The Pillow Fight (17 page)

I must admit that I cheated a bit, at the start; not with other men – I didn’t seem to want that, exactly, or perhaps the available candidates didn’t, after Jonathan, make much sense – but in the realm of self-solace, borrowed from the adolescent past.

It was something I hadn’t done for years; but the awakened, troublesome flesh had to be assuaged somehow, and this did not seem a particularly grotesque outlet. Of course, it was within the scale of sin, it was naughty … I remembered a phrase from the nursery past (not, so far as I know, invoked in this connection): ‘The Devil finds work for idle hands to do.’ How very true … But since I was not as good a lover as Jonathan, it presently faded and died.

Thus tided over in one area, I still mourned him in another. Jonathan had been very good company; we disagreed over lots of things, but he could be very funny when he felt like it, and behind the fun was wisdom, and behind that, compassion. I had no compassion; he had enough for two; it had been exciting to borrow it for a space, to see one’s fellow men through eyes which did not invariably find them ludicrous or contemptible.

Perhaps this was the most searching bereavement, the worst aspect of doing without him. I got used to it in the end, like the other thing, but the self-denial was difficult, and took a degree of determination of which I came to be quite proud.

After a week, I was still hungry, in bed and out of it; after a month, I was reconciled to both areas of loneliness; after three months, I was restored enough (and busy enough) to feel only an occasional twinge. Life went on, I found – perhaps the saddest, and also the happiest, residue of a lost love. It was all one with the fundamental lesson of living as well. If you lost your eyes, you did not lie down and cry. You learned to be blind, and thus you learned to see.

Certain things still hurt, I found; even after months and months, they still had power to pierce and to wound, however briefly. These were the first-hand, accidental things; like sleeping in the great bed at Maraisgezicht, and reaching out unawares, and finding no one there; like my father not asking questions about Jonathan, yet knowing I was bereft; like lunching at Fraternelli’s, and glancing at the table where I had first seen him, and finding it occupied by quite different people – fat, gobbling, base.

Once I did catch sight of him, at a charity concert in Cape Town; he was with a woman I did not know, quite old, grey-haired, somewhat over-intense; he was talking to her with great concentration. It was disturbing, even after six months, to discover that he was in the same city; but what I really wanted, for thirty forlorn seconds, was for him to be talking to me, with the same wrapped-up air, the same lean power. And for the whole of the next day, I was glad that the woman was old.

There were other things that Eumor, a faithful correspondent, told me from time to time. Jonathan was much the same, he wrote me in one letter, dictated to a secretary who probably took an iron hand in the re-phrasing – ‘but he does not seem to care so much about what happens. He is working, you will be pleased to hear – or will you be pleased? – but he gets into trouble rather easily. First he was drinking too much, and I told him not to, and he said it was in order to forget you, and it would soon be past, and I warned him that such things are hard to stop, once you start them, whatever the reason that made them begin.’ Here Eumor’s secretary, no doubt breathing hard, had imposed an arbitrary full-stop and a fresh paragraph. ‘He wanders out at night, and sometimes he has bad adventures. Then there are politics. You probably read about the protest march.’

I had indeed read about the protest march the first occasion (so far as I knew) that Jonathan Steele had achieved the status of a news item. He had been foolish enough to come into collision with two basic South African laws, accompanied by considerable fanfare; firstly, by taking part, with Indian and native speakers, in a public meeting which had been banned by the police, and secondly, by marching in a Johannesburg protest demonstration which ended up in a free-for-all riot outside Marshall Square police headquarters.

Subsequently, in the magistrate’s court, he had been sternly lectured (‘Disgrace to European Community’) and fined £5 (‘paid by supporters on the spot’). Rumour, which I took the trouble to confirm, said that the dossier recommending deportation had got as far as the Ministerial desk before being allowed to fade out again.

‘After that,’ wrote Eumor, ‘he went to Natal with Father Shillingford, and sat down on the ground with some Indians.’

There Eumor’s letter, tantalisingly, came to an end; but it seemed to paint quite enough of the picture. It confirmed, for me, Jonathan’s fatally amateur status; he wasn’t a writer at all, he was just one of those café exhibitionists of the school of Paris and elsewhere, who did everything to books except write them.

They talked about them, read bits of them aloud, spilled Pernod on page one, practised their dialogue on passing whores, boasted of how good they were going to be, what master craftsmen, how much better than Proust and Sartre and Victor Hugo. But, like professional ‘lovers’, all they did was talk; when it came to the pitch, they were as scared to put pen to paper as a gigolo to put Figure A anywhere near Figure B.

If Eumor claimed that Jonathan was working, then he was probably trying to be kind. It was possible that he was trying to be kind to me. But by then it hardly mattered at all, except for statistical reasons. All I wanted to do was to file him away at the back of the right drawer.

Bruno, in the line of duty as my Johannesburg contributor to the column, was another source for keeping me up-to-date, using a special, spiteful kind of exaggeration no doubt intended to cheer my desolation, to show me that in losing Jonathan I had lost nothing. About mid-year, on his way to England, he stopped a night at Cape Town; and there, after dinner at my flat, he unfolded a curious tale.

‘Darling, your little chum is
definitely
operating in our area,’ he told me. ‘I haven’t sent you much about it, because it’s so dull anyway, and I didn’t really think you’d want to print anything about that
monster
. But he has
not
been idle.’

‘You mentioned Di Magnussen in one letter,’ I reminded him. ‘Surely she’s been covering a great deal of carpet lately?’

‘I think it must be her geophysical year.’

‘Who else, Bruno?’ The idea of Jonathan making love to other women still made me want to be sick; I hoped that Bruno would exaggerate, tell lies if necessary, twist the knife and make a wound so gross that it would no longer hurt … ‘Tell me the worst.’

‘He seems to like
older
ladies,’ announced Bruno, with relish. ‘Belle York; Nancy Hughieson – all that nest. They pass him from hand to hand like a
ferret
, and compare notes afterwards. He told Martha Barker that she was too acrobatic for his taste, and my dear, it was all over town next morning! She took it as a compliment!’

‘Bruno, does he really go to bed with those old sacks?’ All the women he had mentioned were certainly prime South African performers, but they were also collector’s items of another era, which should have dated them fatally. Their hospitality, for example, towards visiting convoys during the war had astonished even United States sailors. ‘I should have thought he would have shown better taste.’

Bruno tossed his head irritably. ‘The only sign of taste that
criminal
ever showed–’ he began, and then stopped. ‘Let’s put it another way,’ he proceeded smoothly. ‘Whatever he was like when
you
knew him, he’s back in the zoo now. My dear, it’s just a continuous performance! I think he must be rewriting a sex manual.’

‘Who else?’ I asked.

He gave me half a dozen names; some I could have forecast, others were a surprise. Then he said: ‘You remember Lyn Elliott-Smith?’

‘Oh,
no!
’

Bruno nodded. ‘I always think of her as the kind of woman who gives adultery a bad name.’

This was indeed true. Lyn Elliott-Smith’s husband had really become a classic figure of fun; he put up with Lyn because he had to (being a senior civil servant for whom divorce was unthinkable), but it cost him dearly in the process. It had reached the stage now when he was afraid to walk into any room unannounced, for fear that Lyn would be in bed with his best friend, on the sofa with a casual caller, on the mat with the butler. Thus, as he moved about, in his own house or in any other, the poor fellow whistled and sang from morning till night; he coughed in every corridor, shuffled his feet outside every door. But it was no good; he still kept tripping over his best beloved in every conceivable attitude of abandon.

Just for once, I hated the idea of Jonathan in bed with this curling snake of a woman; and I hated him more for betraying me thus far.

‘What happened with Lyn?’ I asked.

‘I understand it was rather hilarious,’ answered Bruno. ‘
I understand
’ usually meant that he was embroidering, if not lying outright, but now I chose to believe him. ‘They say that George Elliot-Smith came home, positively
booming
out the 1812 Overture, as usual, and Lyn called out: “For Christ’s sake stop that bloody singing!” and he thought she must be alone, and he trotted upstairs rather too fast, and Jonathan had to skip down the fire escape with his trousers gaping in the breeze …’ Bruno, pleased with his recital, stood up, preparing to take his leave. ‘If he’d only stopped to think, he really needn’t have bothered. George would always have zipped them up for him.’

That night, when Bruno had gone, I actually roughed out a piece for the column, starting: ‘
Jonathan Steele
,
now in strict training as South Africa’s guided muscle
–’ and then I tore it up. If it were all true, the thing either hurt too much, or it didn’t hurt at all – in slight sad confusion, I couldn’t make up my mind which. But either way, I wanted to bury it; and anything except a silent disposal seemed silly and unworthy.

It must have been about five months later that Eumor rang me up from Johannesburg.

It was an office call, about ten o’clock in the morning, a product of one of those rare occasions when Eumor and I were in business together; he had acquired four hundred tons of Bulgarian caviar which he wished to unload upon a defenceless public, and mine was the glowing prose which was going to do it. (‘
So
different from ordinary caviar!’ was our eventual, utterly truthful slogan; we polished the whole lot off in about six weeks.) When we had finished the business side of our talk, and were gossiping (at eight shillings a minute) Eumor suddenly said: ‘By the way, Kate, have, you heard about Jonathan?’

‘Jonathan who?’ The query was almost a genuine reaction; I had not seen him even casually for half a year, nor thought about him for weeks.

‘
Sans blague!
Jonathan Steele!’

‘Yes, I’ve heard all I want about Jonathan Steele.’

‘But about his book?’

‘Yes, I’ve heard all about his book, too. I just
can’t
wait.’

Eumor seemed somewhat mystified. ‘You mean, you want to read it?’

There was something in his tone which communicated interest, and indeed alertness. ‘Start again, Eumor,’ I said. ‘What about his book?’

‘It is a success already,’ said Eumor importantly. ‘It has been chosen. And in America also.’

This was difficult to translate. ‘You mean he’s finished it?’

‘Certainly he has finished it! Some few months ago. Now it is chosen. By the Book Society. And it will be a serial story in America. I have read it. It is wonderful, Kate. So wise. But I told you he was good.’

‘Who’s serialising it in America?’ I asked, slightly knocked over in the rush.

‘A magazine. To do with the Pacific. But not about the sea.’

‘The
Pacific Monthly
?’

‘Exactly!’

That really brought me up short, in spite of a prolonged, cast-iron refusal to be impressed by anything that Jonathan Steele might do. If Eumor had his facts right, it was sufficiently astonishing that Jonathan had produced a book at all; and a ‘choice’ by the Book Society argued (if nothing else) a respectable standard of saleability, as well as a positive guarantee that the book was not trash. But the
Pacific Monthly
was something else again. Unique in America, its consistently high standard, and crotchety insistence upon quality, meant a total absence of the second-rate; quaintly, it only hired writers who could coax the right words into the right sequence; having nailed the word ‘literate’ to its masthead, it kept it there, in all its baffling nudity. If Jonathan had made the
Pacific
, then he had made a lot of other things as well.

There had to be some mistake, if only to keep me happy.

‘Are you there, Kate?’ asked Eumor presently.

‘Yes. I’m just being astonished, that’s all … Eumor, you said you’d read the book. Do you mean, in manuscript?’

‘No.’ Eumor struggled with the technicalities. ‘It was printed. But with brown paper.’

‘You mean, page proofs? In a brown paper cover?’

‘Yes. They have printed five hundred copies like that, to send to people in advance.’

This was another whole series of surprises, which I appreciated even less. It meant that Jonathan must have finished the book at least two months ago. It meant that, in spite of the oddest evidence to the contrary, he had been working all the time. And a page proof distribution of five hundred copies indicated that his publishers were behind the book, and the author, in a very big way indeed.

I wasn’t feeling guilty yet, but I had an idea that it would not be delayed very long. I fought valiantly against the process, which would leave me self-convicted as a damned fool, and a solitary one also.

‘What’s it like, Eumor?’ I asked as grudgingly as I could. ‘It isn’t really any good, is it?’

‘It is beautiful, Kate.’ His voice had a sudden warmth. ‘I told you it would be, a long time ago – do you remember? It is about politics, and the locations, and people in Johannesburg, and how to live together. It is about a young man who comes to South Africa. There is a girl like you in it, too.’