The Pillow Fight (26 page)

‘That was Gerald Thyssen on the telephone,’ she said, without any other lead-in. I had heard the phone ringing, and, as usual, had left it to more willing, female hands. ‘You remember him.’

‘Yes,’ I said, not too enthusiastically. I had enough enemies already, without importing them from the southern tip of Africa. ‘Is he in New York?’

‘No. He was calling from Johannesburg.’ She came round the corner of the desk and, to my surprise, put her arm tight round my neck. ‘My father’s ill, Johnny.’

‘Oh.’ I never had the right words ready for other people’s woes, but I tried my best. ‘I’m so sorry, Kate. Is it serious?’

‘It sounded like it.’ Her hands, restless and strong, were now pulling and kneading my neck, communicating a desperate anxiety. ‘I’ll have to go. I’ll have to go immediately.’

‘Of course.’

‘Can you fix it all up for me?’

‘Yes.’

Lucky Kate, I thought, as I reached for the telephone and the receptive ear of American Express. Lucky Kate, to have a rich husband, and be able to fly off to South Africa with a single snap of the fingers, for a mere $1,600. Lucky Steele, to be able to spread this jewelled cloak for his beloved … Of course I could not help being sad about her father, if she was sad herself; it was not possible to be neutral – no man could become so detached an island, however hard he tried. But her father’s illness was not exactly a sword-thrust through the bleeding heart of the world-famous author.

We have never liked each other, the old man and I; and the kind of relationship which she maintained with him – close, loving, dependent, interested – had occasionally irked me. No girl should need such a father, with such an all-capable husband on hand … But who would argue the finer points of family loyalty, at such a moment? Faced with a crisis which would take her from me, and towards him, I was still terribly good with American Express, and they with me.

‘Tell them, two tickets,’ said Kate suddenly, while I was busy on the phone. And as I turned to take proper stock of this: ‘I want Julia to come with me,’ she said. ‘It’ll be so much easier.’

I nodded, while the man on the other end of the telephone reeled off alternative connecting flights from London, Lisbon and Lagos. I had not really thought that there was any question of my going with her, but I was glad to be sure.

‘Don’t let Julia get caught down there,’ I warned her. ‘As a Coloured fugitive from the glorious republic, or something. Hang on to her passport. You know the trouble you had, getting her out.’

‘I can fix it again. Or Gerald will.’

‘Two bookings,’ I said, back on the phone again, making a swift choice, like any hotshot executive with a sales-graph spearing his vitals. ‘Pan-Am to Lisbon, BOAC from there. It’ll save five hours.’

Later, when Kate was choosing what should be packed for her journey that night, and I was sitting on the window seat in helpful indolence, she asked: ‘What about you? Will you be all right?’

‘Oh, sure,’ I answered. ‘I want to work, anyway. I’ll get somebody to come in. Or I can go to the Pierre.’ A patter of raindrops beat against the window behind my head, and when I turned, I did not like the look of New York at all. It was damp, it was grey; no guaranteed sun shone here, nor would do so for many a long week. ‘Actually,’ I said, on an impulse, ‘I think I might take off into the blue myself. I can work anywhere, at this stage.’

‘Why not?’ She was preoccupied, sorting shoes, underwear, jewellery, furs – all the secure armour of womanhood. ‘It’ll do you good to get away. Where will you go? Florida?’

‘I think Barbados.’

She came to, at that, and raised her head and stared at me, across an armful of clothes which would no doubt have kept the traditional family of five moribund Koreans alive for a year. ‘Oh Johnny – what a fantastic idea. Do you really want to go back there?’

‘I liked it,’ I answered. And then, since this was for many reasons a particularly crude thing to say, I added: ‘I could do with some sun, too. And I want to look at Negro faces.’

She had turned away again. Woman’s basic dilemma, I thought. She had to pack, and plan, and worry about her father, and the housekeeping, and what to wear at a possible funeral; there was scarcely time for the big-scale, raw emotions; scarcely time for battle.

All she said was: ‘Don’t you remember what the faces were like?’

‘They alter,’ I said. ‘Like people.’

It was clear that I needed a complete change. We both did.

I drove down from New York, taking four days on the trip and then leaving the car at Miami; it was only 1,300 miles, and the slow approach, the gradual melting of the winterised spirit, the warming trend from bleak New York to a Florida which really was doing its damnedest as the Sunshine State, was much more fun than any quick flip by jet. The soft sell was the one which best suited escapist authors. So I loitered by the way, though the way – mostly US Highway No. 1 – was not invariably enchanting.

There were some curious contrasts on that journey, the contrasts of two or more Americas. There were the rich and rolling grasslands of Virginia, and the bare, scratched, exhausted earth of South Carolina. There was poor drab Georgia, suddenly blossoming into rich, well-kept Florida within the space of a few yards of highway. There was the magnificence of Palm Beach, which must command some of the finest houses in the world, compared with the vulgar stucco horrors of Daytona and Defray. There were Spanish mission-churches four hundred years old, and then the miles of garish motels, and the snakepits and monkey glades and alligator farms, and the temples erected to pecan fudge and peanut brittle, and all the orange juice you could drink for ten cents (children, fifteen).

Above all, there were the signs – signs by the million, all the way from the New Jersey Turnpike to the last screaming mile of the main street into Miami. There must have been a clear thousand miles of exhortation – to eat, to drink, to sleep; to spend, to save, to invest; to visit, to explore, to sing, and dance, and pray; to ride, walk, swim, fly and sail; to mount elephants, to crawl along the sea-bottom, to catch tuna and tarpon, to wrestle with alligators and shoot the rapids in the Tunnel of Love and send a peach-fed ham home to the folks. There were twenty-seven flavours of ice cream, and a flavour of nothing at the same time.

I would like to read the journal of the Man Who Did Everything. But it would have to be posthumous.

At the beginning, I started to ‘collect’ odd signs, and then the spirit of research faded and I gave up. With the sun warming my hibernated bones, and the Mercedes going like an elegant bomb, I wanted to enjoy myself, not probe the sociological horrors of tourist travel. But a few of them stuck in the memory. They ranged from whimsical motel signs: ‘madam, your sleep is showing,’ and ‘our honeymoon suites are heir-conditioned,’ to the sinister: ‘save america - impeach earl warren,’ and the cynical: ‘souvenirs of anywhere’. But after I encountered ‘it’s paradise in the garden of eatin’ ’, I lost heart. There was a limit to what one creative writer could take from his competitors.

As soon as I was airborne, however, the voyage itself took wing. The only available plane, on the day I wanted to leave, was an island hopper, reaching Barbados by a wayward route which included Jamaica, San Juan, St Croix in the Virgin Islands, Antigua and Martinique; and the idea of taking off and touching down six separate times, instead of sampling one shot of each manoeuvre, seemed to involve lending several extra hostages to fortune.

I had never really enjoyed flying, since the day when a plane from New York to Washington, with me in it, developed a high-pitched scream in one of its engines and had to make a forced landing at Newark, New Jersey. The magnificent array of fire engines, ambulances, police cars, television equipment, and undertakers’ touts which awaited our arrival on the runway had turned me a dull shade of green at the time, and remained in the memory ever after. Since then, if I flew at all, I flew fortified.

I was fortified now, on a rum basis, and continued to be so for the best part of twelve hours, as we zigzagged our way south. It was not at all an ordeal. With each stop, itgrew sunnier, and warmer, and greener, and friendlier; it was a pleasure, every time, to dip down upon a new island, and emerge from the plane into the benevolent air, progressively shedding top coats, and other coats, and waistcoats, and eventually ties, as the air grew more benevolent still, and the bars cosier, and the drinks longer and cooler.

I made several lifelong friends in the course of that journey, all for the right length of time – about an hour; and there was always something to watch, even if it was only staid citizens buying funny island hats, and being self-conscious about them, and then gradually growing to look as if they had worn them all their lives. As far as Puerto Rico, where we were bereaved, there was a most ravishingstewardess on board; about eighteen, hopelessly incompetent, quite lovely. All the male passengers were turning handsprings and putting up with terrible service, just to catch a glimpse of those shy young breasts, that delicious puzzled face.

‘Regular Madonna of the airways,’ said the man next to me, with absolutely no warranty, practically sobbing into one of his martinis. But I wasn’t going to argue a technical point. She had just bent over me, and beamed her breathless smile, and murmured: ‘I declare – I’ll forget
myself
next!’ When we finally lost her, we lost a certain zany element, and no more coffee was served in Old Fashioned glasses; but we lost a lot of the
décor
as well.

Her place was taken, as a focal point of interest for the observer, by a quintet of people who, on the next leg of the journey, honoured us with their presence. They were five largish, fattish, oafish young men, distinguished by an enormous self-assurance. They broke all the rules enforced upon ordinary travellers; they stood up during take-off and landing, wandered in and out of the pilot’s cockpit, clogged the aisles, monopolised the pint-sized bar, talked loudly and determinedly about recent air disasters, exhibited an embarrassing gallantry towards any woman travelling alone, and generally impeded and annoyed the paying passengers to the point when a lot of us wished we had gone by sea.

They were delegates on their way to a convention of airline public relations officers, enjoying a free ride with the aim of popularising air travel.

But all things pass, including such thick-skinned idiots as these; and next, between St Croix and Antigua, we were entertained by a genuine drunken nuisance. He was a great bulging hulk of a man, wearing a ten-gallon white Stetson which might have been Texan, and could have been Albertan – or any other part of the world where the men look like bulls and the bulls look ashamed of it. He had a load on when he came aboard – and who was I to comment? – and he improved on this at a phenomenal rate; the process involved, apart from a fresh drink every ten minutes, a servile and scurrying attention from anyone for whom the bell might toll.

Above all, he was argument-prone, and proud of it; everything was wrong, from the buckle of his seat belt to the ice in his drinks; it was clear that he had assumed a God-given right to be where he was, and for all others a God-given duty to minister to his needs. He was up, we were down; he was rich, and everyone else was poor.

Such men were only funny if in the end, they were defeated; and eventually this one was. But before that happened, we had a long way to go, and a lot to endure. He got into one tremendously vulgar row with one of the stewardesses, a nervous Jamaican girl who was doing her best in exceptionally trying circumstances, and who was finally dismissed with the bellowed command: ‘If you don’t want to be a hostess, for Christ’s sake change your job! If you want to keep it, bring me another martini-on-the-rocks. Pronto!’

Later, after Antigua, there was another rancorous scene when the vacant seat next to him, over which he had spread his coat, hat, briefcase, camera, and feet, was needed for an incoming passenger. He rounded out a noisy refusal to give way with the ringing declaration: ‘If these cheap trash are first-class passengers, then we’re using the wrong words.’ After that, the captain was called, a man of a different calibre, and the culprit – dispossessed, deflated and dry – subsided into mundane sulks.

There were plenty of ways, I thought virtuously, to be drunk on an aircraft, without using this one.

Then suddenly it was the dusk of a long day, dusk at Martinique. As we climbed back on board for the last lap of all, the burnt smell of the tropics mingled with flower scents – of hibiscus, and bougainvillea, and wild orchid – to make the bowl of night a perfumed blessing. A row of scarlet poinsettias, standing sentinel at the edge of the tarmac, caught the lights overhead, and gleamed darkly, and shimmered, waving us farewell.

By way of earthy contrast, while we were waiting for our final take-off, the captain came out of his cockpit, walked purposefully down the length of the passenger compartment, gathered up a handful of air-sickness disposal bags, and went back into his lair. But the incident was funny rather than foreboding; at this stage, it did not seem to matter much – and in the event it did not matter at all, since the short flight was rock steady all the way, and no disaster threatened. By logical deduction, I worked out that he probably wanted to wrap up some spare sandwiches for home consumption.

We flew low, across a dark sea just restless enough to shiver when it caught the track of the moon. The stars came up to bear us company; the Dog Star for mariners, the far-away Southern Cross for romantics, the winking Pleiades for decoration. Presently we picked up the glow of Bridgetown Harbour, and the ribbon of lights along the shoreline; I took my last legal swig of rum at the company’s expense; and then we touched down in the warm, welcoming air of Barbados.

It was eleven o’clock on a velvet night; twelve hours from Miami, and the forsaken world; a gentler pace altogether, a release from care, a private accommodation.

The reporter, a small, earnest young Negro who had never seen me, nor anyone else, on television, but had actually read one of my books, asked: ‘Mr Steele, what do you think are the chances of the novel surviving, as an art form?’