The Pillow Fight (13 page)

I kissed the top of his head. ‘I
am
happy. Will you come fishing with us tomorrow?’

‘You don’t want me hanging around playing gooseberry.’

‘But of course we do!’

‘I always knew there was something wrong with Englishmen,’ he grumbled. But he was pleased. ‘I’ll see … I’m getting a bit old for scrambling about the rocks.’ He heaved himself out of his chair. ‘Now I’m off to bed. Don’t stay up too late.’

‘We won’t.’

He winked, and said: ‘I don’t expect you will, somehow.’

‘He’s wonderful, Daddy,’ I said, in necessary extenuation.

‘He’d better be,’ retorted my father, and stumped off to his room.

Punctually on cue, Jonathan wandered in from the balcony. ‘It’s a heavenly night,’ he said. ‘The moon is enormous.’

‘It’s all right,’ I told him. ‘He likes you terribly.’

‘How can you tell?’

‘If he didn’t, he’d still be here, just to annoy you … He once sat up for
four
hours, until my current young man lost heart and went home. I was furious.’

‘Is that meant to make me jealous?’ asked Jonathan, putting an arm round my waist.

‘Yes.’

‘It has succeeded.’

‘What happens when you’re jealous?’

‘The same as when I’m not jealous … I love you, Kate.’

‘It’s mutual, like the insurance.’

‘Strong, like the box.’

We had lots of silly jokes already.

We slept deep and lovingly that night, and awoke to the sound of the surf pounding the beach below the house. As often happened in the Cape Province, the wind had got up swiftly during the night, whipping the long Indian Ocean swell to a fierce tumult; on our treacherous coastline, it was not a day for fishing, unless one wanted to end up as a statistic under the traditional headline: ‘
Fishing Party Washed Off Rocks At Hermanus
.’

Instead, we slaked our breakfast appetite with pawpaw and red snapper, assumed the customary Hermanus uniform of khaki slacks and rope-soled shoes, and prepared to loaf in the sun for the next forty-eight hours.

We started by being happy. It happened that the household needed a new wash-girl (the last one had done something criminal to one of my father’s shirts) and we were commissioned to quarter the locality until we discovered one. ‘Find me a slut,’ had been my father’s directive, and so we drove round Hermanus in search of this commodity.

Despite the wind, it was a bright day, warm and encouraging; and Hermanus, as usual, was a good place to be in. My father had been right in saying that it was becoming overcrowded, overbuilt and far too social for the simple tastes that had led us all there in the first place; but that could not spoil its basic attractions, which were sunshine, colour and a superb position at the edge, nor affect its air of village affability.

I still knew most of the people on the street; pausing here and there in our curious task, eating ice cream, buying oranges and young asparagus, we were greeted by everyone from the local librarian (who, alas, had never heard of Jonathan Steele) to the courtly, devout and high-principled cleric known to one and all as the Venereal Arch-Demon.

We found our wash-girl, after a number of false alarms; ‘There’s a slut!’ exclaimed Jonathan at one point, only to add, a moment later: ‘Sorry – no good – she has a tiny slut at breast.’ But, in the usual Hermanus pattern, somebody’s houseboy knew someone else whose girlfriend was ‘going to be busy by and by’ (the Cape-Coloured euphemism for pregnant) and would welcome the extra money; we finished up among some hessian shacks on the outskirts of the village, interviewing and then engaging an ugly sad-eyed girl who, if the three children playing at her feet were anything to go by, must have been fairly busy, on and off, for the past few years.

Then we drove home, happy for a variety of reasons; and then, after lunch (which saw an agreeably heavy intake of martinis, our own white wine, and Van der Hum liqueur) things started to come unstuck.

As so often in South Africa, the touchstone was political. My father had no politics to speak of; as an Afrikaner, he was fiercely proud of our people’s past, and their separate, valiant emergence as a nation; but he was also anti-Nationalist, and quite ready to concede that South Africa owed her nationhood to a genuine, twin-elemental grounding, and that neither side, Dutch or English, had had a monopoly of brains, guts and endurance in the past.

However, he had his tender spots; and one of these was the late General Smuts, whose special repute in South African history he thought overblown and undeserved.

Jonathan, as an Englishman, did not; and he was foolish enough to argue about it, well beyond the point where argument becomes sullen disagreement.

I don’t think he would have done so if, in some curious, unassimilated way, he had not made up his mind that he disapproved of my father. Of course, there was no compulsion upon him to like rich people, nor any reason why he should be attracted by my father’s special brand of effortless self-assurance. As a poor man, he must have found Maraisgezicht, and also the Hermanus house, somewhat daunting; jealousy was therefore involved, as well as the careless spur of alcohol.

In a much more subtle way, however, I believe Jonathan was shocked that my father did not object to our liaison – an example of upside-down English piety which at any other time I might have found funny. But whatever the mainsprings of his discontent, it emerged as a sort of cocksure argumentativeness, with which, alas, my father was just the right man to deal.

It would be dull to retail the whole course of their argument, which covered virtually everything, from the Battle of Slagter’s Nek during the Anglo-Boer war to the inaugural session of the United Nations at Lake Success in 1945. In my country, it was a familiar theme and a familiar division of opinion; whether a newish, immature country like South Africa could afford the luxury of a ‘world statesman’ of Smuts’ calibre, when the real need was for honest and capable politicians working on the home front.

My father, of course, was in no doubt about the latter point.

‘I knew Smuts well,’ he said at one stage, when Jonathan, already rather irritable, had tossed off some phrase about ‘the verdict of history’. ‘I don’t really feel I have to wait for the verdict of history, as far as his effect on this country is concerned. He was a good chap, basically, and shrewd, but he was vain – vain as one of my peacocks! He was immensely flattered at the attention he got overseas, particularly in England; he never recovered from the idea which that rogue Lloyd George originally gave him – that he was too big for South Africa, and that his real parish was the whole world.’

‘But that was perfectly true,’ said Jonathan shortly.

‘Nonsense, my dear boy!’ said my father, with his customary self-confidence. ‘Lloyd George simply wanted to flatter us country bumpkins into tagging along behind England, and Smuts was the bait.’

‘He was a great man,’ said Jonathan stubbornly.

‘Oh, I agree! He was just the kind of man South Africa needed – but we needed him here at home, not throwing his weight about at the League of Nations and the UN. If he’d given half the attention to South African politics – particularly race relations – that he gave to buttering up those damn half-baked banana republics in South America, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are today.’

‘But he put South Africa on the world map,’ said Jonathan. ‘In fact, he was about the only man who could have done it. No one had heard of the place before he came along.’

‘He put South Africa back fifty years,’ rejoined my father, ignoring Jonathan’s last astonishing sentence. ‘We didn’t especially want to be on the world map, as you call it. It was much more important to set our own house in order, and earn a
solid
reputation, slowly and honestly.’

‘Well, of course, if you’d rather South Africa had remained a sort of farmers’ republic, stuck at the end of nowhere–’

My father regarded him with his usual courteous attention, but there was steel underneath. ‘There are worse people than farmers, Jonathan,’ he said, ‘and worse countries than old-fashioned, simple, honestly-run communities that don’t bother overmuch about their world reputation. Smuts worked and lived and thought completely apart from this country; and we just couldn’t afford to have a man like that going to waste. When he died, he left his own political party in a mess, he left his country half-organised and very vulnerable, and he left a thousand things undone that were worth all his attention.’

‘Of course,’ said Jonathan, with some insolence, ‘I suppose most Afrikaners are bound to be jealous of him.’

‘I hope I shall never be jealous of self-conceit.’

And so on … It did not end in direct collision, which my father’s code of hospitality would never have allowed; but it was a somewhat grim host who presently went out into the garden, and a distinctly angry Jonathan who was left to me.

‘You
are
a bloody fool,’ I told him, without hesitation, as soon as we were alone. ‘What did you want to get into that silly argument for? He knows ten times more about it than you.’

‘Does he?’ asked Jonathan, forbiddingly.

‘Yes. And it’s his house, too. It’s so rude to behave like that.’

‘He was rude to me.’

‘I wish he had been. By now, you’d be lying in about eight separate heaps.’

‘Those people are all the same – self-opinionated – blind – running in blinkers–’

What do you mean,
those
people?’

‘Afrikaners.’

‘
I’m
an Afrikaner.’

‘But you’re not a real one. I mean, you were educated in England, and you’ve travelled–’

This point of view – that only an English education had saved me from utter degradation – always infuriated me, and it did so now. I got up from my chair, and from there looked down at him.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ I exploded, ‘do you think you’re doing me a favour by including me among the English? You and Lord Muddley ought to get married … I’m an Afrikaner, like my father, and we both know a bloody sight more about South Africa than you ever will, if you stay here until you’re eighty.’

Jonathan, less angry now, looked at me in the most annoying way he could devise. ‘Such language,’ he murmured. ‘I always say, an oath on a woman’s lips–’

I produced another oath, which startled both of us. ‘And I meant that, too!’ I went on. ‘If you want to give a lecture on South African politics, don’t choose this house to give it in.’

Sulky once more, Jonathan said: ‘I’d certainly prefer a more literate audience,’ and retired to the sideboard for another drink.

We kept up this sort of thing for most of the rest of that day; it ended, indeed, after a very trying dinner, with myself going off to bed early, and telling Jonathan to go and sleep somewhere else, when he tried to come into our room. From the doorway, in his dressing-gown, he looked at me rather forlornly, and said: ‘Oh well, that’s the way it goes – chicken one day, feathers the next.’ That made me laugh at last, and laughter, presently, made us lovers again.

I hated quarrelling with him, and I hoped that this was the end of it. But as it turned out, we had only just started.

If, on Sunday, we had been able to fish, perhaps it would have been all right; South African ‘sport’ fishing, for yellow-tail or mussel-cracker up to forty pounds, and sharks up to a hundred, was often extremely strenuous, and left people far too tired to argue about anything except the right time to go to bed.

But the gale still persisted, keeping the rocks all round the bay perpetually gleaming and sluicing with sea water under its attack, and we were thus under-employed. We tried to sunbathe, but there was too much wind; we played canasta, and got bored with it; we drank rather too much at lunchtime, and thereafter embarked on a royal row which put an end to the whole excursion – and to a lot of other things as well.

Perhaps I should have made some allowance for Jonathan; he had agreed to apologise to my father during the morning, and possibly a quarrel with me was his way of assuaging a climb down which, for someone of his temperament, must have been morbidly undignified. (I was coming to realise that he was a much more complex character than I had supposed.) But I made no such allowances, because I chanced to be in a brusque sort of mood myself; and the result was an argument of very considerable scope.

Basically, it was a continuation, an expansion, of the one we had had, driving into Cape Town on that earlier Monday morning. As on that occasion, I wanted to get back into town; Jonathan, however, wanted us to stay on in Hermanus, and tried to persuade me that it would make no difference if we did so. But this time, he was rather more direct about the whole thing.

‘But, Kate, how on earth could it matter?’ he asked, when I told him it was out of the question for me to stay. ‘One day, two days, even a week – the world won’t come to an end if you take a holiday. It’s so lovely here, and–’

‘Of course the world won’t come to an end,’ I answered irritably. ‘I’m not claiming that it would. But I’ve got a job to do, with a lot of people depending on me, and I’m not taking any more holidays until I’m due for them.’

‘I thought you were the boss.’

I stared at him. ‘I’m the boss, just
because
I’ve got that sense of responsibility.’

‘Oh darling, don’t be so pompous!’

That annoyed me. ‘Look, you can take all the holidays you want. You can loaf for six months without visible loss to anyone. I can’t, and that’s the difference between us.’

‘It’s not the only difference.’ Clearly he thought I was sneering at him – as perhaps I was – and he grew angry in his turn. ‘You may earn ten times as much as I do, but my God! what you become in the process!’

‘What does that mean, exactly?’

‘Tough!’ he answered immediately, with a certain crude relish. ‘You just don’t give a damn for anyone but yourself, do you? – I saw that, when we made that silly trip to Teroka. You won’t even try to do anything with Maraisgezicht, because you can do much better for yourself as the queen-bee in an advertising firm.’ He really
had
been laid low by that thing with my father, I realised, and now the score was being evened up, at my expense. ‘All that damned nonsense about “my people”–’ he mimicked me savagely, ‘–you wouldn’t lose an hour’s sleep if they all dropped dead tomorrow!’