The Great Pursuit (17 page)

'Don't waste time talking. Get the suitcase,' she said. 'The wind's dying down. They could be
back at any moment now.'

Piper looked longingly at the window. If only they would come back now before it was too late.
'I really do think we ought to reconsider this,' he said. Baby stopped emptying the drawers and
turned to him. Her taut face was alight with unventured dreams. She was every heroine she had
ever read, every woman who had gone off happily to Siberia or followed her man across the
Sherman-devastated South. She was more, at once the inspiration and protectress of this unhappy
youth. This was her one chance of realization and she was not going to let it escape her. Behind
was Hutchmeyer, the years of servitude to boredom and artifice, of surgical restoration and
constructed enthusiasms; in front Piper, the knowledge that she was needed, a new life filled
with meaning and significance in the service of this young genius. And now at this moment of
supreme sacrifice, the culmination of so many years of expectation, he was hesitating. Baby's
eyes filled with tears and she raised her arms in supplication.

'Don't you understand what this means?' she asked. Piper gaped at her. He understood only too
well what it meant. He was alone in an enormous house with the demented wife of America's richest
and most powerful publisher and she was proposing that they should run away together. And if he
didn't she would almost certainly tell Hutchmeyer the true story of Pause or invent some equally
frightful tale about how he had tried to seduce her. And finally there was the gun. It lay on the
bed where she had dropped it. Piper glanced at the thing and as he did so Baby took a step
forward, the tears that had gathered in her eyes ran down her cheeks and carried with them a
contact lens. She fumbled for it on the counterpane and encountered the gun. Piper hesitated no
longer. He grabbed the suitcase and plumped it on the bed and the next moment was packing it
hastily with his shirts and pants. He didn't stop until everything was in, his ledgers and pens
and his bottle of Waterman's Midnight Black. Finally he sat on it and fastened the catches. Only
then did he turn towards her. Baby was still groping on the bed.

'I can't find it,' she said, 'I can't find it.'

'Leave it, we don't need a thing like that,' said Piper anxious to avoid any further
acquaintance with firearms.

'I must have it,' said Baby, 'I can't get along without it.'

Piper humped the suitcase off the bed and Baby found the contact lens. And the gun. Clutching
the one while trying to reinsert the other she followed Piper into the corridor. 'Take your bag
down and come back for mine,' she told him and went into her own bedroom. Piper went downstairs,
encountered the glowering portrait of Hutchmeyer and came back again. Baby was standing by the
great water-bed wearing a mink. Beside her were six large travel bags.

'Look,' said Piper, 'are you sure you really want.,

'Yes, oh yes,' said Baby. 'It's what I've always dreamt of doing. Leaving all this...this
falsehood and starting afresh.'

'But don't you think...' Piper began again but Baby was not thinking. With a grand final
gesture she picked up the gun and fired it repeatedly into the waterbed. Little spurts of water
leapt into the air and the room echoed deafeningly with the shots.

'That's symbolic,' she cried and tossed the gun across the room. But Piper didn't hear her.
Grabbing three travel bags in each hand he staggered out of the bedroom and dragged them along
the corridor, his ears ringing with the sound of gunfire. He knew now that she was definitely out
of her mind and the sight of the expiring waterbed had been another awful reminder of his own
mortality. By the time he reached the bottom of the stairs he was panting and puffing. Baby
followed him, a wraith in mink.

'Now what?' he asked.

'We'll take the cruiser,' she said.

'The cruiser?'

Baby nodded, her imagination once more inflamed with images from novels. The night flight
across the water was essential.

'But won't they...' Piper began.

'That way they'll never know where we've gone,' said Baby. 'We'll land down the coast and buy
a car.'

'Buy a car?' said Piper. 'But I haven't any money.'

'I have,' said Baby and with Piper lugging the travel bags behind her they went through the
lounge and down the path to the jetty. The wind had fallen but still the water was choppy and
slapped against the wooden piles and the rocks so that drifts of spray sprang up wetly against
Piper's face.

'Put the bags aboard,' said Baby, 'I've got to go back for something.'

Piper hesitated for a moment and stared with mixed feelings out across the bay. He wasn't sure
whether he wanted Sonia and Hutchmeyer to heave in sight now or not. But there was no sign of
them. In the end he dropped the bags down into the cruiser and waited. Baby returned with a
briefcase.

'My alimony,' she explained, 'from the safe.' Clutching her mink to her, she clambered down
into the cruiser and went to the controls. Piper followed her unsteadily.

'Low on fuel,' she said. 'We'll need some more.' Presently Piper was trudging back and forth
between the cruiser and the fuel store at the far side of the courtyard behind the house. It was
dark and occasionally he stumbled.

'Isn't that enough?' he asked after the fifth journey as he handed the cans down to Baby in
the cruiser.

'We can't afford to make mistakes,' she replied. 'You wouldn't want us to run out of gas in
the middle of the bay.'

Piper set off for the store again. There was no doubt in his mind that he had already made a
terrible mistake. He should have listened to Sonia. She had said the woman was a ghoul and she
was right. A demented ghoul. And what on earth was he doing in the middle of the night filling a
cruiser with cans of petrol? It wasn't an activity even vaguely related with being a novelist.
Thomas Mann wouldn't have been found dead doing it. Nor would D. H. Lawrence. Conrad might have,
just. Even then it was highly unlikely. Piper consulted Lord Jim and found nothing reassuring in
it, nothing to justify this insane activity. Yes, insane was the word. Standing in the fuel store
with two more cans Piper hesitated. There wasn't a single novelist of any merit who would have
done what he was doing. They would all have refused to be party to such a scheme. Which was all
very well, but then none of them had been in the awful predicament he was in. True, D. H.
Lawrence had run off with Mr Somebody-or-other's wife, Frieda, but presumably of his own accord
and because he was in love with the woman. Piper was most certainly not in love with Baby and he
wasn't doing this of his own accord. Definitely not. Having consulted these precedents Piper
tried to think how to live up to them. After all, he hadn't spent the last ten years of his life
being the great novelist for nothing. He would take a moral stand. Which was rather easier said
than done. Baby Hutchmeyer wasn't the sort of woman who would understand taking a moral stand.
Besides there wasn't time to explain. The best thing to do would be to stay where he was and not
go down to the boat again. That would put her in a spot when Hutchmeyer and Sonia got back. She'd
have her work cut out explaining what she was doing on board the cruiser with her bags packed and
ten five-gallon cans of gasolene stashed around the cabin. At least she wouldn't be able to argue
that he had forced her to elope with him if elope was the right word for running away with
another man's wife. Not if he wasn't there. On the other hand there was his suitcase on board
too. He would have to get that off. But how? Well of course if he didn't go back down there she
would come looking for him and in that case...Piper peered out of the store and seeing that the
courtyard was clear, stole across it to the front door and into the house. Presently he was
looking out from behind the lattice of the piazza lounge at the boat. Around him the great wooden
house creaked. Piper looked at his watch. It was one o'clock. Where had Sonia and Hutchmeyer got
to? They should have been back hours ago.

On board the cruiser Baby was having the same thought about Piper. What was keeping him? She
had started the engine and checked the fuel gauge and was ready to go now and he was holding
everything up. After ten minutes she became genuinely alarmed.

And with each succeeding minute her alarm grew. The sea was calm now and if he didn't come
soon...

'Genius is so unpredictable,' she muttered finally and climbed back on to the jetty. She went
round the house and across the yard to the fuel store and switched on the light. Empty. Two
jerry-cans standing in the middle of the floor were mute testimony to Piper's change of heart.
Baby went to the door.

'Peter,' she called, her thin voice dying in the night air. Thrice she called and thrice there
was no reply.

'Oh heartless boy!' she cried and this time it seemed there was an answer. It came faintly
from the house in the form of a crash and a muffled shout. Piper had tripped over an ornamental
vase. Baby headed across the court and up the steps to the door. Once inside she called again. In
vain. Standing in the centre of the great hall Baby looked up at the portrait of her detested
husband and it seemed to her overwrought imagination that a smile played about those gross
arrogant lips. He had won again. He would always win and she would always remain the plaything of
his idle hours.

'Never!' she shouted in answer to the clichés that fluttered hysterically about her mind and
to the portrait's unspoken scorn. She hadn't come this far to be deprived of her right to freedom
and romance and significance by a pusillanimous literary genius. She would do something,
something symbolic that would stand as a testimony to her independence. From the ashes of the
past she would arise anew like some wild phoenix from the...Flames? Ashes? The symbolism drew her
on. It would be an act from which there could be no going back. She would burn her boats. Baby,
urged on by heroines of several hundred novels, flew back across the courtyard, opened a
jerry-can and a moment later was trailing gasolene back to the house. She sloshed it up the
steps, over the threshold, across the manifold activities of the mosaic floor, up more steps into
the piazza lounge and across the carpet to the study. Then with the reckless abandon that so
became her in her new role she seized a table lighter from the desk and lit it. A sheet of flame
engulfed the room, scurried into the lounge, hurtled across the hall and out into the night. Then
and only then did Baby turn and open the door to the terrace.

Meanwhile Piper, after his brief contretemps with the ornamental vase, was busy on the
cruiser. He had heard her call and had seized his opportunity to retrieve his suitcase. He ran
down the path to the jetty and clambered aboard. Above him the huge house loomed dark with
derived menace. Its towers and turrets, culled from Ruskin and Morris and distilled into shingle
through the architectural extravagance of Peabody and Stearns, merged with the lowering sky. Only
behind the lattice of the piazza were there lights and these were dim. So was the interior of the
cruiser. Piper fumbled about among the travel bags and jerry-cans for his suitcase. Where the
hell had it got to? He found it finally under the mink coat and was just disentangling it when he
was stopped by a sudden roar from the house and the flicker of flames. Dropping the coat he
stumbled to the cabin door and looked out dumbfounded.

The Hutchmeyer Residence was ablaze. Flames shot up across the windows of Hutchmeyer's study.
More flames danced behind the latticework. There was a crash of breaking glass as windows
shattered in the heat and almost simultaneously from behind the house a mushroom of flame
billowed up into the sky followed by the most appalling explosion. Piper gaped, transfixed by the
enormity of what was happening. And as he gaped a slim figure detached itself from the shadows of
the house and ran across the terrace towards him. It was Baby. The bloody woman must have...but
Piper had no time to follow this obvious train of thought to its conclusion. As Baby ran towards
him another train appeared round the side of the house, a train of flames that danced and
skipped, held for a moment and then flickered on along the trail of gasolene Piper had left from
the fuel store. Piper watched it coming and then, with a presence of mind that was wholly his own
and owed nothing to The Moral Novel, he clambered on to the jetty and wrestled with the ropes
that held the cruiser.

'We've got to get away before that fire...' he yelled to Baby as she rushed along the jetty
towards him. Baby looked over her shoulder at the fuse.

'Oh my God,' she shrieked. The dancing flames were scurrying closer. She leapt down into the
boat and into the cabin.

'It's too late,' shouted Piper. The flames were licking along the jetty now. They would reach
the boat with its cargo of gas and then...Piper dropped the line and ran. In the cabin of the
cruiser. Baby struggled to find her alimony, grabbed the mink, dropped it again, and finally
found the case she was looking for. She turned back towards the door but the flames had reached
the end of the jetty and as she looked they leapt the gap. There was no hope. Baby turned to the
controls, put the throttle full on, and as the cruiser surged forward, she scrambled out of the
cabin and, still clutching the briefcase, dived over the side. Behind her the cruiser gathered
speed. Flames flickered somewhere inside to mark its progress and then seemed to die down.
Finally it disappeared into the darkness of the bay, the roar of its motor drowned by the much
more powerful roar of the blazing house. Baby swam ashore and stumbled up the rocky beach. Piper
was standing on the lawn staring in horror at the house. The flames had reached the upper storeys
now, they glowed behind windows briefly, there was the crash of breaking glass as more windows
splintered and then great gusts of flame shot out to lick up the sides of the shingle. Within
minutes the entire facade was ablaze. Baby stood beside Piper proudly.