The Pillow Fight (16 page)

‘All right. Come round at drinking time, then.’

Well …’ Now he
was
slightly embarrassed, and I knew that something unusual must be coming. ‘As a matter of fact, I promised to have dinner with Father Shillingford tonight. Down at the mission. Wouldn’t you like to come along?’

‘It doesn’t sound quite my cup of tea, Jonathan.’

‘I suppose not.’

‘I’ll be here, then.’ I was going to say:
When you want me
, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to that forlorn peak of availability. Instead I said: ‘Give me a ring.’

‘I’ll do that.’ He hunched his shoulders, buttoned his coat, preparing to take off. Then he added, in a much more concise voice: ‘Kate, you do realise, don’t you, that that room of mine is a lot bigger than most
families
have, in places like Teroka?’

‘Sheer heaven, darling!’ said Bruno van Thaal, licking the last remaining drops of strawberry juice laced with Curaçao off the tips of his fingers – a display of honest greed which in anyone else would have looked merely piggish. ‘And that wine was
fully
as nice as my aunt’s gooseberry Sauterne … I must say that now and again even this
hostile
hostelry can produce the perfect meal.’

We had dined that evening in my suite, on a scale suitable to Bruno’s appetite and my own need for reassurance; behind us lay a pleasing vista of cold Vichyssoise, a small Spanish omelette, and breast of guinea-fowl topped off with the delicate strawberry dish which was currently exciting Bruno’s enthusiasm. I felt much better now, and certainly there had been room for improvement.

‘Why hostile, Bruno?’ I asked idly, pouring his coffee, and then moving towards the couch. ‘I’m very fond of it here.’

‘Haven’t you heard yet, darling?’ His innocent blue eyes opened in a thoroughly untrustworthy way. ‘I had an
altercation
in the bar here last week. They asked me not to come back unless I could behave
quite
differently. So strict!’

‘But what were you doing, Bruno?’

‘Just discussing things in a general way.’

I decided that I was likely to get a much more accurate version from someone else, and I cast around for an alternative subject. It became apparent that there was now only one. After an evening spent in talking of everything under the sun except what was in the forefront of my mind, it was high time to be serious.

I was not sure how to effect the change, since we had been exclusively frivolous so far; but Bruno, who, as well as being very good company, was one of the most perceptive people I knew, anticipated the switch of conversation. Making himself comfortable in a deep armchair opposite me, he suddenly said: ‘And now, dear, how are things between you and that
pest
of a man? Still utter magic, I hope?’

I had to smile. ‘Not quite utter, Bruno … Do you ever see him?’

‘Be your age, dear! Our
backgrounds
are so different … Why haven’t I been favoured tonight, by the way?’

‘He was busy. As a matter of fact he’s having dinner with Father Shillingford.’

‘How very cosy!’ But Bruno was regarding me with genuine surprise. ‘Kate, surely you came up here in order to pursue love’s torrid dream every single moment of the day and night?’

‘More or less. But he did have this date with Shillingford.’

‘Of course, Steele is like that,’ said Bruno, who could not have been displeased with what I was telling him. ‘So dedicated … He turns every room into a seminary … I picture him scurrying through the streets at dawn, famished and devout, tearing himself to ribbons in the confessional and then administering
soup
to the black poor … Of course he’s not a Roman Catholic, but he’s
bosom
pals with Father Billingsgate, and if you made inquiries you’d probably find that he comes from a
long
line of priests and nuns … However, please don’t get the idea that I dislike him.’

‘Of course you don’t like him, Bruno. Why should you? It was me that fell in love with him.’

‘In the past tense?’

‘It wasn’t, until – oh God, I don’t know!
Our
backgrounds are different, too.’

‘Love conquers all, I heard somewhere.’

I had to tell the story, and Bruno was the man to tell it to. ‘Love was wonderful, Bruno,’ I answered him. ‘The most wonderful thing that ever happened to me. But basically there’s almost everything wrong with Jonathan, from my point of view. He’s so poor – I know that sounds awful, but it’s silly to say that it’s not important. He’s
good
, in a very annoying way. He’s been trying to change me. He lectures all the time … He makes absolute chaos of my work. And if I get in any deeper, I know I’ll be absolutely dependent on him for everything.’

‘Darling, he sounds
perfect!
’ Being Bruno, he had to say that, but he reverted swiftly to kindness and sympathy. ‘Kate, you know I shall never understand love. I just take it for granted that if people feel it, they feel it, like the heat. But you and Steele together are really Siamese freaks … Couldn’t you just write it off to experience? Heavenly, no doubt, but just an
episode
, a
mad
moment?’

‘I’m not like that, Bruno.’

‘You’re not like
this
.’

‘True.’

Then the phone rang.

What followed must have been deeply instructive to all concerned, though Bruno, a fascinated eavesdropper, heard only an incomplete version of it. I said: ‘Hallo?’ and then: ‘How was dinner?’ My next sentence was ‘Come back and sleep here,’ and then, after a long pause: ‘All right, then.’ Thereafter I rang off, and that was all.

Bruno, regarding me closely, began: ‘If I may read between the lines–’

‘He won’t come to the Carlton,’ I said briefly. ‘Because I wouldn’t stay at his place, I suppose.’

‘Perhaps he’s afraid of the house detective.’

‘
I’m
not afraid of the house detective.’

‘Well, of course,’ said Bruno, ‘if you
will
form a liaison with Hopalong Chastity–’

I was thinking deeply, and only half hearing anything else. I had a feeling that Jonathan was doing all this on purpose; he was once more applying pressure, in a novel, almost reverse way, and for reasons I could not comprehend. But whatever they were, there was an aspect of punitive therapy involved. As if from a long way off, I heard Bruno say: ‘Darling, this is all
so
unlike you. You
can’t
want it as much as this … Why don’t you take the bull by the horns, and sack him?’

Everyone has some deep-seated personal infection, some disease which they will never lose. For myself, it is a taste for entertaining; for Eumor, it is horses, and for Bruno, gossip. For Jonathan, astonishingly, it turned out to be poker. But I only discovered this in the most mortifying fashion possible.

True, he had mentioned the fact before, at some happier time, and though I had thought it an odd enthusiasm for his kind of person, I also thought (being newly in love) that it could not conceivably have any sort of significance, as between myself and him. He played poker, he had told me on that occasion, every Saturday night, with the same six other people; Eumor was one of them, the rest were mostly stockbrokers.

My girlish trouble now was that I hadn’t realised that today was Saturday.

When Jonathan told me what he had in mind, over the telephone, I was first incredulous, then furious. Dinner with Father Shillingford, coupled with a wasted night (as we both might have termed it, a few weeks earlier), was one thing; but this was really too rich for my blood.

‘Jonathan,’ I demanded, straight away, ‘what are you trying to do?’

‘Nothing, Kate,’ he answered, wonderfully innocent. ‘I told you before. I always play on Saturdays, with the same school. I can’t let them down.’

‘You can’t let
them
down?’

‘But we always play. I told you.’ There was an edge of nervousness in his voice, as if he bore in mind the idea that he might be going too far, and yet was determined to persevere. ‘I can’t just not turn up, can I?’

‘You could have let them know days ago.’

‘But it’s been a regular fixture for months … Darling,’ he went on, ‘I’ll be finished by two o’clock at the latest.’

I was now quite furious. ‘What do you mean, finished by two o’clock? What the hell’s the point of making all that fuss about my coming up here, when you’re just not available when I arrive? And why poker, anyway? If you’ve got any spare time, you know damned well you ought to be working!’

‘But I
am
working. I never stop. This poker game is part of working. Poker – oh, you just wouldn’t understand, Kate! It’s one of the reasons why I love it so much. It’s exciting, and sometimes expensive, but it’s a lesson in psychology all the time. I learn more about people from playing poker with them–’

I dismissed that idea with a single word. Then: ‘You’re meant to be writing a book, or so you told me. Why don’t you get on with it?’

‘What do you know about writing?’ he asked edgily.

I laughed. ‘Writing happens to earn a large part of my living for me. And one thing I
do
know is the first rule: you have to
write
.’

‘I meant writing books,’ he said loftily. ‘For that, you have to think as well. That’s
my
kind of writing.’

He would never be arguing with me like this, I realised, in the silence that followed this particular piece of effrontery, if he were not satiated, if he had not slept with me enough times to risk a rain-check. I remembered an odd phrase of his from a past conversation: ‘If you achieve something, whether it’s a woman or an appointment as ambassador, you don’t really want it any more.’ Because of this ‘achievement’ he was prepared to take chances with my good humour which he would never have dared before.

He would probably be sorry later. I was sorry now; and, being sorry, there was only one thing for me to do. It only involved putting down the receiver, but (being a woman still) it cost me a special, angry, satisfying heartache to do it.

Joel Sachs rang me up about an hour later. I had never heard him so tense.

‘Kate, what’s going on?’

‘This isn’t a good moment to ask me that, Joel.’

‘But I thought you were in Cape Town! George Barnaby flew down yesterday specially to see you.’

‘Oh dear!’ Barnaby was head of the principal cinema chain in South Africa. We had been after their account for years. ‘I can still see him,’ I told Joel.

‘No, you can’t.’ It was the first time I had heard Joel anything but soft-spoken, fundamentally controlled. ‘He just rang me up. He’s sailing for the States tonight. You know what he’s like. Now he says he doesn’t want to make a change, after all. Kate, I’ve been working on this thing for three months. It was almost sewn up.’

‘I know, Joel. I’m terribly sorry.’

‘Kate.’ He was speaking from the same inner, first-time pressure. ‘I may as well tell you. There’s a lot of talk going round the town. About your coming up here so suddenly, and – and everything. What’s going on?’

‘Nothing, Joel.’

‘Why are you here, then?’

‘It’s not important now. I’m going back in a couple of hours.’ I tried a laugh. ‘If it’s costing us money, I’m damned well going back!’

‘Well, that’s good news.’ Now he was softened, more like Joel Sachs again. ‘Kate, if you have to come up again at short notice, if you
have
to see somebody … I mean, just let me know.’

‘I don’t have to see anybody.’

‘Well, that’s good news,’ he said again. ‘But just let me know, all the same.’

‘I’ll let you know,’ I promised. ‘But at the present rate, it’ll only come as a suicide note … Joel, I’ll ring you up from Cape Town.’

‘Good girl.’

I might have spent hours in mourning, and perhaps that would come later; at the moment, being disappointed, angry, ashamed of myself and my feeble feminine heart, I was in the mood for quick decisions: Our swift rise, our astonishing ebb, would later puzzle me, keep me awake at nights; now they were just the twin triggers for a final definitive blast.

Playing poker, by God! I thought on my way out to the airport; if Jonathan didn’t spend his spare time in bed with me, he might at least apply his manhood to his typewriter. What a hopeless, loafing amateur … It annoyed me that it had taken a whole forty-eight hours to learn my lesson; to find out that, if two careers in one bed was a difficult proposition – indeed, almost unworkable – one and a half careers wasn’t worth an hour’s trouble, a moment’s indecision, a single missed heartbeat.

I must, I decided, have been slipping. But I wasn’t going to slip any farther.

He wrote. I didn’t answer. He rang up. I wasn’t in. He sent messages, which I tore up, and flowers, which I gave to hospitals. He came to Cape Town to try to see me; I heard of it in time, from my spy and ally Bruno van Thaal, and took off for Durban. This time I had made up my mind, and nothing was going to change it. This time, I was doing the walking out, not Jonathan, and the
fiat
was going to stick.

Accidental strands of evidence, kind contributions from friends, indicated that it first made him angry, then it made him sad. I had been both these things, in the course of our short love affair, but now I was calling the tune, putting on the record myself, controlling the volume. The sense of power was important.

Of course, I was sad, too … The items I held against Jonathan – that he interrupted my work, that (like every other man in the world) he was determined to change me, that he was poor and proud and prejudiced – these things were valid arguments, well-chosen words and sentences to satisfy the cool mind. But they didn’t make allowance for feelings, they were no good to a girl in bed. I couldn’t take the phrase: ‘He was all wrong about race relations, too,’ and make it keep me warm at night.

Sexually, to begin with, I missed him very much indeed; to have been celibate so long, and then ecstatically abandon it, and then to impose celibacy again, was one of the hardest, saddest, loneliest, most miserable things I had ever tried to do.