The Pillow Fight Read Online Free PDF Page A

sometimes too much courage for his own good.
    On the sunny side of the street, the colours were gaudy and eye-catching; in the shade, we walked in a cool twilight, part of a restless drifting throng approaching with pleasure the idle hours of the day.
    Of course, one never really saw faces, unless they were white; if they were anything less, they were part of the scenery, part of the huge amorphous element known as ‘them’. The thought recalled Jonathan Steele to me, and I decided that I had given him quite enough attention already, that afternoon.
    ‘Bring me up to date,’ I said to Joel Sachs.
    Joel, who was always the quietest person at our lunches (since they spanned a number of different worlds, while he had only one), came swiftly to life.
    Kate Marais Advertising was going through one of its spells of unpopularity, he told me. Turnover was up, prestige was high, bigger and bigger accounts were showing a tendency to gravitate in our direction; and since such gravitation always looked, to the loser, like bare-faced stealing, we were both of us branded as thieves, murderers, and worse, at the moment.
    I was pleased. I kept Joel up in Johannesburg to conduct the biggest poaching operation he could manage; that was the essence of the advertising business, and if we didn’t deliver first-class copy and service, we in our turn would be poached out of existence. I loved the whole thing, because I had built it up myself in four years, starting with a single room in Cape Town and a loan of £500 from my father; now, with the main office still in Cape Town, but with branches in Johannesburg and Durban, we were at the very top of the heap.
    If I was any sort of a snob, it was an achievement snob. It gave me unique pleasure to have got so far, remembering the very early days when setting up the firm had been a driving, heartbreaking scramble for a marginal profit, in an area where, if you were a woman, the marginal profit was you … It had meant very hard work, complete self-discipline, and the cultivation of a sexless, emotionless life in the face of a male world which didn’t believe in such a thing for a single moment.
    ‘Come and have lunch,’ they used to say, when I was trying to negotiate an intricate contract that would leave me with something to show for it besides bruises. And later: ‘Come and have dinner. Come to bed. Come.’ In a way, it was no wonder that I had made good in advertising. Everyone else was thinking of something quite different.
    The gossip column had been an alternative kind of achievement. KMA made money in the business world, and ‘ Kate Marais Calling ’ kept people hopping, in a fashion vaguely related, vaguely complementary. The column held people at arm’s length, also, the way I liked to have them. A man with whom I was trying to do business was going to think twice about staring at my bosom or crossed legs, or trying the frontal approach in a nightclub, if his wife were certain to read a fragrant little paragraph about it, the following Sunday morning.
    Between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-six, I had wanted, progressively, a highly successful business (I ticked the items off in my mind), the odd glamour attached to being a good-looking woman in the business world, and the power (overt or undercover) that went with being able to say in cold print what lesser operators were whispering, hinting at, or ignoring.
    I had got all these things, and it hadn’t taken as long as I had feared, nor as my father had forecast.
    Joel was saying: ‘There’s a good chance that we’ll get the Anglo-African account as well.’
    I laughed, so that a man outside the Carlton Hotel turned and stared. ‘That will make us very unpopular.’
    Anglo-African was a big mining house – nearly the biggest. They did not take a great deal of space in any one year (they had no reason to, gold being a commodity which really did sell itself); but it was an excellent account, and they also paid a great deal,