The Pillow Fight

There was a vague disturbance behind me, and a commanding voice said: ‘Here she is!’ I turned, to be confronted by the gimlet eyes, lacquered smile and loathsome personality of Mrs Arkell.

  Mrs Arkell, for me, existed on a very odd plane indeed. I could only see her in social-page headlines; not as a womanat all, but as a portmanteau word, expressing entertainment, charitable blackmail and unremitting social activity. I had only to shut my eyes, and there she was, in black and white, but endlessly so, like old-fashioned ticker-tape.

  I saw her now. FLASH! Mrs Arkell Entertains Visiting Polo Team. FLASH! Johannesburg Hostesses: No. 8. Mrs Arkell. FLASH! Mrs Arkell and Doggy Friend. FLASH! Arkell Home Thrown Open to Boy Scouts. FLASH! Prime Minister Takes Tea at ‘Little Cherrystones’, Gracious Home of Mrs Arkell. FLASH! Cripples Express Thanks. FLASH! Mrs Arkell Ends South Coast Holiday.

  I was always hoping to read: FLASH! South Coast Holiday Ends Mrs Arkell, but alas, it was not to be … She was a Johannesburg institution, like gambling or criminal assault: traditional, regrettable, old-established; and though we had the most cordial dislike for each other it was for some reason unthinkable that I should not invite her to my parties, or that she should not attend – arriving rather late, leaving rather early, exhibiting throughout a rather special blend of snobbery and discontent. And here she was now, all ready with the acid dropper and the bared bodkin. I braced myself.

  ‘Darling, such crowds!’ she began, on a shrill note of disapproval. ‘You really do invite everybody to your parties, don’t you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But yes!’ It came like a rifle-shot. ‘I’ve noticed! You like lots of people! So original! Makes us all look like snobs!’ She half turned, towards a man at her side; then, as if the words made up for all the patent shortcomings of her surroundings, she intoned: ‘Darling, I’ve brought Lord Muddley!’

  Lord Muddley looked like an exceptionally stupid farmer; large, blond, ruddy, wearing a hound’s-tooth suit that gave me a jumping abscess just to glance at. He stared down at me with pale glazed eyes, as if I were a marginal pig at some unfashionable show; and on being introduced he said, ‘Delighted,’ on a note of such absolute indifference that for one wild moment I thought he might be a tremendously bad actor impersonating an English peer. (We do occasionally entertain false baronets, princes of less than noble blood, Hungarian counts whom the police later establish as absconding valets and chauffeurs; it lends to social life in South Africa a certain frontier hazard.) But after a few moments it became apparent that Lord Muddley, alas, was true.

  ‘I’m very glad you could come along,’ I said.

  ‘I knew you wouldn’t mind, darling,’ said Mrs Arkell.

  Naturally I did mind, since we had had to limit the invitations very severely indeed, and no one save Mrs Arkell would have dreamed of bringing an extra guest without at least ringing up beforehand. But there seemed no polite method of showing this.

  ‘Of course not,’ I answered insincerely. ‘Never let it be said that I invited so many people that there wasn’t room for one or two uninvited ones.’

  If Lord Muddley had been an actor or any other kind of impersonator, he would at that point have made some remark, however brief or offhand, excusing his presence. But his lordship continued to gaze at me, wordless, invincible, doing us all a favour by standing there in an agricultural trance, and I knew he must be genuine.

  I asked: ‘Are you staying in South Africa long?’

  He considered this for some time, and then, as though negotiating a very special brand of patrician, high-pitched hot potato, answered: ‘Just looking round.’

  ‘Brilliant financial brain!’ said Mrs Arkell, sotto voce. ‘Absolutely uncanny!’

  ‘Just looking round,’ said Lord Muddley again. ‘I may even – ah – settle here.’

  He was now staring at me as if I might faint or break down for very joy.

  ‘Doing what!’ I asked.

  ‘Doing?’ he repeated, as if this were a particularly foreign word.

  ‘Don’t be silly, darling,’ said Mrs Arkell. ‘Finance, of course! I told you!’

  ‘I am meeting Sir Albert Ireton in the morning,’ said Lord Muddley. Once more I had the feeling that I ought to go to pieces completely, burst into tears, kiss his ring. ‘Ireton is connected with the Anglo-African Corporation, a mining company,’ he went on, after a suitable pause. ‘Gold mines and – ah – things like that … You know Sir Albert?’

  I decided that I had had enough of this. ‘He’s on one or two of my father’s boards,’ I said. I looked at my watch. ‘Actually you’ve missed him by about ten minutes. He doesn’t really like parties.’

  The predatory gleam in Lord Muddley’s eye was slow in appearing, but eventually it was there, shining like an old fashioned stable-lamp.

  ‘I would like to meet your father,’ he said.

  ‘He’s a poppet!’ said Mrs Arkell, who was my father’s least favourite woman in the whole of the English-speaking world.

  ‘He’s never here at this time of the year,’ I said, delighted to be speaking the truth. ‘He’s down at the Cape. Fishing.’

  ‘I fish,’ said Lord Muddley.

  As a loving and loyal daughter, I knew I had to close this one off.

  ‘Then he’s going on to Durban, and then to Lourenço Marques,’ I improvised swiftly. ‘He’ll be so sorry to have missed you … Well, do enjoy yourselves. I must shake a few more hands.’

  It was rude, but necessary, I assured my dear mother as I moved away.

  My wanderings had now brought me up to the buffet tables, presided over by Fraternelli and four of his own waiters. They were all busy; huge and flattering inroads had been made upon the iced soup, trout in aspic, cold barons of beef, curried prawns, avocado salads, asparagus tips, and the eight different cheeses which comprised Fraternelli’s meagre selection. I wanted to speak to Fraternelli; blocking my way was a large black beflowered hat, suspiciously face-shading, which could only belong to one person.

  I touched that person on the shoulder, and Salome Strauss swung round slowly, manoeuvring with great skill a plate piled as high as any plate could be.

  ‘Darling!’ said Salome, pecking my cheek carefully. ‘I must have missed you at the door … Isn’t that awful? – nowadays, food is literally all I care about!’

  There must, I thought, have been nearly fifty years during which that was definitely not true … It was a frequent point of discussion, in many other large cities besides Johannesburg, as to how many lovers Salome Strauss had had; five marriages, argued the experts, all of them disrupted in various circumstances of rage, violence and uproarious scandal, must have involved at least fifty other men – and then there were all the other customers, from kings to commoners, who had slipped onto the stage in between.

  Salome was at least seventy years old now; but her wonderful faded beauty still shone out from behind the brittle pink make-up, the dyed yellow hair reinforced with God-knows-what assortment of switches and transformations, the gauzy veils, the tremendous strapped-up cornucopia of the bosom. To say that fantastic beauty and a generous heart had been her downfall would be quite wrong; those things had been the making of her, and if some people disdained or derided the finished product, I was not one of them.

  To listen to Salome, on a good day, in a good mood, reminiscing about the past was an entertainment and an education unlikely to occur again in our dull century; her portrait gallery of the king, the two dukes, the millionaire Greek, the Texan who slept in his boots, the titled actor, the untitled cabinet minister, the visiting Indian cricket team, the twin head waiters in Budapest, the precocious French student (destined for the priesthood) who turned out to be fifteen years old, the bullfighter who shouted ‘Olé!’ and twirled his cape with such agility and fire – these, for the past twenty years, had been my constant, envious inspiration, whenever I day
dreamed of love.

  Salome Strauss had been one of my mother’s greatest friends; they used to talk interminably on the stoep, while I eavesdropped without shame. To this day I could remember Salome saying: ‘Darling – do you know the most revolting thing that can happen to anybody? – to wake up in the morning with a fearful hangover, in an empty bed, and there on the bedside table is a cigar butt stubbed out in a brandy-and-soda! Can you imagine that?’ To which my mother had replied, correctly: ‘I do not know, Salome. My husband does not smoke upstairs.’

  Now I eyed her piled plate, which did indeed reflect a changed if still catholic appetite, and encouraged her: ‘Salome, you can do any darned thing you like, at any time.’

  ‘Thank you, darling. So reassuring … Kate, that man behind you, the big farmer’s boy type.’

  ‘Name of Muddley.’

  Her brilliant violet eyes flickered. ‘I thought so. I knew his father very well.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Salome, don’t tell me he’s yours!’

  She affected to shake her head. ‘My terrible memory …’

  ‘You would surely remember that particular product.’

  Across the loaded buffet table, Fraternelli beamed at me. ‘Prego! You want, Miss Mary?’

  ‘I want, Fraternelli. I want a teaspoonful of everything, except the beef, which is fattening, and the gnocchi, which still looks horrid.’

  ‘Pronto!’

  A gentle yet commanding voice at my elbow said: ‘Muddley’s the name.’

  I turned, amused, and startled in a rather odd way.

  ‘Mr Steele, you’ve been eavesdropping.’

  He shook his head. ‘No. But I was watching your reaction a moment ago. His lordship is a well-known menace. My apologies, on behalf of the British upper classes.’

  ‘You speak for them?’

  ‘When people like Muddley are around, certainly.’ Noticing that I was examining him in some detail, he said: ‘This is my other suit.’

  His other suit was of a lightweight flannel, neat, somewhat old-fashioned in cut, acceptable. But I still didn’t like his approach, which was several notches in advance of our tenuous, three-hour-old relationship. It combined an assumption of familiarity with a certain prudent self-effacement; it carried the unmistakable odour of reinsurance. When he went on to say, in a cautious tone: ‘You look even more beautiful than at lunchtime,’ I was confirmed in my view that Jonathan Steele, in this present version, just wouldn’t do at all.

  Without acknowledging the remark in any way, I introduced him to Salome, and turned away as if to speak to Fraternelli again.

  The particular brand of romantic humility exhibited by Jonathan Steele was something which, in a man, I could never endure. If it was genuine, it was a bore; if assumed, a trap for the unwary. When a man, for example, murmured how little he deserved your favours, that was the time to watch his other hand. It might well start weaving.

  Nor did I enjoy the company of poor young men, however good-looking or accomplished. They added complication to a way of life which, with great effort and concentration, I had made reasonably smooth – a feat which for the majority of women, with their silliness, their vulnerability, their emotional lunacy when confronted with decisions of the greatest importance, receded further and further out of reach.

  A small part of that life was solvency, which I could have had from my father at any time, but which I had preferred to fashion for myself. I could now pay for my own drinks, meals, travel, luxuries; why on earth should I have to worry whether a casual escort could foot the bill without turning grey at the temples? Besides, they always wanted to change my personality, from an individual to a dependent, at the cost of two whiskies-and-sodas and a tomato sandwich. That would be the frosty Friday …

  There was another aspect of poverty which I found particularly repellent. When a poor man wanted to make love to me, it was almost as if he were watching the meter in a taxi (sometimes, indeed, literally so). At the time, I could feel his mind running on shillings and pence, while the conversation was inexorably levered round to a quite different transaction. Was this promotion going to pay off? – so his prudent speculation seemed to run: could he get me into bed on one bottle of wine, or two? It would be nice to do it on one, but a chap needed to protect his investment, a chap liked to make absolutely sure.

  Lovers, lovers … For me, the worst venereal disease was love. There had been no one for more than two years now, and I wanted to keep it that way, as much in the interests of personal efficiency as anything else. So far I had found love disconcerting, untidy, and progressively time-wasting; at the age of twenty-six, there had still only been three people altogether, ranging from the ludicrous to the shattering.

  The first was in Rome, where I had been holidaying with some older people, loosely styled ‘chaperones’, who seemed to find something uproariously funny in the fact that at the age of nineteen I was still a virgin. To escape this stigma, and the screams and giggles that went with it, I simply sallied forth and gave my dearest jewel away to the first man I could pick up in a bar. He was a mechanic, Roman, swarthy, rather dirty. First he was disbelieving, then complacent, then violent and gross; it had been a horrible evening, from which I retreated as fast and as far as I could.

  Then there had been an American, so considerate, worshipful and awed that I soon tired of talking him into bed; and then the deep and unhappy time with Lucien, bearing all its own fatal complications – the rationed ecstasies, the lies, the quarrels, the subterfuges, the promise of a divorce next year, and the final cool walkout which left me defenceless and astonished.

  Looking back on it, it had been an effective sign-off from the lists of love, at a time when at last I had won a foothold in the work I wanted to do, and concentration was therefore essential. But for long afterwards, pain was all I awoke to, and betrayal the only taste upon the tongue.

  In between times, of course, had been the ones that didn’t count, the promising ones that petered out, the ones that just never got off the ground. Basically, they had all foundered on one of three things: either the man tried too hard, or he wanted to rescue me from a lifetime of gross materialism, or he insisted, as of divine right, on appropriating every available moment of my day. The overriding kiss of death was that none of these things fitted in with Kate Marais Advertising; and KMA had clearly emerged as my true and lasting love.

  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.’

  Fo
r 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.’