The Great Pursuit (16 page)

Upstairs Piper was anything but. The first flush of his courage in challenging Hutchmeyer had
ebbed away leaving him with the horrible feeling that he was in desperate trouble. He took his
wet trousers off and sat on the bed wondering what on earth to do. He should never have left the
Gleneagle Guest House in Exforth. He should never have listened to Frensic and Sonia. He should
never have come to America. He should never have betrayed his literary principles. As the sunset
faded Piper got up and was just looking for another pair of trousers when there was a knock at
the door and Baby entered.

'You were wonderful,' she said, 'really wonderful.'

'Kind of you to say so,' said Piper interposing the furbelowed stool between his trouserless
self and Mrs Hutchmeyer and conscious that if anything more was needed to infuriate Mr Hutchmeyer
it was to find the two of them in this compromising situation.

'And I want you to know I appreciate what you have written about me,' continued Baby.

'Written about you?' said Piper groping in the cupboard.

'In your diary,' said Baby. 'I know I shouldn't have...'

'What?' squawked Piper from the depths of the cupboard. He found a pair of trousers and
struggled into them.

'I just couldn't help it,' said Baby. 'It was lying open on the table and I...'

'Then you know,' said Piper emerging from the cupboard.

'Yes,' said Baby.

'Christ,' said Piper and slumped on to the stool. 'Are you going to tell him?'

Baby shook her head. 'It's between us two.'

Piper considered this and found it only faintly reassuring. 'It's been a terrible strain,' he
said finally. 'I mean not being able to talk to anyone about it. Apart from Sonia of course but
she's no help.'

'I don't suppose she is,' said Baby who didn't for one moment suppose that Miss Futtle
appreciated being told what a deeply sensitive, intelligent and perceptive person another woman
was.

'Well she wouldn't be,' said Piper, 'I mean it was her idea in the first place.'

'It was?' said Baby.

'She said it would work out all right but I knew I would never be able to keep up the
pretence,' continued Piper.

'I think that does you great credit,' said Baby trying desperately to imagine what Miss Futtle
had had in mind in persuading Piper to pretend that he...There was something very screwy about
all this. 'Look, why don't we go downstairs and have a drink and you can tell me all about
it.'

'I've got to talk to someone,' said Piper, 'but won't they be down there?'

They've gone out on the yacht. We've got all the privacy in the world.'

They went downstairs to a little corner room with a balcony which hung out over rocks and the
water lapping the beach.

'It's my hidey hole,' said Baby indicating the rows of books lining the walls. 'Where I can be
myself.' She poured two drinks while Piper looked miserably at the titles. They were as confusing
as his own situation and seemed to argue an eclecticism he found surprising. Maupassant leant
against Hailey who in turn propped up Tolkien, and Piper, whose self was founded upon a few great
writers, couldn't imagine how anyone could be themselves in these surroundings. Besides, there
were a large number of detective stories and thrillers and Piper held very strong views on such
trite works.

'Now tell me all about it,' said Baby soothingly and settled herself on a sofa. Piper sipped
his drink and tried to think where to begin.

'Well you see I've been writing for ten years now,' he said finally, 'and...'

Dusk deepened into night outside as Piper told his story. Beside him Baby sat enthralled. This
was better than books. This was life, life not as she had known it but as she had always wanted
it to be. Exciting and mysterious and filled with strange, extraordinary hazards which excited
her imagination. She refilled their glasses and Piper, intoxicated by her sympathy, spoke on more
fluently than he had ever written. He told the story of his life as an unrecognized genius alone
in a garret, in any number of garrets looking out on to the windswept sea, struggling through
months and years to express with pen and ink and those exquisite curlicues she had so admired in
his notebooks the meaning of life and its deepest significance.

Baby gazed into his face and invested it all with a new romance. Pea-soup fogs returned to
London. Gas lamps gleamed on the sea-fronts as Piper took his nightly stroll along the promenade.
Baby drew copiously on her fund of half-remembered novels to add these details. Finally there
were villains, tawdry rogues out of Dickens, Fagins of the literary world in the form of Frensic
& Futtle of Lanyard Lane who lured the genius from his garret with the false promise of
recognition. Lanyard Lane! The very name evoked for Baby a legendary London. And Covent Garden.
But best of all there was Piper standing alone on a sea wall with the waves breaking below him
staring fixedly out across the English Channel, the wind blowing through his hair. And here in
front of her was the man himself with his peaked anxious face and tortured eyes, the living
embodiment of undiscovered genius as she had visualized it in Keats and Shelley and all those
other poets who had died so young. And between him and the harsh relentless reality of Hutchmeyer
and Frensic and Futtle there was only Baby herself. For the first time she felt needed. Without
her he would be hounded and persecuted and driven to...Baby prophesied suicide or madness and
certainly a haunted, hunted future, with Piper prey to the commercial rapacity of all those
forces which had conspired to compromise him. Baby's imagination raced on into melodrama.

'We can't let it happen,' she said impetuously as Piper ran out of self-pity. He looked at her
sorrowfully.

'What can I do?' he asked.

'You've got to get away,' said Baby and turned to the door on to the balcony and flung it
open. Piper looked dubiously out into the night. The wind had risen and nature, imitating art or
Piper's modicum of art, was hurling waves against the rocks below the house. The gusts caught at
the curtains and threw them flapping into the room. Baby stood between them gazing out across the
bay. Her mind was inflamed with images from novels. The night escape. The sea lashing at a small
boat. A great house blazing in the darkness and two lovers locked in one another's arms. She saw
herself in new guises, no longer the disregarded wife of a rich publisher, a creature of habits
and surgical artifice, but the heroine of some great novel: Rebecca, Jane Eyre, Gone With The
Wind. She turned back into the room and Piper was astonished at the intensity of her expression.
Her eyes gleamed and her mouth was firm with purpose. 'We will go together,' she said and reached
out her hand.

Piper took it cautiously. 'Together?' he said. 'You mean...'

'Together,' said Baby. 'You and I. Tonight.' And holding Piper's hand she led the way out into
the piazza lounge.

In the middle of the bay Hutchmeyer wrestled with the helm. His evening had not been a
success. It was bad enough to be insulted by one of his own authors, a unique experience for
which nothing in twenty-five years in the book trade had prepared him; it was even worse to be
out in a yacht in the tail end of a typhoon on a pitch-dark night with a crew that consisted of
one cheerfully drunk woman who insisted on enjoying herself.

'This is great,' she shouted as the yacht heaved and a wave broke over the deck, 'England here
we come.'

'Oh no we don't,' said Hutchmeyer and put the helm over in order to avoid the possibility that
they were heading out into the Atlantic. He stared out into the darkness and then down at the
binnacle. At that moment Romain du Roy took a terrible turn, water flushed along the rail and
into the cockpit. Hutchmeyer clung to the wheel and cursed. Beside him in the darkness Sonia
squealed, whether from fear or excitement Hutchmeyer neither knew nor cared. He was wrestling
with nautical problems beyond his meagre knowledge. In the dim recesses of his memory he seemed
to remember that you shouldn't have sails up in a storm. You rode storms out.

'Hold this,' he yelled to Sonia and waded below into the cabin to find a knife. Another wave
broke over the cockpit and into his face as he emerged.

'What are you doing with that thing?' Sonia asked. Hutchmeyer brandished the knife and clung
to the rail.

'I'm going to make goddam certain we don't hit land,' he shouted as the yacht scudded forward
alarmingly. He crawled along the deck and hacked at every rope he could find. Presently he was
writhing in canvas. By the time he had untangled himself they were no longer scudding. The yacht
wallowed.

'You shouldn't have done that,' said Sonia, 'I was getting a real high out of that zoom.'

'Well, I wasn't,' said Hutchmeyer, peering into the night. It was impossible to tell where
they were. A black sky hung overhead and the lights along both shores seemed to have gone out. Or
they had. Out to sea.

'Christ,' said Hutchmeyer dismally. Beside him Sonia played with the wheel happily. There was
something exhilarating about being out in a storm on a dark night that appealed to her sense of
adventure. It awoke her combative instincts. Something tangible to pit herself against. And
besides, Hutchmeyer's despondency was reassuring. At least she had taken his mind off Piper and
off her too. A storm at sea was no scene for seduction. And Hutchmeyer's efforts in that
direction had been heavy-handed. Sonia had sought refuge in Scotch. Now as they rose and fell
with each successive wave she was cheerfully drunk.

'We'll just have to sit the storm out,' said Hutchmeyer presently but Sonia demanded
action.

'Start the motor,' she said.

'What the hell for? We don't know where we are. We could run aground.'

'I want the wind in my hair and the spume in my face,' yelled Sonia.

'Spume?' said Hutchmeyer hoarsely.

'And a man at the helm with his hand on the tiller...'

'You got a man at the helm,' said Hutchmeyer taking it from her.

The yacht lurched into the wind and waves sucked at the dragging mainsail. Sonia laughed. 'A
real man, a he-man, a seaman. A man with salt in his veins and a sail in his heart. Someone to
stir the blood.'

'Stir the blood,' muttered Hutchmeyer. 'You'll get all the blood-stirring you want if we hit a
rock. I should never have listened to you. Coming out on a night like this.'

'You should have listened to the weather report,' said Sonia, 'that's what you should have
listened to. All I said was...'

'I know what you said. You said, "Let's take a sail round the bay." That's what you said.'

'So we're having a little sail. The challenge of the elements. I think it's just
wonderful.'

Hutchmeyer didn't. Wet, cold and bedraggled he clutched the wheel and searched the darkness
for some sign of the shoreline. It was nowhere to be seen.

'Challenge of the elements my ass,' he thought bitterly, and wondered why it was that women
had so little sense of reality.

It was a thought that would have found an echo in Piper's heart. Baby had changed. From being
the deeply perceptive intelligent woman he had described in his diary she had become a quite
extraordinarily urgent creature hell-bent on getting him out of the house in the middle of a most
unsuitably stormy night. To make matters worse she seemed determined to come with him, a course
of action calculated in Piper's opinion to put his already strained relations with Mr Hutchmeyer
to a test which even flight was hardly likely to mitigate. He made the point to Baby as she led
the way through the piazza lounge and into great hall.

'I mean we can't just walk out together in the middle of the night,' he protested standing on
a mosaic vat of boiling wood pulp. Hutchmeyer glowered down from his portrait on the wall.

'Why not?' said Baby, whose sense of the melodramatic seemed to be heightened in these
grandiose surroundings. Piper tried to think of a persuasive answer and could only come up with
the rather obvious one that Hutchmeyer wouldn't like it. Baby laughed luridly.

'Let him lump it,' she said and before Piper could point out that Hutchmeyer's lumping it was
going to be personally disadvantageous and that in any case he would prefer the dangers involved
in pulling the wool over Hutchmeyer's eyes as to the authorship of Pause to the more terrible
ones of running off with his wife, Baby had clutched his hand again and was leading him up the
Renaissance staircase.

'Pack your things as quickly as you can,' she said in a whisper as they stood outside the door
of the Boudoir bedroom.

'Yes but...' Piper began whispering involuntarily himself. But Baby had gone. Piper went into
his room and switched on the light. His suitcase lay uninvitingly against the wall. Piper shut
the door and wondered what on earth to do now. The woman must be demented to think that he was
going to...Piper staggered across the room to the window trying to rid himself of the notion that
all this was really happening to him. There was an awful hallucinatory quality about the
experience which fitted in with everything that had taken place since he had stepped ashore in
New York. Everyone was stark staring mad. What was more they acted out their madness without a
moment's hesitation. 'Shoot you as soon as look at you' was the expression that sprang to mind.
It certainly sprang to mind five minutes later when Piper, his case still unpacked, opened the
door of the Boudoir bedroom and poked his head outside. Baby was coming down the corridor with a
large revolver in her hand. Piper shrank back into his room.

'You'd better pack this,' she said.

'Pack it?' said Piper still glowering at the thing.

'Just in case,' said Baby. 'You never know.'

Piper did. He sidled round the bed and shook his head. 'You've got to understand...' he began
but Baby had dived into the drawers of the dressing-table and was piling his underclothes on the
bed.