The Great Pursuit

Chapter 18

In Chattanooga Baby had fulfilled her ambition. She had seen the Choo Choo. Installed in Pullman Car Number Nine, she lay on the brass bedstead and stared out of the window at the illuminated fountain playing across the tracks. Above the main building of the station tube lighting emblazoned the night sky with words Hilton Choo Choo and below, in what had once been the waiting-room, dinner was being served. Beside the restaurant there was a crafts shop and in front of them both stood huge locomotives of a bygone era, their cow-catchers freshly painted and their smokestacks gleaming as if in anticipation of some great journey. In fact they were going nowhere. Their fireboxes were cold and empty and their pistons would never move again. Only in the imagination of those who stayed the night in the ornate and divided Pullman cars, now motel bedrooms, was it still possible to entertain the illusion that they would presently pull out of the station and begin the long haul north or west. The place was part museum, part fantasy and wholly commercial. At the entrance to the car park uniformed guards sat in a small cabin watching the television screens on which each platform and each dark corner of the station was displayed for the protection of the guests. Outside the perimeter of the station Chattanooga spread dark and seedy with boarded hotel windows and derelict buildings, a victim of the shopping precincts beyond the ring of suburbs.

But Baby wasn't thinking about Chattanooga or even the Choo Choo. They had joined the illusions of her retarded youth. Age had caught up with her and she felt tired and empty of hope. All the romance of life had gone. Piper had seen to that. Travelling day after day with a self-confessed genius whose thoughts were centred on literary immortality to the exclusion of all else had given Baby a new insight into the monotony of Piper's mind. By comparison Hutchmeyer's obsession with money and power and wheeling and dealing now seemed positively healthy. Piper evinced no interest in the countryside nor the towns they passed through and the fact that they were now in, or at least on the frontier of, the Deep South and that wild country of Baby's soft-corn imagination appeared to mean nothing to him. He had hardly glanced at the locomotives drawn up in the station and seemed only surprised that they weren't travelling anywhere on them. Once that had been impressed on him he had retreated to his stateroom and had started work again on his second version of Pause.

'For a great novelist you've just got to be the least observant,' Baby said when they met in the restaurant for dinner. 'I mean don't you ever look around and wonder what it's all about.'

Piper looked around. 'Seems an odd place to put a restaurant,' he said. 'Still, it's nice and cool.'

'That just happens to be the air-conditioning,' said Baby irritably.

'Oh, is that what it is,' said Piper. 'I wondered.'

'He wondered. And what about all the people who have sat right here waiting to take the train north to New York and Detroit and Chicago to make their fortunes instead of scratching a living from a patch of dirt? Doesn't that mean anything to you?'

'There don't seem many of them about,' said Piper looking idly at a woman with an obesity problem and tartan shorts, 'and anyway I thought you said the trains weren't running any more.'

'Oh my God,' said Baby, 'I sometimes wonder what century you're living in. And I suppose it doesn't mean a thing to you that there was a battle here in the Civil War?'

'No,' said Piper. 'Battles don't figure in great literature.'

'They don't? What about Gone With The Wind and War and Peace? I suppose they aren't great literature.'

'Not English literature,' said Piper. 'What matters in English literature is the relationships people have with one another.'

Baby dug into her steak. 'And people don't relate to one another in battles? Is that it?'

Piper nodded.

'So when one guy kills another that's not relating in a way that matters?'

'Only transitorily,' said Piper.

'And when Sherman's troops go looting and burning and raping their way from Atlanta to the sea and leave behind them homeless families and burning mansions that isn't altering relationships either so you don't write about it?'

'The best novelists wouldn't,' said Piper. 'It didn't happen to them and therefore they couldn't.'

'Couldn't what?'

'Write about it.'

'Are you telling me a writer can only write what has really happened to him? Is that what you're saying?' said Baby with a new edge to her voice.

'Yes,' said Piper, 'you see it would be outside the range of his experience and therefore...'

He spoke at length from The Moral Novel while Baby slowly chewed her way through her steak and thought dark thoughts about Piper's theory.

'In that case you're going to need a lot more experience is all I can say.'

Piper pricked up his ears. 'Now wait a minute,' he said, 'if you think I want to be involved in any more houseburning and boat-exploding and that sort of thing '

'I wasn't thinking of that sort of experience. I mean things like burning houses don't count do they? It's relationships that matter. What you need is experience in relating.'

Piper ate uneasily. The conversation had taken a distasteful turn. They finished their meal in silence. Afterwards Piper returned to his stateroom and wrote five hundred more words about his tortured adolescence and his feelings for Gwendolen/Miss Pears. Finally he turned out the electric oil lamp that hung above his brass bedstead and undressed. In the next compartment Baby readied herself for Piper's first lesson in relationships. She put on a very little nightdress and a great deal of perfume and opened the door to Piper's stateroom.

'For God's sake,' squawked Piper as she climbed into bed with him.

'This is where it all begins, baby,' said Baby, 'relationshipwise.'

'No, it doesn't,' said Piper. 'It's '

Baby's hand closed over his mouth and her voice whispered in his ear.

'And don't think you're going to get out of here. They've got TV cameras on every platform and you go hobbling out there in the raw the guards are going to want to know what's been going on.'

'But I'm not in the raw,' said Piper as Baby's hand left his mouth.

'You soon will be, honey,' Baby whispered as her hands deftly untied his pyjamas.

'Please,' said Piper plaintively.

'I aim to, honey, I aim to,' said Baby. She lifted her nightdress and her great breasts dug into Piper's chest. For the next two hours the brass bedstead heaved and creaked as Baby Hutchmeyer, née Sugg, Miss Penobscot 1935, put all the expertise of her years to work on Piper. And in spite of himself and his invocation of the precepts in The Moral Novel, Piper was for the first time lost to the world of letters and moved by an inchoate passion. He writhed beneath her, he pounded on top, his mouth sucked at her silicon breasts and slithered across the minute scars on her stomach. All the time Baby's fingers caressed and dug and scratched and squeezed until Piper's back was torn and his buttocks marked by the curve of her nails and all the time Baby stared into the dimness of the stateroom dispassionately and wondered at her own boredom. 'Youth must have its fling,' she thought to herself as Piper hurled himself into her yet again. But she was no longer young and flinging without feeling was not her scene. There was more to life than fucking. Much more, and she was going to find it.

In Oxford Frensic was up and about and finding it when Baby returned to her own compartment and left Piper sleeping exhaustedly next door. Frensic had got up early and had breakfasted before eight. By half past he had found the Cynthia Bogden Typing Service in Fenet Street. With what he hoped was the expectant look of an American tourist he haunted the church opposite and sat in one of the pews staring back through the open door at the entrance to the Bogden bureau. If he knew anything about middle-aged women who were divorced and ran their own businesses, Miss Bogden would be the first to arrive in the morning and the last to leave at night. By quarter past nine Frensic certainly hoped so. The trail of women he had seen entering the office were not at all to his taste but at least the first to arrive had been the most presentable. She had been a large woman but Frensic's brief glimpse had told him that her legs were good and that if Mr Cadwalladine had been right about her being forty-five she didn't look it. Frensic left the church and pondered his next step. There was no point in going into the Agency and asking Miss Bogden point blank who had sent her Pause. Her tone the previous day had indicated that more subtle tactics were necessary.

Frensic made his next move. He found a flower shop and went inside. Twenty minutes later two dozen red roses were delivered to the Bogden Typing Service with a note which said simply, 'To Miss Bogden from an Admirer.' Frensic had thought of adding 'ardent' but had decided against it. Two dozen expensive red roses argued an ardency by themselves. Miss Bogden or more properly Mrs Bogden, and the reversion indicated a romantic direction to that lady's thoughts, would supply the adjective. Frensic wandered round Oxford, had coffee in the Ship and lunch back at the Randolph. Then, gauging that enough time had elapsed for Miss Bogden to have digested the implications of the roses, he went to Professor Facit's room and phoned the Agency. As before, Miss Bogden answered. Frensic took a deep breath, swallowed and presently heard himself asking with an agony of unaffected coyness if she would do him the honour and privilege of having dinner with him at the Elizabeth. There was a sibilant pause before Miss Bogden replied.

'Do I know you?' she asked archly. Frensic squirmed.

'An admirer,' he murmured.

'Oo,' said Miss Bogden. There was another pause while she observed the proprieties of hesitation.

'Roses,' said Frensic garrottedly.

'Are you quite sure? I mean it's rather unusual...'

Frensic silently agreed that it was. 'It's just that...' he began and then took the plunge, 'I haven't had the nerve before and...' The garrotte tightened.

Miss Bogden on the other hand breathed sympathy. 'Better late than never,' she said softly.

'That's what I thought,' said Frensic who didn't

'And you did say the Elizabeth?'

'Yes,' said Frensic, 'shall we say eight in the bar?'

'How will I know you?'

'I know you,' said Frensic and giggled involuntarily. Miss Bogden took it as a compliment.

'You haven't told me your name.'

Frensic hesitated. He couldn't use his own and Facit was in Pause. It had to be someone else. 'Corkadale,' he muttered finally, 'Geoffrey Corkadale.'

'Not the Geoffrey Corkadale?' said Miss Bogden.

'Yes,' stammered Frensic hoping to hell that Geoffrey's epicene reputation hadn't reached her ears. It hadn't. Miss Bogden cooed.

'Well in that case...' She left the rest unsaid.

'Till eight,' said Frensic.

'Till eight,' echoed Miss Bogden. Frensic put the phone down and sat limply on the bed.

Then he lay down and had a long nap. He woke at four and went downstairs. There was one last thing to do. He didn't know Miss Bogden and there must be no mistake. He made his way to Fenet Street and stationed himself in the church. He was there at five thirty when the trail of awful women came out of the office. Frensic sighed with relief. None of them was carrying a bunch of red roses. Finally the large woman appeared and locked the door. She clutched roses to her ample bosom and hurried off down the street. Frensic emerged from the church and watched her go. Miss Bogden was definitely well-preserved. From her permed head to her pink shoes by way of a turquoise costume there was a tastelessness about the woman that was almost inspired. Frensic went back to the hotel and had a stiff gin. Then he had another, took a bath and rehearsed various approaches that seemed likely to elicit from Miss Bogden the name of the author of Pause.

On the other side of Oxford, Cynthia Bogden prepared herself for the evening with the same thoroughness with which she did everything. It had been some years since her divorce and to be asked to dine at the Elizabeth by a publisher augured well. So did the roses, carefully arranged in a vase, and the nervousness of her admirer. There had been nothing brash about the voice on the telephone. It had been an educated voice and Corkadales were most respectable publishers. And in any case Cynthia Bogden was in need of admirers. She selected her most seductive costume, sprayed herself in various places with various aerosols, fixed her face and set out prepared to be wined, dined and, not to put too fine a point on it, fucked. She entered the foyer of the Elizabeth exuding an uncertain hauteur and was somewhat startled when a short baggy man sidled up to her and took her hand.

'Miss Bogden,' he murmured, 'your fond admirer.'

Miss Bogden looked down at her fond admirer dubiously. She was still looking down at him half an hour and three pink gins later as they made their way to the table Frensic had reserved in the farthest corner of the restaurant. He held her chair for her and then, conscious that perhaps he hadn't come as far up to her expectations as he might have done, threw himself into the part of fond admirer with a desperate gallantry and inventiveness that surprised them both.

'I first glimpsed you a year ago when I was up for a conference,' he told her having ordered the wine waiter to bring them a bottle of not too dry champagne, 'I saw you in the street and followed you to your office.'

'You should have introduced yourself,' said Miss Bogden.

Frensic blushed convincingly. 'I was too shy,' he murmured, 'and besides I thought you were...'

'Married?' said Miss Bogden helpfully.

'Exactly,' said Frensic, 'or shall we say attached. A woman as...er...beautiful...er...'

It was Miss Bogden's turn to blush. Frensic plunged on. 'I was overcome. Your charm, your air of quiet reserve, your...how shall I put it...' There was no need to put it. While Frensic burrowed into an avocado pear, Cynthia Bogden savoured a shrimp. Baggy this little man might be but he was clearly a gentleman and a man of the world. Champagne at twelve pounds a bottle was a sufficient indication of his honourable intentions. When Frensic ordered a second, Miss Bogden protested feebly.

'Special occasion,' said Frensic wondering if he wasn't overdoing things a bit, 'and besides we have something to celebrate.'

'We do?'

'Our meeting for one thing,' said Frensic, 'and the success of a mutual venture.'

'Mutual venture?' said Miss Bogden, her thoughts veering sharply to the altar.

'Something we both had a hand in,' continued Frensic, 'I mean we don't usually publish that sort of book but I must say it's been a great success.'

Miss Bogden's thoughts turned away from the altar. Frensic helped himself to more champagne. 'We're a very traditional publishing house,' he said, 'but Pause O Men for the Virgin is what the public demands these days.'

'It was rather awful, wasn't it?' said Miss Bogden, 'I typed it myself you know.'

'Really?' said Frensic.

'Well I didn't like my girls having to do it and the author was so peculiar about it.'

'Was he?'

'I had to phone up ever so often,' said Miss Bogden. 'But you don't want to hear about that.'

Frensic did but Miss Bogden was adamant. 'We mustn't spoil our first evening talking shop,' she said and in spite of more champagne and a large Cointreau all Frensic's attempts to steer the conversation back to the subject failed. Miss Bogden wanted to hear about Corkadales. The name seemed to appeal to her.

'Why don't you come back to my place?' she asked as they walked beside the river after dinner. 'For a nightcap.'

'That's frightfully kind of you,' said Frensic prepared to pursue his quarry to the bitter end. 'Are you sure I wouldn't be imposing on you?'

'I'd like that,' said Miss Bogden with a giggle and took his arm, 'to be imposed on by you.' She steered him to the carpark and a light blue MG. Frensic gaped at the car. It did not accord with his notion of what a forty-five-year-old head of a typing bureau should drive and besides he was unused to bucket seats. Frensic squeezed in and was forced to allow Miss Bogden to fasten his safety belt. Then they drove rather faster than he liked along the Banbury Road and into a hinterland of semi-detached houses. Miss Bogden lived at 33 Viewpark Avenue, a mixture of pebbledash and Tudor. She pulled up in front of the garage. Frensic fumbled for the catch of his safety belt but Cynthia Bogden was there before him and leaning expectantly. Frensic nerved himself for the inevitable and took her in his arms. It was a long kiss and a passionate one, made even less enjoyable for Frensic by the presence of the gear lever in his right kidney. By the time they had finished and climbed out of the car he was having third and fourth thoughts about the whole enterprise. But there was too much at stake to falter now. Frensic followed her into the house. Miss Bogden switched on the hall light.

'Would you like a drinkie?' she asked.

'No,' said Frensic with a fervour that came largely from the conviction that she would offer him cooking sherry. Miss Bogden took his refusal as a compliment and once more they grappled, this time in the company of a hat stand. Then taking his hand she led the way upstairs.

'The you-know-what's in there,' she said helpfully. Frensic staggered into the bathroom and shut the door. He spent several minutes staring at his reflection in the mirror and wondering why it was that only the most predatory women found him attractive and wishing to hell they didn't and then, having promised himself that he would never again be rude about Geoffrey Corkadale's preferences, he came out and went into the bedroom. Cynthia Bogden's bedroom was pink. The curtains were pink, the carpet pink, the padded and quilted bedhead pink and the lampshade beside it pink. And finally there was a pink Frensic wrestling with the intricacies of Cynthia Bogden's pink underwear while muttering pinkish endearments in her pink ear.

An hour later Frensic was no longer pink. Against the pink sheets he was puce and having palpitations to boot. His efforts to get into her good books among other less savoury things had done something to his circulatory system and Miss Bogden's sexual skills, nurtured in a justifiably broken marriage and gleaned, Frensic suspected, from some frightful manual on how to make sex an adventure, had led him to contortions which would have defied the imaginations of his most sexually obsessed authors. As he lay panting, alternately thanking God it was all over and wondering if he was going to have a coronary, Cynthia bent her permed head over him.

'Satisfied?' she asked. Frensic stared at her and nodded frantically. Any other answer would have invited suicide.

'And now we'll have a little drinkie,' she said and skipping to Frensic's amazement lightly off the bed she went downstairs and returned with a bottle of whisky. She sat down on the edge of the bed and poured two tots.

'To us,' she said. Frensic drank deeply and held out his glass for more. Cynthia smiled and handed him the bottle.

In New York Hutchmeyer was having problems too. They were of a different sort to Frensic's but since they involved three and a half million dollars the effect was much the same.

'What do you mean they aren't prepared to pay?' he yelled at MacMordie who had reported that the insurance company were holding back on compensation. 'They got to pay. I mean why should I insure my property if they aren't going to pay when it's arsonized?'

'I don't know,' said MacMordie, 'I'm just telling you what Mr Synstrom said.'

'Get me Synstrom,' yelled Hutchmeyer. MacMordie got Synstrom. He came up to Hutchmeyer's office and sat blandly regarding the great publisher through steel-rimmed glasses.

'Now I don't know what you're trying to get at ' Hutchmeyer began.

'The truth,' said Mr Synstrom. 'Just the plain truth.'

'That's okay by me,' said Hutchmeyer, 'just so long as you pay up when you've got it.'

The thing is, Mr Hutchmeyer, we know how that fire started.'

'How?'

'Someone deliberately lit the house with a can of gasolene. And that someone was your wife...'

'You know that?'

'Mr Hutchmeyer, we've got analysts who can figure out the nail varnish your wife was wearing when she opened that safe and took out that quarter of a million dollars you had stashed there.'

Hutchmeyer eyed him suspiciously. 'You can?' he said.

'Sure. And we know too she loaded that cruiser of yours with fifty gallons of gasolene. She and that Piper. He carried the cans down and we've got their prints.'

'What the hell would she do that for?'

'We thought you might have the answer to that one,' said Mr Synstrom.

'Me? I was out in the middle of the goddam bay. How should I know what was going on back at my house?'

'We wouldn't know that, Mr Hutchmeyer. Just seems a kind of coincidence you go sailing with Miss Futtle in a storm and your wife is setting out to burn your house down and fake her own death.'

Hutchmeyer paled. 'Fake her own death? Did you say...'

Mr Synstrom nodded. 'We call it the Stonehouse syndrome in the trade,' he said. 'It happens every once in a while someone wants the world to think they're dead so they disappear and leave their nearest and dearest to claim the insurance. Now you've put in a claim for three and a half million dollars and we've got no proof your wife isn't alive some place.'

Hutchmeyer stared miserably at him. He was considering the awful possibility that Baby was still around and with her she was carrying all that evidence of his tax evasions, bribes and illegal dealings that could send him to prison. By comparison the forfeiture of three and a half million dollars was peanuts.

'I just can't believe she'd do a thing like that,' he said finally. 'I mean we had a happy marriage. No problems. I gave her everything she asked for...'

'Like young men?' said Mr Synstrom.

'No, not like young men,' shouted Hutchmeyer, and felt his pulse. 'Now this Piper writer was a young man,' said Mr Synstrom, 'and from what we've heard Mrs Hutchmeyer had a taste for...'

'Are you accusing my wife of...My God, I'll...'

'We're not accusing anyone of anything, Mr Hutchmeyer. Like I've said we're trying to get at the truth.'

'And are you telling me that my wife, my own dear little Baby, filled that cruiser with gasolene and deliberately tried to murder me by aiming it at my yacht in the middle of '

'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.