The Pillow Fight (10 page)

‘The slaves.’

‘Not quite. In fact, not nearly. Of course, cheap labour is the mainspring of South Africa. But I don’t think of them as slaves, I don’t treat them as slaves. Naturally, I expect them to work hard, the same as I do, but I feel all the time that we owe them – oh, consideration, care, guardianship, whatever you like to call it. It’s different down at the Cape, anyway. There’s a different atmosphere there. You can feel it all the time at places like Maraisgezicht, especially.’

‘
Where
?’

‘Oh, don’t be so English! Maraisgezicht. It’s our family house – huge, old, beautiful, with acres of vineyards and about five hundred natives and Coloureds to work them. We’re very proud of our vintages, and we always try to look after our people. That’s what they are – our people.’

‘Is that where you live?’

‘I go there most weekends. But basically I live in a flat in Cape Town. We have a couple of agents to run Maraisgezicht, and my father’s there, now and again.’

‘Doesn’t he live there either?’

‘Not any more. My brother was killed there.’

Jonathan said: ‘There’s so much I don’t know about you.’

‘But so much time also,’ I answered.

Then we were staring at each other, gently intent, gently entranced. ‘Do you ever come to Cape Town?’ I asked, as naturally as I could.

‘Now and then. When shall I come down next?’

A beating heart was all I was conscious of. ‘In about a fortnight, if you like.’ There was even a conventional reason for setting the date thus: I still wasn’t shocked. ‘I have to go to Durban, and then clear my desk. I’d like to be free when you come.’

He nodded, and said: ‘“Free” is the best word in any language.’

We had stopped being astonished, and it was thus that we made our assignation. Much later, with dawn coming up pink and pearly grey, I walked back to my hotel down the very centre of Commissioner Street, arm-in-arm with my English lover-to-be and my small Greek uncle. I was blissfully happy, soberly drunk, treading the champagne air of enchantment, wanting to give everyone we saw at least a thousand pounds.

It was the end of our night, but the beginning of everything else in the world. As I had said to Jonathan Steele, so shyly, so boldly, we had so much time.

Time was extremely hard to manipulate during the next fortnight; try as I would, I could not make it move fast enough. I toiled as necessary, first at Durban (all heat, humidity, and sharks working, like pickpockets, the shores of the Indian Ocean), and then back at Cape Town, where the office grew quiet again, the people strolled up and down Adderley Street as if all the world were on their side, and the enormous bulk of Table Mountain loomed above us like a poised cliff.

Over the telephone to Johannesburg, I made up my tiff with Bruno van Thaal; all he said was, ‘Darling, you really have a whim of
iron!
’ and went on immediately to relay some truly acid copy. (Of an ageing playboy, he commented: ‘Fancy making love through a cascade of falling hair’; and, of a woman proud of her new house: ‘They must have connected the plumbing wrong, because all she gets is hot flushes.’ Dear Bruno …)

But mostly I daydreamed, and especially so in the street, wandering often in happy vacuity, wearing that kind of idiotic grin which makes other people turn and smile. Waiting for Jonathan Steele, I seemed to have shed years of discipline, decades of growing up, and to be joyfully vulnerable again.

Stendhal, pontifical writer on love (but how was he
personally
? One sometimes wonders), once evolved a theory of ‘crystallisation’, which advised a period of separation for lovers between their first meeting, and the act of jumping into bed. (A courtly fellow, he phrased it somewhat more elegantly.) During this interval, he maintained, their thoughts and fancies about each other could have free play, conjuring up the ideal man and woman, fashioning out of the lover a crystallised object of intense desire. Stendhal, I found, was right … It was not simply an erotic exercise, by any means; but during that fortnight apart I certainly had time to make of Jonathan an image for my delight.

We wrote each other every day; treasuring each other’s handwriting (his was terrible), warming to each other’s voices. On long distance, across nine hundred miles, the operator would say to me: ‘Johannesburg wants you,’ and I would answer: ‘Cape Town wants
you
,’ knowing that he could already hear.

Our letters were love letters, though not really in so many words; we were tacitly assuming that we would be lovers as soon as possible, in the sense that the actual fact was never mentioned, though it was implicit in every sentence, every inflexion. He once quoted the words of the rude French sailor to his sweetheart: ‘
Je t’écris avec la main droite
,
et je pense à toi avec la gauche
.’ That was as nearly erotic as his letters ever became, though admittedly it was reasonably near.

Mostly, he wrote of his ‘admiration’, which was flattering, and disarming also. It recalled a moment in the nightclub, when he had picked up my cigarette case and looked at its design. I had said: ‘Gold is the prettiest metal, don’t you think?’ and he had smiled and said: ‘Valuable as well,’ and I said: ‘That too, I suppose,’ and he had smiled again and answered: ‘Kate, you’re
not
going to get me down!’ But I knew that, in spite of himself, he liked that sort of thing, and he liked it in me; I was the kind of success which appealed to him, and when I seemed to shrug it all off, that appealed to him even more.

Waiting, I read his books. They were two: a traditional first novel about school and university, and a curious, somewhat moving story about a soldier unable to settle down to the drab routine of peacetime. Since he was only fifteen when the war ended, he could never have been a returning soldier; but somehow he had caught the discomforts, miseries and dangers inherent in that misfitting moment of life.

Both books were well-written, slight, and promising – that grisly word. But they had attracted no attention at all; they were lightweights. As a writer, he had still to prove himself, and there was a long way for him to go.

Perhaps the raw themes of Africa would develop the talent that was waiting to emerge. Equally, he might just produce the usual South African novel, about the noble savages held in bondage by oafish Dutch
boers
with ox-hide whips. I found already that I wanted very much for him to write the good book, not the bad one.

I wanted lots of other things, during that fortnight; the inside of my head must have looked like a teenager’s stocking drawer. I wanted him to grow up. I wanted him to keep his innocence, hold his odd ideals, yet shed the rancour and the touchiness which had sparked that scalding row in the nightclub with Gerald Thyssen. I wanted to help him to be a man, and a wonderful writer as well, if that were possible. I wanted him to want me. I wanted him.

Of course, down at Cape Town, dealing death and destruction at my desk in a flourishing office, or isolated in an astringent flat which had seen no lover, and scarcely any man, for years, the thing made even less sense than it had, that last night in Johannesburg; and just occasionally I caught my breath in mid-dream and, like any lovelorn lass gazing into a mirror, asked:
Can this really be you
? … Anyone who seriously tried to answer that one was heading straight for the couch; I didn’t attempt it. Instead, treading water in this private whirlpool, I wondered, while I still had time, what was happening to me.

He was a man. I didn’t especially want a man, but I wanted this one. He was an Englishman. Afrikaners don’t especially like Englishmen, and I am sure it is thoroughly mutual. He was a writer, which was all right, and a socialist, which was not. He was good-looking, but so was every tenth man one met in the street, and I still had no decimal urges.

Indeed, I had almost everything else that worked against them: a self-made job, a self-made reputation, a contempt for those weaker sisters whose determined whoring made my column worth reading, and an absolute conviction that the head must rule the heart, from here to breakfast time. Yet somehow, somewhere, Jonathan Steele had got under my skin, and the only thing I truly wanted was for him to stay there, all of him, for a long long time.

I didn’t even want to keep the thing a secret, which opened up further horrid vistas. All sorts of people were going to be astonished, as I was myself. There was Mrs Patch, my secretary, tremendously feminist, slightly lesbian, who only recognised men as the root of all evil. There was my darling father, who sometimes said: ‘Time you got married,’ but always added: ‘He’ll have to pass
me
, remember!’ There was Julia, my maid for the past eight years, who had seen them come and seen them go, and was permanently, fiercely, protectively jealous of the empty side of my bed.

There were people like Bruno van Thaal, who relied on me to behave quite differently, and like Joel Sachs, whose livelihood might depend on it; old friends like Peggy Marchant, who expected me to be an angel; and old enemies like Mrs Arkell, who had known all along that I was a complete harlot.

Sometimes, I thought of it in terms of my own un-pretty columnese: ‘
Kate Marais
,
who tells us all how to behave
,
cosily installed with left-winger Jonathan Steele. Such beautiful music … He writes as well
,
though not just now
…’ But the subcutaneous smear had not yet been coined which could make me feel second-rate, or tarnish this idyll. This time,
I
was doing it, and so it was all different.

Thus, at the mirror, in the street, on my bed, all the foolish lineaments of love … I got the flat ready. I bought six bottles of champagne, and some masculine-type soap that smelt of hot tar. I alerted Julia who, as expected, was shocked to the back teeth and refused to speak anything but Cape-Coloured Afrikaans for three whole days. I visited my doctor, whose eyebrows rose a full inch before he said: ‘Of course …’

Then suddenly it was the day, and, more suddenly, the night.

I met his plane at the airport. Standing in the sunshine, looking across the sandy expanse of the Cape Flats towards the broad bulk of Table Mountain, still dominant against the blue flag of the sky even at a distance of twenty miles, I felt sure of myself, and happy, and excited. When his plane came winging in from the north-east, dropping steeply as it crossed the last outcrop of the Drakensberg Range, I stared at it – a tiny silver bird catching the sun joyfully on its wings – and thought: All that I love, all that I am going to love, is up there in blessed suspension, coming towards me, keeping our appointment … But that turned out to be the last moment of certainty, of assurance, for several long hours.

He seemed taller than I remembered, and pale (‘We came down too fast’), and nervous (‘I always forget that I
hate
flying’). I was suddenly nervous too; the words I spoke, the answers I gave, were wayward and nonsensical. There were two or three people I knew, among the disembarking passengers; I felt that they were looking at me, and then at Jonathan Steele, as if we were a strange couple indeed, undoubtedly suspect. (‘Kate Marais was at the airport,’ I imagined the dark commentary, ‘meeting someone we’d never set eyes on before! He looked so
odd!
Do you suppose …’) I felt odd also, for the first time within a now shaky memory.

I drove into town abominably, earning horn-blasts from other, infuriated road-users, and a harsh glare from a motorcycle cop on the watch for just such female mavericks as myself. It was nerves, of course; I wanted to do everything well that day – driving cars, mixing champagne cocktails, organising a meal, making love – and the omens already were quite otherwise.

It grew worse later on; in my flat which should have been a warm, exciting refuge from everything and everyone that was not us, we found ourselves talking with ludicrous constraint. It seemed that we had said all that had to be said, on that last night together in Johannesburg; the next stage could only be a headlong dive into action, and it was too early for that, too light, too soon.

Serving amid lengthening silence a dinner which was not as good as I had planned, Julia looked at me as if I were out of my wits, and at Jonathan as if he were a burglar. If this was madam’s idea of love, her caustic glances said, then madam should see the head-doctor, now. Tomorrow would be too late.

Ten o’clock came, and then eleven. Julia had long since gone home, though the resentful clatter of dishes in the sink still rang in my ears. I sat feet-up on the couch, wearing a housecoat which had seemed just the thing when I bought it, two days earlier, but which now felt indecorous, even indecent. Jonathan was at the radiogram, changing the records over – we had had an hour-long session of Dixieland, which had proved about as inspiring as a programme of Sousa marches. In sudden panic, I was just about to tell him that I had changed my mind, and that he must go home, when he took charge.

He turned towards me. He was pale still, and tense, but suddenly he was a lover instead of an intruder, looking down at me with a kind of despairing tenderness, as though searching for the exact words he thought I deserved.

When they came, they were forthright, the way I was accustomed to talk myself, and had unhappily forgotten.

He said: ‘I want to stay with you tonight. The way we imagined it in Johannesburg. Things haven’t changed – they’ve only come to a crisis. But it’s
our
crisis. Can I stay?’

I had to match his spirit, or be a coward forever.

I said: ‘Give me twenty minutes’ start.’

He kissed me before I left the room, a sweet kiss, our first. It sustained me as far as my bedroom, but there I lapsed horribly again, the prey to every kind of paralysing emotion. In my bath, at my dressing-table, in bed at last, I was conscious only of foreboding, last-minute fears; fear that I was wrong to throw away the years of discipline, that I would be no good with him, that it wouldn’t work, that we had staked too much on the chance of physical concord, that I would cry or suddenly run away, that as a lover he would be ‘finished’ within a few seconds, leaving us both marooned on a foolish limb. First-night nerves. I swallowed my whisky, half-smoked three cigarettes, threw off the eiderdown and drew it back on again.