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, nee 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.
