The Great Pursuit (28 page)

'That's exactly what I'm saying. Mind you, that could have been an accident,' said Mr
Synstrom, 'the cruiser blowing up where she did.'

'Yeah, well from where I was standing it didn't look like an accident. You can believe it
didn't,' said Hutchmeyer. 'You want to have a cruiser come out of the night straight for you
before you go round making allegations like you've just done.'

Mr Synstrom got to his feet. 'So you still want us to continue with our investigations?' he
said.

Hutchmeyer hesitated. If Baby was still alive the last thing he wanted was investigations. 'I
just don't believe my Baby would have done a thing like that is all,' he said.

Mr Synstrom sat down again. 'If she did and we can prove it I'm afraid Mrs Hutchmeyer would
stand trial. Arson, attempted murder, defrauding an insurance company. And then there's Mr Piper.
He's an accessory. Bestselling author, I hear. I guess he could always get a job in the prison
library. Make a sensational trial too. Now if you don't want all of that...'

Hutchmeyer didn't want any of that. Sensational trials with Baby in the box pleading that...Oh
no! Definitely not. And Pause was selling by the hundred thousand, had passed the million mark
and with the movie of the book in production the computer was overheating with the stupendous
forecasts. Sensational trials were out.

'What's the alternative?' he asked.

Mr Synstrom leant forward. 'We could come to an arrangement,' he said.

'We could,' Hutchmeyer agreed, 'but that still leaves the cops...'

Mr Synstrom shook his head. They're sitting around waiting to see what we come up with. Now
the way I see it...'

By the time he had finished Hutchmeyer saw it that way too. The insurance company would
announce that the claim had been met in full and in return Hutchmeyer would write a disclaimer.
Hutchmeyer did. Three and a half million dollars was worth every cent for keeping Baby
'dead'.

'What happens if you're right and she turns up out of the blue?' Hutchmeyer asked as Mr
Synstrom got up to leave.

'Then you've really got problems,' he said. 'That's what I'd say.'

He left and Hutchmeyer sat back and considered those problems. The only consolation he could
find was that if Baby was still alive she had problems too. Like coming back to life and going to
prison. She wasn't fool enough to do that. Which left Hutchmeyer free to go his own way. He could
even marry again. His thoughts turned to Sonia Futtle. Now there was a real woman.

Two thousand miles to the south Baby's problems had taken on a new dimension. Her attempt to
give Piper the experience he needed relationshipwise had succeeded too well and where before he
had thrown himself into Work In Regress he now insisted on throwing himself into her as well. The
years of his celibacy were over and Piper was making up for them in a hurry. As he lay each night
kissing her reinforced breasts and gripping her degreased thighs Piper experienced an ecstasy he
could never have found with another woman. Baby's artificiality was entirely to his taste.
Lacking so many original parts she had none of those natural physiological disadvantages he had
found in Sonia. She had, as it were, been expurgated and Piper, himself in the process of
expurgating Pause, derived enormous satisfaction from the fact that with Baby he could act out
the role he had been assigned as narrator in the book with a woman who if she was much older than
him didn't look it. And Baby's response added to his pleasure. She combined lack of fervour with
sexual expertise so that he didn't feel threatened by her passion. She was simply there to be
enjoyed and didn't interfere with his writing by demanding his constant attention. Finally her
intimate knowledge of the novel meant that she could respond word-perfect to his cues. When he
murmured, 'Darling, we're being so heuristically creative,' at the penultimate moment of ecstasy,
Baby, feeling nothing, could reply, 'Constating, my baby,' in unison with her prototype the
ancient Gwendolen on page 185, and thus maintain quite literally the fiction that was the
essential core of Piper's being.

But if Baby met Piper's requirements as the ideal lover the reverse was not true. Baby found
it unflattering to know that she was merely a stand-in for a figment of his imagination and not
even his own imagination but that of the real author of Pause. Knowing this, Piper's ardour took
on an almost ghoulish quality so that Baby, staring over his shoulder at the ceiling, had the
horrid feeling that she might just as well not have been present. At such moments she saw herself
as something that had coalesced from the pages of Pause, a phantom of the opus which was Piper's
pretentious name for what he was now doing in Work In Regress and intended to continue in another
version. Her future seemed destined to be the recipient of his derived feelings, a sexual
artefact compiled from words upon pages to be ejaculated into and then set aside while he put pen
to paper. Even the routine of their days had altered. Piper insisted on writing each morning and
driving through the heat of the day and stopping early at a motel so that he could read to her
what he had written that morning and then relate.

'Can't you just say "fuck" once in a while?' Baby asked one evening at a motel in Tuscaloosa.
'I mean that's what we're doing so why not name it right?'

But Piper wouldn't. The word wasn't in Pause and 'relating' was an approved term in The Moral
Novel.

'What I feel for you...' he began but Baby stopped him.

'So I read the original. I don't need to see the movie.'

'As I was saying,' said Piper, 'what I feel for you is...'

'Zero,' said Baby, 'absolute zero. You've got more feelings towards that ink bottle you're
always sticking your pen in than you have towards me.'

'Well, I like that...' said Piper.

'I don't,' said Baby and there was a new note of desperation in her voice. For a moment she
thought of leaving Piper there in the motel and going off on her own. But the moment passed. She
was tied by the irrevocable act of the fire and her disappearance to this literary mongol whose
notion of great writing was to step backwards in time in futile imitation of novelists long dead.
Worst of all, she saw in Piper's obsession with past glories a mirror-image of herself. For forty
years she too had waged a war with time and had by surgical recession maintained the outward
appearance of the foolish beauty who had been Miss Penobscot 1935. They had so much in common and
Piper served to remind her of her own stupidity. All that was gone now, the longing to be young
again and the sense of knowing she was still sexually attractive. Only death remained and the
certainty that when she died there would be no call for the embalmer. She had seen to that in
advance.

She had seen to more than that. She had already died by fire, by water, by the bizarre
circumstances of her own romantic madness. Which gave her something more in common with Piper.
They were both nonentities moving in a limbo of monotonous motels, he with his ledgers and her
body but she with nothing more than a sense of meaninglessness and a desperate futility. That
night while Piper related, Baby, inanimate beneath him, made up her mind. They would leave the
beaten track of motels and drive down dirt roads into the hinterland of the Deep South. What
happened to them there would be beyond her choosing.

What was happening to Frensic was definitely beyond his choosing. He sat at the Formica-topped
table in Cynthia Bogden's kitchen and tried to eat his cornflakes and forget what had occurred
towards dawn. Driven frantic by Cynthia's omnivorous sexuality he had proposed to the woman. It
had seemed in his whisky-sodden state the only defence against a fatal coronary and a means of
getting her to tell him who had sent her Pause. But Miss Bogden had been too overwhelmed to
discuss minor matters of that sort in the middle of the night. In the end Frensic had snatched a
few hours sleep and had been woken by a radiant Cynthia with a cup of tea. Frensic had staggered
through to the bathroom and had shaved with someone else's razor and had come down to breakfast
determined to force the issue. But Miss Bogden's thoughts were confined to their wedding
day.

'Shall we have a church wedding?' she asked as Piper toyed biliously with a boiled egg.

'What? Oh. Yes.'

'I've always wanted a church wedding.'

'So have I,' said Frensic with as much enthusiasm as if she had suggested a crematorium. He
savaged the egg and decided on the direct approach. 'By the way did you ever meet the author of
Pause O Men for the Virgin?'

Miss Bogden dragged her thoughts away from aisles, altars and Mendelssohn. 'No,' she said,
'the manuscript came by post.'

'By post?' said Frensic, dropping his spoon. 'Isn't that rather unusual?'

'You're not eating your egg,' said Miss Bogden. Frensic took a spoonful of egg into his dry
mouth.

'Where did it come from?'

'Lloyds Bank,' said Miss Bogden and poured herself another cup of tea. 'Another cup for
you?'

Frensic nodded. He needed something to wash the egg down with. 'Lloyds Bank?' he said finally.
'But there must have been words you couldn't read. What did you do then?'

'Oh I just rang up and asked.'

'You phoned? You mean you phoned Lloyds Bank and they'd...'

'Oh you are silly, Geoffrey,' said Miss Bogden, 'I didn't phone Lloyds Bank. I had this other
number.'

'What other number?'

'The one I had to ring, silly,' said Miss Bogden and looked at her watch. 'Oh look at the
time. It's almost nine. You've made me late, you naughty boy.' And she rushed out of the kitchen.
When she returned she was dressed for the day. 'You can call a taxi when you're ready,' she said,
'and we'll meet at the office.' She kissed Frensic passionately on his egg-filled mouth and went
out.

Frensic got to his feet and spat the egg into the sink and turned the tap on. Then he took a
pinch of snuff, helped himself to some more tea and tried to think. A phone number she had to
ring? The whole business became more extraordinary the further he delved into it. And for once
delved was the right word. In looking for the source of Pause he had dug himself...Frensic
shuddered. Dug was the right word too. In the plural it was exact. He went through to the
lavatory and sat there miserably for ten minutes trying to concentrate on his next move. A phone
number? An author who insisted on making corrections by telephone? There was an insanity about
all this that made his own actions over the past few days look positively rational. And there was
absolutely nothing rational about proposing to Miss Cynthia Bogden. Frensic finished his business
in the lavatory and came out. On a small table in the hall stood a telephone. Frensic crossed to
it and looked through Miss Bogden's private list of numbers but there was nothing there to
indicate the author. Frensic returned to the kitchen, made himself a cup of instant coffee, took
some more snuff and finally telephoned for a taxi.

It came at ten and at half past Frensic shuffled into the Typing Agency. Miss Bogden was
waiting for him. So were twelve awful women sitting at typewriters.

'Girls,' Miss Bogden called euphemistically as Frensic peered anxiously into the office, 'I
want you all to meet my fiancé, Mr Geoffrey Corkadale.'

The women all rose from the seats and gaggled congratulations on Frensic while Miss Bogden
suppurated happiness.

'And now the ring,' she said when the congratulations died down. She led the way out of the
office and Frensic followed. The bloody woman would want a ring. Just so long as it wasn't too
expensive. It was.

'I think I like the solitaire,' she told the jeweller in the Broad. Frensic flinched at the
price and was about to put his entire scheme in jeopardy when he was struck by a brilliant
thought. After all, what was five hundred pounds when his entire future was at stake?

'Oughtn't we to have it engraved?' he said as Cynthia put it on her finger and admired its
brilliance.

'What with?' she cooed.

Frensic simpered. 'Something secret,' he whispered, 'something we two alone will understand. A
code d'amour.'

'Oh you are awful,' said Miss Bogden. 'Fancy thinking of something like that.' Frensic glanced
at the jeweller uncomfortably and applied his lips to the perm again.

'A code of love,' he explained.

'A code of love?' echoed Miss Bogden. 'What sort of code?'

'A number,' said Frensic, and paused. 'Some number that only we would know had brought us
together.'

'You mean...?'

'Exactly,' said Frensic forestalling any alternatives, 'after all, you typed the book and I
published it.'

'Couldn't we just have Till Death Do Us Part?'

'Too much like the TV series,' said Frensic who had very much earlier intentions. He was saved
by the jeweller.

'You'd never get that inside the ring. Not Till Death Do Us Part. Too many letters.'

'But you could do numbers?' said Frensic.

'Depends how many.'

Frensic looked enquiringly at Miss Bogden. 'Five,' she said after a moment's hesitation.

'Five,' said Frensic. 'Five teeny weeny little numbers that are our code of love, our own, our
very own itsy bitsy secret.' It was his last desperate act of heroism. Miss Bogden succumbed. For
a moment she had...but no, a man who could in the presence of an austere jeweller By Appointment
to Her Majesty talk openly about five teeny weeny itsy bitsy numbers that were their code of
love, such a man was above suspicion.

'Two oh three five seven,' she simpered.

'Two oh three five seven,' said Frensic loudly. 'You're quite sure? We don't want to make any
mistakes.'

'Of course I'm sure,' said Miss Bogden, 'I'm not in the habit of making mistakes.'

'Right,' said Frensic plucking the ring from her finger and handing it to the jeweller, 'stick
them on the inside of the thing. I'll be back to collect it this afternoon,' and taking Miss
Bogden firmly by the arm he steered her towards the door.