The Pillow Fight

by Nicholas Monsarrat

  Her indignation was so fierce that I could not help laughing. The proud lineage had certainly taken a beating, and I knew, better than most people, what it must have meant to her. By now, I was beginning to suspect that this crusade of hers was grounded in something else beside political morality, that injured self-respect was playing a large part. But this was clearly not the moment to raise the point.

  ‘Don’t laugh,’ she snapped irritably. ‘You wouldn’t have thought it funny if you’d been there, or if it had happened to you.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘You looked so indignant.’

  ‘I was indignant. I was furious. And I still am.’

  ‘Well, you’re home safe and sound now, anyway.’

  ‘And that wasn’t so easy, either,’ she flared out again. ‘Do you know, I had the damnedest time bringing Julia back here with me? First they said, no, she couldn’t leave, she had to stay there for further investigation. Then they said she could go, but they would impound her passport so that she couldn’t come back to South Africa again. Johnny, it’s her country! … If it hadn’t been for Gerald Thyssen going into action and getting them to drop it, Julia would still be there, being hauled in for questioning whenever the police felt like it. And she’s still going to run into trouble, whenever we want to go back.’

  ‘What did Gerald do?’ I asked, curious.

  ‘He’s Gerald Thyssen,’ she said curtly. ‘He mines gold. It’s the only thing these crooks understand.’

  After a moment, during which I felt somewhat excluded from great affairs, I said again: ‘Well, you’re out of it, anyway.’

  ‘But that’s exactly what they want,’ she declared. Apparently I was doomed, tonight, to produce all the wrong answers, the kind which only triggered a fresh fuse. ‘They want people like me to get out, and stay out, so they can go ahead with their stinking little police state. There’s a terrible I’m-all-right-Jack process going on down there; whatever awful thing happens, no one does anything about it, as long as they’re left alone themselves. It’s like bullying at school; the victim takes the heat off all the others … It just isn’t good enough, not for any country, and particularly a country where the people being bullied are a five-to-one majority. Black South Africans won’t stand for it much longer. They’re sick of injustice, they’re sick of being kicked around, and they’re sick of running the elevators.’

  I shrugged. ‘Who isn’t?’ I was growing tired of this topic myself; all I had was a thirst, and it wasn’t a thirst for facts, nor for causes either. ‘Who doesn’t want to step up in the world? We all do.’

  But I had only lit another firecracker. ‘Oh Johnny, don’t say things like that!’ she burst out passionately. ‘That isn’t even remotely the problem, for people like you. These are men and women who have nothing! All their hopes, all their real lives are being squeezed out of them. I saw it happening. That man Koopman was making a slum out of Maraisgezicht, and his friends are making a slum out of the whole country. We can’t just ignore it; the bell is tolling for us. All cruel laws are wrong, whether they hit you or whether they pass you by.’ Suddenly she got up, and crossed over to me where I stood by the drinks cabinet; she seemed to be on fire with her determination. ‘Come back with me, Johnny. Let’s go together. There’s so much for both of us to do, and we’re just the people to do it.’

  The plea was incomprehensible; it would have made more sense if she had been urging me to sign up as a space-pilot. I almost backed away from her, so startling was the lunatic proposition. Though I wanted to avoid an argument, there was a tide here which had to be stemmed, before it ran completely wild and carried me away with it. I half turned from her, in physical disengagement, and busied myself at the bar. Over my shoulder, I said, as coolly as I could: ‘How can I conceivably do that?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Why not? There are hundreds of arguments.’ I was untwisting the wires of a fresh bottle of champagne, and I gave this the attention it deserved before going back to my answer. ‘To begin with, I can’t afford to. I’m busy now, and I shall always have to work for a living, in the future. Work means writing. I can’t possibly break it off now. It’s ridiculous to ask me.’

  ‘I’m not asking you to break anything off. You can work in South Africa.’

  ‘Not if I get tied up in politics.’

  ‘But that would be your work. Writing about South Africa, writing about race relations, writing about the people there. You know so much about them already. You could do enormous good, even if you never touched active politics, just by being there and telling the rest of the world what was going on.’

  ‘I’ve done that once already.’

  After a moment’s silence, I heard her voice say: ‘Johnny, can’t you even look at me?’

  ‘Oh, nuts!’ I exclaimed. I turned, irritated and impatient. ‘What the hell is all this? Kate, you’re talking absolute rubbish. I can’t go to South Africa, or anywhere else where the very stones are crying out for justice. I live and work here in New York. I like it. This is where my life is, and this is where I’m going to live it.’

  ‘It’s not a life. It’s a selfish holiday.’

  I drank deep before I answered: ‘It may be selfish, but it’s not a holiday. I do work, damn it!’

  ‘What at? Making a funny musical out of a deadly serious subject? You’re just wasting your talents. You’re wasting your feelings. You’re wasting everything that ever made you worthwhile, as a man.’

  ‘So your courier said.’

  ‘Courier?’

  ‘Eumor. The cunning old Greek messenger of the gods, Eumorphopulos. He gave me an earful, too.’

  She had crossed to the sofa, as if in retreat or despair, and was preparing to lie down again. ‘Did you listen to him?’ she asked more quietly.

  ‘I listened. Then we went to a strip-tease show. I’m just not in the market for a reforming influence.’

  She sighed, dropping her head back on the sofa arm. ‘It’s this damned town, I suppose.’

  ‘It’s not this damned town!’ I said, with some spirit. ‘New York is wonderful, if you allow it to be.’

  ‘Look what it’s done to you.’

  ‘It hasn’t done anything that wasn’t there before.’

  She shook her head. ‘That’s not true, Johnny. Basically, you’re not phoney, you don’t give a damn about status or money. You’ve just lost your head over this crazy sort of life. You’re in the middle of a love affair.’

  ‘Now, now,’ I said. ‘No re-hash.’

  ‘Oh, not that one. You’re having a love affair with New York. With the idea of New York, the idea of fun and games, and a wild time as a celebrity, and money to throw away on things that nobody in their senses would ever want. It’s the very worst of the western world, a distillation of the whole damned idea of luxury, where they do more for the man who has everything than the child who has nothing.’

  ‘I read that somewhere.’

  ‘Then I wish you’d get it through your skull that it’s the literal truth.’

  And so on. Kate would not stop making her absurd presentation, and eventually I ran out of patience, and we went off to our separate beds, as sundered as we had ever been. I was angry with her both for spoiling a perfectly good homecoming, and for interrupting me, with this picket-line parade of banners and slogans, when I was trying to concentrate on something quite different.

  I was working, as hard as I had done for a long time, and this was the wrong moment for her to mount another crusade. There had been more than enough of that already. First it had been my awful writing, now it was my awful politics – or lack of them. Both campaigns were aimed at involving me in the fatal trap of participation.

  I did not want to be involved, I did not want to take part. Though, long ago, I had believed that all artists should be thus ‘engaged’, that they owe
d mankind a duty to dismantle the flaws and cruelties and indecencies of our mortal house, and then to build something better with whatever sound timbers they could find, I did not think so now.

  A writer, especially, had enough to do, scratching a living from the bare earth of invention … I took to bed with me a fresh astonishment – the totally unreal moment when I asked Kate, in exasperation: ‘Why do you feel this way about South Africa?’ and she had answered, soberly and seriously: ‘I learned it from you, and I shall always be grateful.’

  That was really the low ebb of this weird little fairy-tale.

  It was good to escape, each day, to another theatre, where I could play something like a man-sized role. There was more work for me now on The Pink Safari than there had ever been; Erwin Orwin was getting his money’s worth, and I was glad to give it him, in a job which involved more question marks, more sudden crises, and more quick thinking than anything I had tackled before.

  Though we were now well into rehearsals, the show was still growing, and changing shape, and losing a bit here and adding a bit there; like a baby in the womb, the main format was traditional, but there were certain processes at work which would determine whether a fat boy, a thin girl, or a six-toed midget would presently emerge. If there was anything I could do, by way of last-minute jewels from my smoke-filled head, to ease the delivery, I was there to do it.

  As an early Christmas present to me, Erwin had given Susan a minute part in the show. It was only a token appearance, involving a couple of those connective phrases which, in old musical comedies, used to be expressed as ‘Girls! Here comes the Duke!’ followed by glad cries, merry laughter and a reprise of ‘Welcome to Monte Carlo!’

  But it gave her an obvious pleasure, and kept her within the fold. Erwin, discounting my thanks, remarked: ‘It saves trouble if you know where they are all day,’ and that was perhaps all that he needed to say, about a situation which had settled down to a pattern of slightly pedestrian sin.

  Following the prudent tradition of such affairs, Susan never called me at the apartment. We used to meet in the early evenings, after rehearsal, and go back to her place on 54th Street; this hallowed time-slot for lovemaking, between the office and the domestic dinner table, was really all I could manage, without going too deep into lies and evasions. It had come to be enough.

  The affair was now not very wild, not very anything. The new body was now the accustomed one; though beautiful as ever, warm and entwining as long grass under sunlight, she was no longer the girl I had to have at all costs. She was a girl who was there when I felt like it, the free pass which never lapsed, and that was a different thing altogether.

  She was also, subtly yet perceptibly, a girl who was ready with the withdrawal symptoms, in case of need.

  ‘Do you still sleep with her?’ she asked me one evening when the matter of who-slept-with-whom was an appropriate topic.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Of course not.’

  She sighed. ‘Men always say that.’

  ‘Do they?’ The bare-faced lie seemed a good mirror of our situation at that moment, and I saw no harm in it. ‘Then it’s probably always true.’

  ‘Are you getting tired of me, Johnny?’

  ‘No. Not in the least.’ I rolled over and looked at her. I was tired of her, at that moment, but it had been a matter of mutual arrangement. ‘I thought I just showed you.’

  ‘That doesn’t count … But I wouldn’t want you to go on, if–’ She threw the rest of the sentence away, as usual, and started another one. ‘I don’t mean you have to make up your mind, or anything. But this has gone on for a long time, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Nearly ten months,’ I agreed. ‘I haven’t kept any other score.’

  ‘It’s been the longest ever, for me.’

  ‘I’m glad.’

  ‘You’d say if you were bored?’

  ‘I’d say.’

  ‘What’s she like, really? What do you talk about? I hear she’s beautiful.’

  ‘Yes.’ I couldn’t get interested in any part of this conversation. ‘You hear right.’

  ‘And rich.’

  ‘Loaded.’

  ‘Johnny?’

  ‘M’m.’

  ‘You never say anything about her. Say something.’

  ‘Curried shrimps à la Creole.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s the thing she cooks best.’ I reached out to touch the nearest plane of Susan’s body, which happened to be agreeably rounded. ‘Knock it off, Susan,’ I said, not too severely. ‘You don’t want to talk about this, and neither do I.’

  ‘I don’t really mind if you do sleep with her,’ she said, and I felt that this was true. ‘I just want to know about it, that’s all.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just so that I know where I am.’

  ‘You’re in bed with me,’ I told her. ‘What more could a girl ask?’

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘But don’t say I make you do things you don’t want to … Wasn’t that an awful row at rehearsal this afternoon?’

  ‘It was just a row.’

  ‘I don’t know how people can behave like that.’

  ‘They’re actors.’

  Her quick change of subject was typical, not only of her attitude towards us – a friendly, take-it-or-leave-it permissiveness – but of what she was really interested in nowadays. Susan had become deeply intrigued with the small internal politics of the show, which I could never take seriously; for her, it really was exciting to watch, listen to, speculate upon and endlessly discuss the private lives and public demeanour of every member of the Safari cast.

  Such up-to-the-minute gossip had become of daily, hourly, engrossing importance to her; and in this she was only joining the throng, following a trend which was probably as old as the theatre itself.

  It was a self-contained world, private, trivial and confined. One was aware all the time of the total absorption of theatre people, not in their art (which though dull would have been excusable), but in themselves. Their days were filled with tremendous, to-and-fro discussion about nothing – about make-up, diet, clothes, missed cues, dry-ups, other shows, flops, smashes, show-stoppers, good and bad reviews and arguments in which they had demolished the opposition. There was occasional, grudging praise for perfection, and instant, spiteful comment on any observed weakness. It was like a nursery, full of boastful little show-offs stealing each other’s toys.

  Above all, these people, like most exhibitionists, were immensely vain. Happy when they were bitching about the rest of mankind, they were happiest of all when listening to single-minded homage of themselves. The old theatre chestnut: ‘But let’s talk about you. What did you think of my performance?’ still remained the classic attitude.

  At the beginning, when Susan joined the cast, I had feared that I might have to watch her being propositioned before my shadowed eyes; that, in this world of handsome, active youth, jealousy would find too much to feed on. I need not have worried. On a few occasions, I did observe the faint beginnings of a romantic approach. But it never lasted, it ran out of muscle well before the muscles came into play. These young men were actors, and their sole enduring love affair was with themselves.

  Buttressing this vanity was an immediate readiness to quarrel. There were perennial feuds between various members of the cast, devious intrigues whose currents altered each day, like the changing delta of a shallow-running river. As on the stage itself, everything had to be larger and brighter coloured and more dramatic than life. The most furious rows could change to vows of eternal friendship overnight, and veer back again at the drop of a mink stole.

  This was the touchy world of the tiff, the hunched shoulder, and the smacked face, and if one did not join in and take sides, one was rated heartless or, worse still, conceited, and a fresh groupin
g, a mute stockade of set faces and meaning looks, very soon made one aware of the fact.

  Some of our crises stemmed from having a cast more ‘mixed’ than in any other comparable operation in New York. We would have had our troubles anyway, but this was an extra guarantee of action. The tender area of race relations (referred to by Susan and her friends as ‘the black and white bit’) ensured that when all other themes of discord ran out, there remained a rich lode of ill-will which had scarcely been mined at all.

  The row that afternoon, which Susan had recalled with such pleasurable awe, had been typical of our brittle, tantrum-prone society. There were four leads in The Pink Safari, two black and two white; they all seemed to get along pretty well (‘So they damned well ought to, for the money,’ Erwin Orwin had growled, when I mentioned this amiable circumstance), except for Dave Jenkin, the leading Negro actor, who, as a matter of professional habit, did not get along with anyone but himself.

  Dave Jenkin was a promoted song-and-dance man who had progressed, by an admittedly rocky road which would have vanquished anyone with less endurance, guts and gall, from small-time vaudeville player to Broadway personality and (when he found something to suit him) a very competent actor; in the process, he had also graduated, with outstanding success, from little bastard to big. Within the sacred grove of race relations, however, no one was allowed to point this fact out. He was one emperor who, by statutory falsehood, was always fully clothed.