The Pillow Fight

by Nicholas Monsarrat

  It was a curious piece of artifice. Here was a man who, if he had been white, would have been written off, by almost anyone who met him, as a loud-mouthed, uncouth and conceited boor. If the question ever came up of his marrying one’s sister, he would have been shown the door as a matter of family necessity. But Jenkin was not a white man, and so none of this could be true. He was black; therefore, he was a great coloured artist, and woe betide the first fascist swine who denied it.

  He had been a pain in all our necks ever since he joined the cast. He was abominably rude to everybody. He argued all the time. He was late for rehearsal, late on cue, late everywhere except for lunch. He arrived each morning with a hangover, and left with a chocolate chip on his shoulder. He should have been sacked at the end of the first day, when he had started bragging about ‘pepping up this turkey’; but that of course would have been a clear case of racial discrimination, shaming the democratic process.

  There was also the fact that he was absolutely made for his part in Safari, if he chose to try. But the job of coaxing him to be a reasonable human being, let alone a good actor, was so mountainous and so unpleasant that, in happier circumstances, he would have been replaced over the weekend.

  There we were, anyway, stuck with Dave Jenkin, the distinguished Negro actor whose best protection was his skin. It was he who had precipitated that day’s quarrel, not the least in our long roster of confrontation. He had kept the stage waiting, at one important moment when he should have sailed in on cue; and apart from the irritation of this check, there was the additional annoyance that his voice could be heard offstage, in a deep-toned monologue which might have had a lot to do with Dave Jenkin but had nothing to do with my plot.

  It was the stage manager’s job to rout him out, but before he could do so, someone more in the limelight took a hand. This was Sally Coates, the actress who was playing the ‘white girl’ lead, a cheerful and bouncing character whose reserves of energy and good humour had already done us many a good turn. It was she who had been held up and thrown out of stride, and she who, at last, felt compelled to point the fact out.

  Standing centre stage, in the slacks and shirt which were the usual rehearsal rig, Sally called out briskly: ‘Dave! Wake up! You’re on!’

  There was a silence, and then Dave Jenkin strolled onstage, at a pace which indicated his indifference to this or any other drama. His tightly-cuffed yellow pants and checkered shirt made a convenient focus for our dislike. He drawled: ‘You want me, honey?’

  Sally Coates had already had enough of this long day, and she reacted snappishly.

  ‘No,’ she shot back, hands on hips. ‘I don’t want you one little bit. But the play does. You had a cue there.’

  ‘Well, now,’ said Dave Jenkin, in the same insolent drawl, ‘aren’t we the funny one today … Maybe if you spoke the cue louder, I could hear it.’

  We were all waiting in silence – Erwin and myself sitting side by side in the second row, the director leaning over the piano on stage, the half-dozen other actors taking part in the scene, the usual drift of people watching or learning lines or hanging about – but now all staring in upon this unpleasant little tangle.

  ‘I spoke loud enough,’ said Sally sharply. ‘If you’d stop talking for a bit, and listen, you could come in on time.’ But she was not the girl to hold a mood of irritation. ‘OK, Dave – let’s go!’ She spoke her cue-line again. “And if I do, I know just the man to take care of you.”

  Dave Jenkin stood silent, sullen and frowning. Finally he executed an absurd little step dance, a cut-and-shuffle from his remote, soft-shoe past, threw out his arms, and said: ‘What was that again?’

  ‘You heard me.’

  ‘I didn’t. That’s just the trouble, baby.’ The whining insolence was even more pronounced than usual. ‘I heard a mumble, that’s what I heard. Can’t hardly take that for a cue, can I?’

  By my side, Erwin Orwin stirred. ‘Dave!’ he called out.

  Dave Jenkin crouched and cupped his hand. ‘Yes, sir, boss?’

  ‘Let’s get on with it.’

  ‘Yes, sir! Any time I hear the call.’

  Erwin drew a considerable breath. ‘All right, Sally,’ he said after a moment. ‘Let’s go back. Just give him that cue-line again.’

  Sally repeated: ‘“And if I do, I know just the man to take care of you.”’ She then, being angry, improvised, ‘And I wish to Christ that was true.’

  Without a word, Dave Jenkin turned and stalked off the stage. His reputed girlfriend, a small and lithe young dancer with the waist and disposition of a wasp, called out: ‘That’s the boy! You show ’em, Dave!’ and was countered by another girl, less sympathetic, whose contribution was a crisp ‘Shut up, you stupid bitch!’ Hair was pulled, faces once again were slapped; Sally’s husband, who had no part at all in the show and was in fact a nightclub singer on holiday from Philadelphia, came down centre stage and embarked on a long harangue vaguely directed at Erwin Orwin.

  The piano player, a man of long-term, all-absorbent resignation, began to play the overture, in a key so satirically modulated that it sounded midway between the Danse Macabre and Chopin in a mood of revolutionary despair. Dave Jenkin reappeared in his street clothes, and strode purposefully from left to right on his way to the exit. Sally’s husband said something to him, whereupon Dave Jenkin, who had been a boxer before he became a tap-dancer, promptly knocked him down, and then continued his walk offstage.

  Sally started to cry, and Dave Jenkin’s girlfriend took a running kick at the prostrate man, missed him, and landed flat on her cushioned-ride behind. From this non-vantage point, she called shrilly after her departing lover: ‘Keep going, honey! Don’t pay them any mind! Don’t even ignore them!’

  Into this lively tableau, which had some affinity with the last act of Hamlet, Erwin injected his own personality. He suddenly stood up, and bawled: ‘Break! Five minutes! And everybody off stage!’ He then rounded on me, and snarled: ‘It’s all your God-damned fault!’ and as I looked up, genuinely startled, I saw that he was grinning, and we both broke into laughter.

  It seemed perfectly natural that, five minutes later at the end of the interval, the rehearsal continued as if nothing had happened. Only Dave Jenkin, coaxed out of the nearest bar by his female friend (who had been threatened with automatic dismissal if she did not bring him back), made anything more out of it. Pleading sinus infection, he had his dresser follow him round the stage with a nasal spray for the rest of the afternoon, applying soothing surges of medicament at the conclusion of every speech.

  ‘I wish I had the use of that thing,’ grumbled Erwin Orwin, settling down again. ‘I’d try a different approach … But he’s good, all the same, isn’t he? The son-of-a-bitch is really good!’

  Surrounded by such intermittent flurries, Steele the stolid anchor-man toiled, feeling at least a hundred years older than the assorted delinquents romping round his feet. But, trying for the long view, it was possible to feel optimistic. The Pink Safari had taken on a good hard outline, and a reasonably distinctive one. It had a book, a score, lyrics, a cast, eight different sets, a costume plan, and a schedule of future operations.

  The time was now December. The play would be ready, even by Erwin’s spendthrift standards, in about a month. It would then have its first try-out in Boston in January, and open in New York in the spring – the second spring of its life.

  Chapter Seven

  The day started, like the first chapter of Genesis, on a note of novelty.

  ‘You have an old friend in town,’ observed Kate, with that lack of emphasis which characterised a lot of the things she said to me nowadays. She tapped the newspaper which lay by her breakfast tray. ‘But I suppose you know about it already.’

  I had only called in to say goodbye on my way to work, and, already preoccupied with what lay ahead, I was paying no more attention than
any other husband on thecommuting wing at ten o’clock in the morning. Straightening my tie before her mirror, I asked: ‘Who would that be?’

  ‘Father Shillingford.’

  ‘Well, well,’ I said, taken by surprise. ‘That is an old friend. Father Billingsgate. What’s he doing at this end of the tottering globe?’

  ‘He’s at the United Nations,’ she answered, in a short sort of voice. ‘He phoned last night. He’s appearing for South Africa.’

  ‘For South Africa?’

  ‘Oh, they didn’t ask him to … He was giving evidence before one of the committees, the one that’s trying to get South Africa expelled. He spoke against it. Didn’t you read about it?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘The Times is terribly bad on foreign affairs, don’t you think?’

  ‘The Times is the best–’ she began energetically, and then broke off. ‘Don’t joke about it, Johnny. People like Father Shillingford are killing themselves, working to get some sense into the world. If you’re not interested, at least you might respect what they’re trying to do.’ She was frowning; it was a familiar pattern of disapproval. ‘Anyway, he’s here, and he’s coming to dinner.’

  ‘Tonight?’

  ‘Yes.’ She looked at me carefully. ‘Please be here, Johnny. Don’t run away from it.’

  ‘I’m not running away from anything. I’m reviewing my social calendar. What’s for dinner?’

  She smiled, having won. ‘Bread and water.’

  ‘Cut another slice.’

  I had, I hoped, shown the necessary co-operation, but in fact it was not at all the sort of interruption I wanted, at this stage of the Safari production, in the last two weeks of rehearsal; and, skimming the solid print in The Times on my way down town, and later on at the theatre, I felt even less inclined to give it room for manoeuvre.

  Father Shillingford was indeed in town. He had left South Africa a few days earlier, minus his passport, with a vague ‘travel document’ which was no guarantee of his return-entry; he had arrived at the UN, and there begged leave to appear before a committee, chiefly African and Asian, which seemed at the moment solely concentrated upon the expulsion of South Africa on the grounds of her racial discrimination.

  Once accredited, he had promptly, and to everyone’s astonishment, brought all his skill and persuasion to pleading the cause of his country – the country which despised and rejected him. Don’t throw South Africa out of UN, had been his theme, in a passionate speech which had ‘visibly moved’ the delegates. Keep her inside, treat her like a misguided but not incorrigible friend, and try to persuade her to mend her ways.

  As an example of ‘other cheek’ Christianity, it was memorably effective. The picture kept nagging me all day; I returned to thinking about it again and again, with foreboding, and with doubt about meeting him once more, and about dining in this elevated atmosphere. It got in the way throughout that day’s rehearsal, which was enough to try the patience of another kind of saint; and was an appropriate prelude to one of the most absurd and uneasy meals I had ever eaten.

  If Lord Muddley had been a fat ghost from the past, Father Shillingford proved a veritable skeleton from a cupboard I had thought long walled up.

  He was there when I got home, talking to Kate, and it was strange to see the two of them together – the extremely elegant woman and the pale shabby priest, sitting side by side in our gilded cage. He got up when I came in, and greeted me very warmly.

  ‘Jonathan! How very nice, after all these years! How are you?’

  ‘All the better for seeing you.’

  It could hardly have been less true. Close to, he looked pathetic; shrunken, cruelly tested, pitifully spent; the energetic and rather tubby little man I remembered from six years earlier had been worn down, by God knew what pressures and pains, to a water-thin figure of exhaustion. His face had that look of bony dejection which one sometimes saw in pietistic carvings of Christ on the cross. Of course, he had fashioned his own cross, and chosen to suffer on it, and perhaps was glorified by his ordeal. But one look at him, one brief clasp of his meagre hand, was enough to send me to the bar, almost at a run.

  Dinner was very awkward. He caught me unawares by bowing his head to say grace, just as I was taking my first swig of wine; I said ‘Cheers’, and he said ‘Benedictus benedicat’, at the same moment; as a chorus, it was ill-matched, and Kate’s face showed it vividly. We talked, of course, about South Africa; or rather, they talked, and I mostly drank. I was not really in on this party, and it needed no stage-direction to make the fact clear.

  His old shanty-town of Teroka, he told us, had now vanished; the people had been dispossessed, the houses razed, the area given over to a neat white suburb called, it seemed sarcastically, Pleasantville. The former population had been pushed still farther out, and rehoused nearly twenty-five miles from the centre of Johannesburg, where they had to work.

  ‘Of course, the houses are a little better,’ he said quietly, ‘and there is running water. But it has become terribly overcrowded already, and lawless, and dirty. And now it means travelling almost fifty miles to and from work each day, in those wretched buses. Some of the men have to queue up at four in the morning, to be sure of getting to town by eight. And the same thing at night.’

  ‘That must mean a long journey for you, each day,’ said Kate.

  ‘About the same,’ he agreed. ‘I tried to move nearer to the mission, but I couldn’t find anywhere suitable. But–’ he smiled, ‘I have a motor scooter now! Very dashing. So I am not really badly off at all.’

  The picture of Father Shillingford, his cassock swirling in the breeze, hitting forty miles an hour on a Vespa along the dusty Transvaal roads, amused me, and I made an effort to become one of the party. I said: ‘I’d like to see you riding that chariot … Of course, they’ve always had those queues for the buses, haven’t they? They must be pretty well resigned to it by now.’

  ‘They are certainly resigned,’ said Father Shillingford. His eyes, meeting mine across the candlelight, were unexpectedly searching, as if he were trying to discover my whole character at a single glance. I wished him luck, and sealed the wish with a libation. ‘But that doesn’t make these hardships any easier to bear.’

  ‘It’s wonderful what you can get used to.’

  ‘I think it is more sad than wonderful.’

  Kate, with a frown for me which made me suspect that I might well finish the evening standing in a corner, guided us somewhere else.

  ‘I don’t think I saw any of the Black Sash people while I was there,’ she remarked, in a bright tone which seemed to invite, irresistibly, the label of Social Notes from All Over. ‘Are they still operating?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Father Shillingford. ‘But less than before, I suppose. Don’t forget that the movement had been going on for nearly fifteen years, and some of the women – well, I don’t wish to be ungallant, but they must now be well into their seventies. It takes a good deal of courage, and stamina as well, to engage in silent-protest picketing at that age. I don’t think they have had much success in gaining new recruits.’ He sighed, and his pale face seemed to go even further into mourning. ‘There is curiously little feeling for that kind of politics among the young people. They simply don’t want to be bothered. South Africa is very prosperous, the police are extremely efficient and energetic, so–’ he spread his hands, ‘–so life goes on quite agreeably, and very few white people want to change it. Particularly as it might cost them their liberty in the process.’

  ‘I think that’s one of the worst things,’ said Kate. ‘The way the police lay down the rules, and everyone just says “Yes” and does what they’re told.’

  Julia came in with a fresh course, of chicken Kiev – dinner was really very good tonight, and it was a pity that one could not enjoy it in peace, instead of being driven inexorably to the bottle – and there was s
ilence as we set to work. Presently Father Shillingford, who was eating with a sad kind of reluctance, as if food, though pleasurable, were an insult to the hungry, took up his tale again.

  ‘The police certainly lay down the rules,’ he said. ‘I don’t think there’s a single thing which a man could say or do in South Africa, which could not somehow be brought within today’s sedition laws. And once you become suspect, you have a police dossier and you can be hounded quite unmercifully.’ He smiled at Kate. ‘You found that out yourself, didn’t you? I remember reading about it, and wondering how a person of spirit would react to it.’

  ‘I reacted, right enough,’ said Kate. ‘I hadn’t been so angry for a long time. But that’s another thing. I didn’t worry, because I was safe, really. I was absolutely innocent, and so was Julia, and I had some influential friends to fall back on, and, I suppose, enough money to get the best kind of legal advice and protection. But what do other people do? What can they do?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Father Shillingford flatly. ‘They are powerless. They are also permanently afraid, whether they are black or white.’ He brushed his hand across his forehead, wearily. ‘I have lived with this for so long, it is sometimes difficult to realise how strange it is. How wrong. How iniquitous!’ It was, for him, a very strong word, and he spoke it with extraordinary feeling. ‘It reaches its worst point in what they now call “house arrest”, which must be one of the most wicked forms of punishment ever devised by a so-called Minister of Justice. Imagine being told to stay at home, seeing no one, during all your free time. Imagine being ordered to travel straight to work, and straight back, and not to visit anyone on the way, except to report at the police station, and not to have friends in your own home, at any time. Imagine a whole weekend like that, when you may not move beyond your garden gate, nor talk to anyone except a policeman. Imagine that for the rest of your life!’