The Great Pursuit (14 page)

'Dear Mr Piper,' murmured Baby huskily, taking his hand and smiling as far as the surgeons had
permitted, 'I've been just dying to meet you. I think your novel is just the loveliest book I've
been privileged to read.'

Piper gazed into the limpid azure contact lenses of Miss Penobscot 1935 and simpered. 'You're
too kind,' he murmured. Baby tucked his hand under her arm and together they went into the piazza
lounge.

'Does he always wear a turban?' Hutchmeyer asked Sonia as they followed.

'Only when he gets hit with a frisbee,' said Sonia coldly.

'Only when he gets hit with a frisbee,' bawled Hutchmeyer roaring with laughter. 'You hear
that, Baby. Mr Piper only wears a turban when he gets hit with a frisbee. Isn't that the
greatest?'

'Edged with razor blades, Hutch. With goddam razor blades!' said Sonia.

'Yeah, well that's different of course,' said Hutchmeyer deflating. 'With razor blades is
different.'

Inside the piazza lounge stood a hundred people. They clutched glasses and were talking at the
tops of their voices.

'Folks,' bawled Hutchmeyer and stilled the din, 'I want you all to meet Mr Peter Piper, the
greatest novelist to come out of England since Frederick Forsyth.'

Piper smiled inanely and shook his head with unaffected modesty. He was not the greatest
novelist to come out of England. Not yet. His greatness lay in the future and it was on the point
of his tongue to state this clearly when the crowd closed round him eager to make his
acquaintance. Baby had chosen her guests with care. Against their geriatric backdrop her own
reconstituted charms would stand out all the more alluringly. Cataracts and fallen arches
abounded. So did bosoms, as opposed to breasts, dentures, girdles, surgical stockings and the
protuberant tracery of varicose veins. And strung round every puckered neck and blotchy wrist
were jewels, an armoury of pearls and diamonds and gold that hung and wobbled and glistened to
detract the eye from the lost battle with time.

'Oh, Mr Piper, I just want to say how much pleasure...'

'I can't tell you how much it means to me to...'

'I think it's fascinating to meet a real...'

'If you would just sign my copy...'

'You've done so much to bring people together...'

With Baby on his arm Piper was swallowed up in the adulating crowd.

'Boy, he's really going over big,' said Hutchmeyer, 'and this is Maine. What's he going to do
to the cities?'

'I hate to think,' said Sonia watching anxiously as Piper's turban bobbed among the
hairdos.

'Wow them. Zap them. We'll sell two million copies if this is anything to indicate. I got a
computer forecast after the welcome he got in New York and '

'Welcome? You call that riot a welcome?' said Sonia bitterly. 'You could have got us
killed.'

'Great copy,' said Hutchmeyer, 'I'm going to give MacMordie a bonus. That boy's got talent.
And while we're on the subject let me say I've got a proposition to make to you.'

'I've heard your propositions, Hutch, and the answer is still no.'

'Sure but this is different.' He steered Sonia over to the bar.

By the time he had signed fifty copies of Pause O Men for the Virgin and drunk, unthinkingly,
four Martinis, Piper's earlier apprehensions had entirely vanished. The enthusiasm with which he
was being greeted had the merit that it didn't require him to say anything. He was bombarded from
all sides by compliments and opinions. They seemed to come in two sizes. The thin women were
intense, the ones with obesity problems cooed. No one expected Piper to contribute more than the
favour of his smile. Only one woman broached the subject of his novel and Baby immediately
intervened.

'Knock you up, Chloe?' she said. 'Now why should Mr Piper want to do that? He's got a very
tight schedule to meet.'

'So not everyone's had the benefit of a pussy lift,' said Chloe with a hideous wink at Piper.
'Now the way I read it Mr Piper's book is about going into the natural in a big way...'

But Baby dragged Piper away before he could hear what Chloe had to say about going into the
natural in a big way.

'What's a pussy lift?' he asked.

'That Chloe's just a cat,' said Baby, leaving Piper under the happy illusion that pussy lifts
were things cats went up and down in. By the time the party broke up Piper was exhausted.

'I've put you in the Boudoir bedroom,' said Baby as she and Sonia escorted him up the
Renaissance staircase. 'It's got a wonderful view of the bay.'

Piper went into the Boudoir bedroom and looked around. Originally designed to combine
convenience with medieval simplicity, it had been refurbished by Baby with an eye to the
supposedly sensual. A heart-shaped bed stood on a carpet of intermingled rainbows which competed
for radiance with a furbelowed stool and an Art Deco dressing-table. To complete the ensemble a
large and evidently demented Spanish gypsy supported a tasselled lampshade on a bedside table
while a black glass chest of drawers gleamed darkly against the Wedgwood blue walls. Piper sat
down on the bed and looked up at the great timber rafters. There was a solid craftsmanship about
them that contrasted with the ephemeral brilliance of the furnishings. He undressed and brushed
his teeth and climbed into bed. Five minutes later he was asleep.

An hour later he was wide awake again. There were voices coming through the wall behind his
quilted bedhead. For a moment Piper wondered where on earth he was. The voices soon told him. The
Hutchmeyers' bedroom was evidently next to his and their bathroom had a connecting door. During
the next half an hour Piper learnt to his disgust that Hutchmeyer wore a truss, that Baby
objected to his use of the washbasin as a urinal, that Hutchmeyer didn't give a damn what she
objected to, that Baby's late and unlamented mother, Mrs Sugg, would have done the world a
service by having an abortion before Baby was born, and finally that on one traumatic occasion
Baby had washed down a sleeping pill with Dentaclene from a glass containing Hutchmeyer's false
teeth so would he kindly not leave the things in the medicine cabinet. From these distressing
domestic details the conversation veered to personalities. Hutchmeyer thought Sonia mighty
attractive. Baby didn't. All Sonia Futtle had got were her hooks into a cute little innocent. It
took Piper a moment or two to recognize himself in this description and he was just wondering if
he liked being called little and cute when Hutchmeyer riposted by saying he was an asslicking
motherfucking Limey who just happened to have written a book that would sell. Piper most
definitely didn't like that. He sat up in bed, fumbled with the anatomy of the Spanish Gipsy and
switched the light on. But the Hutchmeyers had warred themselves to sleep.

Piper got out of bed and waded across the carpet to the window. Outside in the darkness he
could just make out the shapes of a yacht and a large cruiser lying out at the end of a long
narrow jetty. Beyond them across the bay a mountain was silhouetted against the starry sky and
the lights of a small town shone faintly. Water slapped on the rocky beach below the house and in
any other circumstances Piper would have felt the need to muse on the beauties of nature and
their possible use in some future novel. Hutchmeyer's opinion of him had driven such thoughts
from his mind. He got out his diary and committed to paper his observations that Hutchmeyer was
the epitome of everything that was vulgar, debased, stupid and crassly commercial about modern
America and that Baby Hutchmeyer was a woman of sensitivity and beauty, and deserved something
better than to be married to a coarse brute. Then he got back into bed, read a chapter of The
Moral Novel to restore his faith in human nature, and fell asleep.

Breakfast next morning proved a further ordeal. Sonia wasn't up and Hutchmeyer was in his
friendliest mood.

'What I like about you is you give your readers a good fuck fantasy,' he told Piper who was
trying to make up his mind which breakfast cereal to try.

'Wheatgerm is great for Vitamin E,' said Baby.

'That's for potency,' said Hutchmeyer. 'Piper's potent already, eh Piper? What he needs is
roughage.'

'I'm sure he'll get all he needs of roughage from you,' said Baby. Piper poured himself a
plateful of Wheatgerm.

'Now like I was saying,' Hutchmeyer continued, 'what readers want is '

'I'm sure Mr Piper knows already what readers want,' said Baby, 'he doesn't have to hear it
over breakfast.'

Hutchmeyer ignored her. 'A guy comes home from work what's he to do? Has himself a beer and
watches TV, eats and goes to bed too tired to lay his wife so he reads a book '

'If he's that tired why does he need to read a book?' asked Baby.

'He's too damned tired to sleep. Needs something to send him off. So he picks up a book and
has fantasies he's not in the Bronx but in...where did you set your book?'

'East Finchley,' said Piper, having trouble with a mouthful of Wheatgerm.

'Devon,' said Baby, 'the book is set in Devon.'

'Devon?' said Hutchmeyer. 'He says it's set in East Finchley, he ought to know for Chrissake.
He wrote the goddam thing.'

'It's set in Devon and Oxford,' said Baby stubbornly. 'She has this big house and he '

'Devon's right,' said Piper, 'I was thinking of my second book.'

Hutchmeyer glowered. 'Yeah, well, wherever. So this guy in the Bronx has fantasies he's in
Devon with this old broad who's crazy about him and before he knows it he's asleep.'

'That's a great recommendation,' said Baby, 'and I don't think Mr Piper writes his books with
insomniacs in the Bronx in mind. He portrays a developing relationship...'

'Sure, sure he does but '

'The hesitations and uncertainties of a young man whose feelings and emotional responses
deviate from the socially accepted norms of his socio-sexual age grouping.'

'Right,' said Hutchmeyer, 'no question about it. He's a deviant and '

'He is not a deviant,' said Baby, 'he is a very gifted adolescent with an identity problem and
Gwendolen...'

While Piper munched his Wheatgerm the battle about his intentions in writing Pause raged on.
Since Piper hadn't written the book and Hutchmeyer hadn't read it, Baby came out on top.
Hutchmeyer retreated to his study and Piper found himself alone with a woman who, for quite the
wrong reasons, shared his own opinion that he was a great writer. And cute. Piper had
reservations about being called cute by a woman whose own attractions were sufficiently at odds
with one another to be disturbing. In the dim light of the party the night before he had supposed
her to be thirty-five. Now he was less sure. Beneath her blouse her bra-less breasts pointed to
the early twenties. Her hands didn't. Finally there was her face. It had a masklike quality, a
lack of anything remotely individual, irregular or out of harmony with the faces of the
two-dimensional women he had seen staring so fixedly from the pages of women's magazines like
Vogue. Taut, impersonal and characterless it held a strange fascination for him, while her limpid
azure eyes...Piper found himself thinking of Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium and the artifice of
jewelled birds that sang. To steady himself he read the label on the Wheatgerm jar and found that
he had just consumed 740 milligrammes of phosphorus, 550 of potassium, together with vast
quantities of other essential minerals and every Vitamin B under the sun.

'It seems to have a lot of Vitamin B,' he said, avoiding the allure of those eyes.

'The Bs give you energy,' murmured Baby. 'And As?' asked Piper.

'Vitamin A smooths the mucous membranes,' said Baby and once again Piper was dimly conscious
that beneath this dietetic commentary there lurked an undertow of dangerous suggestion. He looked
up from the Wheatgerm label and was held once more by that masklike face and limpid azure
eyes.

Sonia Futtle rose late. Never an early riser, she had slept more heavily than usual. The
strain of the previous day had taken its toll. She came downstairs to find the house empty apart
from Hutchmeyer who was growling into the telephone in his study. She made herself some coffee
and interrupted him. 'Have you seen Peter?' she asked.

'Baby's taken him some place. They'll be back,' said Hutchmeyer. 'Now about that proposition I
put to you...'

'No way. F & F is a good agency. We're doing well. So what would I want to change?'

'It's a Vice-Presidency I'm offering you,' said Hutchmeyer, 'and the offer stays open.'

'The only offer I'm interested in right now,' said Sonia, 'is the one you're going to make my
client for all the physical injury and mental suffering and public ridicule he sustained as a
result of yesterday's riot you organized at the docks.'

'Physical injury? Mental suffering?' shouted Hutchmeyer incredulously. 'That was the greatest
publicity in the world and you want me to make an offer?'

Sonia nodded. 'Compensation. In the region of twenty-five thousand.'

'Twenty-five...Are you crazy? Two million I give him for that book and you want to take me for
another twenty-five grand?'

'I do,' said Sonia. 'There is nothing in the contract that says my client has to be subjected
to violence, assault and the attentions of lethal frisbees. Now you organized that caper '

'Go jump,' said Hutchmeyer.

'In that case I shall advise Mr Piper to cancel the tour.'

'You do that,' shouted Hutchmeyer, 'and I'll sue for non-fulfilment of contract. I'll take him
to the cleaners. I'll goddam...'

'Pay up,' said Sonia taking a seat and crossing her legs provocatively.

'Jesus,' said Hutchmeyer admiringly, 'I'll say this for you, you've got nerve.'

'Not all I got,' said Sonia, exposing a bit more, 'I've got Piper's second novel too.'

'And I have the option on it.'

'If he finishes it, Hutch, if he finishes it. You keep this sort of pressure up on him he's
likely to Scott Fitzgerald on you. He's sensitive and '