'Not that way,' shouted Hutchmeyer, 'Jesus, MacMordie, we're talking about my wife, not some crazy bitch dog lover. Have some respect please.'
'But you said she was into bears and I thought '
'The trouble with you, MacMordie, is you don't think. So she's into bears. Doesn't mean the bears are into her for Chrissake. Whoever heard of a woman into anything sexual? It isn't possible.'
'I don't know. I knew a woman once with this '
'You want to know something, MacMordie, you know some fucking horrible women no kidding. You should get yourself a decent wife.'
'I got a decent wife. I don't go messing no longer. I just don't have the energy.'
'Should eat Wheatgerm and Vitamin E like I do. Helps get it up better than anything. What were we talking about?'
'Bears,' said MacMordie avidly.
'Baby's got this thing about ecology and wildlife. Been reading about animals being human and all. Some guy called Morris wrote a book...'
'I read that too,' said MacMordie.
'Not that Morris. This Morris worked in a zoo and had a naked ape and writes this book about it. Must have shaved the fucking thing. So Baby reads it and the next thing you know she has bought a lot of bears and things and let them loose round the house. Place is thick with bears and the neighbours start complaining just when I'm applying to join the Yacht Club. I tell you, that woman gives me a pain in the ass all the problems she manages to come up with.'
MacMordie looked puzzled. 'If this Morris guy went in for apes how come Mrs Hutchmeyer is into bears?' he asked.
'Whoever heard of a fucking naked ape in the Maine woods? It's impossible. The thing would freeze to death first snowfall and it's got to be natural.'
'Isn't natural having bears in your backyard. Not any place I know.'
'First thing I said to Baby. I said you want an ape it's okay with me but bears is into another ballgame. Know what she said? She said she'd had a naked fucking ape round the house forty years and bears needed protecting. Protecting? Three hundred fifty pounds they weigh and they need protection? Anyone round the place needs protection it's got to be me.'
'What did you do then?' asked MacMordie.
'Got myself a machine-gun and told her the first bear I saw coming into the house I'd blow its fucking head off. So the bears got the message and took to the woods and now it's all fine up there.'
It was all fine at sea too. Piper woke the next morning to find himself in a floating hotel but since his adult life had been spent moving from one boarding-house to another, each with a view of the English Channel, there was nothing very surprising about his new circumstances. True, the luxury he was now enjoying was better than the amenities offered by the Gleneagle Guest House in Exforth, but surroundings meant little to Piper. The main thing in his life was his writing and he continued his routine on the ship. In the morning he wrote at a table in his cabin and after lunch lay with Sonia on the sundeck discussing life, literature and Pause O Men for the Virgin in a haze of happiness.
'For the first time in my life I am truly happy,' he confided to his diary and that band of future scholars who would one day study his private life. 'My relationship with Sonia has added a new dimension to my existence and extended my understanding of what it means to be mature. Whether this can be called love only time will tell but is it not enough to know that we interrelate so personally? I can only find it in myself to regret that we have been brought together by so humanly debasing a book as POMFTV. But as Thomas Mann would have said with that symbolic irony which is the hallmark of his work 'Every cloud has a silver lining', and one can only agree with him. Would that it were otherwise!!! Sonia insists on my re-reading the book so
