The Pillow Fight

by Nicholas Monsarrat

  ‘Of course you don’t like him, Bruno. Why should you? It was me that fell in love with him.’

  ‘In the past tense?’

  ‘It wasn’t, until – oh God, I don’t know! Our backgrounds are different, too.’

  ‘Love conquers all, I heard somewhere.’

  I had to tell the story, and Bruno was the man to tell it to. ‘Love was wonderful, Bruno,’ I answered him. ‘The most wonderful thing that ever happened to me. But basically there’s almost everything wrong with Jonathan, from my point of view. He’s so poor – I know that sounds awful, but it’s silly to say that it’s not important. He’s good, in a very annoying way. He’s been trying to change me. He lectures all the time … He makes absolute chaos of my work. And if I get in any deeper, I know I’ll be absolutely dependent on him for everything.’

  ‘Darling, he sounds perfect!’ Being Bruno, he had to say that, but he reverted swiftly to kindness and sympathy. ‘Kate, you know I shall never understand love. I just take it for granted that if people feel it, they feel it, like the heat. But you and Steele together are really Siamese freaks … Couldn’t you just write it off to experience? Heavenly, no doubt, but just an episode, a mad moment?’

  ‘I’m not like that, Bruno.’

  ‘You’re not like this.’

  ‘True.’

  Then the phone rang.

  What followed must have been deeply instructive to all concerned, though Bruno, a fascinated eavesdropper, heard only an incomplete version of it. I said: ‘Hallo?’ and then: ‘How was dinner?’ My next sentence was ‘Come back and sleep here,’ and then, after a long pause: ‘All right, then.’ Thereafter I rang off, and that was all.

  Bruno, regarding me closely, began: ‘If I may read between the lines–’

  ‘He won’t come to the Carlton,’ I said briefly. ‘Because I wouldn’t stay at his place, I suppose.’

  ‘Perhaps he’s afraid of the house detective.’

  ‘I’m not afraid of the house detective.’

  ‘Well, of course,’ said Bruno, ‘if you will form a liaison with Hopalong Chastity–’

  I was thinking deeply, and only half hearing anything else. I had a feeling that Jonathan was doing all this on purpose; he was once more applying pressure, in a novel, almost reverse way, and for reasons I could not comprehend. But whatever they were, there was an aspect of punitive therapy involved. As if from a long way off, I heard Bruno say: ‘Darling, this is all so unlike you. You can’t want it as much as this … Why don’t you take the bull by the horns, and sack him?’

  Everyone has some deep-seated personal infection, some disease which they will never lose. For myself, it is a taste for entertaining; for Eumor, it is horses, and for Bruno, gossip. For Jonathan, astonishingly, it turned out to be poker. But I only discovered this in the most mortifying fashion possible.

  True, he had mentioned the fact before, at some happier time, and though I had thought it an odd enthusiasm for his kind of person, I also thought (being newly in love) that it could not conceivably have any sort of significance, as between myself and him. He played poker, he had told me on that occasion, every Saturday night, with the same six other people; Eumor was one of them, the rest were mostly stockbrokers.

  My girlish trouble now was that I hadn’t realised that today was Saturday.

  When Jonathan told me what he had in mind, over the telephone, I was first incredulous, then furious. Dinner with Father Shillingford, coupled with a wasted night (as we both might have termed it, a few weeks earlier), was one thing; but this was really too rich for my blood.

  ‘Jonathan,’ I demanded, straight away, ‘what are you trying to do?’

  ‘Nothing, Kate,’ he answered, wonderfully innocent. ‘I told you before. I always play on Saturdays, with the same school. I can’t let them down.’

  ‘You can’t let them down?’

  ‘But we always play. I told you.’ There was an edge of nervousness in his voice, as if he bore in mind the idea that he might be going too far, and yet was determined to persevere. ‘I can’t just not turn up, can I?’

  ‘You could have let them know days ago.’

  ‘But it’s been a regular fixture for months … Darling,’ he went on, ‘I’ll be finished by two o’clock at the latest.’

  I was now quite furious. ‘What do you mean, finished by two o’clock? What the hell’s the point of making all that fuss about my coming up here, when you’re just not available when I arrive? And why poker, anyway? If you’ve got any spare time, you know damned well you ought to be working!’

  ‘But I am working. I never stop. This poker game is part of working. Poker – oh, you just wouldn’t understand, Kate! It’s one of the reasons why I love it so much. It’s exciting, and sometimes expensive, but it’s a lesson in psychology all the time. I learn more about people from playing poker with them–’

  I dismissed that idea with a single word. Then: ‘You’re meant to be writing a book, or so you told me. Why don’t you get on with it?’

  ‘What do you know about writing?’ he asked edgily.

  I laughed. ‘Writing happens to earn a large part of my living for me. And one thing I do know is the first rule: you have to write.’

  ‘I meant writing books,’ he said loftily. ‘For that, you have to think as well. That’s my kind of writing.’

  He would never be arguing with me like this, I realised, in the silence that followed this particular piece of effrontery, if he were not satiated, if he had not slept with me enough times to risk a rain-check. I remembered an odd phrase of his from a past conversation: ‘If you achieve something, whether it’s a woman or an appointment as ambassador, you don’t really want it any more.’ Because of this ‘achievement’ he was prepared to take chances with my good humour which he would never have dared before.

  He would probably be sorry later. I was sorry now; and, being sorry, there was only one thing for me to do. It only involved putting down the receiver, but (being a woman still) it cost me a special, angry, satisfying heartache to do it.

  Joel Sachs rang me up about an hour later. I had never heard him so tense.

  ‘Kate, what’s going on?’

  ‘This isn’t a good moment to ask me that, Joel.’

  ‘But I thought you were in Cape Town! George Barnaby flew down yesterday specially to see you.’

  ‘Oh dear!’ Barnaby was head of the principal cinema chain in South Africa. We had been after their account for years. ‘I can still see him,’ I told Joel.

  ‘No, you can’t.’ It was the first time I had heard Joel anything but soft-spoken, fundamentally controlled. ‘He just rang me up. He’s sailing for the States tonight. You know what he’s like. Now he says he doesn’t want to make a change, after all. Kate, I’ve been working on this thing for three months. It was almost sewn up.’

  ‘I know, Joel. I’m terribly sorry.’

  ‘Kate.’ He was speaking from the same inner, first-time pressure. ‘I may as well tell you. There’s a lot of talk going round the town. About your coming up here so suddenly, and – and everything. What’s going on?’

  ‘Nothing, Joel.’

  ‘Why are you here, then?’

  ‘It’s not important now. I’m going back in a couple of hours.’ I tried a laugh. ‘If it’s costing us money, I’m damned well going back!’

  ‘Well, that’s good news.’ Now he was softened, more like Joel Sachs again. ‘Kate, if you have to come up again at short notice, if you have to see somebody … I mean, just let me know.’

  ‘I don’t have to see anybody.’

  ‘Well, that’s good news,’ he said again. ‘But just let me know, all the same.’

  ‘I’ll let you know,’ I promised. ‘But at the present rate, it’ll only come as a suicide note … Joel, I’ll ring you up from Cape Town.’<
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  ‘Good girl.’

  I might have spent hours in mourning, and perhaps that would come later; at the moment, being disappointed, angry, ashamed of myself and my feeble feminine heart, I was in the mood for quick decisions: Our swift rise, our astonishing ebb, would later puzzle me, keep me awake at nights; now they were just the twin triggers for a final definitive blast.

  Playing poker, by God! I thought on my way out to the airport; if Jonathan didn’t spend his spare time in bed with me, he might at least apply his manhood to his typewriter. What a hopeless, loafing amateur … It annoyed me that it had taken a whole forty-eight hours to learn my lesson; to find out that, if two careers in one bed was a difficult proposition – indeed, almost unworkable – one and a half careers wasn’t worth an hour’s trouble, a moment’s indecision, a single missed heartbeat.

  I must, I decided, have been slipping. But I wasn’t going to slip any farther.

  Chapter Eleven

  He wrote. I didn’t answer. He rang up. I wasn’t in. He sent messages, which I tore up, and flowers, which I gave to hospitals. He came to Cape Town to try to see me; I heard of it in time, from my spy and ally Bruno van Thaal, and took off for Durban. This time I had made up my mind, and nothing was going to change it. This time, I was doing the walking out, not Jonathan, and the fiat was going to stick.

  Accidental strands of evidence, kind contributions from friends, indicated that it first made him angry, then it made him sad. I had been both these things, in the course of our short love affair, but now I was calling the tune, putting on the record myself, controlling the volume. The sense of power was important.

  Of course, I was sad, too … The items I held against Jonathan – that he interrupted my work, that (like every other man in the world) he was determined to change me, that he was poor and proud and prejudiced – these things were valid arguments, well-chosen words and sentences to satisfy the cool mind. But they didn’t make allowance for feelings, they were no good to a girl in bed. I couldn’t take the phrase: ‘He was all wrong about race relations, too,’ and make it keep me warm at night.

  Sexually, to begin with, I missed him very much indeed; to have been celibate so long, and then ecstatically abandon it, and then to impose celibacy again, was one of the hardest, saddest, loneliest, most miserable things I had ever tried to do.

  I must admit that I cheated a bit, at the start; not with other men – I didn’t seem to want that, exactly, or perhaps the available candidates didn’t, after Jonathan, make much sense – but in the realm of self-solace, borrowed from the adolescent past.

  It was something I hadn’t done for years; but the awakened, troublesome flesh had to be assuaged somehow, and this did not seem a particularly grotesque outlet. Of course, it was within the scale of sin, it was naughty … I remembered a phrase from the nursery past (not, so far as I know, invoked in this connection): ‘The Devil finds work for idle hands to do.’ How very true … But since I was not as good a lover as Jonathan, it presently faded and died.

  Thus tided over in one area, I still mourned him in another. Jonathan had been very good company; we disagreed over lots of things, but he could be very funny when he felt like it, and behind the fun was wisdom, and behind that, compassion. I had no compassion; he had enough for two; it had been exciting to borrow it for a space, to see one’s fellow men through eyes which did not invariably find them ludicrous or contemptible.

  Perhaps this was the most searching bereavement, the worst aspect of doing without him. I got used to it in the end, like the other thing, but the self-denial was difficult, and took a degree of determination of which I came to be quite proud.

  After a week, I was still hungry, in bed and out of it; after a month, I was reconciled to both areas of loneliness; after three months, I was restored enough (and busy enough) to feel only an occasional twinge. Life went on, I found – perhaps the saddest, and also the happiest, residue of a lost love. It was all one with the fundamental lesson of living as well. If you lost your eyes, you did not lie down and cry. You learned to be blind, and thus you learned to see.

  Certain things still hurt, I found; even after months and months, they still had power to pierce and to wound, however briefly. These were the first-hand, accidental things; like sleeping in the great bed at Maraisgezicht, and reaching out unawares, and finding no one there; like my father not asking questions about Jonathan, yet knowing I was bereft; like lunching at Fraternelli’s, and glancing at the table where I had first seen him, and finding it occupied by quite different people – fat, gobbling, base.

  Once I did catch sight of him, at a charity concert in Cape Town; he was with a woman I did not know, quite old, grey-haired, somewhat over-intense; he was talking to her with great concentration. It was disturbing, even after six months, to discover that he was in the same city; but what I really wanted, for thirty forlorn seconds, was for him to be talking to me, with the same wrapped-up air, the same lean power. And for the whole of the next day, I was glad that the woman was old.

  There were other things that Eumor, a faithful correspondent, told me from time to time. Jonathan was much the same, he wrote me in one letter, dictated to a secretary who probably took an iron hand in the re-phrasing – ‘but he does not seem to care so much about what happens. He is working, you will be pleased to hear – or will you be pleased? – but he gets into trouble rather easily. First he was drinking too much, and I told him not to, and he said it was in order to forget you, and it would soon be past, and I warned him that such things are hard to stop, once you start them, whatever the reason that made them begin.’ Here Eumor’s secretary, no doubt breathing hard, had imposed an arbitrary full-stop and a fresh paragraph. ‘He wanders out at night, and sometimes he has bad adventures. Then there are politics. You probably read about the protest march.’

  I had indeed read about the protest march the first occasion (so far as I knew) that Jonathan Steele had achieved the status of a news item. He had been foolish enough to come into collision with two basic South African laws, accompanied by considerable fanfare; firstly, by taking part, with Indian and native speakers, in a public meeting which had been banned by the police, and secondly, by marching in a Johannesburg protest demonstration which ended up in a free-for-all riot outside Marshall Square police headquarters.

  Subsequently, in the magistrate’s court, he had been sternly lectured (‘Disgrace to European Community’) and fined £5 (‘paid by supporters on the spot’). Rumour, which I took the trouble to confirm, said that the dossier recommending deportation had got as far as the Ministerial desk before being allowed to fade out again.

  ‘After that,’ wrote Eumor, ‘he went to Natal with Father Shillingford, and sat down on the ground with some Indians.’

  There Eumor’s letter, tantalisingly, came to an end; but it seemed to paint quite enough of the picture. It confirmed, for me, Jonathan’s fatally amateur status; he wasn’t a writer at all, he was just one of those café exhibitionists of the school of Paris and elsewhere, who did everything to books except write them.

  They talked about them, read bits of them aloud, spilled Pernod on page one, practised their dialogue on passing whores, boasted of how good they were going to be, what master craftsmen, how much better than Proust and Sartre and Victor Hugo. But, like professional ‘lovers’, all they did was talk; when it came to the pitch, they were as scared to put pen to paper as a gigolo to put Figure A anywhere near Figure B.

  If Eumor claimed that Jonathan was working, then he was probably trying to be kind. It was possible that he was trying to be kind to me. But by then it hardly mattered at all, except for statistical reasons. All I wanted to do was to file him away at the back of the right drawer.

  Bruno, in the line of duty as my Johannesburg contributor to the column, was another source for keeping me up-to-date, using a special, spiteful kind of exaggeration no doubt intended to cheer my desolation, to show
me that in losing Jonathan I had lost nothing. About mid-year, on his way to England, he stopped a night at Cape Town; and there, after dinner at my flat, he unfolded a curious tale.

  ‘Darling, your little chum is definitely operating in our area,’ he told me. ‘I haven’t sent you much about it, because it’s so dull anyway, and I didn’t really think you’d want to print anything about that monster. But he has not been idle.’

  ‘You mentioned Di Magnussen in one letter,’ I reminded him. ‘Surely she’s been covering a great deal of carpet lately?’

  ‘I think it must be her geophysical year.’

  ‘Who else, Bruno?’ The idea of Jonathan making love to other women still made me want to be sick; I hoped that Bruno would exaggerate, tell lies if necessary, twist the knife and make a wound so gross that it would no longer hurt … ‘Tell me the worst.’

  ‘He seems to like older ladies,’ announced Bruno, with relish. ‘Belle York; Nancy Hughieson – all that nest. They pass him from hand to hand like a ferret, and compare notes afterwards. He told Martha Barker that she was too acrobatic for his taste, and my dear, it was all over town next morning! She took it as a compliment!’

  ‘Bruno, does he really go to bed with those old sacks?’ All the women he had mentioned were certainly prime South African performers, but they were also collector’s items of another era, which should have dated them fatally. Their hospitality, for example, towards visiting convoys during the war had astonished even United States sailors. ‘I should have thought he would have shown better taste.’

  Bruno tossed his head irritably. ‘The only sign of taste that criminal ever showed–’ he began, and then stopped. ‘Let’s put it another way,’ he proceeded smoothly. ‘Whatever he was like when you knew him, he’s back in the zoo now. My dear, it’s just a continuous performance! I think he must be rewriting a sex manual.’