The Pillow Fight

by Nicholas Monsarrat

  I sighed again, more genuinely. ‘You and Kate. You ought to set up as Authors Anonymous.’

  He laughed. ‘Give her my love, and tell her I’ll sign up for that, any time.’ The door slammed, and he was lost to view, in the moving cars and thronging people of Fifth Avenue.

  ‘Your friend just fractured a city ordinance,’ said the cab driver, a nice young man, a spectacled Negro with a copy of the Saturday Review clipped to his sun-vizor. ‘But I see no evil. Where to, now?’

  ‘The Sherry-Netherland.’

  I was not quite ready to meet the other charter-member of Authors Anonymous.

  Chapter Three

  It was half-past five before I got back; one thing had led to another, and not by accident. I had not hurried home, because I had enjoyed the session at the Satraps, and did not want it spoiled too soon. I had not hurried home, because if there were lunch guests, as there usually were, I probably wouldn’t like them and preferred to have them out of the way. I had not hurried home, Immortal Bird, because hell! I had something of my own to celebrate.

  It was nice and quiet upstairs, as I stepped out of the elevator and let myself into the apartment; quiet, private, un-invaded. Generally, we lived in crowds, Kate and I; they were not always of my choosing, and I suppose – to be fair – my own crowd was not always hers. She had retained ataste for two categories of people whom I had found a pathetic waste of time: for those very smart women of the kind who thronged the Colony at lunchtime, twittering like love-birds on the loose, all hat and no head; and for chic, elegant, pastel young men who kept her boredom at bay without introducing anything so crude as the battle of the sexes.

  The women I could avoid, and did; the young gentlemen I was trying to freeze out, and it was a long process. (I had been reminded of this by a stop at an equivocal ‘Men’s Bar’ on the way home, where, at my entrance, a trio of emaciated fruits had paused in discussing their affairs, giving me long appraising stares, and gone back into committee again. I was only there because I had become thirsty on that particular street-corner, and I hoped they knew it.) But I was always likely to find a nest of such soft-skinned snakes at home, curled up on cushions at floor level, entertaining Kate with song and story.

  At one time the invasion had been spearheaded (to use the term loosely) by a man I specially disliked, Bruno van Thaal, on a visit from South Africa. That had turned out to be a very long visit; indeed, there were moments when it seemed that he might infest us forever.

  Kate loved having him there, for obvious reasons which I could understand; he was first-hand news from home, he was amusing in her own, not-too-generous fashion, he spoke that dialect of the language of South Africa which reminded her of warm sunlight, warm entanglements, warm words at superior social levels. He recalled to her, in a series of quick snapshots, spitefully focused, what she had ‘given up’ by marrying me; the aura of success, the pleasures of manipulation, the fun of being Kate Marais in a world small enough to fit a juggling hand.

  He had brought a message from Johannesburg, which she had dearly loved, to New York, which she was beginning to find false, and perhaps daunting. Johannesburg and Cape Town had been just the right size for her conquerable size, made to measure for such slim fingers, speculative eyes, influential comment. She had had the inside track there. In New York, there was no such thing; not for a female stranger, anyway. The city was too big, too alien; it was not to be breached and therefore not to be loved.

  Bruno van Thaal had reminded her of the glowing time when she had called the tune.

  Perhaps that was the main reason why I had worked to get him out again. He was disturbing: not to me – and I needed no ghost from the grave of Freud to instruct me in the possible mainsprings of anti-homosexuality – but to Kate. Our marriage had given us a year of enthralment, a year of intense happiness, and a year of search and dilemma; the rest, dating from Wrap-Around’s fire-stoking success, had been resolutely neutral. I did not want a freelance archaeologist probing this delicately balanced structure.

  But there was no doubt that Bruno had been amusing, in spite of all the things I disliked or found embarrassing (he was now too obvious altogether, and in the freer air of New York he talked with a lisp even more pronounced than I remembered). Once again, he had brought her news exactly angled to her own nostalgia. Talking about her gossip column, and what had happened to it since she left, he said: ‘We do miss you, Kate. The girl who took over wouldn’t hurt a fly. In fact, she wouldn’t even mention such a rude thing.’ It had been just what she wanted to hear, and phrased in her own brittle language, by way of dividend.

  No wonder that he had been hard to detach, that he had sparked a tremendous seminar of quasi-residential queers, that there rose from our apartment what Tennyson innocently called the murmuring of innumerable bees.

  No wonder Bruno, noting my expression as I broke in upon this honeyed, intertwining hive, had once exclaimed: ‘My dear, we’re driving you out!’ and I had answered: ‘Wait and see.’ No wonder I had not rested until I got rid of him, and some of them, and celebrated this first win in a crucial tug-of-war by buying Kate the longest, widest, pinkest mink stole ever seen this side of Cinerama.

  Too confusing, not important now … I slammed the door shut behind me, dropped my coat in a chair, and marched towards the sound of the ice cubes.

  I was heading for that benign first drink of the evening, to which I was now, by the clock, entitled; the sedative, remedial gin-and-tonic. It was not until I had dropped the cap of the bottle into the poured-out gin, and started to splash tonic-water into the waste-paper basket, that I realized what a long day it had been. Another Jonathan Steele first … (The previous record for relaxed behaviour had been when I lost my balance and plunged an elbow wrist-deep into the wedding cake at a reception, attended by royalty, at Claridge’s in London. Then, I had overheard an austere compatriot murmur: ‘Pity about Steele,’ to which his companion, equally austere, had answered: ‘I do not agree.’) Rocking slightly, I now rectified today’s glaring social error, and bore my fresh drink across the hall and up the stairway leading to Kate.

  At the top of the stairs, a guardian wardress stood in the way. It was Julia, another person who, fantastically, did not approve of me. She was standing there, silent, watchful, thin as a mahogany rail, her brown brow sullenly opposed to all such uncouth invasions. I said, in her own funny tongue: ‘Hoe gaan dit, Julia,’ and moved to get past her. But I had not given her the acceptable password. All she answered was: ‘Madam’s resting.’

  Momentarily I was inclined to think that this might suit me best. Though I bore good news, it would not be good news for Kate; why should I exchange the dust of contentment for the burning noon-day of the inquisition? (That lunch had really been extremely good.) But then I heard Kate’s voice calling me, and suddenly it suited me better still to tell her my story there and then. We would not be different people tomorrow. I would not have a readier tongue, nor she a softer heart. The prudent man who laid down that there was a time to fish, and a time to dry the nets, was concerned too much about the weather.

  Smiling at Julia – who was not an enemy, only an ally in a different uniform – I passed her by, and walked through into Kate’s bedroom.

  I had crossed this threshold many times, on many a diverse errand; most had been pleasurable, some dubious, a few lit or dulled by rage or spite or despair. But they had always had some meaning; as long as she was there, it was never a walk into an empty room. There was some meaning now, as I came in, and saw her lying on the bed under a light silk coverlet, with the lamplight falling softly on a face full of quality, and beauty, and grave assurance. There was no doubt that she was a person, and – as soon as I could get her into reasonable focus – a damned good-looking one as well.

  Kate had been reading; now she laid the book, still open, face downwards on the bed, in the way which enrages bibliophiles and does not wo
rry writers at all, and smiled, and said: ‘Sorry I was so low, Johnny.’ Then she saw me closer to, in more detail, and added: ‘But as long as you’ve been making up for it.’

  ‘I was celebrating.’ I sat down, as I often did, at her dressing table, and started fiddling with bottles and sprays and manicuring what-nots. When I knocked over a lamp, it made a wonderful clatter, and then went out, like the lamp over Erwin Orwin’s head. ‘God damn it,’ I said, not worrying at all. ‘I could have sworn that was a fixture.’

  ‘We will make it so …’ She was staring at me, without rancour, without surprise. I was the man she had married, give or take a swindle or two; I was not Caliban drunk, nor Galahad sober. As I took a deep refreshing draught of my gin-and-tonic, she asked: ‘What was there to celebrate? Or was it just lunch?’

  ‘More than lunch.’ I was looking down at my feet, because that was the way I sometimes liked to tell her things. ‘We’re just thirty thousand dollars richer than we were at noon, that’s all.’

  Her voice broke a silence. ‘How did that happen?’

  Rather drunk, rather pleased, I said: ‘They’re going to make a musical out of Ex Afrika.’

  When I looked up, I saw to my surprise that her eyes were closed; the lamplight now fell on a face as lovely, blank and impenetrable as a sculptured mask on the grave of Helen. I had a coward’s moment when I feared to know what those closed eyelids might be concealing – whether anger, or tears, or the insult of laughter; and then I thought: To hell with this guest-charade – it is my scene, and I said: ‘Well, say something, if it’s only goodbye.’

  ‘I could say goodbye.’ Her eyes opened, and I saw then that she was absolutely appalled; she was staring at me as if I were something precious lying dead in the gutter. In a fainter voice, she asked: ‘What’s it going to be like?’

  I had been sufficiently warned, but this was still my scene, my very own creation; I was not going to be robbed of any of it. ‘Something like the book. But basically it’s going to be funny.’

  ‘And called?’

  I had decided this, too, the perfect title; it had flashed itself upon a spectral screen, right before my happy eyes, just as I was negotiating the swing doors of the Sherry-Netherland.

  ‘The Pink Safari.’

  There was no applause; and when I looked for it, I found that the audience itself had turned away. Kate’s head had fallen sideways onto the pillow, like a weary child’s. It was as if dead Helen had become one of her own mourners – but a mourner remote as the very ghost of grief, drained dry of tears before they had time to fall. ‘Oh, Johnny,’ she said, in the most desolate of all the voices I had heard in many a year. ‘What’s happened to you?’

  She was always asking me that, and I could not have been more sick of the question if it had been the key phrase in some absurd oath of loyalty, administered every hour on the hour for six dictatorial years. God damn it, I thought, what more did a woman want from a man, apart from his guts and brains and liking and love and loose cash? There was only his doubt and sorrow left to give …

  People always changed; Kate had changed herself, in a thoroughly odd way; why should I be the exception, the Man Who Never Wavered? But this, it seemed, was what she was expecting of me; and in this process of encouragement towards the grail of perfection, it had been a long time since she had approved of anything I did.

  What Kate had never seemed to understand was the weird lure of great success; how the man took the bait, and the bait took the man, and no one could say which was the captor and which the prize; how this was a mutual love affair, a pact between doomed and generous equals; and how, unless a man kept pace with the coursing stream in which he swam, he would be no better than any other landed fish, first gasping, then stunned, then dying, then gutted, sliced and powdered for the pigs to root.

  Fish, flesh, fowl, or good red herring, I was not going to finish up on that side of the trough.

  Where she had changed most strangely was that she had, at one time, understood this process perfectly well. The cult of success had ruled her completely, when first we met; and I had despised, even while I acknowledged, her skill at it. It had then been I who struck the moral attitudes, and laid about me with a sword labelled ‘Right, Justice, Truth, and Brotherhood’ – one of that year’s longer swords. But presently, when I lost a skin or two of this pristine innocence, and exchanged the sword for a dagger labelled just as Erwin Orwin’s Rolls-Royce was labelled, she had turned pale with grief and begun to intone the Credo.

  It had started with Ex Afrika, that freak of nature – the book of quality which sold like the News of the World. Kate had loved it, and perhaps loved me more because of it, and had taken enormous pleasure in its success; and when they made it into a really good film – produced in England, winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Festival, a perennial stand-by at the ‘art houses’, and a financial flop in eight assorted countries – she had been happier still. But from then on, I began to fall in her regard.

  Chiefly it was the things I had to do, involving the public face of Jonathan Steele; the lectures, the television slots, the glittering life of New York, the ‘being seen’ in public when she thought I should be crouched in private over my desk, patiently writing books as good as Ex Afrika, and nothing else. Even at that stage, I could not afford this shadowy seclusion, and the sort of writing it might produce; the habit of high living – from which Kate herself did extremely well – had us firmly hooked, and the bills were coming in.

  Whatever I wrote next had to be a ‘property’; worth a minimum of $100,000 before a line of it was set in type; tailored just right for a club choice or a condensed book contract; certain to be read in galley proof by half a dozen competing film companies, and snapped up by the one who got there first with the most. So I wrote Wrap-Around, succinctly labelled by one reviewer – the kind of reviewer who waited, his tiny razor a-gleam, for the second novel of people like myself – as ‘Sex on the half-shell’. It was about love in idleness.

  It was supposed that I had dashed it off, all 700 pages of it, over a couple of high-class weekends at Palm Beach, with my literary conscience in one hand and a glass of champagne in the other. In fact, Wrap-Around was rewritten four times, polished and repolished until the very back of my brain was shining in sympathy, and delivered two years from the day I first tapped out its opening sentence. It left me with what a psychiatrist would call – or should call – the ivory-tower syndrome. Whenever any sniffy practitioner of the profound proclaimed that it was only too easy to turn one’s back on artistic integrity and produce a rip-roaring best-seller, I always invited him to lay aside his current masterpiece, which only his mother would love, and try his luck in my vulgar marketplace.

  The curious idea that anyone with a typewriter and two reams of quarto white could write books which millions of people wanted to read, died very hard; but it certainly died on my doorstep.

  Kate was different; I could not preach this doctrine to her; she wanted me pure and undefiled – and maybe poor and edgy again. I could name the very moment when she took off in final flight from this traditional odour of corruption: a brief and tremendous row over one particular bit of the promotion of Wrap-Around.

  In the course of their many-hued campaign, Mackay Jones, my American publishers, had sent to every bookseller in the United States a small, foot-square decorative towel, with the message: ‘Wrap this around your head, while you count the take from wrap-around.’ As a matter of courtesy, they sent one to us.

  Kate was absolutely furious. Adjectives such as ‘cheap’, ‘corny’, ‘vulgar’, ‘crude’ and ‘insulting’ flew through the air like whirling darts; she called up Hobart Mackay to give him a monumental earful, and she hammered on my door at ten o’clock in the morning to deliver a red-hot slice of the same message. I wasn’t that sort of writer, she declared, with all the appropriate gestures; I didn’t need that sort of promo
tion; if I had to write bad books, they didn’t have to be sold as if they were cut-price salami. Unless this kind of exploitation stopped immediately – and so on.

  I couldn’t take her very seriously, and I didn’t pretend to. Books were things which competed with each other, as well as with all the other merchandise in the showcase; people didn’t buy books, in preference to records, theatre tickets, television sets and magazines, unless the idea was pushed at them forcefully, right in the flap of their wallet, not with a whimper but a bang. In this field, Mackay Jones knew exactly what they were doing, and I was delighted to leave it all to them.

  In the event, Wrap-Around had appalling reviews and tremendous sales, particularly as a paperback; the film version won five Academy Awards, including a little one for me; and Kate and I were still merrily spending the half-million dollars it had pulled in. Neither financial flow, inwards or out, had ever ceased.

  We needed that money, the way we lived, travelled and entertained. Taxes came very high; so did chinchilla, and Balenciaga, and Mercedes station-wagons with fitted bar-refrigerators. Kate hadn’t suffered too much … We needed that money; and I could not forget that I had worked like a ditch-digger to make it.

  I got no credit for that, either; no ‘E’ for effort, no award of any sort. What I got instead was a sort of running emotional invoice, expressed or implied, for all that she had ‘given up’ in marrying me; for betting on me as an artist and finding, on the contrary, that I was a pro in a rather rougher league. Of course it was a lot for her to lose; when Kate Marais of Johannesburg, advertising queen-bee in her own right, was transformed into Mrs Jonathan Steele, little brown hen (with mink accessories), faint second fiddle in a thoroughly noisy duo, it was not exactly her fairy godmother’s work.

  But she had volunteered for it, she had chosen marriage in preference to that solitary life on her own self-erected pinnacle; and though she might now feel cheated, the rules were the same as for any other bet on any other breed of animal; those losers who wished to cry into their beer had to pay for the beer as well.