The Pillow Fight (7 page)

Gerald Thyssen shook his head. I think he shared my view that this could be an explosive occasion, and didn’t want to touch it off; but he had his own personal convictions as well.

‘I wouldn’t call it a slave economy,’ he said reasonably. ‘We’re lucky to have a large labour force, with a relatively low standard of living. All sorts of countries have that – England is one of them, the United States is another.’ He raised his hand as Jonathan Steele, who had been taking a deep draught of whisky-and-soda, made as if to break in. ‘Just a minute … I know that there are opportunities of rising from one class to another, in both those countries, and that those opportunities don’t exist in South Africa, though they may do so in the future. But the net result
now
, after less than a hundred years of industrial development from very crude beginnings, is a prosperous country, based largely on gold, diamonds and uranium, but with substantial industries as well, which supports twelve million people.’

‘The net result is a criminal mess!’ Jonathan Steele burst out. ‘Good God, don’t any of you use your eyes as you walk about? You’re living on top of the worst ghetto in the world … It wouldn’t be so bad, in a way, if you made something worthwhile out of your slave-state, like Athens did, or Rome – something handsome, creative, cultured, to justify all the misery at the lower levels. But all you make is money.’

‘That’s bad?’ asked Bruno sarcastically.

But Steele couldn’t be bothered with the fleas on the body politic. ‘The same goes for women,’ he said, though not looking at me. ‘Here they are, with unlimited servants, unlimited leisure, unlimited opportunity to make something out of their lives. What do they do with it all? – just bridge teas, gossip, triviality, love affairs, a six-hour siesta every day. They’re the laziest, most expensive harlots in the world.’

‘Come on, Steele,’ I said suddenly, edgily. ‘You haven’t said a damned thing yet … What else don’t you like about us?’

His eyes came round to mine, very straight, very direct; I decided that he wasn’t drunk at all, just explosively keyed up, bursting with things he had wanted to say for a long time, to the people he thought deserved them.

‘The way you treat your natives,’ he said, as if reciting from some inner rubric. ‘The way you just don’t see them, on the street or in a room … The way old natives can be barred from using the lifts, and have to walk up eleven flights of stairs … The way servants, regardless of sex, are herded together in the sleeping quarters at the backs of houses, like a kennel full of mongrels … The “Whites Only” labels on benches, trains, lavatories, shop counters … The brutality of the most degraded poor whites, tramps, the sherry-gang type, towards
any
black man, regardless of his worth … The way the police treat a native when they stop him in the street, or pick him up for forgetting his pass … Johannesburg, especially, is just an appalling square mile of jungle, surrounded by black civilization.’

Gerald Thyssen burst out laughing. ‘Now I’ve heard everything.’

‘You’ve heard it,’ said Jonathan Steele, ‘but you haven’t listened to it.’

Lord Muddley expelled a deep breath. ‘The fellow’s just a communist!’

Thinking to lower the temperature: ‘Are you a communist, fellow?’ I asked.

‘Not yet. If I stayed here I would be.’

‘Then don’t stay here,’ said Bruno.

‘I suppose you want us all to be the same,’ said Muddley.

Steele looked at him, and answered: ‘God forbid!’

My irritation returned. ‘But if you feel like this, what are you doing here? Why aren’t you out in the streets, binding up the wounds and throwing open the ghettos? I notice all these classy ideas haven’t stopped you spending nearly six hours with us top-flight barbarians, accepting our hospitality on a fairly extensive scale.’

Steele smiled, not humorously. ‘I’ve always had a weakness for the expense-account aristocracy.’

It was a very rude remark indeed, and it brought Gerald Thyssen to life.

‘I think you ought to apologise for that,’ he said, very much the chairman of companies with scores of men jumping whenever he told them to. ‘It was unforgivably rude.’

After an uncomfortable pause: ‘I’m sorry,’ said Jonathan Steele. ‘I didn’t mean to be personal.’

‘Forget it,’ I told him.

‘But it does seem to be true that–’

‘Jesus Christ!’ exploded Bruno van Thaal. ‘Can’t you leave it alone?’

‘–that if you ignore politics and race relations, you’re just running in blinkers,’ Steele went on, as though Bruno had not spoken. ‘It’s almost as if there were parts of South Africa you were afraid to look at.’

I knew he was needling me again, but I took it up anyway. ‘Such as?’

‘Well, have you ever been round a native location in Johannesburg?’

‘No. But I’m not afraid to.’

‘Come with me tomorrow, then.’

‘I have to work.’

‘Ah, well …’

One of these days, I thought, Jonathan Steele was going to get a knife in the back, and I envied, in advance, the man or woman who would wield it.

‘Which location?’ I asked.

‘Teroka.’

‘Don’t go, Kate,’ said Bruno crossly. ‘It’ll be
grisly
.’

‘Don’t you have to have a permit?’

‘I’m meeting Father Shillingford. He can fix it.’

‘Oh, God!’ said Bruno. ‘I knew it. That
monstrous
man!’

The others were watching me – Muddley somewhat mystified, Gerald Thyssen uneasy, and still prickly-tempered on my behalf.

‘I’ve never met Father Shillingford,’ I said.

‘He’s a very remarkable person,’ answered Steele.

‘What time?’

‘Ten o’clock.’

‘God damn it!’ I said, half angry, half amused. ‘It’s a deal … And now I want a
really
big whisky-and-soda.’

I was not at my sunniest next morning, and if it had not been for a cast-iron rule never to break appointments, either personal or professional, I would have left a message for Jonathan Steele, and forgotten the whole thing. Joel Sachs and I had a ton of office work to get through; I had lots of people to see, and a good many other ways of passing the time; the very last thing I wanted to do was to throw away the morning in trudging through a native location which I knew in advance would be dirty, mean and depressing.

Moreover, looking back on it in cool sober daylight, I could appreciate the weapons by which I had been bounced into making the trip; a combination of argumentative blackmail, induced irritation, and a mood of anything-for-a-quiet-life which the unedifying scene at the Cascade had promoted. Whether intentional or not, Jonathan Steele had done an adroit job, and I had long graduated from such haphazard pressures.

Nor was I at all enamoured of the idea of meeting Father Shillingford, who had hitherto been only a name to me, as to most of my friends. He ran a mission in Teroka, one of the native locations; he was always figuring in the headlines as coming into collision with the authorities, preaching a near-the-knuckle sermon, defying the apartheid laws, joining protest marches, and peddling his particular brand of fraternal saccharine.

Overseas, they called him, among other things, the ‘conscience of South Africa’; here he was just a pain in theneck, one of the Bleeding Hearts brigade who intermittently displayed the wounds of mankind for the edification of the readers of the London
Observer
. If there had to be people like that, I still didn’t want to meet them.

The fact that Jonathan Steele, looking exceptionally shabby, called for me in a small English car, not less than ten years old, whose battered appearance made even the Canton Hotel’s luggage-boys laugh aloud, put the dunce’s cap on the whole excursion.

Jonathan Steele was not at all repentant about the previous night; indeed, he only mentioned it once, and that indirectly, when he said: ‘I thought Muddley excelled himself, didn’t you?’ There were so many answers to that one that I didn’t make any of them. Instead I said: ‘I have to be back by half-past twelve.’

‘That’ll give us about an hour there,’ he answered, rather offhandedly. ‘Probably your saturation point.’

I forebore to say that in some ways I had reached this already.

We took the Main Reef road, through busy traffic, and then branched south, towards Teroka. Tall buildings gave way to smaller ones, and then to the open
veld
; the surfaced road trailed off into a yellow dusty track, bad alike for the hair and the nerves. Steele drove his horrid little car well, but our progress was not easy; deep ruts, corrugations, and that enveloping ochre dust all conspired with the heat to complete our discomfort.

Then, on the skyline, I saw the outlying shacks of Teroka Township.

It was what I had expected – not better, not worse; a sprawling mess of tin shanties, hessian shelters, lean-to sheds made of planks and barrel-staves. The buildings (for want of a better word) seemed to have been planted higgledy-piggledy, but there was a road system of sorts; a distorted latticework of pitted tracks, deeply scarred by wagon wheels and rivulets of drainage, and cluttered by every sort of refuse and every breed of goat, dog and child.

It was stiflingly hot; the air smelt acridly of woodsmoke, natives and excrement; a pall of dust enclosed it all like a murky blanket. I wanted to turn back, admitting without argument that I wasn’t this sort of person. But for a number of foolish reasons, compounded of pride, good manners and simple obstinacy, it had already become too late.

As we drove towards the entrance gates, Jonathan Steele said: ‘Fill your lungs. This is the authentic stink of South Africa.’ My conviction that this was a special promotion, designed to shame Marie Antoinette under the cruel spotlight of reality, returned anew.

Then came two minor surprises, the two things I remembered best about that morning. At the rusty barbed-wire gate which marked the entrance to Teroka, a native policeman waved us to a standstill. He looked indulgently at the car, which might indeed have served as a Class II taxi: then he looked at us, and his bearing changed. He said to Jonathan Steele, with not too subtle insolence: ‘Sir, no entrance to Europeans.’

It was easy to understand why he enjoyed saying it. Normally, no white man in South Africa could be disciplined by a native; here was one of the few special cases where the policeman’s writ enabled him to step across that line, since under the new
apartheid
laws certain civic areas were barred to the ‘non-designated’ race, whichever that was. While appreciating the fact that this was the policeman’s big moment, I still disliked the implications.

‘Tell him to get out of the way,’ I said, loud enough for him to hear.

The first surprise was that Jonathan Steele answered him, not in English or Afrikaans, but in a native language which I took to be Zulu. They talked rapidly for about a minute, Shillingford’s name occurring here and there; and then the policeman stood aside and we went through.

‘Do you really know Zulu?’ I asked, impressed.

He looked puzzled. ‘Zulu? He wasn’t a Zulu. That was Shangaan.’

‘Now how did you know
that
?’

‘The earrings,’ he said. ‘They had the Shangaan tribal emblem.’

‘You seem to be doing things very thoroughly.’

He grinned. ‘I’m writing a book about South Africa.’

The second surprise was Father Shillingford himself. We found him at the door of his ‘church’, a wretched tin shanty with a yellow pine cross over the door. Shillingford was a small, modest, rubicund man, far from Christlike – if Christlike means bearded, lean and dramatic, as the painters persuade us. He had a dusty brown cassock, and cracked boots. Only the eyes were out of the ordinary – pale, looking at you, and at the horizon behind you, in one embracing glance. I suppose they were the give-away; the rest of him couldn’t have been less distinguished.

He greeted Jonathan Steele like an old friend, and myself with the reserve normal in a priest.

‘It’s very good of you to come,’ he said. ‘We don’t have many visitors.’

‘Miss Marais writes for the newspapers,’ said Jonathan Steele, as if trying to put in a good word for me.

‘Oh yes, I know,’ said Father Shillingford.

I decided that they weren’t going to get me down. ‘This isn’t my usual area of operations, Father,’ I said.

He narrowed his gaze until it reached my face, and answered: ‘There are many different kinds of slum.’

‘But she
is
interested,’ said Jonathan Steele, rather harassed.

Once again he seemed to be apologising for me – for the way I looked, my jewellery, my shoes. It was true that I seemed out of place in Teroka’s grimy ugliness, and for my part I was going to take damned good care to keep things that way … There was a naked boy-child sitting on the lowest of the church steps – coal-black, innocent, and very beautiful. He was a small, engaging fellow creature now, but in a few years he would be a native, probably criminal or sexually dangerous. Father Shillingford wasn’t going to change that fact, and he wasn’t going to change that feeling in myself, either.

These were odd thoughts for me, Teroka thoughts, and I turned away from them. I wanted nothing so much as to be back in my suite at the Carlton, preferably drinking the second of two dry martinis. But that respite was still some distance, and many ugly sights and people, away from me.

Father Shillingford led us first into his church. The sunlight fell pathetically on the worn pews, the beaten earth floor, the altar-cloth stained by rainwater at one corner.

‘We are very poor, as you see,’ said Father Shillingford.

He seemed to be waiting for me to say something, but I had nothing to contribute. This was a shanty-church in a native location: I had expected it to be poor and shabby. To remark on that aspect of it would be as silly as attending a striptease act, advertised as such, and then saying: ‘But she’s naked!’ I had known Teroka would be naked.

‘And of course people break in at night, and take things,’ Father Shillingford continued. ‘I used to be able to sleep here, but that’s not allowed any more.’