The Pillow Fight

by Nicholas Monsarrat

  I had to deny the vague basis of truth. ‘No, it’s not that at all.’

  ‘Then you don’t care any more.’

  ‘Darling, you know I adore you!’

  ‘Then come to Johannesburg.’

  It would have been possible for me to do so, of course; as in any efficiently organised business, I could leave things to run themselves for quite a long time; it was the implications I didn’t like.

  ‘Johnny, I can’t come to Johannesburg for no reason at all. I just don’t live like that. I’ve got a working schedule.’

  He didn’t like the implications either.

  ‘Won’t you make any alteration for me? Any sort of effort?’

  So it went on, for many nights.

  Commanding: ‘Darling, come up to see me. It’s your turn.’

  And pleading: ‘Darling, I’m lost without you.’

  And insulting: ‘You’ve got someone else down there. I just know!’

  And blackmailing: ‘There are lots of women in Johannesburg too, don’t forget.’

  And tantalising: ‘Remember what it was like? You know you want me to do all that again.’

  And heckling: ‘Why won’t you come? Why? Why?’

  And coarsely wounding: ‘You bloody teasers are all alike!’

  And pleading again: ‘I’m sorry, sweet. It’s just that I’m so miserable and lonely. And starved! Please come.’

  ‘All right,’ I said at last. ‘All right. All right!’

  Chapter Ten

  It was a disastrous expedition. Perhaps, having been over-persuaded, I wanted it to be.

  Jonathan lived like a pig, in a shabby one-roomed flat off down-town Eloff Street. It was an old-fashioned warren of a building, dirty, dilapidated, suspiciously busy; the crazy lift ground up and down all day, cleaning-boys skylarked on the stairways; nearby radios blared out endlessly the world’s dreariest listening-fare – the boere-musiek which a succession of third-rate accordion orchestras had somehow unloaded onto latter-day Afrikaners as their cultural birthright.

  The room was tiny, a mere slit of a place shaped like a wedge of cheese; it had a narrow bed, covered with a tartan rug and doubling as a sofa; a scored wooden table, and a curtained-off corner for a wardrobe; an airless kitchen smelling of fried grease; and an intrusive lavatory recalling (as Bruno van Thaal once remarked) the last act of Tristan – too loud and too long. The view from the single window was a grimy brick chasm below, wireless aerials and washing far above.

  Into this paradise Jonathan bore me, protesting somewhat (since I had booked a suite at the Carlton), after meeting me at the airport in his embarrassing little car. I was already prepared for the worst; and the worst – in one area – happened immediately.

  He was nervous, and, I suppose, sexually triggered; I was neither. He made love to me within a few moments, on the creaking, none-too-clean iron bed; as was bound to happen, he was finished almost immediately, leaving me not even frustrated (one cannot get frustrated in thirty seconds), just cheapened and angry. Hypersensitive, I felt that he had tried to prove something by this swift disposal; or once again, perhaps I had wanted it to happen like that, and thus to set the pattern – what was left of the pattern.

  There were footsteps and laughter in the passageway outside as we completed our idyll. Then he started apologising.

  ‘Oh God, Kate, I’m sorry!’ he said, his breathing still constricted. ‘I just had to have you … I’ll try to–’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I told him – and that was the very truth. All the posthumous manipulations of love – the smoothing out, the buttoning-up – suddenly seemed inexpressively sordid; I lay there feeling that I would be sick if I opened my eyes.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ he repeated. ‘I was afraid it would be like … You were too good for me … It’s been so long without you.’

  I felt him get off the bed, walk into the bathroom. I lay still, trying to stun myself into deafness. The water gurgled and roared. Then he reappeared, and as I opened my eyes, he was wiping his hands on a grubby towel.

  ‘Do you want to–’ he began, looking down at me.

  ‘In a minute … Jonathan, give me a drink.’

  ‘I’ve only got beer, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Give me some beer.’

  From the kitchen, he presently called out: ‘You were wonderful, Kate!’

  I could not utter a single word.

  When he came through, glass of beer in hand, he said again: ‘I’m awfully sorry, Kate.’ But he was brighter already, recovered, relaxed. Presently, with unbearable good humour, he set himself to entertain me.

  We made love again an hour later, and it was better this time – possibly because the room was dark, or because I now wanted him, or because he took trouble about it, the trouble with which he had swamped and spoiled me in Cape Town. But though afterwards I lay by his side, tenderly spent, thinking: Perhaps it’s going to be all right, perhaps I do adore him after all, perhaps I was right to come up here – yet this was not a lasting mood.

  I had sent him out for some whisky, and this we now sipped, in a silence not quite easy; as far as I was concerned, there had been something about the act of taking £2 from my handbag, and giving it to him for his errand, which recalled horrid race-memories from the gigolo world of Antibes and Eden Roc … It might have been this which prompted me to ask: ‘Who looks after you, Johnny?’

  ‘A boy. The faithful Alfred. He’s not bad … I told him not to come today.’

  That seemed to have a slightly vulgar connotation, recalling my doubts, recalling the first, near-brutal, split-minute lovemaking which had felt so much like a cut across the face. Shying away, I said: ‘But can you work here? It’s so shut in.’

  ‘It’s good enough for what I want. It’s only a base, after all.’ I felt him smiling by my side. ‘I know it’s not quite up to your standard, Miss Marais.’

  ‘We have the same standard, Johnny.’

  ‘No. You’re slumming, and we both know it. Don’t think it isn’t appreciated, though.’

  We seemed destined to rub each other the wrong way. ‘But is it appreciated? Don’t forget I’ve cancelled half a dozen appointments, and flown an uncomfortable thousand miles, just to curl up with you.’

  ‘I hope it was worth it.’

  ‘That’s what I’m meant to say to you.’

  ‘My dear Kate, this little matinée hasn’t cost me a thing. I’m just taking an afternoon off.’

  ‘What would you be doing if I weren’t here?’

  ‘Probably staring at the wall. What would you?’

  ‘Oh – dictating letters – seeing customers – looking over layouts – listening to other people’s ideas – ironing out contracts.’

  ‘Making money?’

  ‘Making money.’

  He stirred and sat up, moving perceptibly away from me. ‘You have to do that, don’t you, Kate?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘The profit motive. Looking for suckers, and squeezing them for all they’re worth … Lying in wait in the jungle … You’d find the world a very dull jungle, with no one to eat, wouldn’t you?’

  I frowned, not agreeing with any of this. ‘It’s not like that at all … Johnny, you just don’t know enough about it; you’re guessing, and they’re children’s guesses. Running an advertising business doesn’t consist of looking for suckers, as you call it, and taking them for a ride. We wouldn’t last a month if that was the project … We try to give people their honest money’s worth, in a highly competitive, highly specialised–’

  ‘Come off it, Kate!’ he interrupted. ‘The answer is in the plural, and they bounce … Listen – we are alone. You needn’t make it sound like the faithful reciting the Rotarian creed.’

  The magic languor of lovemaking
had, I found, now largely worn off. Indeed, it was quite easy to remember that most of it hadn’t been so magic, anyway.

  ‘Let’s go out, Jonathan,’ I said. I pulled the fraying string which lit the ceiling light over our heads, and the room sprang into drab, shoddy life again. ‘Let’s have dinner at Fraternelli’s.’

  ‘Can’t afford it, darling. I’m a writer. Remember?’

  ‘I’ll stake you.’

  ‘Not in Johannesburg. Not any more.’

  ‘Well, let’s go out anyway.’

  ‘No.’ There was something in his manner which recalled an old, cruel, half forgotten governess working off her spite; saying ‘Just for that, no circus …’ ‘No,’ repeated Jonathan, smiling at me over the rim of his glass, ‘Let’s stay at home. Just you and me, Kate. It’ll be wonderful.’

  In the night, strange creakings, shouts, traffic noises from the streets below; sometimes footsteps on the stairway outside, slurring, drunken, too close. In the room, oppressive heat, kitchen smells, cockroaches, peeping and scuttling under the rug. In the frowsy narrow bed, brief joy, briefly achieved, like a small erotic dream, and then a night-long, wakeful, sweating discomfort. In the dawn, the brown flaked ceiling above my head making cracked patterns, puzzle-pieces shaped like animals, shaped like leaves. In the morning, a slatternly servant plodding out from the kitchen, leering stupidly at me, saying: ‘Missis hungry, I bet.’

  Turning from the telephone, Jonathan announced: ‘Eumor says, can we have lunch with him, and if so, will Krug do?’

  ‘Krug will do,’ I said. ‘But a magnum … Let us accept.’

  Fraternelli was delighted to see me (and why not, indeed?); he managed to enunciate: ‘So soon again, no?’ and then his English took the headlong nose-dive which meant that he was trying to extend a special welcome. Later, the veal à la Zingara spoke the necessary volumes for him. Eumor, on the other hand, started off by being sombre. He had a complaint.

  ‘You come up here secretly?’ he asked, as soon as we had greeted each other. ‘You don’t tell me?’

  ‘I was going to ring you,’ I reassured him. ‘It was all spur-of-the-moment stuff. How did you find out, anyway?’

  ‘My friend at the airport … But he does not know where you are. The Carlton does not know where you are, either. They are sad. Then I ring Jonathan. But where are you?’

  I indicated Jonathan. ‘With my friend in Eloff Street.’

  Eumor started to say something, then changed his mind. ‘And how is the making of love?’ he substituted.

  ‘Ask my friend.’

  Jonathan, sipping a six-to-one martini, inclined his head. ‘Very satisfactory.’

  Eumor looked from one to the other of us. ‘Such enthusiasm …’ Then his face assumed a certain Balkan leer. ‘You are tired, perhaps?’

  ‘I’m tired,’ I said. ‘No perhaps.’

  ‘That is better … I tell you a story.’ He was eating palm kernels in oil, one of Fraternelli’s minor specialities; he gestured with the small pointed weapon. ‘It is a saying in Greece. If you take an empty bottle, and put into it one penny for every time you make love with a certain woman–’

  ‘Not quite so loud, Eumor.’

  ‘For every time you make love during the first two years – you follow me?’

  ‘Yes. But why a penny?’

  ‘Sixpence will do. Or a pin. Or a match. Anything.’ He was not going to have his story spoilt. ‘You do it for two years, and after that, every time you make love, you take a penny out.’ He paused.

  ‘Is that the end of the story, Eumor?’

  ‘Comes the point now! If you do that, the saying is that the bottle will never be empty.’

  We digested this in silence.

  ‘That’s a rather sad story,’ I said at length.

  ‘Not for the first two years,’ said Jonathan.

  Fraternelli, who had been listening under the pretence of pouring out more martinis, said something in Italian to Eumor, and they both laughed.

  ‘What was that?’ I inquired. ‘If a lady may ask.’

  ‘He said, what happens if you take the bottle and go somewhere else?’

  ‘You end up by getting shot in the back,’ said Jonathan, ‘leaving in your will the finest collection of bottled pennies south of the Sahara. By the way, Eumor, have you ever tried taking a penny out of a bottle?’

  ‘It is a saying in Greece,’ said Eumor. ‘Do not be so literate.’

  ‘I can’t help being literate,’ said Jonathan. He glanced at me. ‘But I must say that, even this morning, I’d much rather keep putting those pennies in.’

  There was something in his manner I had never seen before, and which I didn’t like at all; a sort of gamey self-importance, unbecoming, proprietory, smug. Thus, no doubt, the plush hypocritical Victorians talked of their mistresses, stowed away snugly in discreet villas in Notting Hill Gate … I was not in the mood, that morning, to be the object, even indirectly, of such comment.

  ‘I’m hungry, Eumor,’ I said.

  ‘Then we eat.’

  ‘Even I am hungry,’ said Jonathan.

  We walked back together, Jonathan and I, down the busy length of Eloff Street, in the afternoon sun. The meal had been wonderful; I was feeling infinitely better; but still, within the area of total enchantment, not quite good enough.

  ‘I think I’ll move into the Carlton,’ I said, when we were near it.

  ‘All right,’ said Jonathan.

  ‘There isn’t really room for both of us at your place, is there?’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘They’ll send round for my suitcase.’

  ‘It will be waiting.’

  We stood on the hotel steps, just out of the main stream of people passing in and out; Pratt the head porter, a very old friend of mine, came to the alert, ready to go into action in any of the half dozen ways controlled by his baton.

  ‘But come up, Jonathan,’ I said, looking into his face for the first time that day. ‘You can help me unpack.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ He returned my look readily enough, but his was veiled, withdrawn; he was contracting out of this moment, and he was not going to tell me why. Nor (I knew) was I going to ask him. ‘I’ve got one or two things to do.’

  ‘All right. Come round at drinking time, then.’

  Well …’ Now he was slightly embarrassed, and I knew that something unusual must be coming. ‘As a matter of fact, I promised to have dinner with Father Shillingford tonight. Down at the mission. Wouldn’t you like to come along?’

  ‘It doesn’t sound quite my cup of tea, Jonathan.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘I’ll be here, then.’ I was going to say: When you want me, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to that forlorn peak of availability. Instead I said: ‘Give me a ring.’

  ‘I’ll do that.’ He hunched his shoulders, buttoned his coat, preparing to take off. Then he added, in a much more concise voice: ‘Kate, you do realise, don’t you, that that room of mine is a lot bigger than most families have, in places like Teroka?’

  ‘Sheer heaven, darling!’ said Bruno van Thaal, licking the last remaining drops of strawberry juice laced with Curaçao off the tips of his fingers – a display of honest greed which in anyone else would have looked merely piggish. ‘And that wine was fully as nice as my aunt’s gooseberry Sauterne … I must say that now and again even this hostile hostelry can produce the perfect meal.’

  We had dined that evening in my suite, on a scale suitable to Bruno’s appetite and my own need for reassurance; behind us lay a pleasing vista of cold Vichyssoise, a small Spanish omelette, and breast of guinea-fowl topped off with the delicate strawberry dish which was currently exciting Bruno’s enthusiasm. I felt much better now, and certainly there had been room for improvement.

&nbs
p; ‘Why hostile, Bruno?’ I asked idly, pouring his coffee, and then moving towards the couch. ‘I’m very fond of it here.’

  ‘Haven’t you heard yet, darling?’ His innocent blue eyes opened in a thoroughly untrustworthy way. ‘I had an altercation in the bar here last week. They asked me not to come back unless I could behave quite differently. So strict!’

  ‘But what were you doing, Bruno?’

  ‘Just discussing things in a general way.’

  I decided that I was likely to get a much more accurate version from someone else, and I cast around for an alternative subject. It became apparent that there was now only one. After an evening spent in talking of everything under the sun except what was in the forefront of my mind, it was high time to be serious.

  I was not sure how to effect the change, since we had been exclusively frivolous so far; but Bruno, who, as well as being very good company, was one of the most perceptive people I knew, anticipated the switch of conversation. Making himself comfortable in a deep armchair opposite me, he suddenly said: ‘And now, dear, how are things between you and that pest of a man? Still utter magic, I hope?’

  I had to smile. ‘Not quite utter, Bruno … Do you ever see him?’

  ‘Be your age, dear! Our backgrounds are so different … Why haven’t I been favoured tonight, by the way?’

  ‘He was busy. As a matter of fact he’s having dinner with Father Shillingford.’

  ‘How very cosy!’ But Bruno was regarding me with genuine surprise. ‘Kate, surely you came up here in order to pursue love’s torrid dream every single moment of the day and night?’

  ‘More or less. But he did have this date with Shillingford.’

  ‘Of course, Steele is like that,’ said Bruno, who could not have been displeased with what I was telling him. ‘So dedicated … He turns every room into a seminary … I picture him scurrying through the streets at dawn, famished and devout, tearing himself to ribbons in the confessional and then administering soup to the black poor … Of course he’s not a Roman Catholic, but he’s bosom pals with Father Billingsgate, and if you made inquiries you’d probably find that he comes from a long line of priests and nuns … However, please don’t get the idea that I dislike him.’