I did not find out, till much later, the reason which lay at the core of this faint detachment; and I was not at all disposed to raise the topic, at such a moment, though my motives were entirely respectable – I wanted to return all her lavish courtesies, in the same measure. But she was not complaining; she was moving like a wild stream, she was clenching my exultant body as if it were the last prize left on earth … I need only take delight in the fact that she was there, to hold and to have, exactly when she was wanted; and being beautiful, agile and utterly unconstrained, she was, on that first night and for many nights thereafter, wanted a great deal.
Some time after dawn we walked back to her hotel together, plodding across the sands with the relaxed, wandering gait of all disbursed lovers at five o’clock in the morning. She was notably pale, and so, I felt, was I; but she looked very beautiful, very languid, very much mine, with that recognisable air of setback which could only be a source of pride to the executioner.
We stopped to kiss halfway, but it was very much a token salute; if the entire band of the Royal Marines had struck up their fortissimo version of Anchors Aweigh!, I could not have hoisted a butterfly net. At her hotel steps, we played a subdued balcony scene.
‘Thank you for all that, Susan.’
‘Thank you for all that … People are dead wrong about the English. Refer them to me.’
‘I’ll do nothing of the sort … Are you going to sleep now?’
‘Yes. And I can recommend it. Aren’t you really tired, Johnny?’
‘I might snatch a brief nap. But towards lunchtime …’
‘We’ll see.’ She reached up, and kissed my cheek briefly. ‘That’s for now … Tell me something. How do you like me to do my hair?’
‘Normal. Smooth. Simple. You’ve got a beautiful shape of head. It doesn’t need to be churned up.’
‘All right,’ she answered, with a curious air of gravity, as if she were agreeing a treaty which would bind us both for a hundred years. ‘From the next time I see you. Good night. Good morning.’
I walked back even more slowly, scuffing the wet sand, observing what seemed to be an entirely different kind of sunrise. Perhaps it was because I wasn’t collecting seashells any more. I was conscious of the usual male tristesse, and accepted it, and took good care to discount it.
This had been the first time, damn it, in six long years. A substantial record had been broken, a citadel of sorts breached and overthrown. A little while ago, I would have been very surprised. Now I was not, and that also was a measure of decline.
But beyond this small moment of mourning, the pangs of conscience could not and did not pierce very deep. Susan had been much too exciting.
She never stopped being exciting, not even when she moved into the cabin next door to mine, and the engagement became continuous. (My hotel, true to form, turned a benevolent eye on this arrangement, when I proposed it; perhaps they had very little choice – its general discouragement would deal a fatal blow to the industry.) She never stopped being exciting, and I did not cease to exploit the fact, on all possible occasions.
We seemed, in those days of dream and desire, to have everything going for us. The sun was constant in a cloudless sky; the sea washed us clean and innocent and as good as new, each morning; the afternoons were gentle pauses in time, yet full of subtle reminder, promising us all that we wished, and very soon, and then and there, if we had a mind for it; the nights were cool, and secret, and ours. At such signals, manhood returned with the full flood of virility, and a pounding eagerness to prove it.
This revival of mine had been instant and inevitable; I had only to put my arms round her to be reminded of a whole range of forgotten tastes and savours. It had a good deal to do with the feel of a different body, which, as always, made for the total renewal of many urges. Susan was taller than Kate, and put together differently, and, at twenty, a full twelve years younger; however little one wanted to make comparisons between the old love and the new, they were being stated all the time, by the response of one’s own body, one’s own instinct and appetite.
When we made love, it was a sensual contact between two people new to each other, never yet explored; and it was rendered wildly exciting by this novelty. She could drive me nearly frantic by a certain movement, or sometimes by a certain lack of it; it was as if she could invent, with her body, things I had to have, things I had to do; and she knew this, and she practised the fluent magic like some goddess-conjurer, dispensing gifts from her liberal store to those who had divined the right answer, and promises to those who had been tricked or blinded.
Sometimes, when in post-operative mood I tried to analyse this to her, and perhaps became over-involved in the minutiae of speculation, or clinically dull, she would smile like an indulgent teacher, and then contribute a chiding, realistic note: ‘You know, one of these days you’re going to talk yourself out of bed. The reasons for things don’t matter!’ And if the tide was right she would show me straight away that they did not matter, and indeed they did not.
She was a funny mixture of a girl. Many of the things I had expected, she was not. I had met beautiful girls, by the raftload, during the last few years; and beautiful girls were not my favourite characters, except to stare at when I had nothing better to do.
For the most part, these creatures grew unbearably spoiled; living on their looks, monstrously proud of them, scared to death of losing them; turning like animated toys towards every mirror in sight, as if to springs of water in the desert; absolutely self-centred, only happy if everyone in any given room was concentrating on them and them alone; and liable to turn into sulky bitches if this were not so.
Susan was not at all like this, though – in the category of good looks she was well entitled to be. She did not seem to give a damn who stared at her, or who did not, or what was happening to the current of her career, or how well she was doing in society, or in love, or in the span of life itself. She was generous, and outgoing, all the time; she could give her undivided attention to another person, and enjoy the process, instead of demanding the same concentration upon herself, as of sacred right.
She seemed content with whatever took place next, good or bad, hopeful or daunting; if she were broke one day, then tomorrow would be better – and if not better, then different anyway, and worth a girl’s living, a girl’s welcoming smile. She had to be very disappointed, or misused, or angry, to take a stand against fate in the form of man.
She knew that I was a celebrity of sorts, she thought that I had a lot of money; naive or not, I was ready to believe that this had made little difference to her, in the realms of seduction, and none at all in its lavish catalogue of sequels.
‘Everyone has the same income in bed,’ she once said, at a moment to match the metaphor. ‘A rich man doesn’t feel rich. He either feels good or bad, gentle or rough, sweet or mean.’ She listed, in her customary specific language, some of the other things which money could not replace. ‘What I like about you,’ she concluded, ‘is that you always do it with you.’
I suppose she had admired this element in a lot of men, that it was what she was always looking for, that this was why she had sacked the odious character who had brought her down to Barbados in the first place. Generally speaking, she was very fond of the male animal, by inference as well as by candid confession; and this was another thing which surprised me, for a particular reason.
It became clear to me, before very long, that in spite of apparent ardours, in spite of a leaping sensuality, she never actually turned the trick; and no divining rod was needed to establish this, once I started watching her progress in love, once I began to take some trouble. At the start, I did take a lot of trouble with her, because I was deeply grateful for all she was giving me, and I thought she deserved her return; and there were also the customary promptings of vanity which, if they did not separate the men from the boys, at least gave them
all the same target to shoot at.
It did not work, and presently, in deep well-being and content, I grew lazy about it, and thought: ‘Hell, I don’t have to bother – it isn’t that sort of transaction.’ I tried to raise the question once, but all she said was: ‘Johnny, don’t think!’ and gave me, with prompt co-operation, something to take the place of thought.
I did not know whether she was being unselfish, or if this was all she wanted; I could not guess what impeded a consummation which, by her look and feel and touch, she might have been invented for. Before very long, I began to forget all about it, as she seemed to wish me to, and simply took the darling hand which had been dealt to me, and had a wild time with it.
If Susan really minded, if she missed something, if I was failing her in any particular way, she never showed it, never once withheld her cunning accommodation, and only spoke of it once again.
On a warm Barbados afternoon, when Susan lay asleep behind our slatted blinds, and I was trying to make the choice between waking her up, shaving, finishing the heel of a bottle of rum, or falling asleep myself, a letter came unexpectedly from Kate. It gave me a faint jolt – nothing worse – and then some news to which I lent all that I could muster in the way of dreamy, detached attention.
She was, she wrote, still in South Africa, in Johannesburg, where her father had now gone into hospital. He was very frail – ‘hanging on’ was the term she used – and terribly depressed about politics, and she was not too hopeful for his recovery. He just didn’t seem to believe that he had much to live for, any more. She would of course stay for as long as was necessary. She sent her love, and (here came a neatly loaded phrase) so did a lot of other people whom I used to know.
She ended with the cryptic message: ‘There are some disgusting things going on here. More when I see you.’
I read the last paragraph with wry recognition. Kate had no monopoly. There were some pretty disgusting things going on here, too.
Suddenly it was time for me to leave. The signal, which I had been hoping never to hear, was relayed by the booming voice of Erwin Orwin, telephoning from a city, New York, which seemed as nebulous and as far away as China or Peru. But I could not really pretend that his world of hard fact did not exist. Not any longer.
‘Mr Steele, I need you!’ was his opening chord, thundering above the minor squeaks and whines of Barbados’ overseas hook-up. ‘And I hope you have some good news for me. How’s my book coming along?’
‘It’s finished,’ I answered, caught off-guard. It was nine o’clock in the morning, and I had been summoned to the hotel lobby, with the utmost discretion, straight from a bed which was a sad one to leave at any time. I back-tracked a little, using the social courtesies as a screen. ‘Hallo, Mr Orwin,’ I said, with great heartiness. ‘Nice to hear your voice again! How’s New York getting on?’
‘New York’s all right,’ he said, ‘if you like rain, and a big row with Equity. How are things down there? How are all those babes in bikinis?’
‘Barely visible,’ I said, straight from the joke book.
The onslaught of his laughter could almost have been heard without the aid of science. I held the phone away from my ear till the paroxysm died away.
‘That’s good!’ he shouted. ‘Keep that one in … Did you say it was finished?’
‘Pretty well.’ I could not really tell him otherwise; I had been gone for six weeks, and writers with contracts and professional commitments did not throw away six weeks, nor any other span of time. ‘I’ve just been polishing it up a bit.’
‘I’d like to see what you’ve done,’ he said, rather more formidably. ‘I want to get things moving. And so do Teller and Wallace. They don’t like hanging about doing nothing, even on my payroll. When can you get back? Tomorrow?’
‘No,’ I answered, conscious of a slightly chill breeze in the warm morning air. I remembered Jack Taggart telling me: ‘Your rules aren’t breakable.’ This must be the translation. ‘That’s too soon,’ I went on. ‘I doubt if I could get a reservation.’
‘I’ll fix the reservation,’ he said, ‘if that’s all it is. What airline are you using?’
‘Don’t you bother,’ I told him. ‘I know the people myself. I’ll organise it.’
‘When?’
The wires and the air-waves hummed and throbbed between us. I had to make up my mind, to this and a lot of other things. ‘In a couple of days,’ I answered. ‘But I left my car down in Miami, and I’ll have to drive it up again. How would it be if I sent you the manuscript? Then I can be back home in about a week, to go over it with you.’
‘I guess that’s OK,’ he said grudgingly. ‘But don’t forget, I need you as well as the book. And Teller and Wallace will be needing you too.’
Everybody needed me.
‘All right,’ I told him, ‘I’ll mail the manuscript tonight, and start back on Wednesday.’
‘We’ll be looking for it. And for you.’ But once he had his promise, he seemed prepared to relax. ‘You know, I envy you creative writers, Mr Steele. A few hours in the sun, and the work’s all done. I’ll bet you didn’t even have to get yourself a desk.’
‘I can’t afford a desk,’ I said. ‘And I’ve been working like a – like an African field-marshal.’
‘Now then,’ he said, starting to wheeze. ‘No editorial comment.’
His laughter roared and crackled over two thousand miles of defenceless air, as the call faded, and I hung up. But it was not infectious; I wasn’t feeling much like laughter myself. I had given Orwin a promise which I did not in the least want to keep, which vaguely I had hoped to stall for another two weeks at the minimum. Yet now Icould not do so. One of my dies was cast.
There were several others already lining up, and as I went down the coral-stone steps into the hotel garden they began to crowd in on me. Under the towering palm trees, the pool was still deserted, and I sat down at the water’s edge to try to sort the thing out. I had known for many days that I would soon have to wake up, and that when I did so, I would be waking to a simple, central problem. The problem had arrived. I must make up my mind about Susan Crompton.
It was not going to be easy, whatever I did. Though she was not yet on my conscience, which was elastic, she certainly would be, as soon as I picked up and left her. It was going to be almost impossible to walk out, and still face the mirror in the morning – or, if that was too much of a cliché from the Boys’ Book of Priggery, it was safe to say that I would feel all sorts of a fool if I quit so early.
Much of that feeling could only be selfish; I simply did not want to bid her goodbye; she had become an endearing as well as a desirable member of our cast, and I wanted lots more of the same. Why should we part now? Why should I leave this feast, when the feasting had hardly begun?
There were other reasons, more admirable – or more arguable, by a man looking for arguments to justify what he was going to do next. There were all kinds of ways in which I could help Susan; there was so much that could be made out of a girl like this, if she were given a new compass and a fresh start; all it needed was a rescue operation, and a little non-opportunist love.
I felt splendidly capable of this, particularly at nine o’clock in the morning after a night of wakeful endeavour, in bed with the object of charity. But if this romantic relief work had Cinderella cast in a dual and somewhat dubious role (one wave of my wand, and we turned into a motel), yet the results might still be just as good as if the Fairy Godmother herself had mapped them out.
Susan had been snared, by her startling good looks, her generous heart, and by the most potent man-trap of all – man. If she ‘went on like this’, it could only be downhill, and she would end up as an old woman in a back alley, performing standing services for sailors. It did not have to happen, and it would not, if she were helped now, at a time when she had so many assets, so much promise, so fine a life
to live.
There was an ancient, skinny Negro circling the pathway round the pool, dressed in a tattered white under-shirt and a pair of blue jeans faded to the colour of a rain-washed sky. He bore a rustic implement resembling a wire-mesh spoon on the end of a pole, and with it he was cleaning the surface of the water. Leaves, weed, patches of scum, palm fronds, dead insects – all were lifted out, piece by piece, one by one, with delicate, dedicated care.
Each time he passed me, he grinned, and raised his straw hat, and bowed. But while the grinning was automatic, the other thing was not; it was, on this bright morning, his life’s work. He was giving his whole soul to his act of purification.
There was a far-fetched lesson here, and I prepared to take it, nodding my head sagely like a man seeing the light – the light he chose to see. It was suddenly tied with something else, something more remarkable, which had only just occurred to me.
Years ago, when it had been desperately important that I marry Kate (and I would never have denied, nor reversed, that urgency), I had made up a story about a girl in Johannesburg, a traditional harlot with a heart of gold, who lived for love, and died of it. It had been a good story, designed to catch Kate’s attention at a crucial moment, and it had worked; along with some other things, it had injected just enough jealousy to propel her into marriage.
One of the points of my story had been that, with a mixture of motives, I had tried to set this girl up as something better than a corporate bed-fellow.
My heroine had started life as fiction, and now she was not. Suddenly she had arrived on my own doorstep, as Susan Crompton, with something like the same problems and all of the same appeal. The fairy-tale girl herself had taken flesh – and no one could deny that she had made a delicious job of the transformation.
All at once, duty seemed clear, and pleasurable at the same time – the way that all duty should present itself. I had to take this thing on. I could not do less for the fact than I had done for the fancy.
The Pillow Fight Page 25