The Pillow Fight (6 page)

Jonathan Steele was still deep in conversation with Salome Strauss, whom he obviously found an absorbing sociological study; and my mind went off at a tangent again – with a slight cautionary twinge as to why I was thinking about love at all, on a visit to Johannesburg at the height of the annual party there. The English, God bless them, never seemed to enter into Nature’s grand designs, as lovers; they might have conquered many worlds, but this was not one of them. I always remembered overhearing, in a London hotel lounge, two well-bred matrons discussing the newly married daughter of one of them.

‘They really are an ideal couple,’ declared the mother. ‘Enid is deliriously happy, though of course she finds the
love
side of it rather tiresome.’

‘That will take care of itself,’ said her companion.

‘Oh, naturally. In fact, I gave her my solemn promise that in a year or so, all that nonsense will be over and done with.’

That for me seemed to sum up love in England, a particularly daunting climate which encouraged men to get out of bed and screw the universe instead.

Salome had edged towards a corner, to demolish her supper in peace, and Jonathan Steele turned back to me.

‘What do you do in your spare time?’ he asked.

Oh dear, I thought:
that
one … ‘I read.’

‘Novels?’

‘Philosophy.’

He did not laugh or turn pale; he looked at me and said: ‘I should guess Schopenhauer.’

For some reason I liked the diagnosis (which was correct) even less than if he had made the usual pretty-girl-shouldn’t-bother-her-little-head rejoinder. Steele was moving in on me at a rate which, if not alarming (I was too old to be alarmed by such traditional manoeuvres) bore signs of becoming a nuisance. I decided to draw the curtain on Kate Marais, once and for all.

‘That’s enough about my hobbies,’ I told him, with finality. And then, following straight through: ‘Eumor says your publishers have actually commissioned a book about South Africa.’

‘That’s roughly the arrangement.’

‘They must like what you’ve written before.’

He grinned. ‘There are men of faith in every profession.’

‘Not so many in publishing … Do you think you’re getting the material you want?’

He became wary; this was
his
area of privacy. ‘Gradually.’

‘But you haven’t started writing yet?’

‘No.’

Feeling the resistance under the probe, and being a woman, I applied some small extra pressure.

‘Would you call this a wasted evening?’

‘Of course not. It’s a particularly pleasant one.’

‘But the people here? How would they fit into your book?’

‘I’m not writing that sort of book.’

‘What sort of book are you writing?’

He was becoming fidgety, turning his eyes away, sipping his drink rather fast. I was delighted.

Finally: ‘A book about South Africa,’ he said, somewhat grumpily. ‘Eumor told you.’

‘But this room is full of South Africans.’

‘They’re not the sort of South Africans I want to write about.’

‘Then it won’t be a book about South Africa.’

Apparently I had probed accurately, and just deep enough. ‘It
will
be a book about South Africa,’ he answered, so loudly that one or two men nearby turned to stare. ‘But these people–’ he gestured round him, ‘–they’re just the thin upper crust. Superficial. They don’t really count. They don’t
mean
anything.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I feel it.’

‘Then you’d better feel again.’ This was my particular hobbyhorse, and I gave it a touch of the whip. ‘The people in this room, and people like them in other towns,
run
this country. They run the mines, the politics, the banks, the business world, the newspapers. They count tremendously, because they’re on top, and if they’re clever enough, they’re going to stay there, till you and I are old and grey.’ I hadn’t intended to link myself in that or any other way with Jonathan Steele, and I went on swiftly: ‘If you leave them out of a book on South Africa, the book will be only half true.’

But he caught up the point I hadn’t wanted to make. ‘When you and I are old and grey,’ he said, smiling more easily, ‘South Africa may be a very different country.’

‘But these people are here, now.’

‘All right,’ he said. ‘They’re here,
now
.’ He gave the last word a slightly satirical emphasis, neatly reversing the sense of my remark. ‘I’m looking for something more enduring.’

‘It’s right here, under your nose.’

‘Let’s disagree,’ he said suddenly. My mother would have approved of the courteous withdrawal. ‘This is much too good a party to spoil … What happens afterwards?’

‘We move on somewhere else.’

‘We?’

‘The stayers, and the people I like.’

‘Can I be a stayer?’

‘Among all these
worthless
characters?’

‘I want to keep them under my nose.’

I had to agree that this was a laudable idea, and we left it like that. I hoped that he would forget, or find something better to do. Certainly I myself had lots of better things to do, than listen to half baked criticism from this wandering, myopic scribe, peering through pre-set spectacles at something he would never comprehend.

Not on that night, nor on any night thereafter, did I know for certain whether or not Jonathan Steele was drunk. Clearly he must have had a lot to drink; but it did not show in his manner, nor in his speech, and the crude clash which took place later that evening might well have been a habit with him, or a way of attracting my attention, or simply an expression of violent disagreement with his surroundings. It certainly made its mark on a number of my friends.

By midnight, we were reduced to a party of five: Steele and myself, Bruno van Thaal, Lord Muddley (who had attached himself unshakeably to my entourage), and Gerald Thyssen. In any list of the ten richest men in South Africa, Gerald Thyssen always figured; my father, I know, was prepared to shorten such a list to five, and still keep Gerald in. He was a youngish mining man, chairman of his own company which had extensive interests in the Free State; most of his wealth was inherited from an intensely hard-working German grandfather, but Gerald himself was sufficiently capable to have doubled that fortune, at a time when cramped investment and political unpopularity had made South Africa no paradise for money-spinners.

Intermittently, he was one of my suitors; now and again, when I was tired, or overworked, or depressed at the mink-less, chinchilla-less, diamond-less state of my wardrobe, I toyed with the idea of sinking back into the state of cushioned respectability which a community-property interest in twenty million pounds seemed likely to ensure.

But it hadn’t happened yet, and Gerald Thyssen stayed as he was one of the world’s most eligible men, the target and the despair of hordes of mothers in London, Paris, New York, Italy and South Africa, and (rare among the very rich) a thoroughly nice man who gave heartening significance to the word ‘generosity’.

Midnight found us at the Cascade, a small restaurant-nightclub with nothing at all to commend it except that it was in the centre of town, and could be relied on to stay open forever, until the last drunk had broken his last leg on the last flight of steps. We were eating Polish eggs, an agreeable form of blotting paper, and drinking whisky. I danced once with Bruno, who was full of gossip and waspish comment about the party, and then, returning to the queue of three other men who probably didn’t want to dance at all, I said: ‘Gentlemen, my feet are killing me – I’d much rather talk,’ and we settled down in the twilight of our table again.

I had Gerald Thyssen on one side, Muddley on the other. Jonathan Steele, looking rather grim and withdrawn, was at the farther end of the table.

It was Lord Muddley who sparked the scene. I must admit that we had all found him rather trying; he had a fruity, ecclesiastical pontificating tone, coupled with an absolute lack of experience in any field save country-gentlemanship, which made him very hard to take. He lectured Bruno on how to make money in real estate; he instructed Jonathan Steele how to write books, and myself how to make good in advertising. It was while he was telling Gerald Thyssen how to run his gold mines that the balloon went up.

‘South Africa,’ proclaimed Muddley, in that high-pitched gargling voice which must have declared many a Conservative fête well and truly opened, ‘should really do very well, if the cost-price structure remains constant. In your particular field, Thyssen, you have only to make sure that the wage costs of your labour force are pegged at their present level, and that the supply of labour itself–’

‘What you really mean,’ said Jonathan Steele, breaking in on a harsh, rather strained note, ‘is that the gold mines will continue to make lots of money if they have an inexhaustible supply of slave labour, labour that isn’t allowed to strike and for whom there’s no alternative employment.’

There was a moment of surprised silence. Then: ‘I don’t mean anything of the sort,’ said Lord Muddley, speaking over his shoulder in a way I would have found infuriating. ‘Those of us with experience in the management field–’

‘You couldn’t manage an automatic sewage farm,’ said Steele crudely. ‘Major contributor though you are.’

It was rather too rude to be acceptably funny, but I smiled in spite of myself, and Bruno laughed out loud. Steele seemed to find this even more infuriating.

‘You’re all the same, you people,’ he said, with extreme bitterness. ‘Everything in South Africa is either a joke or a racket. You bleat about wage costs and the supply of labour, but you never think of those things in human terms at all. You don’t see, behind the words, millions of wretched natives sweating their guts out, cooped up in this stinking squirrel’s cage–’ his voice tailed off, as if he were going to cry.

Gerald Thyssen, a gentle yet authoritative man, tried to intervene in a situation which, even for a Johannesburg nightclub, was somewhat embarrassing.

‘I wouldn’t say things were exactly like that.’

‘
You
wouldn’t say,’ said Jonathan Steele rudely.

Gerald smiled. ‘Yes, I wouldn’t say. We certainly couldn’t run our mines properly if we kept our mine-boys, how did you put it? – cooped up in a stinking squirrel’s cage. We try to do a lot better for them than that.’

Gerald Thyssen was, I knew, personally on very strong ground there. No one in the modern mining industry had done more for his mine-workers; apart from special safety gear in the shafts themselves, his compounds, with their married quarters and recreation halls, and spotless cafeterias, were probably the finest in Africa, a showpiece which the Nationalist Government (not strikingly intent on cherishing its humblest citizens) were constantly inspecting, chivvying, complaining about, and trying subtly to sabotage.

‘What do you do for them,’ asked Jonathan Steele, ‘that’s so different from anyone else?’

‘It’s not so very different from anyone else,’ answered Gerald, still equable, ‘though we like to think that we have the best-run mines in the country. To begin with, we spent nearly a million pounds last year on housing, improved diet, hospitals, medical care and welfare generally.’

‘Princely,’ said Lord Muddley. ‘Positively princely.’

‘Bunk!’ said Jonathan Steele. ‘It’s just to keep your work-people in prime condition.’ And to Lord Muddley: ‘You do the same for your pigs, don’t you?’

‘Darling,’ said Bruno to me, in an undertone, ‘I have a feeling that this is going to end in tears.’

‘Pigs?’ repeated Lord Muddley, his jaw dropping. ‘What on earth do you mean, pigs? We’re talking about gold-mining.’

‘We’re talking about the pig aspect of gold-mining,’ said Steele, ‘and all the other aspects of life in South Africa that make pigs out of men.’

It now occurred to me that he was drunk, although it was not apparent in his speech; and I wondered (as a girl does) what form it usually took with him – whether he remained a talking drunk, or graduated to a fighting drunk, or a crying drunk, and if he threw lampshades and felled waiters, or just knocked over tables and crumpled to the ground. The present situation bore many of the classic earmarks of a nightclub brawl, the only difference being that nowadays this sort of thing very seldom happened to me.

It became apparent that Steele was a talker; and, truth to tell, I was never too sure about the ‘drunk’ part of it, since his enunciation remained embarrassingly clear.

Now: ‘
Pigs out of men
?’ repeated Lord Muddley, who made a good, if slow, straight man. ‘Upon my soul, I don’t know what you’re talking about!’

‘I’m talking about race relations,’ said Jonathan Steele, ‘and a system which keeps millions of people permanently poor, and a few thousands rich.’

‘Here we go!’ said Bruno. ‘London School of Economics.’

‘There’ll always be rich and poor,’ said Lord Muddley.

‘Very likely,’ said Steele. ‘But in most parts of the modern world they won’t always be the same lot of people, permanently anchored in one class or the other. Even the British Conservative party,’ he said, ironically, ‘endorses a system of private enterprise, by which a man can rise from the bottom to the top, if he works hard enough.’

Lord Muddley said: ‘Quite,’ expressing, I had no doubt, a limited allegiance to this view.

‘You can’t do that in South Africa,’ said Jonathan Steele. ‘There’s a line between the Negro and the white man, and the Negro can’t cross it. There’s a wage level dividing the Negro and the white man, and the Negro can’t rise above it. There’s an educational barrier between the Negro and the white man, and the Negro can’t climb it. You’ve got the poor bastards hamstrung, and you’re going to keep them that way.’

‘And a bloody good idea, too!’ said Bruno van Thaal, who had his own notion of paradise, and was not ashamed of it.

‘Of course it’s a good idea, from your point of view,’ said Steele, ‘but I’m talking about
real
people … That means that you have a permanent slave colony in South Africa, something unique in the twentieth century. Do you wonder that the rest of the world thinks of you as barbarians?’