The Pillow Fight (11 page)

I was trembling. I knew it was absolutely hopeless. I wanted to lock the door, or faint, or die.

I need not have worried at all. Indeed, halfway through that wakeful night, I wanted to laugh for joy at my foolish fears. For he was wonderful, and we were wonderful. Taking charge again, first calming my thundering heart and jittery body with words and soft hands, he made love to me with enormous care, and gentleness, and potency. Failure never threatened us, every moment seemed preordained by some singing pattern of success.

When I was ready, he was ready. When I grew wild, he was there to match it. Presently he was like a warrior at the gate, and, in the end, like a god.

We had been right all the time.

In our day-long, night-long, week-long dream, where we wandered over such a vast area of delight that we could never see nor feel its confines, music aided and abetted us at all hours. It happened that we shared, normally, a somewhat austere musical taste – Bach, Brahms, the later Mozart – but this was not a time for the attentive ear. Softer airs, warmer climes, were our need and our pleasure.

We fell in love, not only with each other, but with oddments of music which forever recalled that first meeting; and though they ‘dated’ us later, we were not then ashamed to be the stepchildren of such dreamy nonsense as the tunes from
South Pacific
, and
My Fair Lady
, and even
Guys and Dolls
. Among a host of other things, some cerebral, some lustful, our love was deeply sentimental. Dance music of this sort, we found, linked many moods, many desires, all of them pricking the spirit, warming the tender flesh, or piercing the heart at will.

‘What did you really think when you first met me?’ I asked.

‘I thought you were a very beautiful, complete bitch.’

‘I am.’

‘Oh, I know. But not all through. Not for ever. And not for me.’

‘We’re so unlike each other, really.’

‘It doesn’t matter … What did you think of me, Kate?’

‘Untidy. Mixed up.’

‘I am.’

‘But
good
. I’m not good.’

‘Perhaps you will be.’

‘Perhaps we’ll both change. Wouldn’t that be funny?’

‘No. It would be very awkward indeed.’

‘Why, Johnny?’

‘If you became a good-natured columnist, and I became a self-regarding, self-centred novelist, we’d both be out of a job.’

‘I have a little money.’

‘Give it all to me.’

The fact that no man had made love to me for more than two years involved some physical intractability. It did not last, but in our shared mood of candour, I had to speak of it.

‘You made me feel almost virginal, the first few times.’

In the darkness, I felt one of his eyebrows gently raised. ‘That was not apparent,’ he told me.

‘But it’s true.’

‘Then you are
my
virgin,’ he said. ‘Let’s call it a special category.’

He was very good for a girl’s morale; not only in the obvious ways, such as being ready to make love to me whenever I gave the smallest signal, but in his admiration of attributes that I myself was somewhat shy of. For example, so far from laughing at my modest configuration – 34-25-36 – he seemed to adore it.

‘They are perfect, Kate,’ he said, at an appropriate moment, ‘and they’re perfectly in proportion, too. Don’t believe all this American nonsense about men really liking 42-inch busts. That’s just the pressure of advertising; they want to sell more elastic. When you see it in the flesh, it looks top heavy, ungainly. All those Italian film stars look like cows walking backwards on their front legs.’

He was an only child, and an orphan since the nursery days. He had never had anyone close to him, to cherish and to be cherished by. Indeed, he was astonishingly lonely. For him, no sister had ever talked the night out; no fond mother had warmed the cocoa and held the jealous inquisition; no other woman had told him, in honest ecstasy: ‘Come close to me, it is mine, it is yours, use it, enjoy it, murder it, slake it, take it.’ There was a moment when he said to me, in true wonderment: ‘Kate,
you are all things
.’ It was my happiest, the moment I had been born for.

Now he was overwhelmed by love. But he was the pilot still. He seemed able to channel and control my heart and body; I could caress and adore him towards our goal, but when he said: ‘
Now!
’ it was I who obeyed, I who gasped and drowned. He had, after all, never stopped being a man, and with me, near me, on me, in me, he proved it in steady mastery, beyond any doubt in the world.

There was one special afternoon, in the warm sunshine, on the screened balcony, when I wore (or rather, discarded) a white robe which was a favourite of mine. We made love then with such shared tenderness, such unique eloquence, that I remembered it always. We slept for three hours afterwards, and woke to hear each other murmur: ‘I adore you.’

‘Oh Steele,’ I said, in the middle of the night. ‘Steele, Steele.’

‘The name in bed is Jonathan.’

‘But the feel is Steele.’ I looked past his bare shoulder at the luminous clock. ‘I can’t still be drunk, at five?’

‘No. Steele it is, Steele forever.’

‘How many babies was that?’

‘About eleven millions, they say.’

‘Darling, so lavish.’

‘The last of the big spenders.’

What a good word, suddenly, was ‘man’.

I never went near my office, during that whole week. Ordinarily I would have been shocked at such indiscipline – indeed, it would have been inconceivable; but now, wandering as if drugged and dreaming, in a private world, hand-in-hand with Jonathan Steele, I found it impossible to care. When I woke up, that would be time enough to feel ashamed … Mrs Patch, my secretary, rang up two or three times, more to check on my sanity than to relay any vital problems. She could not have been reassured by any of my answers.

Mostly we did nothing, and yet, as with a Chinese box-within-a-box, we did everything at the same time. We slept, made love, ate and drank, listened to our sentimental music, became aware of successive dawns piercing the curtains, watched Cape Town harbour far below beyond our private drawbridge, heard by day the street-sellers’ cries and the strange ‘fish-horns’ that announced the morning’s catch, and by night the dogs and the drunks and the church bells counting our loving hours.

We talked and listened to each other with longing attention. We laughed, and stared at each other in enraptured silence. We kissed in tenderness, and then inwild excitement. We learned all of each other’s bodies, and much of each other’s hearts and minds.

We only went out three times in seven days, and that grudgingly. We drove along the coast to Hout Bay, a fishing village haunted by artistic human flotsam reputed to be homosexuals, lesbians, half-and-halfers; our own preoccupation was with lobsters. Once, on Julia’s night out, we dined at Cape Town’s most monolithic hotel, where the resident clientele was very old indeed, and (it was rumoured) the waiters conducted a running sweepstake on who among the customers would die next, and watched their own candidates greedily for signs of dragging feet, failing appetite, a bad colour at nightfall … And once we went racing, and made a little money, and had a little quarrel.

On the racecourse, I had the feeling that everyone was staring at us, and I had never felt more glad of it. I borrowed some money from one bookmaker, got a side-of-the-mouth tip from another, and, thus armed, took a third one for a ride with a walk-away winner at eight-to-one. I talked to an old flame of mine, who, searching my face, said: ‘My God, you never looked like this for me!’ and perhaps some of my intense happiness overflowed into my manner, because Jonathan, watching us with shadowed eyes from the Pay Out queue, grew quite livid with anger and would scarcely utter a word when he returned. We made it up
ad interim
in the Stewards’ private bar, when he said: ‘Jealousy will be very dull later on. But now it’s desperately important, an essential part of loving each other. I want you to keep
all
of yourself for me … Can we go home now?’

We went home, practically running the last few yards, and falling into each other’s arms behind the slammed front door of my flat. And then, with no hurry at all, it was Sunday morning, and we drove out, as promised, to Maraisgezicht, my home.

I had hoped all along that he would love the place, since Maraisgezicht to me was irresistible; it was my one piece of family snobbery that everyone should instantly feel the same way about it. Jonathan did … Maraisgezicht means, in the old Dutch tongue now bastardised into Afrikaans, ‘Marais’ View’; and Marais’ view was obviously that he should live in the utmost elegance and comfort, and his children’s children after him. To this end he had bought, two hundred years earlier, a whole slope of a mountain in the Constantia district, spent a fortune on building and landscaping, and produced one of the world’s most beautiful houses.

Andries Marais had settled at the Cape in 1750, when people came to stay and built to last; much of the stone of the house, every stick of timber, and all the furniture had been brought from Holland or the Dutch East Indies, and there assembled on a pattern in which good taste, home-sickness, and a frank burgher-like self-esteem all played a part.

There were not now remaining more than half a dozen such great houses, in the classical Cape-Dutch mode; for us, their builders – Van Riebeeck, Van der Stel, Serrurier, Cloete – were part of the fabric of South Africa, and their very names were like jewels – Vergelegen, Stellenberg, Steenberg, Groot Constantia, Morgenster, Alphen. But no jewel shone brighter than Maraisgezicht, on that or any other morning.

We approached it slowly by a mile-long oak avenue, past the low-lying vineyards, with the sun through the interlaced branches dappling our pathway; and I heard Jonathan catch his breath as the house came into view, unfolding in a fantastic backdrop of gleaming white walls, great curving gables, massive window shutters of polished teak, and a flagged courtyard with the twin whitewashed columns of a slave bell at its farther margin. When the perspective was completed, all was noble and peaceful, as far as the eye could reach.

‘But it’s wonderful, Kate,’ said Jonathan, rather breathless, as we came to a stop. ‘And the view …’ His eyes turned from the house to the Constantia valley below us, twenty hazy miles of trees, vineyards and sunny pastures. ‘I can’t understand why you don’t live here for ever.’

‘Nor can I, sometimes.’

Simeon, the major-domo, came down the wide steps to greet us, splendid in his white frock coat, scarlet tasselled sash and buckled shoes; above this display of consequence, his austere Cape Malay face was unbending, like proud mahogany. As with many of the Cape families, he bore our name; he was Simeon Marais, the eighth of the line, as my father was the eighth of his. Slave forbears meant nothing to either side now, and perhaps they had never done so.

‘Well, Simeon.’

‘Miss Kate is a day late,’ he said, with a slight relenting smile. As he spoke, his hands moved, like a conductor’s, motioning other servants to unload the luggage. Various dogs bounded up, plastering my white linen slacks with yellow dust; at the edge of the terrace, one of the bad-tempered peacocks screeched and spread his tail like a rainbow fan.

‘We went racing, Simeon.’

‘With good fortune?’

‘Yes, for a change … This is Mr Steele.’

‘Sir,’ said Simeon. His face grew austere again; like Julia, he exhibited a long-term jealousy where I was concerned; he had been warding off unworthy suitors for twenty-six years, and there was a clear assumption that he would continue to do so. ‘You are staying tonight, Miss Kate?’

‘Yes.’

I led Jonathan indoors, slowly, happily; across the screened
stoep
, one of the world’s nicest drinking places, and then into the
vorhuis
with its frieze of blue Batavian tiles. Here, as in the other rooms, and all over the house, the polished elegance of the past still reigned; the sun fell benignly on satinwood and ebony,
imbuia
and burr walnut; on the brass locks of a huge linen press, on
kists
of yellow-wood and oiled teaks; on Delftware brought out from Holland by Andries Marais himself, and blue-and-white Nankin china commanded from the other side of the world, when the Dutch East India Company was young.

Our feet fell softly upon silk carpets, exquisitely patterned, but worn thin by generations of dancing slippers, riding boots,
veldskoen
, the high button shoes of my great-grandmother, my father’s shooting boots, and now by our own twentieth-century rope-soled
espadrilles
. A trio of Famille Rose wine-servers caught the sun afresh on their ancient glaze as we passed the dining room door.

Of course, so much of all this was going to waste … My long-dead and adored mother had graced this house like an angel; when she died, and my brother was killed there also, the heart went out of it for my father, and he was now a rare visitor to a place which, though uniquely lovely, held too many poisonous memories for him. As I had told Jonathan, an agent ran the winery, another administered the estate as a whole; for the rest, it was a focal point for Cape sightseers, and a weekend dormitory for me.

We returned to this matter of desertion later, after a walk round the estate, a hand-in-hand tourist’s view of the main vineyards, the slopes with the young vines, the 2,000-gallon vats in the vast cool cellars, the ‘slave quarters’ which now housed a hundred happy families. At lunch in the high-panelled dining-room, our view through the top half of the ‘stable door’ was a lovely square of sunlight, a vista of red and yellow leaves, jacaranda, proteas, chincherinchees, framing a pathway leading off into towering oak trees; a view occasionally notched by the two pointed ears, no more, of one of the inquisitive ridge-back hounds.

Everything, as usual, was just right, and I could feel the magic working inside Jonathan, see its reflection in his alert, watchful, surrendering face. At the end he sat back in his high-backed chair of Sumatran wood, eating our Hanepoot grapes, drinking our own
vin rosé
, loving me, utterly content.