The Pillow Fight Read online

  We lunched, as usual, at the most civilised restaurant in Johannesburg, Fraternelli’s; this was a four-times-a-year ritual, and the ritual allowed us to be greedy, self-indulgent, and just a little bit high at the finish. We all had caviar an blinis, with Akvavit as a lubricant, to start with; then Bruno and I had truite an bleu, Joel Sachs grappled with a steak obviously culled from the biggest ox in the Transvaal, and Eumor, grumbling all the time, went off into the kitchen with Fraternelli and came back presently with the oddest-looking Italian confection, loosely labelled cannelloni, that I had seen since my last visit.

  Pol Roger eased it all down; Armagnac pronounced the blessing; and Fraternelli came up with a rich and rare cheese from the Bel Paese stable, by way of farewell. And lest anyone should think this a specially Lucullan lunch, by Johannesburg standards, I can assure them that it was not.

  Fraternelli served us, with much theatrical sleight of hand and finger-snapping; though disappointed that we had not ordered anything in the flambé category, so that he could attract attention to his favourite customers by applying a blowtorch and singeing the chandelier, he still contrived to make a La Scala production of the meal. He was a unique Johannesburg institution, capable, talented and enormously successful; in this city, whether you wanted a directors’ dinner for twenty or a seduction snack for two, food meant Fraternelli, and that was all there was to it.

  He was a middle-aged Italian with two crosses to bear: the English language, which gave him every conceivable kind of trouble, and women, who served him even worse. If he could have mastered the one with the doomed facility with which he succumbed to the other, he would have been a happy man indeed.

  He always called me ‘Miss Mary’ near enough to Miss Marais, and much nearer than he came to a lot of other words.

  We were cheerful, rather noisy, and talkative in a slanderous sort of way. It was a well-lit, beautifully decorated room with a lot of elegant wrought ironwork framing the windows, and it was crammed with people who behaved according to their several public habits – eating stolidly, drinking deep, staring round them, table-hopping, waving, quarrelling, spilling water jugs, falling down when they paid the bill.

  People table-hopped a good deal in our direction; it is a habit I can do without, particularly when one is hungry and fond of food; and we were not very forthcoming to such visitors. But it isn’t easy to be dismissive with one’s mouth full.

  Women tended to dress well when they went to Fraternelli’s, and I noticed several people I knew who had obviously shot the works on their spring outfits. My dear silly friend Mrs Marchant, wearing a hat that I coveted, waved to me from across the room; another grim-looking woman whose name I couldn’t remember stopped as she neared our table, remarked somewhat coldly: ‘So sorry we can’t come tonight,’ and passed on.

  ‘I didn’t invite her,’ said Bruno, with relish.

  ‘Why not?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t you remember? Last time she got as high as a kite, and started juggling with the stuffed avocados.’

  Fraternelli, who according to his custom had been listening closely, leant over and confided: ‘When wine is in, brain is out.’

  ‘Well said, Fraternelli,’ I answered, ‘You’re getting positively colloquial.’

  He beamed, and hurried away to his dictionary.

  ‘And anyway,’ said Bruno, pursuing his theme, ‘she’s so ugly.’

  ‘I am ugly,’ said Eumor, with conviction. ‘This party is for beautiful people only?’

  ‘It is for my friends,’ I answered. ‘It is also for my many enemies, for the business connections of Kate Marais Advertising, for people I grew up with when I was a pretty little Johannesburg girl, for old chums of my father, and for odds and sods paying a visit to darkest Africa. It is to give me pleasure, and for Bruno to enjoy himself, fiddling the invitations.’

  ‘Were you a pretty little girl?’ asked Joel.

  ‘No, hideous. People would gaze at my brother, and say: “What a perfect angel!” and then they’d look at me, and say: “This is going to be the brainy one.” Very mortifying.’

  ‘You’ve come on since then, dear,’ said Bruno.

  ‘I was always ugly,’ said Eumor.

  We talked about that night’s party, a yearly function for my firm, wildly expensive and great fun. Bruno and Joel Sachs did the invitations between them; I, first at long range and then a good deal closer, laid down the law about the decorations, the food, the entertainment and the service. In a city of parties, some of them excellent, we always tried to give ours a special quality partly for prestige reasons, partly because that is the only kind of party to give. Not for me the dusty canapés and tepid drinks, the crenellated fish-paste sandwiches which only a professional caterer could possibly dream up.

  Generally, about three hundred people came, stayed for four hours, and then went on their way, much elevated. Already there had grown up a fissionable tradition, a tendency for our guests to split into smaller and smaller groups as the remainder of the evening progressed. Many was the continent girl, indeed, who had bestowed her all after the Kate Marais spring gallop, and many the maturer lady who had bestowed it all again.

  Towards three o’clock that afternoon, Johannesburg being a very hard-working town, the restaurant began to clear. We sat back from our table, enjoying the Armagnac and an easier view of our surroundings. Joel and Bruno were arguing about the exact proportions of a dry martini, a traditional area of disagreement among Americans which was only now setting Johannesburg in an uproar. Eumor was giving me the horrid inside story of why one of his horses had failed to win, over the weekend.

  A man whom I had subtly insulted in my column, twenty-four hours earlier, cut me so dead in passing, with such a defiant toss of the head, that I choked, and had to be revived. Fraternelli, now preoccupied with our catering for that evening, brought in (with suitable fanfare) a 16-lb Cape salmon in aspic for me to look at; I complained about the colour of the lemon peel decoration, which clashed with the creature’s eyes, and he retreated again, hand to head, promising much better things in the future.

  Across the wastes of the emptying room, I became aware that I was being stared at.

  It was a man, of course; in spite of the aura of oddity which surrounds any woman who lives alone and likes it, I was not an afficionada of any other club. He was sitting across the room from us, alone at an inconspicuous table; I had an impression of slimness, leanness, black hair, careless dress, disdain, poverty, maleness. (Several newspapers pay me substantial sums every week to recognise such things, even at thirty paces.) He was drinking his coffee, and staring, without insistence and with a certain detachment, at our table, and in particular at me.

  I wondered why he was lunching at Fraternelli’s, and if he were finding it worth the snob-surcharge on the bill, and if so, for what reason.

  I leant across to Eumor, cutting short his sad tale of bribed jockeys, colour-blind race stewards, and trainers sunk in debt, and asked: ‘’Oo dat?’

  Eumor’s creased olive face wrinkled ever further, as if plumbing yet inkier depths of woe. He suddenly looked like the oldest Greek in the world, hearing the final results of Thermopylae.

  ‘Kate, Kate … You’re not listening to me the least little bit.’

  ‘Yes I am, Eumor, and I think it’s all perfectly terrible. But who’s the shady customer with the black hair?’

  ‘That’s me, darling.’

  ‘Eumor …’

  Eumor, who (when he was not pretending to be my lover) liked to do a little social pimping on the side, half turned and glanced in the direction I indicated, though with such a hammed-up air of insouciance that he might as well have fired a signal rocket. Then, to my surprise, he waved in acknowledgement, and turned back to me.

  ‘Stupido! That’s Jonathan Steele.’

  ‘I’m a country girl,’ I said. ‘
Who’s Jonathan Steele?’

  ‘English,’ said Bruno over his shoulder. He always followed other people’s conversations, no matter how preoccupied he seemed to be. ‘Been here about three months.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Writing a book.’

  ‘Oh, God …’

  Nowadays, everyone wrote books about my poor country, and about Africa in general; ranging from Alan Paton (wonderful) to John Gunther (worthy); from Ruark’s blood-and-guts melodrama to Monsarrat’s ponderous headstone over the colonial civil service. Most of the ones written by visitors were trash, ready-minced for the literary supermarket, like parti-coloured hamburger meat; seldom were they better than slick reportage.

  In South Africa especially, we were by now bored to extinction with weekend ‘special correspondents’ who flew in, flew round, and flew out again, confident that they had exhausted the potentialities of this enormously complicated country in seventy-two hours, 2,000 miles of air travel, twenty conversations, three almost traditional love affairs, and one undercover session with devoted Anglican priest, heroic native leader, courageous Jewish advocate – whoever the current journalistic queen-ant might be.

  Personally, I took little interest in South African politics, and still less in race relations. My family had played no small part in all these things, since 1750; and it now seemed to me high time for the Marais clan to take a rest, and concentrate on some kind of selfish personality cult, by way of a change.

  Nor was I especially enamoured of visiting Englishmen who (if they were not rumpled, know-it-all journalists) were mostly those modern versions of the rooinek – terrible pink-faced City types, who arrived with £500 and a third-hand introduction to Harry Oppenheimer, and expected to assume control of the gold and diamond industries by the following weekend.

  True, the English had made an unmatched contribution to my country, far greater than most Afrikaners (even non-Nationalists) would admit; their missionaries were opening up the country, and their soldiers stemming the black tide sweeping down from the north, when many of my ancestors were loafing down in Cape Town, complaining about the heat or slipping off to the slave quarters for a refresher course in sexual callisthenics. But latter-day Englishmen, with their E-string vocal chords and their intact colonial superiority, gave most of us a deep-seated pain which not even a title could assuage.

  I woke from my acid daydream to hear Eumor say: ‘But this one is different, Kate. He is serious. He is going to remain a year.’

  ‘So long?’

  ‘He has written some earlier books also.’

  ‘All same Mickey Spillane.’

  ‘He is paid for by his publishers.’

  ‘Huh?’

  Bruno – and this was exactly the sort of thing he ferreted out – explained. ‘Whoever they are, they’ve advanced enough money for him to live here a year, and write a book about it.’

  That attracted my attention; all the publishers I knew were the hardest of hard-headed people, not at all given to this kind of wagering. ‘What sort of book?’

  Bruno sniffed. ‘With Rod and Gun in Darkest Johannesburg,’ he said spitefully. ‘With full-colour illustration of the author wrestling a stockbroker in the lounge of the Canton Hotel.’

  Eumor looked mystified. ‘Nonsense. It is a roman.’

  ‘Again?’

  ‘A romance. A novel.’

  Sipping my brandy, I took another look at Jonathan Steele. This time our eyes met. He seemed to be smiling faintly. He must have been aware that we were talking about him.

  ‘You want to meet him?’ asked Eumor, the old-time fixer.

  ‘Yes.’

  Close to, he was disappointing, for reasons grounded in a personal foible of mine. Whatever their size or shape, there is no reason why men should not be neat, clean, well-dressed; if we pay them the compliment of taking enormous trouble over our clothes, our make-up and our grooming, they should certainly be prepared to do the same. Rumpled suits, grubby cuffs, wrinkled ties, hair at the nape of the neck, yesterday’s shave – all these are within the spectrum of curable masculine faults.

  Jonathan Steele was as clean as a new nail, but he was untidy, dressed in a rather shabby seersucker suit which should have been sent to the cleaners once more, that very afternoon, and then thrown away. His hair was suitable to a writer, his tie something less even than that. There was a further annoyance. Just as all women who wear high heels with slacks or a bathing suit look like whores, so all men in scuffed suede shoes carry with them a fatal air of poverty and neglect. Steele’s shoes were scuffed to the inner lining.

  Eumor introduced him all round. He waited until I asked him to sit down. He lit my fresh cigarette with the minimum of delay and fuss. He looked at me with a neutral air, neither as if I were the target for tonight (the majority reaction), nor as if his time for such frivolous contacts was severely limited. He seemed in fact a shabby man with brains and good manners; slightly withdrawn, somewhat proud, inwardly confident, as if he alone had the secret but wasn’t boasting about it. An Irish face, vaguely; pale, lean, potent … In a horribly feminine way, I felt that he was working his way into my good opinion, just by sitting there. I didn’t like that at all.

  I asked him what he would drink and, after looking round at all our glasses, he said: ‘Brandy, please,’ with that slight edge to his voice which indicated that brandy would be a treat. Fraternelli took the order, and went behind a screen to execute it. (For some reason, grounded in heaven-knows-what morass of religion, teetotal fanaticism, and misplaced care, women in South Africa were not allowed to see bottles actually uncorked in public; there was thought to be something inflammatory in the gesture though I should have thought the reverse operation was the more suggestive. No matter; the result was that there were no mixed-company bars open to our shy gaze.)

  While we were waiting, I asked Jonathan Steele about his book.

  ‘It’s still in the planning stage,’ he answered, with diffidence. His voice was deeper than I had expected. ‘I’ve only been here three months. I’m still wandering around, and talking to people.’

  ‘What sort of people?’

  He looked at me. ‘You probably wouldn’t know them.’

  I didn’t like that either, though I disguised it with a mock sternness when I spoke next.

  ‘Tell me,’ I commanded, ‘exactly what people you talked to yesterday!’

  He answered, with ironic deliberation: ‘I was in Pretoria. There was a Black Sash demonstration. I watched, and talked to some of the women.’

  I made the usual face. The Black Sash was an organisation which had grown up during the last few years; its members (all women) followed Cabinet ministers around, or picketed them at their offices, or lined up outside the House of Assembly, standing completely silent and immobile, wearing a black sash to indicate that they were in mourning for our somewhat tattered Constitution.

  It was a good tactic, and effective to a limited extent; the police didn’t appreciate it at all, and a number of Cabinet ministers had reacted with a degree of rudeness and crudity which showed that it had got well under their skins.

  Steele noticed my expression, and asked: ‘Don’t you believe in the idea?’

  ‘In a way,’ I answered. ‘But I just don’t want to be a lady in a black sash.’

  ‘You just want to be a lady?’

  Our drinks had arrived, and in the pause that followed his words we all sipped them, as if signalled to do so. Bruno was watching Jonathan Steele and myself, with malicious interest; it was the sort of thing I paid him to do, in other circumstances and with other people; now it was rather disconcerting.

  ‘I’m a working girl,’ I answered curtly. ‘My family have lived a long time in this country – two hundred years, to be exact. Good or bad, we feel it belongs to us. And good or bad, we can choose whether to g
et involved in politics, or whether to do something else instead.’

  ‘But I don’t see,’ he said, again with deceptive diffidence, ‘how you can possibly live in South Africa, and not get involved in politics.’

  ‘It would take too long to explain,’ I answered. ‘But you can.’

  At that point, if I had been ten years younger and my mother still alive and present at the table, she would have raised her eyebrows gently yet decisively, and changed the subject to one of her own choosing; later, in her bedroom, she would have said to me: ‘Katherine, I did not bring you up to be rude to your guests, however odd they may be …’ It was true that Jonathan Steele had made me angry; and the process was still continuing.

  I watched him now, smiling faintly as he surveyed the four of us over the top of his brandy ballon, and I put into my own mental quotation marks the things he was thinking and saying to himself, like the disgruntled, declamatory, round-the-table list one makes up in one’s head at a dull dinner party.

  To Eumor he was saying: ‘You are the classic type of financial juggler.’

  To Joel: ‘You are the wrong kind of Jew.’

  To Bruno: ‘You are a pansy. I don’t like them.’

  To myself: ‘You are beautiful, and unimportant.’

  And to all of us: ‘How can you play like children, living on top of this disgusting volcano?’

  It was therefore with the utmost surprise that I heard myself saying to Jonathan Steele: ‘If you’re not doing anything else this evening, come to our party.’

  Apparently he was the only one who was not surprised; he answered: ‘Thank you – I’d like that very much,’ as if the invitation stemmed from a half-hour’s easy social intercourse. Eumor was staring at me in sardonic inquiry; Bruno frowned petulantly; Joel Sachs went so far as to choke on his Armagnac. But it was Joel, the perceptive Jew, and the only person at the table with a built-in, hereditary preference for peace, who smoothed the moment out.

  ‘That’s fine, Mr Steele!’ he said. ‘Marlborough Hotel, any time after six o’clock … I’m sure there’ll be a lot of people you know.’