The Pillow Fight (12 page)

But, being Jonathan Steele, he had a sociological problem to discuss.

‘It’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen in my life, Kate,’ he said. ‘But a tremendous responsibility … Why don’t you live here, really?’

‘I’m the urban type,’ I told him, ‘and I prefer the urban effort. I like the sort of work I’m doing now, and I don’t want to do anything different.’

‘But don’t you feel you ought to stay here, and help to run the place? Or contribute in some way?’

‘No.’ I overcame a slight guilty touchiness at the word ‘contribute’. He had strayed into another area which didn’t concern him at all; but for anyone who was seeing Maraisgezicht for the first time, it was still a fair question. ‘It’s being very efficiently run as it is. I couldn’t do better, and even to do as well I’d virtually have to go back to school, learn estate management, learn the wine trade. Why should I?’

His voice was tender, but quite firm. ‘Because it’s yours.’

‘It’s my father’s.’

‘And after him?’

‘It will be mine, of course. But on the same basis. I will enjoy it, other people will make it work.’ I smiled at him. ‘That’s what we call the Kate Marais division of labour.’

‘But in Johannesburg you said they were “your people”.’

‘They are, and they will be. Always, I’ll see to that, at least.’ On an impulse I got up (the servants had left the room), came up behind his chair, and kissed the back of his neck, where what we called his ‘writer’s hair’ grew in literary profusion. ‘Oh Johnny, don’t probe too deep today, don’t make us think, or go into mourning. Maraisgezicht is tremendously sad in spite of everything, and we both know it.’

‘How can it be sad?’

‘Because there’s no one to take it over after my father dies. It would all be different if Theunis were alive.’

‘Theunis?’ He stumbled over the unfamiliar name.

‘My brother.’

I kissed him once more, briefly, and sat down on the nearest chair, still holding his warm hand.

‘What happened to him, Kate?’

‘He was killed, quite close to the house, about two years ago. It was a useless, senseless thing. He was caught under a tractor.’

‘How horrible.’

‘Yes, it was.’ I wanted to tell him the story, in spite of us, in spite of our deep content. ‘There was no need for it. One of the boys got the tractor stuck in a big irrigation ditch, and Theunis tried to get it out. It was the sort of thing he loved doing. It rolled back on him.’

‘Were you here?’

‘Yes. It was a Saturday, a happy Saturday.’ The terrible afternoon came back to me; for the first time, I wanted to share it with another person. ‘When they carried him in, my father was asleep on the
stoep
; he woke up, and saw all their faces, and he shut his eyes again, trying to make it a dream … Ever since I can remember, whenever father told him not to drive too fast, not to ride like a lunatic, not to swim too far out, Theunis always said: “You should have had more sons” … Would you like to see his room?’

‘If you would.’

‘I always go.’

Theunis’ room was as we had agreed to leave it, without even mentioning the fact, for the past two years; untouched, unchanged, a monument to handsome, hopeful, bright-painted youth, a requiem for the last of the male line. It was an undergraduate room, somewhat spare in furniture – he had never cared for our show pieces. There was a rack of guns; rods piled in one corner; eighteen pairs of boots and shoes, all worn, some muddy; a rowing machine that he was too lazy to use; girls’ photographs.

‘He had lots of girls, bless him,’ I said. ‘He drove them all crazy. He didn’t give a finger-snap for any of them.’

‘How old was he, Kate?’

‘Twenty-six. Two years older than me. He used to look after me. He used to make me think that incest wouldn’t be such a disgusting sin, after all … Is it awful to say that?’

‘Yes.’ But Jonathan was smiling gently, his arm round my waist. ‘I know what you mean.’

‘He was terribly good-looking, and kind, and clever. He got a cricket blue at Oxford, much to our disgust.’

‘Why?’

‘Afrikaners think cricket is just a little too English to be bearable … Actually we were quite speechless with pride. My father and I flew to England for the match.’ Suddenly I had to complete the story. ‘The boy who put the tractor into the ditch starved himself to death.’

Jonathan stared, as I had known he would. ‘Why, Kate?’

‘For African reasons.’

Suddenly the foreboding scent of death was heavy around us, and Jonathan caught it. He turned me round until I was facing him, close-pressed, enfolded.

‘But we are alive, Kate.’

‘Yes, thank God.’

‘And I love you.’

‘Yes, thank God.’

‘Forever.’

‘Forever is a very long word, Johnny.’

‘Not too long for us.’

We slept that night in the bed in which I had been born; a huge bed, canopied, with the Marais arms on the carved satinwood headboard. (Said Jonathan at one point: ‘These are the only Marais arms I’m interested in.’) There were no question marks in our lovemaking now, no area of hesitation or shyness; we frankly adored one another, and we did our candid best to prove it.

It should perhaps have shamed me to sleep with Jonathan in my own home – my mother, indeed, had once mentioned this as the ultimate in misconduct; as it was, it seemed the most natural thing in the world, and when at a certain moment a leap of flame from the dying fire briefly picked out the crimson canopy over my head, I only thought: lucky girl, to be twice sheltered.

Then, much too soon, it was Monday morning, and after breakfasting enormously off fish kedgeree and sugar-cured ham, we were driving back into Cape Town again. We had no plans, except to be in love, but the world was falling into step once more.

When we were near the city limits: ‘What are you doing today, darling?’ I asked Jonathan. ‘Are you going to work?’

‘I don’t think so. Are you?’

‘Yes. I have to.’

‘Don’t, Kate,’ he said, to my surprise.

‘But I have to,’ I repeated. ‘I’ve taken a whole week off already. I really must start up again.’

‘All day?’

‘All day and every day.’

‘But I’ll be lonely without you.’

‘Me too. But if I don’t work, things will only start dropping to pieces. I wish it weren’t so.’ I realised that this wasn’t quite true, and I added: ‘It’s my
work
, Jonathan. It’s the way I spend my time. I like it.’

There was an edge of sulkiness in his voice as he said: ‘What about us, then?’

I laid my free hand over his. ‘Darling, don’t be a baby. You’re writing a book, I’m running an office. Neither of those things even begins to come between us. Why should they?’

‘But it means we can’t be together.’

I realised at that moment that one could be swamped with love, and yet disappointed at the same time. Jonathan’s attitude seemed curiously frivolous; moreover it appeared to contradict his expressed ‘admiration’ for what I had done with my life so far, which would have amounted to nothing at all without persistent concentration. As we inched our way city-wards along De Waal Drive, thick with the morning traffic, I thought that this was a point worth making.

‘Darling, if I were the sort of girl who played truant from the office whenever she felt like it, I wouldn’t have any kind of career, and you wouldn’t think much of me, would you?’

‘It depends.’ But he was relaxing again, aware perhaps of a thread of discord which was his own responsibility. ‘Look, I know I’m being selfish. I just want you to myself, for as long as I’m here.’

‘You’ve got me.’

‘Out of office hours?’

‘Just that … Mr Steele, how much more proof do you want that I’m wild about you?’

‘Give me some more at five this evening.’

‘At half past four.’

‘I’ll try to make that half-hour significant.’

I was to remember that conversation months afterwards, as a distant signal I should have recognised, like a faint swinging lamp in a bank of fog. But that morning, it only seemed to reflect a rather endearing masculine tantrum, with a distinctly flattering basis … Jonathan spent the rest of the week at my flat, pottering about, going for walks, or scribbling notes, while I took up my own pattern again.

It was odd to think of him installed at home, while I worked downtown; indeed, it took some getting used to. Julia thought it very odd … But it was fun to come back to a guaranteed loving welcome, and the nights of course were wonderful.

Then, at the week’s end, we made another promised journey together, to see my father.

My father was still the wisest man I knew, and in many ways the most admirable. Psychiatrists customarily split their sides when a woman tells them this; it means, of course, the very worst. But in simple truth, he had been, and was, a great man; and lucky is the girl who has a great man for a father. Basically he was a mining man, of the older, tougher generation; family background had given him a running start, hard work and integrity had taken him to the very top.

He would have been a great deal richer if, in the bad old days of not so very long ago, he had been a more accommodating character – in brief, if he had played it crooked. But he had played it straight, as a lifelong habit, and was now, alas, only a moderate millionaire.

At the age of sixty-five, he was already in semi-retirement; he had no wish to be any richer, and my brother’s death had made most other pursuits and interests pointless. He spent a little time each year at Maraisgezicht, to enjoy the harvest; a little time in Johannesburg, where a dozen boards claimed his intermittent attention; in the autumn he shot buck and guineafowl, in the spring he watched his horses lose two or three of the top classics; the rest of his time he spent by the sea, and most of that in simply watching it.

The house he had built for our family holidays was near Hermanus, a small fishing village now grown somewhat sophisticated, about eighty miles east of Cape Town. When we drove down on Friday night, it took about three hours, by a mountain road which gave us, in the early moonlight, a matchless view of the whole Cape Peninsula. Jonathan and I were very happy, as usual, and my father, bless him, was happy to see us.

He came down the front steps as soon as he saw the lights of the car; a bluff square figure, a little shrunken now, the lamplight falling on a face deeply carved, full of thought, full of time. I had not seen him for four months; he seemed greyer, but not less commanding, not less dear. He must have been very good-looking as a young man; now it could only be traced by the eyes of faith and love; the bony symmetry had shed its flowering, leaving only a gaunt outline of the happy past.

He knew already that Jonathan and I were lovers, since I had told him when I telephoned earlier; observant without being in the least inquisitive, he would have divined it anyway, and it seemed better manners on my part to volunteer the information. It also simplified the housekeeping. As an Afrikaner, he would have made Jonathan welcome in any case; since I was involved, however irregularly, and he loved and trusted me, he made a special effort of hospitality.

After he had kissed me, and I had inhaled his admirable male blend of cigars, brandy, bay rum, and the aftershave lotion (by Gourielli) I had given him for his last birthday, he turned to Jonathan, holding out a firm hand.

‘Welcome to my house!’ he said. It was the old-fashioned, traditional phrase I had never known him leave unspoken, with any newly arrived guest. ‘Did you have a good drive?’

‘Yes, thank you, sir,’ answered Jonathan. In the half-light, he was looking at my father in the way that most young men did: impressed, slightly awed, ready to be dutiful and attentive. On the journey down, he had remarked,
à propos
of nothing: ‘I hope the old boy likes me.’ This was the proper evaluation of that somewhat offhand phrase.

‘You’ve not been here before?’

‘No, never. It looks beautiful.’

‘It was beautiful,’ corrected my father, an opponent of all progress which did not relate to deep-level mining. ‘Now it’s nothing but crowds, and new houses, and bottle-stores, and damned women playing bridge all day and night in mink coats. Hermanus used to be a simple place. Now it’s a resort!’

He said the last word with special emphasis, as if it were his private synonym for hell.

‘You don’t see much of them, Daddy,’ I reassured him.

‘No, thank God! The best thing about this house is that it’s got twelve acres and a good high wall … Let’s go in. You must be ready for a drink.’

Presently, at ease in the comfortable living-room, furnished seaside fashion with the shabby overflow from Maraisgezicht, he nursed his drink, and said: ‘I’ll call you Jonathan, if I may … Do you two want to fish tomorrow, or just do nothing?’

‘Fish, I think,’ I answered. ‘Has it been any good?’

‘The yellow-tail are running, I’m told. I’ve got you two gullies, anyway.’

‘I’m not getting up at the crack of dawn,’ I warned him.

He smiled, looking from Jonathan to me. ‘I wasn’t expecting any enthusiasm for outdoor sport before ten o’clock, at the very earliest.’ But he said it without undue innuendo; it was part of his enormous capacity for strength and comfort that he never offered advice unless it was asked for, nor passed judgement until the appropriate curtain fell.

He knew that I had had lovers before; face to face with Jonathan, the incumbent, he might well have been discomforted, or disapproving of an idea scarcely conceivable to his own generation. But it did not show now, and it would never show unless, some time in the shadowy future, I perhaps asked him: ‘What did you really think? …’

It amused me to see that, of the three of us, only Jonathan was embarrassed by this exchange. Indeed, on the pretext of looking at the view, he now wandered out onto the
stoep
, from where, I knew, the track of the moon on the water would be like a broad silver arrow pointing at the house.

‘An Englishman, eh?’ said my father in a gruff voice.

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Your poor mother …’ But he was smiling. ‘Be happy, girl! Life doesn’t go on forever.’