The Pillow Fight

by Nicholas Monsarrat

  Teller and Wallace and Steele were hard at work, at one of the things which was giving them trouble – a Johannesburg native location scene which had to steer a delicate course between the maudlin and the murderous – when Erwin Orwin came into the studio. He sat down in his corner, as usual, and busied himself with the pile-up of papers which, however large it grew, never snowed him under for more than an hour of any day.

  Clearing for action, I strolled over, leaving Teller and Wallace to weave a few more of their spells round the piano.

  ‘Good morning, Erwin,’ I greeted him. We had progressed to this stage of familiarity, after a formal period unusual in theatre. ‘Is this your day for doing favours?’

  He looked up, losing one enormous jowl in the process but not really altering his air of heavyweight consequence.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ he growled. ‘You’ve got a girl who wants a part in a play.’

  Though I was used to his displays of intuition, which had made him a very rich man in an area where, above all, hunches paid off handsomely, I thought this was a superior example of the art. I tried to take it in my stride.

  ‘Just that.’

  ‘I knew it.’ It was difficult to tell if he were in a good humour or not. ‘I should have put something about this in your contract … Well, let’s hear the worst.’

  I told him about Susan, using certain significant and glowing adjectives from my own field of achievement. ‘I don’t want to make anything special out of it,’ I finished. ‘I know you get ten of these things a day. But if you could possibly fit her in somewhere–’

  ‘Can she sing?’

  ‘She’s sung at the Met.’

  ‘Oh, come on!’ he said. ‘You don’t have to overdo it.’

  ‘But it’s true. She was one of the gypsies in Carmen.’

  ‘I knew there was a bull involved somewhere … OK, Johnny. I’ll take a look at her, if that’ll keep you happy. I like happy authors, provided they don’t cost me too much.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I’m leaving for the coast in a couple of hours. Is she available now?’

  ‘In ten minutes,’ I told him. Susan was, in fact, waiting round the corner, in our bar on 44th Street.

  ‘Wheel her in, before I change my mind.’

  It was funny to see Susan in the studio, and to watch, as a neutral observer, while she put on her act for someone else. She really did it very well, with the right amount of deference to the great Broadway producer, and the right show of leg for the man behind the label. When she had gone, with a wink to me and a smile for the general public so warm and lovely that even Teller’s mother’s cousin looked up from his piano, I closed in again to scout the prospects.

  ‘What do you think?’ I inquired of Erwin.

  ‘I wouldn’t ask that, if I were you … Pretty girl, all right. Too pretty – she’ll never be taken seriously. What do you want me to do for her? Something in a road company? I’ve got Greensleeves playing Chicago, and then going on west.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘that’s not quite what I had in mind.’

  ‘OK, OK. She’s too delicate to travel. But there’s not much here in New York.’ He fingered the nearest of his chins. ‘There’s a bit part coming up in Josephine. The victory pageant scene. The girl who plays the Goddess of Plenty got herself pregnant again.’

  ‘That sounds wonderful.’

  ‘It’s not,’ he said, rather grumpily. ‘It’s a fill-in between Austerlitz and Waterloo … Hundred-twenty-five a week, then. Why should I pay your bills?’

  ‘Thank you so much, Erwin,’ I said formally. ‘It’s very good of you.’

  ‘I like happy authors,’ he said again. His face cleared, as if, against all likelihood, he really did prefer to make people happy. ‘Incidentally, when’s your wife coming back?’ he asked, and burst out into laughter so loud that Teller, who had heard the laughter but not the joke, looked up and called out: ‘My God, Erwin! Let’s keep that one in.’

  I could have done without Erwin’s last comment, though it was not much of a price to pay for having this thing settled, so satisfactorily, with a small wave of the wand. But of course his question had the truth at its core. I did not want Kate to come back yet; and I knew, perfectly well, the reason why. It was not entirely the obvious reason.

  Apart from her tremendous sensual appeal, Susan was giving me something else; along with the generous girl came freedom from that close, cool and penetrating inspection of love, which I could only sum up as Kate herself, and which had begun to unnerve me.

  It was peace I really wanted; peace, and a long truce to the cold war which our marriage had in part become. With Susan, at last, I had established an uncomplicated, simple give-and-take, without deep engagement, without inquisition, without comment, without the cloying siege of love. With Susan, it was summertime, and the living was easy.

  Once again, that was all I wanted; and if it was more than I deserved, that was my dividend.

  We worked all through a hot mid-year, in a town full of tourists, Turkish-bath humidity, gasoline fumes and crabby cab drivers. By early September, The Pink Safari was finished, or as nearly finished as it would be before Erwin Orwin, that maddening perfectionist, started pulling it to pieces again on the stage; casting had begun in earnest, and rehearsals were due to start in about a month.

  I had been paid my second $15,000, and had banked it, in the sense that it had been pushed through one bank-teller’s wicket and had started to leak out at another. Erwin had then asked me to stay on with him, on a salary basis, until the première. It was being forecast, with true theatrical vagueness, that the show might start its out-of-town try-outs in January, and open in New York some time in April.

  The smaller partnership of Crompton and Steel continued, with unflagging energy, or (not to be too boastful) with the energy appropriate to an affair which had gone on for seven straight months. It seemed that she was happy, in bed and out of it; professionally, she was still with My Darling Josephine, and had been promoted from the Goddess of Plenty to the Spirit of Paris, whose décolletage was lower. I had stopped paying substantial sums of money for not using my suite at the Pierre, and divided the time between Susan’s modest lair, and occasionally camping out in the apartment.

  I was beginning to wonder, at odd moments of the day, what was happening to Kate.

  She had stayed where she was, down at Maraisgezicht in the Cape Province; regular letters arrived, saying how busy she was, how much there remained to be done in the settlement of her father’s estate, how impossible it was to come back to New York at the moment. I believed her, but I had a curious feeling that there was a loose end somewhere, some item unidentified and out of my control. Or perhaps it was just that we could not talk things over any more.

  I began to speculate on what she was really thinking. One of her recent letters, at least, had brought some substantial news: ‘I have inherited, after taxes, about £600,000, but I still love you, just the same.’ I could credit at least half of this, and, perversely, wanted to believe the other half.

  Then, in October, with rehearsals just starting, an unexpected courier arrived, bringing news.

  I was at home – my home early one evening, wandering about the silent rooms in a dressing-gown, after a bath which had done nothing much to remove the scars of a sticky day, when the phone rang. I very nearly ignored it, being in that nineteenth-century mood which was prepared to dismiss the telephone as the damned intrusion it was; but it rang for a long time and finally I picked it up.

  A voice said, very loudly: ‘Enfin!’ and then: ‘Is that Jonathan Steele, if you please? Is it?’ The rasping tone and fractured accent could only belong to one man. It was my old and wily Greek friend from darkest Johannesburg, Eumor Eumorphopulos.

  ‘Eumor!’ I shouted, unreasonably delighted. ‘What are you doing in New York?’

 
‘Trying to find you,’ he answered, promptly and sardonically. ‘Where you live these days?’

  ‘Here. But I was away last night.’

  ‘Ha!’

  ‘It’s not “Ha!” at all,’ I said. ‘I was sitting up with a sick manuscript. Where are you staying?’

  ‘At the Plaza. But I leave again tonight.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Peruvia.’

  ‘That’s Peru, Eumor,’ I told him. ‘And it’s in the other direction. But hop into a cab and come on over.’

  ‘I bring bottle champagne?’

  ‘I have bottle champagne waiting. Hurry!’

  After a six years’ interval, he really looked very odd – or perhaps I had forgotten how odd he had looked in the first place. He seemed smaller, older and greener than I ever remembered; under the kind of wide-brimmed black hat which George Raft wore on very late-night movies, his face was more creased, more crafty and more Balkan than ever. He advanced through the open door at a run, threw his arms round me with a cry of ‘My friend!’ and kissed me energetically on both cheeks. I was not at all put out. I had always had a soft spot for Eumor, who had proved himself so good a champion in Johannesburg, and had been, I remembered, the first non-publishing character to read Ex Afrika.

  When our outlandish greetings were over, he wandered round the room, fingered the curtain material, and asked ‘How much?’ as if he really expected an answer. Then, across brimming glasses, we toasted each other, and the happy past, and set to work to bring it up to date.

  He was going to Peru to do something about a bauxite mine. Was he buying it? I asked.

  ‘Or selling,’ he answered, between swallows. ‘These things very difficult. I have not yet made my mind. You know I am a millionaire again?’

  ‘So am I, Eumor. But I spent it all.’

  ‘Mon élève. You want some more money?’

  ‘No, but I’ll keep you in mind. What time does your plane leave?’

  ‘Middle night.’

  ‘We’ll have dinner, and I’ll drive you out to the airport. But can’t you stay any longer?’

  He shook his head. ‘Have meetings in Peruvia. I stopped to see you. I promised Kate. But I come back in three, four weeks.’

  ‘How is Kate?’

  ‘Fabelhaft! Sends her love.’

  ‘What’s she doing, and when’s she coming back?’

  He held out his glass for a refill before answering: ‘She is working hard. She doesn’t come back till work is finished.’

  ‘When will that be?’

  He looked at me, his eyes calculating. ‘Perhaps never, Jonathan.’

  ‘Good God!’ I said, startled. ‘Why? What does she want to stay for? What is there to do?’

  ‘Plenty.’ He sat down, and began to speak more slowly and carefully. ‘You know she has Maraisgezicht to look after now. She is very busy with that. She feels she cannot leave yet, because of her people.’

  ‘But the place can run itself,’ I protested. ‘With a good agent. Or she could sell it.’

  ‘She does not want to sell it. She does not want to sell anything. She wants to stay. Because of that, and because of South Africa.’

  ‘Is that the real reason?’

  ‘I believe so.’

  ‘But what about South Africa?’

  ‘It is terrible, Jonathan. Such hatred, such bad laws, such division of peoples. You would not believe.’

  ‘I don’t see what that has to do with Kate.’

  ‘It has to do with everyone.’ He looked up suddenly. ‘It has to do with you.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  He was silent, and I felt that we were in danger of parting almost before we had properly met. I tried to soften my last firm reply.

  ‘Of course it has to do with everyone, in a way. But you can’t go on tearing yourself to bits all your life … Be fair, Eumor. I did what I could about that sort of thing, with Ex Afrika.’

  He nodded. ‘Oh yes. I agree. A very wonderful book. How I remember when I first read it! You write another one like that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not, Jonathan?’

  ‘Because I’ve done it once, and I’m not going to do it again. What do you want me to write this time? Son of Ex Afrika?’

  ‘You are son of Ex Afrika,’ he countered, with, for Eumor, a rather subtle twist of phrase. ‘Don’t turn your back on your father.’

  I had to laugh, since I did not wish to get angry, nor sad either. I wanted to enjoy my friend’s company, and the grisly side of the grey world was going to wait till I had done so. I poured out some more champagne, and tried to convey my own mood of relaxation.

  ‘Come on, Eumor,’ I told him. ‘We’re not going to solve any of these problems tonight. I’m sorry if Kate’s getting really involved, and we’ll talk some more about that, but not just now. Hell, I haven’t seen you for six years! Tell me what’s been happening in the old home town. How’s Skip Shannon? How’s Fraternelli?’

  We gossiped and drank for about an hour, touching nothing that hurt, enjoying a re-hash of South African wild life such as the tourists did not see. Eumor, who had been thoughtful, almost brooding, now seemed ready to join in this nonsense. Presently I looked at my watch, and at the two empty bottles, and said: ‘I’m meeting a girl for dinner, Eumor. Let’s pick her up, and then eat somewhere. She’s got to go to the theatre about nine, so we can come back to all this later.’

  His corrugated olive face assumed a well-remembered air of appetite.

  ‘What girl is this?’

  ‘She’s beautiful, Eumor. You’ll love her.’

  ‘Tall?’

  ‘Huge.’

  ‘All right. She do for me. What about you?’

  ‘I like food. I’ll just watch.’

  ‘You voyeur now?’

  ‘Me voyeur. You Tarzan.’

  As a compliment to the visiting potentate, we dined at a Greek restaurant, where Eumor, taking over completely – and who had a better right? – used the Grecian inside track to command one of the strangest meals I had ever eaten, seeming to consist of large, unrelated portions of things from different ends of the normal menu.

  Among other items, we had stuffed vine leaves, and a moussaka of aubergines, and skewered lamb, and most of a sturgeon, and piles of those elegant long fritters, perfumed with rose-water, called Scaltsounia, and honey-cake, and a jar – an actual amphora with the classic tapered base – of white Retsina wine which tasted, most agreeably, of pine-tree gum.

  In sum, it was a prodigious meal, and it made my friend Eumor very popular with Susan.

  This seemed to be mutual. Eumor always behaved, towards any woman who was not seriously disfigured, with such alarming gallantry that it was difficult to gauge his private scale; but there could be no doubt that this time he thought he had moved into Elysian fields of beauty.

  There was no doubt either, judging from his increasingly complicated jokes, that he was taking my relationship with Susan for granted; and indeed, since at one point she absent-mindedly said something about the laundry having ruined one of my shirts, not too much guesswork was needed.

  We were a cheerful party, and when, at nine o’clock, Susan had to leave us, to make her triumphant second-act appearance as the Spirit of Paris, she was given a flourishing send-off, and Eumor kissed her hand so often and so hungrily that other diners cheered. But I did not make a date for her to meet us later. Eumor and I had left some important things unsaid, and I was now in the right mood of well-fed benevolence not to wish to shirk them.

  Eumor came back from the door, whither his farewell enthusiasm had swept him, and sat down with gleaming eyes.

  ‘More wine!’ he said, and snapped his fingers, alerting the whole world of waiters. ‘What a girl! I meet her
when I come back, yes?’

  ‘I’ll warn her about that,’ I assured him, and hoped it did not sound too ambiguous. ‘You really liked her, Eumor?’

  Having nothing else to kiss, Eumor kissed the back of his own hand, in private homage. ‘I love her already!’ he exclaimed, and snatched his freshly-poured glass of Retsina, and gulped it as no doubt it was meant to be gulped. ‘How long has she been your friend?’

  ‘About seven months.’

  ‘Oh …’ He raised his eyebrows very high indeed. ‘I did not realise. That’s not good, Jonathan. That is too long a situation.’

  I drank also. ‘Why too long? She’s a beautiful girl, and I’m very fond of her.’

  ‘But seven months,’ he said, and I felt he was ready to be serious again, and that we were moving to that part of the field from which I had coaxed him earlier. This time, it did not seem to matter. ‘It’s too long,’ he said again. ‘Too permanent. After all, she is only–’

  ‘Only what?’

  ‘Poule de luxe.’

  I wasn’t going to lose my head over a point of protocol. ‘She’s more than that.’

  ‘Not for you, my friend.’

  ‘Why not for me?’

  ‘Because you have Kate.’

  This was something else I was ready to talk about. ‘That’s been a long situation too, Eumor. Six years. Remember that joke you used to tell? About putting pennies in a bottle, and taking them out again?’

  ‘It was a joke.’

  ‘Jokes can be true.’

  ‘And now you are putting pennies into this bottle,’ he said, with sudden energy. ‘What does that prove? Even I could put pennies into that one. At my age! But it is not marriage. Not marriage like you have.’

  ‘Like I had,’ I corrected him. ‘It isn’t the same now. Why should it be? These things always fade out, and it’s silly to pretend otherwise. Or to expect it. I honestly believe there’s a natural term for every marriage – five years, ten years, whatever it is – and after that it’s over, except as a matter of habit, of social convenience, to keep the kids in the station-wagon and the neighbours in the rumpus room.’ I could see from his face that he was not agreeing, but I pressed on with an argument which, at that moment, across that dinner-table, armed by that particular glass of wine, seemed crystal clear, and utterly logical. ‘It’s true, Eumor! Never shake thy gory locks at me! Marriage can be like that, a sort of hen-coop of togetherness. But because it comes to an end, that doesn’t mean it’s been a failure. It may have been wonderful, for its correct length of time, and then it finishes, at exactly the right moment.’