‘Tonight?’ asked Ambuko.
‘Maybe. You’re not the only kaffir in this bloody location, you know.’
Ambuko walked back. He had been away three hours. There was a crowd outside his house, idlers and gossipers, who parted to let him through. In the darkness, he could not see Amara, and then he stumbled over a form beside the door, and it was she, and she was cold and lifeless.
When he had wept, and shivered, and thought for some time, he came to his door again.
‘You,’ he said, to an old man in an old army coat, ‘what happened?’
‘They used her, and then stabbed her,’ answered the man indifferently.
‘Did she not cry out?’
‘Very loudly,’ said a young man, almost laughing.
‘And none came?’
‘Who would come against the Lion-men?’ said the old man.
‘The men of my tribe would do so,’ said Ambuko.
‘Then keep your tribe away, for the love of Christ!’ said a woman, a thin slattern with a thin child at her back. ‘And pay your roof-protection, old fool! Do you think we want the Lion-men here every night?’
There was nodding and head-shaking among the crowd, and many said: ‘The woman is right. Pay your roof-protection. Let us have peace here, for God’s sake.’
Ambuko withdrew into his house, and did what could be done, in simple decency, for the body of his young wife Amara. Then he waited.
At midnight, a man called loudly from outside: ‘Ambuko!’
He answered: ‘What is it, woman-fighter?’
‘Now is the time to pay roof-protection,’ said the same loud voice.
‘I will not pay.’ He walked to the door, and saw under the moonlight not one but twelve men, ringed about his small house. ‘Murderers!’ he said. ‘Woman-killers. I will not pay.’
Four torches blazed suddenly, and then the roof over his head took fire at its four corners. The twelve men moved close to his door, as if to prevent his leaving. But he did not try to break past them, nor to put out the fire.
‘Pay,’ said the leader. ‘Pay before it is too late.’
Ambuko sat down on the floor of his hut, beside the body of his wife, and bowed his head.
‘Pay,’ said the leader, somewhat taken aback. ‘Come out, and pay.’
‘I will not pay, and I will not come out.’ The fire began to leap and roar, and sparks fell upon his glistening shoulders. Suddenly he shouted: ‘People of Teroka, watch how a man can die!’
‘Come out, fool,’ called the leader. ‘We will let you out.’
‘Men of Teroka!’ shouted Ambuko, in agony amid the blaze. ‘Watch how a man of my tribe can die, rather than pay roof-protection to these stinking jackals!’
He drew his blanket over his head, sitting like a crouching statue in the roaring flames. At the moment before the end, he called out: ‘Remember me!’
Then the roof fell upon him, and the fierce flames sprang up and then died down, and the crowd walked away from the smouldering pile that had been the house of Ambuko. They muttered among themselves, and some looked sideways at the band of Lion-men; but it did not seem that they now had much more spirit than they had had, an hour earlier, and it was easy to guess that it would all be gone before morning.
‘Bloody old fool!’ said the policeman to his relief, later. ‘All that commotion, just for ten shillings a week … I tell you, man, these kaffirs have no brains.’
When Jonathan had finished his story he lay on his back, apart from me, his eyes closed, as if dreaming still. It was nearly dawn; the light was coming through the curtains, the thin pure Johannesburg air which promised us another day of dry sunshine.
‘You really do love everybody, Johnny, don’t you?’ I said presently.
‘You first,’ he answered, his eyes still closed. ‘Then everybody else.’
‘Was that a true story?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why didn’t you use it in Ex Afrika?’
‘I suppose I was keeping it for you.’
‘It makes me want to cry.’
His eyes opened unexpectedly, and he was smiling. ‘For no particular reason, it makes me want to make love to you.’ Without warning, his voice suddenly changed, taking on a low-pitched, almost ferocious intensity. ‘Though I’m looking at the ceiling, Kate, I can see all your body perfectly. It’s beautifully formed and wonderfully slim, and it will be mine again in a moment … Your eyes are watching me, and the rest of you is getting ready – small movements, accommodations – we’ve learned them all, thank God. There’s actually a second heartbeat where I’m going to be in twenty seconds from now.’ He still had not moved; it was just his voice, his spring-gun concentration; already I was hypnotized into readiness. ‘Open your arms, Kate,’ he commanded, withdrawn yet imminent. ‘So that you’ll be absolutely ready for me. Are you ready?’
I could hardly breathe. ‘Yes.’
‘Three two one zero … Steele.’
A long and languid and drowsy time afterwards, I said: ‘What about the other story, Johnny? – the second one?’
He had returned – gently, lovingly, gratefully – to his relaxed position, his ceiling stare. ‘It’s about me and that girl. So it’s closer to home … Do you want to hear about it now, Kate?’
‘Yes, I do.’ He must have known what my answer would be; the preparation had been fantastically adroit. ‘I’m ready for that, too. Tell me.’
‘She was a whore,’ he began, without preamble. ‘If you don’t know it already, it’s just as easy to fall in love with a whore as with anyone else … She was small and slim and very good-looking. She’d done a certain amount of posing and modelling, and she had a lot of character, of a sort. I must have loved her a bit, and I certainly slept with her a bit, because she was extremely good at it. But basically I thought I could reform her, help her to make something out of her life.’ In the light which was by now nearly full daylight, he grinned ruefully. ‘Writers and artists are always trying to work that particular, self-deluding swindle, aren’t they? Toulouse-Lautrec, Maupassant … She’d had an incredible life, Kate. She simply adored men, she just couldn’t say no to any of them. During the last three or four years – she was only nineteen when I met her – she had been having a really fantastic sexual gallop.
‘If the men paid her, well and good. If they couldn’t pay, she put it on the slate. She’d had abortions without number. She’d had operations that you only hear about by accident, from the police-court news. She’d had Fallopian pregnancies. She’d had her tubes blown from here to Cape Horn. She’d been barred from clubs, even golf clubs. She’d been cited in divorce cases. Men had left her. She had left men. Revolvers had been fired, mirrors broken by flying scent-bottles … She’d had at least two tries at suicide. Once she had to have an abortion, and she hadn’t got a penny in the world, so she agreed to sleep with the doctor for a fortnight – that was his price – and he was a repellent, diseased Hun with a suppurating thigh, and he gave her another baby.’
Jonathan lit a cigarette, took a sip of his decadent dawn whisky and soda. It was difficult to tell if he were moved at all by what he was saying; he was telling the story as if it were a skeleton plot for his next novel. Perhaps it was – and that was a comforting thought, for a girl just below the surface of extreme jealousy and hate, as I suddenly was.
‘Well, as I said, I thought I’d reform her,’ he went on. ‘Silly Steele … I stopped sleeping with her, so as to give her a flying start. I paid her rent for six months in advance, so that she wouldn’t have to earn it by internal revenue. I put her through a modelling school, and a radio school, and then an acting school. At least I tried to, but nothing happened, it never jelled; her average enrolment anywhere was never more than a fortnight. You see, she didn’t really want to model, or broadcast, or act; it was just a shop
window for her pretty little mousetrap.
‘She took a typing course, but she didn’t like the feel of an office chair. Too vertical … She was a doctor’s secretary for a while, but he turned out to be a specialist, like all the rest. I even tried her at home economics. God, she was a lousy cook … But nothing was any good. She had a lot of character, but it was all bad. She always crept back to whoring, only now she didn’t have to charge anything, so she gave all her old chums a free ride. She adored me, I think, and she was grateful – but I was always catching sight of her in terrible nightclubs, obviously on the verge of climbing into terrible beds – soft-goods buyers, rotten wrestlers … Once, when she was drunk, she let me see her diary. On the back page were a hundred and sixty pen and pencil strokes. They were men, by God! … When I said: “But that’s an awful lot, isn’t it?” (she was still only nineteen, remember) she answered: “But darling, that’s for the whole of this year.”
‘It wasn’t her fault. She couldn’t help it. She was a sexual egg-beater. She had the itch, and I mean that literally. Because she died of it.’
‘Oh, Johnny!’ I said, torn by every kind of frantic emotion, but chiefly a late-coming, grisly happiness. ‘She’s dead?’
‘Oh yes. Last month. That itch was real. She had some kind of internal growth, which had to be continually appeased, like a second, famished mouth … She went into hospital for an emergency operation, but it didn’t take, it was too late. Darling Kate, that was the very saddest funeral I’ve ever attended. It was pouring with rain, and I held the umbrella over the priest. You know why? Because there wasn’t anybody else to do it. After all those men, all those hundreds of customers, there wasn’t a single person except me and the priest and the gravediggers, within a mile of her coffin.’
We were married four days later.
My dear friend Mrs Marchant lent me her house; my father made a speech; Eumor, who was in England, sent a telegram full of esoteric references to bottles and pennies, to which we replied austerely: ‘They don’t make bottles big enough for us.’ But it was a delightful wedding, by civil ceremony – possibly the least civil ceremony ever staged in Johannesburg. All the better-known drunks shouted insults at their wives or toppled into the swimming-pool; many of the wedding presents were stolen; two Cadillacs were pulverised in the driveway. The bride wore pink, in elegant compromise.
Bruno van Thaal turned up for breakfast next morning, at 7.45 a.m., and when I objected, from deep beneath the bedclothes, he patted us both fondly on the bottom, and said: ‘Don’t exaggerate so, dear – this is a day like any other day.’
We were very happy; and then presently things began to happen to Jonathan, and thus to me, making us happier still, and the future brighter than a hundred suns.
Book Two
The Pink Safari
Chapter One
I could hear the Segovia record, from downstairs, all the time I was shaving, and bathing, and dressing, and I wasn’t at all happy about it. It was not a tonic sound; the guitar, muted, exquisite and melancholy, was for us an instrument of bad omen. If Kate were going on another Segovia kick, it could only mean one thing; she was brooding, she was sad, she was walled up again.
After six years of marriage, I knew all her moods, and all her music too. Chopin was love, Brahms was deep feeling, Mozart was pleasure, Dixieland was the spark for rowdy fun. The classical guitar, of Frescobaldi and Fernando Sor, was music of mourning. This must be the boy’s death once more, and the muddy stream of time, and me.
Since I was dawdling over dressing anyway – my lunch wasn’t till one-fifteen – it seemed appropriate to take the hint and change ties, from a sparkling Jacques Fath to abrown, subdued Dior. It would be wrong to waste a Jacques Fath on a foreboding day like this. Perhaps later that afternoon … And I still hadn’t told Kate about the poker game, either.
Knotting the tie, I glanced over the edge of the mirror at the scene outside the window. The top floor of a twelve-storey building did not, in New York, allow anything spectacular in the way of long-range vista; competition from the forty-storey monsters nearby took care of that. But the view faced south, across the patchwork roofs of 76th Street and down to the low sixties; there was a glimpse of Park Avenue trees on one side, and the bare spaces of Central Park on the other. A February sun, pale and welcome as an honoured ghost, was doing its best with the overcast sky. It was, as I had thought many times before, not bad for New York; and so, at $800 a month, it damned well should be.
The extension telephone in my dressing-room rang, and I waited, lazy-like, to see if anyone else would answer it. But the guitar was claiming Kate’s attention, and Julia, even after six years in a part of the world where the phone rang twenty times a day, was still afraid of the instrument and never picked it up if she could possibly avoid it. (She still used the Cape-Coloured phrase: ‘The telephone wants you,’ as if bearing a message from a living tyrant. How right she was.) So I answered it myself.
‘Good morning!’ said an exceptionally eager voice, a girl’s voice, bright and confident. ‘Is that the man of the house?’
I said that it was.
‘Well, how are you today?’ asked the girl, as if she were my closest living relative.
‘All right,’ I said glumly. I knew what was coming.
‘Well, that’s just fine! Because I have a wonderful surprise for you!’
‘I don’t want a wonderful surprise.’
But already, even at this early stage, she was no longer listening; she had launched, at breakneck speed, into her pitch.
‘This is a personal and private call from the Steps of Heaven School of Dancing. Your name has been selected for one whole hour’s dancing lesson, entirely free, without any obligation on your part. No matter whether one is a beginner, or a seasoned performer, we can all benefit from a lesson, can’t we? Especially a free lesson in strict privacy.’ She drew breath, for the first time, but not long enough to risk interruption. ‘This is not a sales promotion; it is a complimentary offer to a few socially prominent persons and busy executives such as yourself. You can come in any time, morning or evening, and an experienced instructor – and mighty pretty too! – will devote sixty whole minutes to you and you alone, in a soundproof studio in New York’s most luxurious academy of the dance. New steps, such as the Cleopatra Cha-Cha, the Mashed Potato, and the Merengue can also be demonstrated. Now isn’t that a wonderful offer, and may we expect you real soon?’
She stopped abruptly, running out of breath and material at the same time; the line hummed expectantly between us, waiting for an answer which must at least match so glorious a burst of generosity. I used to find this sort of thing sad, because behind every such call must be a girl backed into a contemporary corner of hell, trying to scrape a living from the forlorn barrel of life; now it was just a damned nuisance, a scuffling sound from someone else’s trap.
‘I’m a seasoned performer,’ I said at length.
‘Pardon me?’
‘I don’t want a dancing lesson. I don’t need one.’
But I had pressed the wrong button; now she was off again, at the same romping pace. ‘So many people think that way, but it is not so.’ I could almost hear a fresh piece of paper, labelled ‘Sales Resistance’, being shuffled to the top of the pack. ‘Our files contain countless testimonials from so-called expert dancers who have been absolutely amazed at what the Steps of Heaven Dancing School was able to do for them. In many cases it transformed their entire lives. Modern ballroom dancing is the key to social success, and social success has no ceiling. There is absolutely no limit–’
I was now fully dressed; I was thirsty; this had therefore gone on long enough. I could have cut her off by abandoning the telephone, but I always did my small best to discourage such intrusion. Obviously she could only be stopped by a shout, and so I shouted.
‘What was that awful noise?’ she asked,
after a startled moment of silence.
‘I didn’t hear anything,’ I said. ‘I was changing a record.’
‘A record?’
‘You people really must bring your files up to date,’ I said coldly. ‘If you knew anything at all about dancing, you would know that I have been a senior instructor at Arthur Murray’s for fifteen years.’
Childish Steele, I thought, clamping down the receiver; silly Steele, baby Steele … But I felt better, all the same; a blow for Steele was a blow for liberty. I was ready for that drink, ready for Segovia, ready for my difficult and darling wife. I shot my cuffs, like any other ham actor, and went blithely down the stairs to the daytime section of our apartment.
It was an elegant mess of a room. A New York decorator with a schizophrenic taste for wrought-iron grilles and long silk tassels had done his worst; and then Kate had moved in and tried to civilise the joint. The result had been a draw. There was still enough deep-pile, oyster-coloured, wall-to-wall carpeting to defeat the average power-mower, and the vast zebra-striped sofa had that come-on look usually associated with old film stars’ beds; but there were also some elements of taste and reason – a bookcase with actual books, a set of Hepplewhite chairs which could be sat in, a modest Modigliani – enough to show that we were just folks after all.
Kate had wanted a London drawing-room, I had wanted a show-off springboard for parties. We had compromised, with a room which we both liked well enough to leave alone – and that, I suppose, was life. It was certainly marriage. I worked across the hall, anyway, in a north-facing, functional office which didn’t pretend to be anything else, and which caused peeping visitors to murmur: ‘So dedicated … They say he actually writes five hundred words every day!’
It was true enough, if you counted cheques.
The Pillow Fight Page 16