The Pillow Fight

by Nicholas Monsarrat

I hated quarrelling with him, and I hoped that this was the end of it. But as it turned out, we had only just started.

  If, on Sunday, we had been able to fish, perhaps it would have been all right; South African ‘sport’ fishing, for yellow-tail or mussel-cracker up to forty pounds, and sharks up to a hundred, was often extremely strenuous, and left people far too tired to argue about anything except the right time to go to bed.

  But the gale still persisted, keeping the rocks all round the bay perpetually gleaming and sluicing with sea water under its attack, and we were thus under-employed. We tried to sunbathe, but there was too much wind; we played canasta, and got bored with it; we drank rather too much at lunchtime, and thereafter embarked on a royal row which put an end to the whole excursion – and to a lot of other things as well.

  Perhaps I should have made some allowance for Jonathan; he had agreed to apologise to my father during the morning, and possibly a quarrel with me was his way of assuaging a climb down which, for someone of his temperament, must have been morbidly undignified. (I was coming to realise that he was a much more complex character than I had supposed.) But I made no such allowances, because I chanced to be in a brusque sort of mood myself; and the result was an argument of very considerable scope.

  Basically, it was a continuation, an expansion, of the one we had had, driving into Cape Town on that earlier Monday morning. As on that occasion, I wanted to get back into town; Jonathan, however, wanted us to stay on in Hermanus, and tried to persuade me that it would make no difference if we did so. But this time, he was rather more direct about the whole thing.

  ‘But, Kate, how on earth could it matter?’ he asked, when I told him it was out of the question for me to stay. ‘One day, two days, even a week – the world won’t come to an end if you take a holiday. It’s so lovely here, and–’

  ‘Of course the world won’t come to an end,’ I answered irritably. ‘I’m not claiming that it would. But I’ve got a job to do, with a lot of people depending on me, and I’m not taking any more holidays until I’m due for them.’

  ‘I thought you were the boss.’

  I stared at him. ‘I’m the boss, just because I’ve got that sense of responsibility.’

  ‘Oh darling, don’t be so pompous!’

  That annoyed me. ‘Look, you can take all the holidays you want. You can loaf for six months without visible loss to anyone. I can’t, and that’s the difference between us.’

  ‘It’s not the only difference.’ Clearly he thought I was sneering at him – as perhaps I was – and he grew angry in his turn. ‘You may earn ten times as much as I do, but my God! what you become in the process!’

  ‘What does that mean, exactly?’

  ‘Tough!’ he answered immediately, with a certain crude relish. ‘You just don’t give a damn for anyone but yourself, do you? – I saw that, when we made that silly trip to Teroka. You won’t even try to do anything with Maraisgezicht, because you can do much better for yourself as the queen-bee in an advertising firm.’ He really had been laid low by that thing with my father, I realised, and now the score was being evened up, at my expense. ‘All that damned nonsense about “my people”–’ he mimicked me savagely, ‘–you wouldn’t lose an hour’s sleep if they all dropped dead tomorrow!’

  It just wasn’t worth answering this sort of thing in detail.

  ‘Listen,’ I said crisply, ‘I know that I’m the bad character, and you’re the good one. We established that, a long time ago. I’m not arguing the point. I happen to like achievement, power, money – whatever yardstick you care to use – and I’m going to continue on those lines. So you go on with the good works, I’ll concentrate on the selfish materialism, and we’ll both be happy … And we’re going back to Cape Town this afternoon.’

  He shrugged. ‘Suits me. This whole atmosphere is pure poison.’

  I looked at him. He was smoking one of my father’s larger Larranagas, and drinking five-star Martell!

  ‘Well, don’t choke on it before you get your money’s worth.’

  It was a sulky, silent drive back; the mountain road and the scenery did not help at all, and I had plenty of time to think as I drove. We were both still furious with each other, but Jonathan was something more.

  For the moment, he was almost vindictively independent. He had been goaded by something – jealousy, my father’s neat disposal of him, even the idea (somewhat late in arrival) that he was ‘betraying his ideals’ by associating with me – into a mood of separation which he was going to carry through, at all costs. Our love, our lovemaking, our recent delight in each other – these were not factors tending to bind him; indeed, they were the measure of his corruption, and thus to be abruptly purged.

  There must have been many strands to this determination; there was even the physical fact that he had been making love to me, with fair persistence on both sides, for fourteen days and nights, and could do with a rest. Jonathan on the sexual ascent was one thing; but Jonathan satiated was a take-it-or-leave-it seller … These were not pretty thoughts; they were deeply disconcerting also; and they guaranteed that I remained angry and uncommunicative, during two hours of frustrated Sunday driving.

  But it was still a shock when, thirty miles out from Cape Town on the Somerset West road, he said: ‘You can drop me off at the airport.’

  Until he rang me up from Johannesburg, late that same night, it was hell. I hadn’t argued with him about leaving; indeed, I had let him go in contemptuous silence, sloughing off both him and his luggage as if the car had become far too crowded anyway. But in the intervening six hours, the wheel had come round full circle again; I missed him so much, with such hungry abandonment, that I actually tried to charter a plane to fly me to Johannesburg, only to be side-tracked by some technical rigmarole about night flying regulations.

  My mood involved a total surrender which might cost me dearly in self-esteem, later on; but that evening, alone in a flat which was full of him, between sheets which smelled achingly of his body, I would have given him the earth, on a plate balanced on my bowed head.

  I didn’t care what he did; he could insult my father, call me a mercenary bitch, show his utter contempt for my preoccupation with my job, be as English as Nelson, give everything we owned to the destitute poor. But he wasn’t to stop loving me.

  He hadn’t stopped, as his charged voice over the long-distance wire from Johannesburg told me, at eleven o’clock that night. Indeed, I was instantly, triumphantly aware that he matched my mood of hunger and loneliness exactly; we made up our quarrel with a rush of endearments in which love, longing and reminiscent sex were almost alarmingly mingled. Good luck, I thought at one point, to anyone who might be listening in …

  We both apologised abjectly, swore it would never happen again, vowed we couldn’t exist without each other, promised a whole range of compensatory delights when next we met, kissed and murmured like infatuated doves. We might have been seventeen years of age. It was heavenly.

  ‘I’m wearing the top half of your pyjamas,’ I told him, when, in tune again, we were saying goodbye.

  ‘A nice thought. Moving, like the pictures.’

  ‘Loose, like the living … When are you coming down to collect them?’

  ‘Soon.’

  ‘Make it really soon, Johnny.’

  ‘But you’re so busy.’

  ‘I won’t be, I promise.’

  ‘Soon, then.’

  Alone again, but happy and reassured, I found myself wondering where we would actually go from there. We had left it in the air, because at that stage neither of us knew. And I really was busy … My last ridiculous decision before I went to sleep was to take Jonathan onto my staff as a copy-writer, and make love to him every lunch hour, in the big dark cupboard next to the water-cooler.

  Chapter Nine

  A fresh start to a fresh week suddenly made a gr
eat deal of difference.

  It began with some self-conscious reminiscence, of a not-too-reassuring kind. Taking stock of the past fortnight’s confusion, in circumstances ideal for such clear-headed appraisal – the office of Kate Marais Advertising, on a Monday morning – I had to admit that I had been behaving very oddly by my own standards, though almost normally by other people’s. Common sense told me that lots of girls had lovers, lots of girls quarrelled with them, lots of girls, emotionally bereft, made it up again; every fifth book, every second TV drama, every single film, endorsed this corny pattern, and my own professional researches confirmed it.

  But it was precisely because everyone else did it that I had never wanted to follow the fashion; and now, brushing free of the same classic web myself, I felt bound to dispose of my case with the equally classic: ‘Not guilty – but don’t do it again.’

  For it had been confusion, fifteen solid days of it; there had been nothing like it, in my ordered life, for years … Sitting at my desk in a room on the fifteenth floor of Cape Town’s highest building – a room whose view of the harbour and its perpetual cross-thread of shipping was always severely rationed, in the interests of concentration, a room whose austere, polished elegance placed it midway between an executive office and a suite in the Queen Elizabeth – I examined the astonishing reverse side of the medal.

  It had been a holiday, of course; the most heavenly holiday so far; but still a holiday, a break with custom and reality. I had treated myself to it because I had fallen in love; and love, as usual, had proved intractable, hard to handle. Jonathan had been a wonderful lover (a cautionary voice asked: How and why? Years of practice? A professional performance?) and a prickly person at the same time (the identical voice demanded: Why? Accident insurance? The door left open for the neat get-away?). During a whole fortnight he had disrupted my schedule, and had raged and sulked when I had refused to have it disrupted indefinitely. Though it had been mostly wonderful – that was not to be the pattern of our future.

  Thinking of it, remembering it, feeling in my blood the intense, languid well-being of a girl full up to here with lovemaking, possessed by a warm tenderness as well, I knew it had been worthwhile. It would be worthwhile again, when I could return to it; but in the meantime, office life went on, and it was still my favourite kind of life, not to be exchanged for climactic partnership on all the inner-spring beds in the world.

  Naturally I wanted to combine the two elements, to be a working girl and a playing girl; but on Monday morning it was the turn of duty, and that was going to be true (I determined) for most of the Monday mornings in the future.

  As though to point this tardy moral, there was a knock at the door, and Mrs Patch, my secretary, came in.

  Mrs Patch was one of those women who, for various unkind reasons, escape being a figure of fun by bare inches. She was large, severe, mannishly tailored, ugly; she affected scraped-back hair, blouses that buttoned up to her neck, shoes patently good for a ten-mile walk. Her massive bosom and rocklike jaw seemed to place her in a definable category; but these were coupled at times with a confusing, wayward coyness which made her a very odd personality indeed.

  Looking at her, I and a lot of other people were bound to think: Oh dear, she doesn’t exactly enjoy being a woman, does she? … But she had been with me for four years, ever since the office opened, and she was an undoubted gem.

  Originally she had been sent down by an employment agency when we were first staffing the office; I was shopping for the perfect secretary, and this was their unlikely answer – unlikely, to start with, because it would be her first office job, though her shorthand grading was marked as ‘Excellent’. When I asked her what she had been doing hitherto, she had answered gruffly: ‘I was a nurse in an institution,’ and had added: ‘But I felt like a change.’

  An asylum attendant with 180-word shorthand seemed just what Kate Marais Advertising needed, at that stage; I engaged her on the spot, and I had never been sorry.

  She did everything for me; kept my appointment book, dealt with my mail, juggled with my cheque book, told social and commercial lies, made excuses, made airline reservations, made coffee. To say that I would have been lost without her would be a mis-statement; it would have been far worse – I would have been unbecomingly crippled, as at the loss of half my fingers.

  Of course, one recovered from such crippling, and learned alternative ways of doing things; but the process of re-education in this case would have been painful and frustrating. Without Mrs Patch, I would have had to do a hundred things each week that bored me to distraction. They didn’t bore her, because she was that very rare creature, a devoted subordinate.

  Of course (as was true of Julia) such devotion, and its complementary dependence on my part, carried with it certain privileges of behaviour; and some of these became apparent during the next few minutes.

  According to custom, we dealt with routine matters – appointments, deadlines to be met, follow-up letters stemming from the last trip to Durban. From the moment that she spoke, I had the idea that she was keeping something in reserve; but this was nothing new. It was Mrs Patch’s odd habit to bring things to my attention in inverse order to their importance; she always trotted out the office trivia first, and then, with a proper sense of drama, worked up to our bankruptcy, or the bleeding body in the waiting-room.

  On this occasion, she obviously had something significant to tell me (I thought it was probably an indiscreetly-worded telegram from Jonathan, opened before I arrived), and, in line with habit, I waited. Mrs Patch and I always played the same childish game; I would refuse to ask what was on her mind, she would disdain to volunteer anything – until finally the thing got too much for her, and out came the tremendous news item, good or bad. To anyone who says that women are nuts, I am prepared to nod my head.

  Mrs Patch, almost on the point of going, suddenly seemed to recall something.

  ‘Oh yes – those air charter people rang up,’ she said.

  I smiled to myself. So that was it … ‘Yes?’

  ‘It was the chairman. He said he was very sorry about last night.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  Mrs Patch frowned down at me. ‘It was a mistake, wasn’t it?’

  I could play this game, too. ‘No, it wasn’t a mistake.’

  ‘But he said he was sorry they couldn’t fly you up to Johannesburg. Last night.’

  ‘I’m sorry too.’

  ‘But, Miss Marais – are you going to Johannesburg?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then it was a mistake?’

  ‘No.’

  Mrs Patch sighed a massive sigh, from the very heart. ‘I don’t understand.’

  She had confessed defeat. ‘I thought of going up to Johannesburg,’ I relented, ‘but I changed my mind.’

  ‘To Johannesburg again? Is there anything wrong?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did Mr Sachs ring up?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you were there only a month ago.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Mrs Patch gazed at me, displeased, reserving judgement only with a great effort. ‘I’m beginning to wonder what the attraction is.’

  She probably knew, or guessed, I thought; there was plenty to go on – the unexpected holiday I had taken, one or two long-distance calls, even local gossip she might have picked up. When she knew for certain, she would be horrified, of course; and then presently she would decide, as usual, that whatever I did was right, and she would defend me valiantly against all corners. It was nice to have loyal supporters, even if they were such odd creatures as this.

  ‘I’m very fond of Johannesburg,’ I said, insincerely. ‘I just felt like going. Then I changed my mind.’

  ‘That’s very unlike you,’ said Mrs Patch severely.

  ‘Yes, isn’t it?’


  We left it at that – or rather, I broke off the fascinating topic and steered us both back to work. But something in the conversation sounded yet another cautionary note; a note rather nastily echoed later that day at a cocktail party, when two extremely badly-behaved girls, who shared their assorted lovers as freely and as briefly as cigarettes, greeted me with such novel, sisterly bonhomie that I realised I must have slipped several points in the market already.

  This disconcerting acceptance, by second-rate people I thoroughly disapproved of, confirmed me in my view that it was time to take a tug, and that love, like the vista of Cape Town harbour, must be rationed. As the blood cooled, as the office made its customary demands, this outline became sharper, and the order of priorities more obvious.

  I was lonely, even miserable, without Jonathan; and yet (looking back on it) rather ashamed of myself when we loafed and loved together. In a contest between misery and guilty joy, I was long accustomed to opt for the former – and to cure the misery in the process.

  With something like relief I settled down once more to the vestal world of business; and then Jonathan started ringing up.

  It was exciting to hear ‘Johannesburg wants you’ again, and at the beginning our words were as loving as ever; but when it happened every night, when the proprietory air grew progressively more obvious (‘Where have you been? I’ve been ringing since nine o’clock!’), and above all, when (however they began) the conversations all ended on the same note of discontent, I realised that I was being pressured, in a way I didn’t like. For the burden of the telephone calls was invariably the same; I was to drop everything, and come to Johannesburg.

  ‘I can’t,’ I told Jonathan a dozen times. ‘I have to work. Why don’t you come down here?’

  ‘I have to work, too.’

  ‘I know, darling. But you’re so much more mobile.’

  Silence over the humming wires. Then: ‘You mean, my work isn’t as important as yours,’ he would say. ‘Mine can be interrupted, yours can’t. Is that it?’