by Tom Sharpe
‘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 …’
‘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 seafronts 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.
12
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 heman, 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 the 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 drawer of the dressing-table and was piling his underclothes on the bed.
‘Don’t waste time talking. Get this 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 waterbed wearing a mink. Beside
her were six large travel bags.
‘Look,’ said Piper, ‘are you sure you really want …’
‘Yes, oh yes,’ said Baby. ‘Its 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.