As the last page disappeared he got up. She was still huddled over the grate. For a second time Frensic was tempted to ask her why she had written the book. To prove her critics wrong. That wasn't the answer. There was more to it than that, the sex, the ardent love affair...He would never learn from her. He left the room quietly and went down the passage to the front door. Outside the air was filled with small black flakes falling from the chimney and near the gate a young cat jumped up clawing at a fragment which danced in the breeze.
Frensic took a deep breath of fresh air and hurried down the road. He had his things to collect from the hotel and then a train to catch to London.
Somewhere south of Tuscaloosa Baby dropped the road map out of the window of the car. It fluttered behind them in the dust and was gone. As usual Piper noticed nothing. His mind was intent on Work In Regress. He had reached page 178 and the book was going well. In another fortnight of hard work he would have finished it. And then he would start the third revision, the one in which not only the characters were changed but the setting of every scene. He had decided to call it Postscript to A Childhood as a precursor to his final, commercially unadulterated novel Search for a Lost Childhood which was to be considered in retrospect as the very first draft of Pause by those same critics who had acclaimed that obnoxious novel. In this way his reputation would have been rescued from the oblivion of facile success and scholars would be able to trace the insidious influence of Frensic's commercial recommendations upon his original talent. Piper smiled to himself at his own ingenuity. And after all there could be other yet to be discovered novels. He would go on writing 'posthumously' and every few years another novel would turn up on Frensic's desk to be released to the world. There was nothing Frensic could do about it. Baby was right. By deceiving Hutchmeyer Frensic & Futtle had made themselves vulnerable. Frensic would have to do what he was told. Piper closed his eyes and lay back in his seat contentedly. Half an hour later he opened them again and sat up. The car, a Ford that Baby had bought in Rossville, was lurching on a bad road surface. Piper looked out and saw they were driving along a road built on an embankment. On either side tall trees stood in dark water.
'Where are we?' he asked.
'I've no idea,' said Baby.
'No idea? You've got to know where we are heading.'
'Into the sticks is all I know. And when we get some place we'll find out.'
Piper looked down at the dark water beneath the trees. The forest had a sinister quality to it that he didn't like. Always before they had travelled along homely, cheerful roads with only the occasional stretch of kudzu vine crawling across trees and banks to suggest wild natural growth. But this was different. There were no billboards, no houses, no gas stations, none of those amenities which had signified civilization. This was a wilderness.
'And what happens if when we do get some place there isn't a motel?' he asked.
'Then we'll have to make do with what there is,' said Baby, 'I told you we were coming to the Deep South and this is where it's at.'
'Where what's at?' said Piper staring down at the black water and thinking of alligators.
'That's what I've come to find out,' said Baby enigmatically and braked the car to a standstill at a cross roads. Piper peered through the windshield at a sign. Its faded letters said BIBLIOPOLIS 15 MILES.
'Looks like your kind of town,' said Baby and turned the car on to the side road. Presently the dark water forest thinned and they came out into an open landscape with lush meadows hazy with heat where cattle grazed in long grass and clumps of trees stood apart. There was something almost English about this scenery, an English parkland gone to seed, luxuriant yet immanent with half-remembered possibilities. Everywhere the distance faded into haze blurring the horizon. Piper, looking across the meadows, felt easier in his mind. There was a sense of domesticity here that was reassuring. Occasionally they passed a wooden shack part-hidden by vegetation and seemingly unoccupied. And finally there was Bibliopolis itself, a small town, almost a hamlet, with a river running sluggishly beside an abandoned quay. Baby drove down to the riverside and stopped. There was no bridge. On the far side an ancient rope ferry provided the only means of crossing.
'Okay, go ring the bell,' said Baby. Piper got out and rang a bell that hung from a post.
'Harder,' said Baby as Piper pulled on the rope. Presently a man appeared on the far shore and the ferry began to move across.
'You wanting something?' said the man when the ferry grounded.
'We're looking for somewhere to stay,' said Baby. The man peered at the licence plate on the Ford and seemed reassured. It read Georgia.
'There ain't no motel in Bibliopolis,' said the man. 'You'd best go back to Selma.'
'There must be somewhere,' said Baby as the man still hesitated.
'Mrs Mathervitie's Tourist Home,' said the man and stepped aside. Baby drove on to the ferry and got out.
'Is this the Alabama river?' she asked. The man shook his head.
'The Ptomaine River, ma'am,' he said and pulled on the rope.
'And that?' asked Baby, pointing to a large dilapidated mansion that was evidently ante-bellum.
That's Pellagra. Nobody lives there now. They all died off.'
Piper sat in the car and stared gloomily at the sluggish river. The trees along its bank were veiled with Spanish moss like widows' weeds and the dilapidated mansion below the town put him in mind of Miss Haversham. But Baby, when she got back into the car and drove off the ferry, was clearly elated by the atmosphere.
'I told you this was where it's at,' she said triumphantly. 'And now for Mrs Mathervitie's Tourist Home.'
They drove down a tree-lined street and stopped outside a house. A signboard said Welcome. Mrs Mathervitie was less effusive. Sitting in the shadow of a porch she watched them get out of the car.
'You folks looking for some place?' she asked, her glasses glinting in the sunset.
'Mrs Mathervitie's Tourist Home,' said Baby.
'Selling or staying? Cos if it's cosmetics I ain't in the market.'
'Staying,' said Baby.
Mrs Mathervitie studied them critically with the air of a connoisseur of irregular relationships.
'I only got singles,' she said and spat into the hub of a sun flower, 'no doubles.'
'Praise be the Lord,' said Baby involuntarily.
'Amen,' said Mrs Mathervitie.
They went into the house and down a passage.
'This is yourn,' said Mrs Mathervitie to Piper and opened a door. The room looked out on to a patch of corn. On the wall there was an oleograph of Christ scourging the moneylenders from the temple and a cardboard sign that decreed NO BROWNBAGGING. Piper looked at it dubiously. It seemed a thoroughly unnecessary injunction.
'Well?' said Mrs Mathervitie.
'Very nice,' said Piper who had spotted a row of books on a shelf. He looked at them and found they were all Bibles. 'Good Lord,' he muttered.
'Amen,' said Mrs Mathervitie and went off with Baby down the passage leaving Piper to consider the sinister implications of NO BROWNBAGGING. By the time they returned he was no nearer a solution to the riddle.
'The Reverend and I are happy to accept your hospitality,' said Baby. 'Aren't we, Reverend?'
'What?' said Piper. Mrs Mathervitie was looking at him with new interest.
'I was just telling Mrs Mathervitie how interested you are in American religion,' said Baby. Piper swallowed and tried to think what to say.