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?'
