The Pillow Fight

by Nicholas Monsarrat

  ‘My poor Jonathan,’ he said, and there was real compassion in his voice. ‘Is this what you have been thinking, in your little tower of success? You cannot have changed so much! What you say is nonsense, and you know it. With Kate you have a wonderful marriage. With this girl–’ he jerked his head towards the street door, ‘–you have just a–’ he used a word, presumably Greek, which I did not understand, and which I took to be biological. ‘You cannot throw away someone like Kate, just because you do not wish to make love with her every day.’

  ‘Twice every day.’

  He was not to be turned from his argument; flippancy would not stem this flood. ‘And now you have this girl twice every day, and you think it–’ he waved his hand irritably, searching for the word he wanted, ‘–you think it cancels Kate? You are mad! Have the girl all you want, until you are tired and don’t want her any more. Have her until you break the bed, or break something else! But do not leave Kate alone. Do not leave yourself alone. You and Kate need each other, and you have proved it.’

  ‘How, proved it?’

  ‘By being married six years, and missing her when she is gone.’

  ‘I never said anything about missing her.’

  ‘You do not have to. This girl is part of missing her.’

  ‘Oh, rubbish!’ I was sure this was not true. ‘You’ve got it all wrong, Eumor. Susan isn’t a substitute for Kate. She’s her successor.’ I did not quite like this idea, and I corrected it. ‘I mean, she’s a complete change, the very opposite of Kate, and just what I need. She doesn’t give a damn what I–’ This was getting too complicated, and confused, and I broke it off. ‘Anyway, Kate’s OK,’ I said, after a moment. ‘Apparently she wants to stay and look after Maraisgezicht. And she’s got all this money. She can be perfectly happy by herself.’

  ‘She does not want to be by herself. That I can assure you.’

  It suddenly struck me that this was really why Eumor was in New York; he had come here on purpose to say these last two sentences of his; he was carrying out an appointed mission, using the weapons of wine, and friendship, and the dedicated look which belonged to the honest go-between. Though he was not the sort of man I could ever be angry with, I was irritated nonetheless.

  ‘Perhaps I want to be by myself,’ I said, shortly.

  ‘You cannot afford to be, Jonathan.’ He really was very involved in this, very earnest, very intense. I could concede that it was good to have such friends, and that at any other time, in any other area, it would have been wonderful to have this paragon of a doctor on hand, ready with the splints and the acute diagnosis and the brisk tonic which would set a man on his feet again, in no time at all. But just at the moment, I wanted to stay in bed, sick as a dog, and loving it. ‘I tell you,’ Eumor the paragon continued, ‘you need her. And she still thinks it is a good marriage, in spite of everything.’

  ‘In spite of what, exactly? The girl?’

  ‘She does not know about the girl. And she will not hear her from me.’ He put his hand on my arm. ‘Anyway, the girl is not important, unless you choose to make her so. Don’t forget that. Girls in bed are cheap. In the end they are just like money, to be enjoyed, to be spent, to be forgotten. That is why they cost money … But they should not cost anything else.’

  ‘What did you mean, then, that Kate thinks our marriage is OK, in spite of everything?’

  ‘Because of how you have changed. You used to be serious. You used to care about such things as Africa, and write about them also. Now you do not.’

  ‘Is that bad?’

  ‘It is tragedy,’ said Eumor, and looked as if he meant it.

  I decided that I did not want another mourner at the bedside of significant literature, and I did not want any more of this, either. Once again, I could not quarrel with Eumor, and particularly, not where Kate was concerned; he had been at our side on the first day we met, and on the night we fell in love, he was our godfather, our presiding angel; such men, such friends, were not expendable in any circumstances. But if this privileged, interior pressure went on any longer, the mould of concord was liable to break, and that would be the end of a lot of things I valued.

  I said: ‘OK, Eumor. You’ve said your piece, and I’ve listened to it. Now let’s press the button on this.’ I looked up, at the clock on the wall behind his head. ‘We have exactly one hour before we have to drive out to the airport. What would you like to do?’

  He opened his mouth to say something, and then, like the rare man he was, changed his mind, and with it his whole expression. He tossed off the last of his wine, and smiled wickedly, and said: ‘Strip-tease! What else?’

  Afterwards I drove him out to Kennedy Airport, and saw him off on his plane to Caracas, which was the first leg of his journey, and went slowly back into town, meandering along the Grand Central Parkway and over the Triborough Bridge. The lights of the East River seemed to unravel as I moved smoothly south again, like an endless skein of yellow-white wool falling gently apart as a dark hand divided it, and I found myself wishing that a lot of other things would unravel half as easily.

  I was ready to acknowledge that Eumor had done his best. As an emissary from Kate, bringing a salutary shock from the world outside my bed, he had made his mark and sounded his warning. The message was simple: when Kate returned, if Kate returned, I would have to straighten up and fly right, because she would be leaving something she wanted for something she could not be sure of.

  She would be doing a basic favour for me, and I would be in honour bound to match it.

  Eumor had given me a lot to think about. The fact that I did not want to think about it could not be held against the man, nor the message, nor anyone but myself.

  Chapter Six

  Eumor’s visit had been like a stone briefly troubling the pool; I felt that if I waited long enough, the ripples would go away. But this was a Chamber of Commerce forecast, tailored strictly for the vacation trade. I was first made aware that the boat itself was beginning to rock, by an entirely new greeting from Joe the doorman.

  I had been on television the previous night, as a guest detective trying to unmask such diverse toilers as the girl who crocheted ball-pockets for billiard tables, and the man who ironed the newspapers at London’s most august club, restricted to the octogenarian nobility. (I had guessed him wrong; I thought he was a pants-presser with a funny accent.) But Joe the doorman did not pass judgement on my performance; this time he broke precedent. He said: ‘Hallo there, Mr Steele! I was reading about you last night.’

  ‘Reading?’ I said, surprised. ‘What have I been doing this time?’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t believe any of it,’ he assured me, with a cheerful grin. ‘It was just an item … But I saved it for you to see.’ He fished inside his coat pocket, and came out with a crumpled evening paper, a paper, which, to put it mildly, I did not normally read. ‘Keep it,’ he said. ‘I’ve been all the way through it.’

  I thanked him, and put the paper in my own pocket, and went on up to the apartment, where I planned to spend a quiet day. I forgot it for about an hour, while I was going through the mail, and listening with half an enchanted ear to David Oistrakh, well-known communist infiltrator, playing his insidious violin. Then something made me remember the conversation downstairs, and I took the paper over to my desk, and looked for the ‘item’ which had caught Joe’s eye.

  It was not too difficult to find; he had folded the paper at the appropriate page. It was halfway down a gossip column headed ‘Show Biz Confidential’.

  Jonathan Steele (I read) now toiling on the final version of Erwin Orwin’s Pink Safari musical, based on Johnny’s own blockbuster, Ex Afrika, still manages to make the scene in his spare time … He’s all over town these days and nights with stunning Susan Crompton, who you can catch (if you’re quick enough) as the low-cut ‘Spirit of Paris’ in Erwin’s other opus, that ever-lov
ely, ever-running darling, Josephine … Nice casting, Johnny … Meanwhile, back at the ostrich farm, current mate Kate Steele sits it out in wildest Johannesburg, her home town, counting the loot from a recent inheritance … Better get your head out of the sand, Kate, or you’ll wind up as the ex in Africa.

  I was glad that I had a drink in my hand, at that moment; there was a sudden and urgent need for a different taste. I read the column again, more analytically, feeling a little sick and a little chilly round the conscience. Then I poured another drink, and turned off the hi-fi set, and gave the matter some serious thought.

  The report was considerably dated, as far as history was concerned; yet, amazingly, this was the first time Susan and I had appeared in print as a team, explicitly or otherwise. I had always been expecting something of the sort, though not perhaps so viciously angled; but there was an enormous amount of competition in this area, from New York’s perennial crop of public lovers, and writers as a class were of less amorous interest than Hollywood apes, French poodles and imported English stallions.

  So far, in spite of a less-than-discreet progress all around the town, we had been left off the form-sheet; we had remained technically anonymous.

  It was difficult to judge if this anonymity had now been breached. Kate might never read the paragraph, nor hear about it; and if she did, she still might not take it seriously. It was, I thought suddenly, couched in her own kind of prose, the kind she and her gossip column had thriven on, in the distant past; and she must know that a lot of such ‘revelations’ were balanced on a very slender wire of fact, if they were sustained by anything at all. She might decide to take the professional view that fire and smoke, so often unrelated, were in this case part of the same mirage.

  I was still speculating about this, an hour and several drinks later, when the phone rang. It was Susan, Susan in a serious mood.

  She began immediately. ‘Johnny, there was a terrible thing in one of the papers last night. Shall I–’

  ‘I know,’ I told her. ‘I heard about it.’

  ‘Who told you?’

  ‘The doorman. Who told you?’

  ‘People have been calling me up all morning,’ she said excitedly. ‘Well, three people, at least.’

  ‘What people?’

  ‘Girls in the show. Johnny, what do you think?’

  ‘I don’t think anything,’ I told her, and after about twelve straight drinks this was fundamentally true. ‘I think we’ve been damned lucky so far, that’s all. Now we’re not.’

  ‘Are you angry?’ she asked after a moment.

  ‘Not with you. Why should I be? You come out of it all right, anyway. They said you were stunning and low-cut. What more do you want?’

  ‘You are angry,’ she said. ‘Johnny, I’m so sorry. I wouldn’t have this happen for anything in the world. Aren’t people awful?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Everyone’s awful but us.’

  ‘Would you like to come back here and talk about it?’

  ‘I don’t think so. At the moment I’m in conference with a bottle of Comrade Smirnoff’s best. Stunning and uncorked. I’ll make out with that.’

  ‘Darling, isn’t there anything I can do?’

  ‘Not a thing.’ I gathered a few stray thoughts together. ‘Susan, don’t worry about this. It’ll either blow up in our face, or it won’t. Probably it won’t. There are hundreds of these damned gossip items every day, and they’re forgotten in twenty-four hours. Who reads the bloody paper, anyway? Doormen, and stunning old show-girls, and pimps, and truck-drivers, and Broadway drunks, and all our best friends.’ I realised that my thought-gathering had not been too successful, and I tried to sum up, in a common sense verdict. ‘Kate may never read it, anyway. By the time she gets back, they’ll be libelling someone else instead.’

  ‘Do you really think so?’

  ‘With every fibre of my being.’

  ‘It is libel, isn’t it? Can’t you sue them?’

  ‘Oh sure. Just let me get my trousers on … Susan, it isn’t libel, and no one is going to sue anyone, and with luck she won’t hear about it, and that’ll be that.’

  ‘I wish you’d come over, all the same.’

  ‘I’m lying low,’ I said. ‘Eliot Ness gave me the signal. Goodbye.’

  When I woke up, it was with a wonderfully dry mouth, but in other respects I felt better all over. Already, the gossip item which had so downcast us was out of date; already, there must be another issue of ‘Show Biz Confidential’ on the stands, and people would be reading and talking about some other sordid couple. There was nothing plucked so featherless and forlorn as yesterday’s love birds.

  Tonight, with luck, Susan and I would start to be forgotten again. And perhaps Kate, six thousand miles away, burying her head, counting her loot, would never hear about it anyway.

  But that guess turned out to be wrong. Kate did hear about it; in fact she must actually have read the column; some prompt and kindly friend must have sent a helpful cutting winging southwards within twenty-four hours. Three days later, I had a cable from her:

  Returning in about ten days. Who is stunning Susan Crompton, or can I do it? Love Kate.

  It was a fair warning, a very fair warning indeed.

  Waiting for her (and it was strange to realise, after so long a separation, that ‘her’ meant Kate), I went to several parties, by myself, in a kind of reverse effort to stay out of the limelight. It seemed possible that if enough people saw me moping unaccompanied round the town, they would begin to think: Poor old bachelor Steele – he must be pining his heart out … But the price of this ingenious stroke of camouflage was, for my own taste, rather high.

  The six-to-eight cocktail circuit, as established in any city where more than a quarter of a million people huddle together for urban shelter, always seemed to me a prime example of the stupidity and self-delusion lying in ambush for group behaviour of any sort.

  It was as if someone, ignoring the law of diminishing returns, had worked out that if four people could enjoy themselves in one room, forty could have a real whale of a time, and four hundred could touch dizzy heights of ecstasy. And if one were really shooting for the moon, there was still the regal or presidential bash for four thousand.

  The result, in cities like New York, or Washington, or London, or San Francisco, or Paris, or Rome – all highly civilised places where people should have known better – as well as in vulgar carbons such as Toronto or Johannesburg, was the conviction, deeply embedded, already sacrosanct, that a party could never hope for the higher ratings unless there was no room to move, no way of talking save to scream against the uproar, no time for anything but banality, and no way to survive except by burying the nose deep inside a glass, and dulling all the other senses as quickly as possible.

  The idea that only an idiot would prefer to stand and shout when he could sit and read, or listen to music, or dine with six friends who were prepared to take turns at talking, seemed to have gone the way of the crinoline.

  Yet I launched out upon this tormented sea nonetheless, and did my share of elbowing, and shouting, and grinning, and gulping, like any compulsive good-timer. The outcome, though negative for fun, was at least instructive.

  I learned that no one seemed to give a damn what I was doing with my spare time, or which bed I was bouncing on, or where I hung my hat. A few friends asked: ‘Where’s Susan?’ and a few others: ‘Where’s Kate?’; neither group used any special or distinguishable tone of voice, and neither group waited for an answer, which they could scarcely have heard in any case.

  It was an effective illustration of the fact that, by and large, in spite of the grinding gossip wheels, other people’s love affairs were really the dullest topic in the world; and that the type of exhibitionist whose peculiar pleasure it was to perch high on the headboard and crow to the world: ‘Look at me – I’m lovi
ng the daylights out of Liz,’ had only his own pointing finger as the emblem of success.

  However, there was one exception to all this, one chance-encountered man who did take a personal interest in how I was spending my time. This was Hobart Mackay, my publisher, whom I met at a literary-and-stage gathering in one of the big party rooms at the St Regis.

  Hobart went to a lot of such parties; he could not have enjoyed them, since he was essentially a quiet and studious character who did more thinking than doing. But he probably felt it necessary to keep an eye on other publishers and authors, to ensure that the former did not steal from his own stable, and the latter, if they felt like straying, knew that they had a comfortable home to go to.

  He was a small man, about fifty, with short sandy hair and a blue bow tie; he looked like a university professor who had not changed his basic style since his own student days. We saw each other by chance across the jam-packed room – he was not an easy man to see at such a party – and he raised his eyebrows comically, as if in despair at the company we were keeping. Then he was lost to view behind a massive man with a bushy white beard, who really did look like a writer, and then we finally came together, in an eddy of traffic beside one of the St Regis potted palms.

  ‘Hallo, Jonathan,’ he said, with a slightly harassed smile. His glass was empty, and he could not have been farther from the bar, which was at the opposite end of the room, and under fierce and continuous siege by crowds of much larger guests. ‘It’s nice to see you, but I wish you were a dry martini … I didn’t know you came to this sort of circus.’