Free The Pillow Fight by Nicholas Monsarrat

‘to get Johannesburg properly zoned. There’s going to be a white area, and a native area. That makes sense, doesn’t it? You don’t want them all mixed up.’
    ‘But it’s so cruel!’ broke in Steele. ‘My God, they already have to get up at five o’clock every morning, to queue up for those bloody buses to get to work by eight! Now they’re being pushed even farther away. And this place belongs to them! It’s theirs. How would you like to be kicked out of your house or flat or whatever it is, with no compensation and no appeal?’
    ‘I wouldn’t like it at all,’ I answered, ‘and I’m taking very good care to see that it will never happen.’
    ‘To you.’
    ‘To me.’
    ‘But that’s so selfish!’ said Steele, exasperated as I had intended him to be.
    ‘I am selfish,’ I said.
    To my surprise and annoyance, Father Shillingford was smiling at me. It was not an amused smile; it even had elements of compassion and understanding, which I did not care for at all. Finally he said: ‘Miss Marais likes to be her own worst advertisement.’
    It occurred to me suddenly that he and I were illustrating two aspects of integrity, the sacred and the profane, and that I much preferred mine. I engaged his intrusive blue eyes for a moment before replying: ‘I don’t fool myself, and I try not to fool other people.’
    We did not stay long after that; I endured a few more streets, a few more smells, a few more insolent or sullen stares. More strongly than ever, I felt that I knew all this without being told it; I knew that Johannesburg natives were poor and meanly housed, that there was violence and theft, that they did not like or trust the white man. If it was Father Shillingford’s self-imposed task to try to soften this hard core of maladjustment, well and good. But when brought face to face with it, no bell tolled for me, nor would ever do so.
    It was like getting involved with other people’s children on an aircraft or a train. If you betrayed the smallest interest in one of these deceptive brats, you were likely to become mother for the duration. Its sticky fingers would explore your hair, its wringing-wet pants would be pressed to your skirt; all its terror and boredoms would be your own. There was only one tactic to be employed on such occasions; to ignore it utterly, and if necessary pull a horrible face and frighten it away for good.
    When we were driving away from the smells and the corrosive dirt of Teroka, Jonathan Steele said: ‘I’ll bet that’s one social engagement we won’t be reading about in your column.’
    I was now comfortably beyond such minor strifes, but I wasn’t speechless on that account. ‘You really are rude, aren’t you?’
    His hands on the steering wheel of his rotten car were, for a moment, steady. He said, with what seemed to me to be extreme care and concentration: ‘Kate, you are very beautiful and very accomplished. But whether you are lying flat on your back, or striding along to victory, Teroka is still there.’

 
     
Chapter Four
     
    I forgot Teroka speedily, though the words ‘very beautiful and very accomplished’ stayed with me, echoing for two busy days in many different places – Joel Sachs’ office, at conferences in my suite, at parties, in the street. At the advanced age of twenty-six, I still received enough compliments to satisfy a not-too-swollen ego; it was odd that I should remember Jonathan Steele’s, particularly since he had tacked on to it a sexual image – ‘lying flat on your back’ – which normally would have annoyed me very much. I decided that I wasn’t working hard enough … I did not see Steele again; Eumor said that he was ‘busy on his master-work’, and Bruno van Thaal said: ‘He can fry in hell for all I care,’ which seemed to dispose of the matter to the satisfaction of all parties.
    Meanwhile I was enjoying Johannesburg, which I always thought of as ‘my town’ because I was born there, at a time when my father