The Pillow Fight by Nicholas Monsarrat Page A

Jonathan was at the radiogram, changing the records over – we had had an hour-long session of Dixieland, which had proved about as inspiring as a programme of Sousa marches. In sudden panic, I was just about to tell him that I had changed my mind, and that he must go home, when he took charge.
    He turned towards me. He was pale still, and tense, but suddenly he was a lover instead of an intruder, looking down at me with a kind of despairing tenderness, as though searching for the exact words he thought I deserved.
    When they came, they were forthright, the way I was accustomed to talk myself, and had unhappily forgotten.
    He said: ‘I want to stay with you tonight. The way we imagined it in Johannesburg. Things haven’t changed – they’ve only come to a crisis. But it’s our crisis. Can I stay?’
    I had to match his spirit, or be a coward forever.
    I said: ‘Give me twenty minutes’ start.’
    He kissed me before I left the room, a sweet kiss, our first. It sustained me as far as my bedroom, but there I lapsed horribly again, the prey to every kind of paralysing emotion. In my bath, at my dressing-table, in bed at last, I was conscious only of foreboding, last-minute fears; fear that I was wrong to throw away the years of discipline, that I would be no good with him, that it wouldn’t work, that we had staked too much on the chance of physical concord, that I would cry or suddenly run away, that as a lover he would be ‘finished’ within a few seconds, leaving us both marooned on a foolish limb. First-night nerves. I swallowed my whisky, half-smoked three cigarettes, threw off the eiderdown and drew it back on again.
    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