The Pillow Fight by Nicholas Monsarrat Page B

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’.

 
     
Chapter Seven
     
    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