Read Online The Pillow Fight by Nicholas Monsarrat - Free Book Online

chairman of companies with scores of men jumping whenever he told them to. ‘It was unforgivably rude.’
    After an uncomfortable pause: ‘I’m sorry,’ said Jonathan Steele. ‘I didn’t mean to be personal.’
    ‘Forget it,’ I told him.
    ‘But it does seem to be true that–’
    ‘Jesus Christ!’ exploded Bruno van Thaal. ‘Can’t you leave it alone?’
    ‘–that if you ignore politics and race relations, you’re just running in blinkers,’ Steele went on, as though Bruno had not spoken. ‘It’s almost as if there were parts of South Africa you were afraid to look at.’
    I knew he was needling me again, but I took it up anyway. ‘Such as?’
    ‘Well, have you ever been round a native location in Johannesburg?’
    ‘No. But I’m not afraid to.’
    ‘Come with me tomorrow, then.’
    ‘I have to work.’
    ‘Ah, well …’
    One of these days, I thought, Jonathan Steele was going to get a knife in the back, and I envied, in advance, the man or woman who would wield it.
    ‘Which location?’ I asked.
    ‘Teroka.’
    ‘Don’t go, Kate,’ said Bruno crossly. ‘It’ll be grisly .’
    ‘Don’t you have to have a permit?’
    ‘I’m meeting Father Shillingford. He can fix it.’
    ‘Oh, God!’ said Bruno. ‘I knew it. That monstrous man!’
    The others were watching me – Muddley somewhat mystified, Gerald Thyssen uneasy, and still prickly-tempered on my behalf.
    ‘I’ve never met Father Shillingford,’ I said.
    ‘He’s a very remarkable person,’ answered Steele.
    ‘What time?’
    ‘Ten o’clock.’
    ‘God damn it!’ I said, half angry, half amused. ‘It’s a deal … And now I want a really big whisky-and-soda.’

 
     
Chapter Three
     
    I was not at my sunniest next morning, and if it had not been for a cast-iron rule never to break appointments, either personal or professional, I would have left a message for Jonathan Steele, and forgotten the whole thing. Joel Sachs and I had a ton of office work to get through; I had lots of people to see, and a good many other ways of passing the time; the very last thing I wanted to do was to throw away the morning in trudging through a native location which I knew in advance would be dirty, mean and depressing.
    Moreover, looking back on it in cool sober daylight, I could appreciate the weapons by which I had been bounced into making the trip; a combination of argumentative blackmail, induced irritation, and a mood of anything-for-a-quiet-life which the unedifying scene at the Cascade had promoted. Whether intentional or not, Jonathan Steele had done an adroit job, and I had long graduated from such haphazard pressures.
    Nor was I at all enamoured of the idea of meeting Father Shillingford, who had hitherto been only a name to me, as to most of my friends. He ran a mission in Teroka, one of the native locations; he was always figuring in the headlines as coming into collision with the authorities, preaching a near-the-knuckle sermon, defying the apartheid laws, joining protest marches, and peddling his particular brand of fraternal saccharine.
    Overseas, they called him, among other things, the ‘conscience of South Africa’; here he was just a pain in theneck, one of the Bleeding Hearts brigade who intermittently displayed the wounds of mankind for the edification of the readers of the London Observer . If there had to be people like that, I still didn’t want to meet them.
    The fact that Jonathan Steele, looking exceptionally shabby, called for me in a small English car, not less than ten years old, whose battered appearance made even the Canton Hotel’s luggage-boys laugh aloud, put the dunce’s cap on the whole excursion.
    Jonathan Steele was not at all repentant about the previous night; indeed, he only mentioned it once, and that indirectly, when he said: ‘I thought Muddley excelled himself, didn’t you?’ There were so many answers to that one that I didn’t make any of them. Instead I said: ‘I have to be back by