It’s mutual, like the insurance.’

  ‘Strong, like the box.’

  We had lots of silly jokes already.

  We slept deep and lovingly that night, and awoke to the sound of the surf pounding the beach below the house. As often happened in the Cape Province, the wind had got up swiftly during the night, whipping the long Indian Ocean swell to a fierce tumult; on our treacherous coastline, it was not a day for fishing, unless one wanted to end up as a statistic under the traditional headline: ‘Fishing Party Washed Off Rocks At Hermanus.’

  Instead, we slaked our breakfast appetite with pawpaw and red snapper, assumed the customary Hermanus uniform of khaki slacks and rope-soled shoes, and prepared to loaf in the sun for the next forty-eight hours.

  We started by being happy. It happened that the household needed a new wash-girl (the last one had done something criminal to one of my father’s shirts) and we were commissioned to quarter the locality until we discovered one. ‘Find me a slut,’ had been my father’s directive, and so we drove round Hermanus in search of this commodity.

  Despite the wind, it was a bright day, warm and encouraging; and Hermanus, as usual, was a good place to be in. My father had been right in saying that it was becoming overcrowded, overbuilt and far too social for the simple tastes that had led us all there in the first place; but that could not spoil its basic attractions, which were sunshine, colour and a superb position at the edge, nor affect its air of village affability.

  I still knew most of the people on the street; pausing here and there in our curious task, eating ice cream, buying oranges and young asparagus, we were greeted by everyone from the local librarian (who, alas, had never heard of Jonathan Steele) to the courtly, devout and high-principled cleric known to one and all as the Venereal Arch-Demon.

  We found our wash-girl, after a number of false alarms; ‘There’s a slut!’ exclaimed Jonathan at one point, only to add, a moment later: ‘Sorry – no good – she has a tiny slut at breast.’ But, in the usual Hermanus pattern, somebody’s houseboy knew someone else whose girlfriend was ‘going to be busy by and by’ (the Cape-Coloured euphemism for pregnant) and would welcome the extra money; we finished up among some hessian shacks on the outskirts of the village, interviewing and then engaging an ugly sad-eyed girl who, if the three children playing at her feet were anything to go by, must have been fairly busy, on and off, for the past few years.

  Then we drove home, happy for a variety of reasons; and then, after lunch (which saw an agreeably heavy intake of martinis, our own white wine, and Van der Hum liqueur) things started to come unstuck.

  As so often in South Africa, the touchstone was political. My father had no politics to speak of; as an Afrikaner, he was fiercely proud of our people’s past, and their separate, valiant emergence as a nation; but he was also anti-Nationalist, and quite ready to concede that South Africa owed her nationhood to a genuine, twin-elemental grounding, and that neither side, Dutch or English, had had a monopoly of brains, guts and endurance in the past.

  However, he had his tender spots; and one of these was the late General Smuts, whose special repute in South African history he thought overblown and undeserved.

  Jonathan, as an Englishman, did not; and he was foolish enough to argue about it, well beyond the point where argument becomes sullen disagreement.

  I don’t think he would have done so if, in some curious, unassimilated way, he had not made up his mind that he disapproved of my father. Of course, there was no compulsion upon him to like rich people, nor any reason why he should be attracted by my father’s special brand of effortless self-assurance. As a poor man, he must have found Maraisgezicht, and also the Hermanus house, somewhat daunting; jealousy was therefore involved, as well as the careless spur of alcohol.

  In a much more subtle way, however, I believe Jonathan was shocked that my father did not object to our liaison – an example of upside-down English piety which at any other time I might have found funny. But whatever the mainsprings of his discontent, it emerged as a sort of cocksure argumentativeness, with which, alas, my father was just the right man to deal.

  It would be dull to retail the whole course of their argument, which covered virtually everything, from the Battle of Slagter’s Nek during the Anglo-Boer war to the inaugural session of the United Nations at Lake Success in 1945. In my country, it was a familiar theme and a familiar division of opinion; whether a newish, immature country like South Africa could afford the luxury of a ‘world statesman’ of Smuts’ calibre, when the real need was for honest and capable politicians working on the home front.

  My father, of course, was in no doubt about the latter point.

  ‘I knew Smuts well,’ he said at one stage, when Jonathan, already rather irritable, had tossed off some phrase about ‘the verdict of history’. ‘I don’t really feel I have to wait for the verdict of history, as far as his effect on this country is concerned. He was a good chap, basically, and shrewd, but he was vain – vain as one of my peacocks! He was immensely flattered at the attention he got overseas, particularly in England; he never recovered from the idea which that rogue Lloyd George originally gave him – that he was too big for South Africa, and that his real parish was the whole world.’

  ‘But that was perfectly true,’ said Jonathan shortly.

  ‘Nonsense, my dear boy!’ said my father, with his customary self-confidence. ‘Lloyd George simply wanted to flatter us country bumpkins into tagging along behind England, and Smuts was the bait.’

  ‘He was a great man,’ said Jonathan stubbornly.

  ‘Oh, I agree! He was just the kind of man South Africa needed – but we needed him here at home, not throwing his weight about at the League of Nations and the UN. If he’d given half the attention to South African politics – particularly race relations – that he gave to buttering up those damn half-baked banana republics in South America, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are today.’

  ‘But he put South Africa on the world map,’ said Jonathan. ‘In fact, he was about the only man who could have done it. No one had heard of the place before he came along.’

  ‘He put South Africa back fifty years,’ rejoined my father, ignoring Jonathan’s last astonishing sentence. ‘We didn’t especially want to be on the world map, as you call it. It was much more important to set our own house in order, and earn a solid reputation, slowly and honestly.’

  ‘Well, of course, if you’d rather South Africa had remained a sort of farmers’ republic, stuck at the end of nowhere–’

  My father regarded him with his usual courteous attention, but there was steel underneath. ‘There are worse people than farmers, Jonathan,’ he said, ‘and worse countries than old-fashioned, simple, honestly-run communities that don’t bother overmuch about their world reputation. Smuts worked and lived and thought completely apart from this country; and we just couldn’t afford to have a man like that going to waste. When he died, he left his own political party in a mess, he left his country half-organised and very vulnerable, and he left a thousand things undone that were worth all his attention.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Jonathan, with some insolence, ‘I suppose most Afrikaners are bound to be jealous of him.’

  ‘I hope I shall never be jealous of self-conceit.’

  And so on … It did not end in direct collision, which my father’s code of hospitality would never have allowed; but it was a somewhat grim host who presently went out into the garden, and a distinctly angry Jonathan who was left to me.

  ‘You are a bloody fool,’ I told him, without hesitation, as soon as we were alone. ‘What did you want to get into that silly argument for? He knows ten times more about it than you.’

  ‘Doe
s he?’ asked Jonathan, forbiddingly.

  ‘Yes. And it’s his house, too. It’s so rude to behave like that.’

  ‘He was rude to me.’

  ‘I wish he had been. By now, you’d be lying in about eight separate heaps.’

  ‘Those people are all the same – self-opinionated – blind – running in blinkers–’

  What do you mean, those people?’

  ‘Afrikaners.’

  ‘I’m an Afrikaner.’

  ‘But you’re not a real one. I mean, you were educated in England, and you’ve travelled–’

  This point of view – that only an English education had saved me from utter degradation – always infuriated me, and it did so now. I got up from my chair, and from there looked down at him.

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ I exploded, ‘do you think you’re doing me a favour by including me among the English? You and Lord Muddley ought to get married … I’m an Afrikaner, like my father, and we both know a bloody sight more about South Africa than you ever will, if you stay here until you’re eighty.’

  Jonathan, less angry now, looked at me in the most annoying way he could devise. ‘Such language,’ he murmured. ‘I always say, an oath on a woman’s lips–’

  I produced another oath, which startled both of us. ‘And I meant that, too!’ I went on. ‘If you want to give a lecture on South African politics, don’t choose this house to give it in.’

  Sulky once more, Jonathan said: ‘I’d certainly prefer a more literate audience,’ and retired to the sideboard for another drink.

  We kept up this sort of thing for most of the rest of that day; it ended, indeed, after a very trying dinner, with myself going off to bed early, and telling Jonathan to go and sleep somewhere else, when he tried to come into our room. From the doorway, in his dressing-gown, he looked at me rather forlornly, and said: ‘Oh well, that’s the way it goes – chicken one day, feathers the next.’ That made me laugh at last, and laughter, presently, made us lovers again.