The Pillow Fight

by Nicholas Monsarrat

  ‘Oh yes!’ said Bruno van Thaal, whose personal preference was for strife. ‘We’ve got the Black Sash running the bar.’

  ‘Then my constitution will be safeguarded,’ said Jonathan Steele, and rose to make his farewells.

  I thought that a very adequate retort, and, in the circumstances, defensively brilliant. Watching Steele leave the restaurant, I was not sorry that I had invited him.

  But I was in a minority.

  ‘Now why on earth did you do that?’ asked Bruno peevishly, as soon as Steele was out of earshot. ‘The Marlborough holds three hundred people in agonising discomfort, we’ve got three hundred and fifty coming for certain, and the people I haven’t asked are all in screaming sulks already. And yet you go and invite that agitator!’

  ‘I heard my mother whispering to me,’ I answered.

  ‘You and your mother,’ said Bruno, who had been fobbed off with this excuse for eccentricity on many similar occasions. ‘I wish you two would work out your timing beforehand.’

  ‘He was not in good humour,’ volunteered Eumor, belatedly conscience-stricken over his protégé. ‘But it will be a great book, I swear to you. I have listened to him talk. Brilliant! Fantastique! Fabelhaft!’

  ‘Nuts!’ said Bruno, who was in a bad mood, and determined to stay there. ‘He’s not a genius – he just needs a haircut. I’ll bet you he never even writes a book.’

  ‘How much?’ asked Eumor.

  ‘One million pounds.’

  ‘Five hundred thousand,’ said Eumor prudently. ‘Cash.’

  ‘Done.’

  ‘Besides,’ I said, wishing for no special reason to make up some ground, ‘if he’s writing about South Africa he ought to meets lots of other people, besides those dreary Black Sash matrons.’

  ‘And communists,’ said Bruno darkly.

  ‘And natives.’

  ‘And Father Billingsgate, or whatever his name is.’

  ‘And the African National Congress.’

  ‘And us,’ concluded Joel Sachs, on a sensible note.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ I said rising, ‘Kate Marais Advertising has to do a little work. I’ll see you all in three hours’ time.’

  ‘If we can get into the hotel,’ said Bruno, ‘past all these hordes of new people.’

  I walked back with Joel Sachs to our office on Commissioner Street. It was one of my favourite times of the day, in Johannesburg; the shadows were lengthening, the caverns of the streets were growing cooler, the first edition of the Star was just out and being bought at the street corners, where groups of people who looked as though they didn’t have a cent in the world thumbed through the stock-market prices, the race results from England, the sweepstake draws, the cars-for-sale.

  These were the white men, poor and not-so-poor, but most of the other faces in the street were black, of course; we were outnumbered (for that was how an Afrikaner thought of it) nearly five to one in this city, and the main throng was native.

  There were women selling lemons and pears and limes and pawpaws; women with babies strapped to their backs; women in brightly-coloured clothes, the élite from the native brothels. The men were office messengers; mine-boys trudging in convoy to the railway station; beggars squirming on the pavement; loafers; pickpockets; shabby black clergymen of the ‘bush Baptist’ variety; young idlers (whom we called skellums) on the lookout for the unlocked car, the coat or suitcase forgotten on a back seat, the handbag hanging open; the American tourists who were fair game for everyone.

  From the groups playing dice at the street corners came an occasional pungent drift of dagga smoke, the home-grown version of marijuana which gave a man courage – sometimes too much courage for his own good.

  On the sunny side of the street, the colours were gaudy and eye-catching; in the shade, we walked in a cool twilight, part of a restless drifting throng approaching with pleasure the idle hours of the day.

  Of course, one never really saw faces, unless they were white; if they were anything less, they were part of the scenery, part of the huge amorphous element known as ‘them’. The thought recalled Jonathan Steele to me, and I decided that I had given him quite enough attention already, that afternoon.

  ‘Bring me up to date,’ I said to Joel Sachs.

  Joel, who was always the quietest person at our lunches (since they spanned a number of different worlds, while he had only one), came swiftly to life.

  Kate Marais Advertising was going through one of its spells of unpopularity, he told me. Turnover was up, prestige was high, bigger and bigger accounts were showing a tendency to gravitate in our direction; and since such gravitation always looked, to the loser, like bare-faced stealing, we were both of us branded as thieves, murderers, and worse, at the moment.

  I was pleased. I kept Joel up in Johannesburg to conduct the biggest poaching operation he could manage; that was the essence of the advertising business, and if we didn’t deliver first-class copy and service, we in our turn would be poached out of existence. I loved the whole thing, because I had built it up myself in four years, starting with a single room in Cape Town and a loan of £500 from my father; now, with the main office still in Cape Town, but with branches in Johannesburg and Durban, we were at the very top of the heap.

  If I was any sort of a snob, it was an achievement snob. It gave me unique pleasure to have got so far, remembering the very early days when setting up the firm had been a driving, heartbreaking scramble for a marginal profit, in an area where, if you were a woman, the marginal profit was you … It had meant very hard work, complete self-discipline, and the cultivation of a sexless, emotionless life in the face of a male world which didn’t believe in such a thing for a single moment.

  ‘Come and have lunch,’ they used to say, when I was trying to negotiate an intricate contract that would leave me with something to show for it besides bruises. And later: ‘Come and have dinner. Come to bed. Come.’ In a way, it was no wonder that I had made good in advertising. Everyone else was thinking of something quite different.

  The gossip column had been an alternative kind of achievement. KMA made money in the business world, and ‘Kate Marais Calling’ kept people hopping, in a fashion vaguely related, vaguely complementary. The column held people at arm’s length, also, the way I liked to have them. A man with whom I was trying to do business was going to think twice about staring at my bosom or crossed legs, or trying the frontal approach in a nightclub, if his wife were certain to read a fragrant little paragraph about it, the following Sunday morning.

  Between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-six, I had wanted, progressively, a highly successful business (I ticked the items off in my mind), the odd glamour attached to being a good-looking woman in the business world, and the power (overt or undercover) that went with being able to say in cold print what lesser operators were whispering, hinting at, or ignoring.

  I had got all these things, and it hadn’t taken as long as I had feared, nor as my father had forecast.

  Joel was saying: ‘There’s a good chance that we’ll get the Anglo-African account as well.’

  I laughed, so that a man outside the Carlton Hotel turned and stared. ‘That will make us very unpopular.’

  Anglo-African was a big mining house – nearly the biggest. They did not take a great deal of space in any one year (they had no reason to, gold being a commodity which really did sell itself); but it was an excellent account, and they also paid a great deal, at the ‘consultative’ level, for somewhat pedestrian copy.

  Joel dodged an early drunk at the next street corner. ‘And I’d like you to call on Sliemeck’s for me.’

  ‘Why, especially?’

  ‘It’s a big firm, as you know. They’re thinking of making a change, in our direction. But Sliemeck hasn’t quite made up his mind.’

  I laughed again. ‘I’m really getting too old to
sell my body for a real-estate account.’

  ‘Just show it in profile, dear.’

  I felt good that afternoon in Johannesburg, walking down Commissioner Street with Joel Sachs. Later, in the air-conditioned office, we did ninety minutes of concentrated, detailed work that made me feel better still. If there was a nicer way of being a woman, I hadn’t discovered it yet, and I didn’t need to.

  Chapter Two

  The Marlborough was not the best hotel south of the Sahara, but it was a good one, and, for party purposes, nearly ideal. The management were inclined to be sad that they were not supplying the food that evening, but they bowed to Fraternelli’s undoubted eminence – the more so as it would save them a lot of trouble, and they would make a minor fortune anyway out of the bar, the flowers and the hire of two rooms big enough to accommodate 350 people. Between five o’clock and six, I had all the flowers changed, from mainly pink to mainly yellow; initiated a good stiff row about the servants’ uniforms, some of which were less than spotless; and drove Fraternelli quietly round the bend with a rush of complaints. But by six o’clock we were ready for the rush, and by seven o’clock the rush was on.

  By and large, South African parties were all the same; you gave people lots to drink, enough to eat, and let them do whatever they wished. If they were actors, they wanted to slander or hug each other; if they were socialites, they wanted to be seen and to be photographed; if they were writers they wanted to talk about their books – past, present, and to be. Painters got drunk and argued; lesbians got drunk and cried; business men got drunk and made passes; newspapermen got drunk. By seven o’clock, all these people were doing all these things, in circumstances which Kate Marais Advertising had tried to make as nearly perfect as possible.

  To begin with, I was kept busy, greeting people I hadn’t seen for three months; introducing the minority of characters who didn’t know each other, pointing out to the photographers the people I wanted for my column, and the old old faces not worth the cost of a flash bulb, even at wholesale prices; and seeing that the genuinely shy guests (of whom there were still a few left in the world) didn’t get stuck in a corner by themselves, with an empty glass and a vase of flowers to stare at. Then the incoming tide slacked off, and I started to make the rounds, and thus to enjoy myself.

  I talked to my Johannesburg editor, Francis Kellaway, a small, monosyllabic, foxy man who liked to think of himself as my employer, with the power of life and death, fame and ignominy, clasped within his hot little hand.

  ‘Wonderful party, Kate,’ he proclaimed, rocking slightly. ‘As usual.’

  ‘Thank you, Francis.’

  ‘About your column.’

  ‘M’m?’

  ‘I’m really very satisfied.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘Except for one thing.’

  ‘Oh, dear!’

  ‘Tends to run a bit short. After editing. Think you ought to watch that.’

  But I wasn’t in the mood for Napoleonic editors, on this or any other evening. ‘My dear Francis,’ I said, ‘if the column runs short after you’ve finished with your little blue pencil, that’s because half the interesting people in South Africa seem to be on your shit-list.’

  He blinked. ‘My what list?’

  ‘You heard …’

  ‘I can assure you–’ he began.

  ‘Save it, Francis,’ I reassured him. ‘It’s your newspaper, and if you’ve banned forever any mention of Jack Cotterell–’ I took just one example, though a good one; Jack had been discovered trouserless in a taxi with one of the Board of Directors’ wives, and his name was never to sully their expensive newsprint again) ‘–then you’re quite within your rights. But I haven’t got a personal S-list, so I’ll go on mentioning him whenever he does something interesting.’

  ‘Cotterell is a thoroughly disreputable character.’

  I shook my head. ‘He’s just a swordsman. One of many. People like to read about him. Then they don’t feel such bastards themselves.’

  ‘You’re in a strange mood tonight, Kate.’

  ‘Hostess Runs Amuck,’ I said, and moved on.

  I moved on to my dear silly friend Mrs Marchant. Peggy Marchant and I had been at school together in England; she a prefect, myself definitely not. At the age of sixteen, hideous in orange taffeta, I had been a bridesmaid at her first marriage, to a rich elderly Italian who was now in prison on a baffling variety of charges. I shall always remember Peggy, a month after her wedding, swearing me to secrecy and then confiding: ‘Darling, Mummy said that sex and the honeymoon and all that stuff would be awful, but I honestly didn’t realise it would be quite as revolting as it is. It’s so sticky!’

  Well-read but still innocent, I could imagine that it might be sticky. I made comforting sounds.

  ‘Every single night!’ she went on. ‘Sometimes strawberry, sometimes raspberry. Last night it was marmalade.’

  ‘Marmalade?’

  ‘Darling, I know you’re not married, but you must know about these things … He throws it at me, from right across the room, and then he spreads it with a butterknife. Honestly, I don’t see what a woman gets out of marriage. And how it makes babies is just a mystery to me.’

  Dear Peggy … She had shed her Italian eccentric and married a tall Australian, a good-looking young man definitely not in the jam business; there were three enchanting children to prove it. But Peggy still maintained the same wide-eyed, dewy innocence of ten years ago. We never talked about the Italian, but we talked about everything else under the sun; giggly, inconsequent, girls’ dormitory talk that relaxed and refreshed.

  ‘Hallo, Mrs Marchant,’ I said now.

  ‘Hallo, Miss Marais … I was just thinking. How much does a party like this cost?’

  ‘That’s an extremely rude question.’

  ‘Is it? … How much, darling?’

  ‘Seven hundred pounds,’ I said.

  ‘Heavens!’ she exclaimed. ‘That’s more than I’ve got in the whole world.’

  ‘But you have your three treasures.’

  ‘Bless their little hearts … I think Caroline is getting a teensy bit bow-legged … Isn’t that tragic?’

  ‘Not necessarily. You can call it the Invitation Look.’

  She sighed. ‘Oh dear – you’re so sophisticated. Did you have a nice lunch?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘I hear that awful man is coming to the party.’

  ‘Now how,’ I asked, ‘did you hear that?’

  ‘Darling, it’s all over town. You know he’s terribly rude to everyone he meets?’

  ‘Is he?’

  ‘He as good as told Maxine Ware she was wasting her life.’

  ‘That’s not rude. Just accurate.’

  ‘Are you in love with him?’

  ‘Oh, yes …’

  ‘It is time you got married, you know.’

  ‘As long as you do it before the change, I always say.’

  There was now an agreeable monotone roar filling the room and the one beyond it as well; token, if not of a good party, then at least of a large number of people pretending it to be so. Weaving my way through the crowded room, glass in hand, I passed Bruno van Thaal and a knot of his chums; small, elegant, soft-eyed young men on the fringe of everything – art, theatre, radio, interior decoration, dress designing, and the more precious aspects of authorship.

  Fringe Men, I thought, beaming at them because I liked them; a good title for a book … As I passed them by, they stopped twittering like wrens and stared at me like baby weasels, appraising my clothes and my hairdo. Finding no fault, they called out ‘Hallo, darling!’ and ‘Wonderful party!’ and ‘Kate, you look heavenly!’ But I moved on; I would come back to their little nest later, for that preferred party session, the post mortem.

  Joel Sachs
was talking rapidly and persuasively to one of the newspaper-women, an earnest female scribe who had once delighted us all by writing of a wedding reception: ‘The bridesmaids wore bouffant skirts and little Dutch caps.’ Joel winked at me; he was working, as he always was.

  At Eumor’s group I stopped for a moment. Even more dwarfed than usual, he was deep in conversation with some of his gambling friends, large fleshy men who grasped their tumblers of whisky as if they were Indian clubs, and constantly stared about them in search of something to bet on – the number of people in the room, drinks on a tray, flies on the wall, waiters with spectacles, women without hats, men with blue eyes.

  It was a world that Eumor loved, though it had often dealt him serious blows; I already knew from other sources that the bookmakers had taken him to the cleaners, the previous weekend, and that this was one of those recurrent moments when he needed £12,000 by Wednesday, without fail … He would get it, of course; he always did. But for gamblers like Eumor, Monday and Tuesday were often bad days.

  ‘Great party, Kate,’ said the largest man in the group, whom I recognised vaguely as a nightclub owner, splendidly indifferent to the law, with such diversified interests as roulette, wrestling promotion and the illegal importation of brook trout from Lourenço Marques. ‘Always the best party of the year.’

  ‘But can I sell you any advertising?’ I asked seriously.

  He guffawed. ‘I don’t want to advertise,’ he said, between wheezes. ‘The police wouldn’t like it at all.’

  ‘Then you must be nice to Eumor instead.’

  He laughed again. ‘Nice to a Greek? Do you think I want to cut my own throat?’

  Eumor kissed my hand, with that air of sexual promise which for him took the place of performance. ‘Thank you, dar-r-r-ling. I really need friends tonight.’

  ‘Anything except money, Eumor.’

  His eyes gleamed. ‘For you I do it free. Later on, yes?’

  ‘I’ll leave the key under the mat.’