The Pillow Fight

by Nicholas Monsarrat

  There was, I found, no residue of distaste. There was quite a lot of jealousy, but that was something different … Above all, this girl, who had put herself in the public domain, still kept intact her own private quality; she had remained a free spirit, and she had not feared to cut loose when she fell out of step with what she was doing.

  It seemed to me that she would never weep, nor blackmail, nor beg for favours, nor move in and try to clean up the masculine half of the human race, no matter how brutally she might be brought up short by its imperfections. She would shrug it all off, and start again.

  The two of us had been silent for a long time, while the music beat its pathway through the gloom, and the smoke shrouded the dubious stationary figures on the dancefloor. It was Susan who spoke first.

  ‘Thinking?’

  ‘Just a little.’

  ‘You want to go?’

  ‘Yes, if that’s OK with you. Let’s breathe some fresh air.’

  ‘I hope that wasn’t meant for me.’

  ‘No. No! Actual oxygen. I’ve had enough of this zoo.’

  She did not argue about that, either.

  That evening’s farewell, on the beach outside her hotel, was far more gentle than the night before. It was not that Iwanted her less; there was, as I now found out when I kissed her, only one thing which would slake that particular thirst, and it wasn’t lime-sherbet. But I had discovered quite a lot more of what she was thinking and feeling, in the course of the evening; I recognised her reasons for withdrawal, and they were good ones. She had been manhandled, in several disgusting sequences, and she was still showing the scars.

  If she needed time to clean the decks, and forget the taste of ordure, then time she could have.

  In all sorts of ways, she was now, more than ever, just what I wanted.

  But this tender and forbearing courtoisie was not the sort of thing that lasted – not with Susan Crompton, not with me. She didn’t need time, I decided next morning, as soon as I awoke, refreshed and ambitious once more; she needed encouragement. I walked along the dawn-deserted beach, and ate breakfast, and downed the first medicinal daiquiri of the day, with a total recall of appetite. Faced by man’s most momentous challenge, I felt lion-hearted, and lion everything else. Today was going to be the clincher, or else.

  All other urges apart, I was in a wayward mood of benevolence, the sort which, in northern latitudes, encouraged men to hand out chinchillas to comparative strangers while the martinis ran out of their ears. I made a quick trip into Bridgetown, and came back with the best example which the modest town afforded, in the realm of diamond bracelets. Then I changed back into Tropical Alert, and walked along the beach again, my little present in my hand, like any dutiful envoy; and there was Susan, just spreading out her wares under the beach umbrella.

  It was bikini day, and I wasn’t quarrelling with that, either. I sat down, and put my hand firmly round her ankle, by way of making the first shy contact.

  ‘That was a message from your sponsor,’ I said. ‘Good morning, out there in TV-land.’

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked. ‘My fraternity doesn’t have that grip.’

  ‘The man of the moment.’ I proffered the jeweller’s case, unwrapped, brash as a bare chest. ‘I was just passing the flea market … This is for you, Susan. I thought you deserved it.’

  She opened it, and gave the traditional gasp of surprise. Then she looked up, her eyes shining. ‘But Johnny – it’s beautiful!’ Swiftly the bracelet was out of the case, and swiftly clasped round her wrist; she turned it this way and that, allowing the sun to set up a very respectable sparkle. ‘Is it really for me? It must have cost a fortune!’

  ‘It cost about the same as a small car, and I don’t care who knows it.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, watching me, but smiling, ‘it’s like that, is it?’

  ‘Just like that.’

  ‘You don’t have to give me presents.’

  ‘That’s all I want to know … How about coming on a picnic?’

  ‘I’d be a fool to say yes.’

  ‘I’ll get the hotel to set up a lunch for us. A shaker of daiquiris and some wine and lots to eat. You like chicken-in-a-basket?’

  ‘Now just a minute …’ she began.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I’ll make the jokes, you – er – make the coffee.’

  Suddenly she put her hand on top of mine, which had left her ankle and was thoughtfully playing scales up and down her leg. ‘Thank you, Johnny,’ she said softly. ‘I was afraid I’d scared you off.’

  ‘Afraid?’

  ‘Just that.’

  ‘I think we’ll have smoked salmon and cold grouse and some of that Brie, don’t you?’

  ‘You mustn’t put yourself out.’

  ‘The very opposite.’

  ‘Hey!’ she said. But she was laughing. ‘So early in the morning.’

  ‘Actually,’ I told her, and I almost meant it, ‘I thought we’d just wander off somewhere in the car, and enjoy ourselves.’

  ‘I’ll have to change, and get ready.’

  ‘Come like that,’ I said, eyeing the bikini.

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  ‘The bracelet will stop the sunburn.’

  ‘Slacks and a shirt,’ she said, ‘for a very minimum.’

  ‘All right,’ I agreed. ‘I’ll pick you up. Twelve o’clock. “When the bawdy hand of the dial is on the prick of noon.” Romeo and Juliet.’

  ‘You’re full of alibis this morning.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m taking over that department.’

  It was cooler inland, on the high ground which formed the spine of the island, as we jogged along in the minute hired car which was all that was viable for the Barbados road system. Susan’s idea of clothes suitable for a picnic turned out to be lemon-coloured stretch pants, and a gaping scarlet shirt with bare black footprints stencilled on it, and a nutty kind of frayed straw hat such as I wore myself, and gold-strapped Roman sandals; this unabashed get-up did not improve my driving, though it did no harm to the scenery. The clink of bottles from the basket on the back seat made music for our holiday mood.

  After a lot of local inquiry and back-tracking – Barbados was signposted strictly for those who knew their way around already – we found the place I was looking for. It was an elegant ruin of a former plantation house, transformed alike by time and by a film company which had tried to make it over into Hollywood’s image of British colonial magnificence; but the later excrescences – fake plaster colonnades, a garden staircase with false magnolias stapled to the balustrade – were now becoming happily overgrown, and the superb shape of the old house, of pink coral stone weathered to a honey-gold, was beginning to assert its mastery.

  We wandered hand in hand through a succession of bare, echoing rooms, and kissed in strange places – larders, slave kitchens, a vast oval ballroom whose ceiling had sagged down in one corner to meet a floor itself buckled and rotted out of shape. Some of it was sad, but we were not sad; if we had a vanished past, it had vanished in favour of a buoyant, impulsive, living present.

  We were followed round, all the time, by a small ragged smiling boy, who might have been the official guide. I gave him some money quite early on in our tour, but he continued to cling to us, wide-eyed, watchful, interested perhaps in human nature for its own sake. True to artistic integrity, we did not censor the show on his account.

  Then it was time for pastoral delights. We found a place for our picnic, on a high bluff of rock with a magnificent view eastwards to the sea; far away, caught by the sun, the marching lines of gleaming white breakers advertised the surge and assault of the great Atlantic. I broke out the bar with a flourish, and we drank to scenery, and sunshine, and us; figured against a pale blue sky, Susan looked very lovely, and I told her so, with words always at
the command of a writer with half a tumbler of rum cocktail in his hand. She seemed pleased, but admitted to being hungry as well.

  ‘You be cook, then,’ I told her, pointing towards the picnic basket. ‘If they haven’t been nice to us, I won’t pay my hotel bill.’

  ‘Is that place very expensive?’ she asked, already rummaging.

  ‘Yes. Much too. It’s like all these Caribbean paradise hideaways. They start by being simple and unspoiled and cheap, and then five different airlines decide to run a daily jet service from New York and Toronto and London and Paris, and the prices go up through the roof. What they sell you here is only what they got for free in the first place – the sea and the sun and the climate. And that hotel of mine is only a sort of Dogpatch Hilton, anyway.’

  She spoke indistinctly, through a smoked salmon sandwich. ‘Why do you stay there, then?’

  ‘It’s comfortable,’ I said, munching also. ‘And I can ring a bell when I want anything, and they leave me alone. It’s been a very good place to work. That’s getting to be the most expensive thing in the world – privacy.’

  ‘It must be wonderful to be a writer,’ she said, traditionally.

  ‘Now don’t you start … You haven’t got a manuscript you want me to look at, have you?’

  ‘I used to keep a diary.’

  ‘And you’d like me to turn it into a book, and go fifty-fifty on the proceeds.’

  She laughed. ‘Is that what people say?’

  ‘It’s one of the things.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘They say: “If only I had the time, I could write a bestseller.” They say: “My life has been much more interesting than that girl in your last book.” They say: “Do you plan it all in advance, or do you wait for inspiration?” They say: “Why don’t you write a book about my uncle? He’s been round the world twice.” They say: “Do you write with a ballpoint pen?” They say: “You’re not at all what I thought you’d be like.”

  ‘What did they think you’d be like?’

  ‘Dignified, I suppose.’

  ‘M’m.’ She was thinking, and of course eating at the same time. ‘Johnny?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do you wait for inspiration? I’ve always wondered.’

  I laughed, and rolled over on my back, and stared up at the flawless sky, with the sun hot on my face, and the earth under me warm and sustaining. ‘No. You sit down and start writing, and if you don’t sit down you starve. Inspiration is for people with rich old aunts … I’m waiting for you to have inspiration,’ I told her. ‘In the meantime, I couldn’t be more content if I was up to my socks in Krug.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A superior brand of champagne.’

  ‘I’m so glad …Why do you want me?’ she asked suddenly.

  I addressed the listening sky. ‘Because you look like a million dollars, and you make me feel like a man.’

  ‘Didn’t you feel like a man before?’

  ‘Not specially.’

  ‘What happened to you?’

  There was a faint echo there, and I knew what it was, and turned deaf to it again.

  ‘I got in with a fast crowd. They go for canasta.’

  ‘I was just interested,’ she said, rather far away. ‘I wondered what made someone like you want one girl more than another, or want to change suddenly … If we made love, would you tell me?’

  ‘If we made love,’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t have to tell you.’

  ‘Oh, tra la la!’ she said, suddenly light-hearted again. She pretended to search through the picnic basket. ‘I can’t find it. Don’t tell me you forgot to bring it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The violin.’

  ‘Now just for that,’ I said, ‘I won’t play my piece.’

  ‘It probably needs a rest.’

  It was good to be mocked, when mocking promised such sweet certainties as these.

  I think we were both feeling happy on the same secure plane, and sun-drugged, and dreamy – the things which accorded with the spirit but not necessarily the act of love, especially not the first act. We found this out a little later on, when the cool wine was finished, and all the food; we smiled at each other, and presently took to the woods, but it was in search of shade, not of cover.

  There was a grove of trees nearby, mostly pine and spreading oak, topped by a lone cork tree which might have served as the banner for my other field of endeavour. We lay down under this interlacing arch, withdrawing into the dappled, speckled shadows, like prudent animals. We kissed, with good average intensity, and Susan was freer with her body than she had ever been, and we saw in each other’s eyes that, by mutual accommodation, the animals need not be prudent.

  But it was siesta time, not lovemaking time. I did not especially want to make love to her then. We did not want it. Though we were moving towards our rendezvous, and we both knew it, we knew also that it would hold a little longer for us. Ours was not to be a cane-field free-for-all, nor love among the pine needles; no lemon-yellow stretch pants were going to be involved, either. We were waiting for the most liberal licence of night.

  So before long we smiled again, and moved gently apart, and went to sleep instead; and we slept untroubled, like babes-in-the-wood who knew their way both round and out, until the sun went down and the cool relief of twilight returned to our earth.

  When we awoke, yawning, thirsty, bone-happy, we clasped hands and wandered once more out of the forest, as good as when we went in. Perhaps there were not many people in the world who would have believed us; and there was one on hand who patently did not. This was the small attendant boy. I gave him some more money as we climbed into the car; but – unfair, suspicious, prurient boy! – he watched us go with shadowed eyes, seemed rather shocked, like Cupid who feared he had only been serving as Pandarus after all. The gulf of doubt between the generations had never seemed wider than at that moment.

  The way back was the way onwards. It was eight o’clock by the time we had regained coastal civilisation, and after a brief parting to put on some clothes more suitable to the conformist trend (it was a long time, a very long time, since I had thought: The next time I take these off …) we dined once again at my hotel. Tonight it was a quieter retreat; the revellers had gone somewhere else, and we could sit in private solitude, under the trees which were once more our own, and talk without intrusion, without raising our voices above a companionable murmur.

  Susan had chosen to wear red, that night, and she had chosen right; no matter from what angle – and she afforded them all – she seemed to sum up the very shape and colour and texture of desire. When she saw me staring at her, in admiration and all sorts of other things, she said: ‘This is the third of my three dresses,’ and I answered: ‘Then they’ve just lasted us out,’ and she mimed the violin-playing motion, in mockery again, yet in collusion.

  She was wearing the diamond bracelet also, and making unashamed play with it, as if the time for secrets – whether between us and the world, or between herself and me – was now coming to an end. It was a very agreeable way to be given the good news.

  After dinner we walked along the beach, in and out of the shadows, in and out of the mounting tide, and when the mood took us we stopped and coupled and kissed. This time the kissing was different. It was as though she were saying: You are hungry? – so am I. Women can be as hungry as men … I had never known – or had forgotten – that there could be such willing and wanton co-operation, in so simple a thing as an open-sky embrace.

  The word ‘professional’ slipped into my mind, and was quietly buried again. If one single fraction of this was assumed, if she was doing any sort of job on me, I didn’t want to know about it.

  ‘Why so sweet to me?’ I asked her, at the end of one memorable bout.

  ‘I suppose because now
I like you enough.’

  ‘What made that happen?’

  ‘Just the way I am. Just the way you are … You’re strong tonight. Strong all over.’

  ‘That’s consolidated Steele.’ We had reached the farthest margin of the beach, under a rising moon; the only way back was now homewards, and I was ready to take it. ‘I would be very sorry,’ I confided, ‘if any of it went to waste.’

  ‘We mustn’t let that happen, must we?’ She was looking round her, at the moon, the lapping tide, the line of palm trees along the foreshore; then she rose on tiptoe to kiss me, and she was all warmth, all yielding softness. ‘What a beautiful night to make up one’s mind … It’s no good at my place, Johnny.’

  ‘Come back to mine, then.’

  ‘Won’t they object?’

  ‘Not if we’re absolutely quiet.’

  ‘Keep reminding me of that,’ she said softly. ‘I could forget.’

  She was extraordinarily talented, as I had known she would be; from the moment when, naked in the half darkness, she allowed her face to take on the divine, surrendering silliness of love, while her superb body lay waiting for my capture, she had not ceased to tremble, to excite, to move like warm quicksilver, to kindle and to assuage. I forgot all else, first in wild enjoyment of this invasion, then in a more lingering reprise which presently achieved the same frank end.

  I could not be quite sure that she shared this abandon. Sometimes, in those moments of acute awareness which illumined our long night, I thought I could detect in her a sort of detachment, as if she felt it was not her province to enjoy, only to serve the tender necessities of love. I never had to caution her to be quiet; indeed, it was she who at one moment laid her fingers gently on my lips, and whispered: ‘You’ll wake the baby,’ in amused, reluctant discipline. She was keeping her head, and it was just as well that this was so, since I was intent on losing mine.