The Pillow Fight Read Online Free PDF Page B

discovered trouserless in a taxi with one of the Board of Directors’ wives, and his name was never to sully their expensive newsprint again) ‘–then you’re quite within your rights. But I haven’t got a personal S-list, so I’ll go on mentioning him whenever he does something interesting.’
    ‘Cotterell is a thoroughly disreputable character.’
    I shook my head. ‘He’s just a swordsman. One of many. People like to read about him. Then they don’t feel such bastards themselves.’
    ‘You’re in a strange mood tonight, Kate.’
    ‘Hostess Runs Amuck,’ I said, and moved on.
    I moved on to my dear silly friend Mrs Marchant. Peggy Marchant and I had been at school together in England; she a prefect, myself definitely not. At the age of sixteen, hideous in orange taffeta, I had been a bridesmaid at her first marriage, to a rich elderly Italian who was now in prison on a baffling variety of charges. I shall always remember Peggy, a month after her wedding, swearing me to secrecy and then confiding: ‘Darling, Mummy said that sex and the honeymoon and all that stuff would be awful, but I honestly didn’t realise it would be quite as revolting as it is. It’s so sticky!’
    Well-read but still innocent, I could imagine that it might be sticky. I made comforting sounds.
    ‘Every single night!’ she went on. ‘Sometimes strawberry, sometimes raspberry. Last night it was marmalade.’
    ‘ Marmalade ?’
    ‘Darling, I know you’re not married, but you must know about these things … He throws it at me, from right across the room, and then he spreads it with a butterknife. Honestly, I don’t see what a woman gets out of marriage. And how it makes babies is just a mystery to me.’
    Dear Peggy … She had shed her Italian eccentric and married a tall Australian, a good-looking young man definitely not in the jam business; there were three enchanting children to prove it. But Peggy still maintained the same wide-eyed, dewy innocence of ten years ago. We never talked about the Italian, but we talked about everything else under the sun; giggly, inconsequent, girls’ dormitory talk that relaxed and refreshed.
    ‘Hallo, Mrs Marchant,’ I said now.
    ‘Hallo, Miss Marais … I was just thinking. How much does a party like this cost?’
    ‘That’s an extremely rude question.’
    ‘ Is it? … How much, darling?’
    ‘Seven hundred pounds,’ I said.
    ‘Heavens!’ she exclaimed. ‘That’s more than I’ve got in the whole world.’
    ‘But you have your three treasures.’
    ‘Bless their little hearts … I think Caroline is getting a teensy bit bow-legged … Isn’t that tragic?’
    ‘Not necessarily. You can call it the Invitation Look.’
    She sighed. ‘Oh dear – you’re so sophisticated. Did you have a nice lunch?’
    ‘Very.’
    ‘I hear that awful man is coming to the party.’
    ‘Now how,’ I asked, ‘did you hear that?’
    ‘Darling, it’s all over town. You know he’s terribly rude to everyone he meets?’
    ‘Is he?’
    ‘He as good as told Maxine Ware she was wasting her life.’
    ‘That’s not rude. Just accurate.’
    ‘Are you in love with him?’
    ‘Oh, yes …’
    ‘It is time you got married, you know.’
    ‘As long as you do it before the change, I always say.’
    There was now an agreeable monotone roar filling the room and the one beyond it as well; token, if not of a good party, then at least of a large number of people pretending it to be so. Weaving my way through the crowded room, glass in hand, I passed Bruno van Thaal and a knot of his chums; small, elegant, soft-eyed young men on the fringe of everything – art, theatre, radio, interior decoration, dress designing, and the more precious aspects of authorship.
    Fringe Men , I thought, beaming at them because I liked them; a good title for a book … As I passed them by, they stopped twittering like wrens and stared at me like baby weasels, appraising my clothes and my hairdo. Finding no fault, they called out