I met his plane at the airport. Standing in the sunshine, looking across the sandy expanse of the Cape Flats towards the broad bulk of Table Mountain, still dominant against the blue flag of the sky even at a distance of twenty miles, I felt sure of myself, and happy, and excited. When his plane came winging in from the north-east, dropping steeply as it crossed the last outcrop of the Drakensberg Range, I stared at it – a tiny silver bird catching the sun joyfully on its wings – and thought: All that I love, all that I am going to love, is up there in blessed suspension, coming towards me, keeping our appointment … But that turned out to be the last moment of certainty, of assurance, for several long hours.
He seemed taller than I remembered, and pale (‘We came down too fast’), and nervous (‘I always forget that Ihate flying’). I was suddenly nervous too; the words I spoke, the answers I gave, were wayward and nonsensical. There were two or three people I knew, among the disembarking passengers; I felt that they were looking at me, and then at Jonathan Steele, as if we were a strange couple indeed, undoubtedly suspect. (‘Kate Marais was at the airport,’ I imagined the dark commentary, ‘meeting someone we’d never set eyes on before! He looked so odd! Do you suppose …’) I felt odd also, for the first time within a now shaky memory.
I drove into town abominably, earning horn-blasts from other, infuriated road-users, and a harsh glare from a motorcycle cop on the watch for just such female mavericks as myself. It was nerves, of course; I wanted to do everything well that day – driving cars, mixing champagne cocktails, organising a meal, making love – and the omens already were quite otherwise.
It grew worse later on; in my flat which should have been a warm, exciting refuge from everything and everyone that was not us, we found ourselves talking with ludicrous constraint. It seemed that we had said all that had to be said, on that last night together in Johannesburg; the next stage could only be a headlong dive into action, and it was too early for that, too light, too soon.
Serving amid lengthening silence a dinner which was not as good as I had planned, Julia looked at me as if I were out of my wits, and at Jonathan as if he were a burglar. If this was madam’s idea of love, her caustic glances said, then madam should see the head-doctor, now. Tomorrow would be too late.
Ten o’clock came, and then eleven. Julia had long since gone home, though the resentful clatter of dishes in the sink still rang in my ears. I sat feet-up on the couch, wearing a housecoat which had seemed just the thing when I bought it, two days earlier, but which now felt indecorous, even indecent. 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 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’.