The Great Pursuit

Chapter 21

In his Hampstead flat Frensic lay in his morning bath and twiddled the hot tap with his big toe to maintain an even temperature. A good night's sleep had helped to undo the ravages of Cynthia Bogden's passion and he was in no hurry to go to the office. He had things to think about. It was all very well congratulating himself for his subtlety in unearthing the genuine author of Pause and forcing her to renounce all rights in the book but there were still problems to be faced. The first of these concerned the continuing existence of Piper and his inordinate claim to be paid for a novel he hadn't written. On the face of it this seemed a minor problem. Frensic could now go ahead and deposit the two million dollars less his own and Corkadales' commissions in Account Number 478776 in the First National Bank of New York. This seemed at first sight the sensible thing to do. Pay Piper and be rid of the rogue. On the other hand it was succumbing to blackmail and blackmailers tended to renew their demands. Give in once and he would have to give in again and again and in any case transferring the money to New York would necessitate explaining to Sonia that Piper wasn't dead. One whiff of that and she'd be off after him like a scalded cat. Perhaps he might be able to fudge the issue and tell her that Mr Cadwalladine's client had given instructions for the royalties to be paid in this way.

But beyond all these technical problems there lay the suspicion that Piper hadn't come up with this conspiracy to defraud on his own initiative. Ten years of the recurrent Search for a Lost Childhood was proof enough that Piper lacked any imagination at all and whoever had dreamt this devious plot up had a remarkably powerful imagination. Frensic's suspicions centred on Mrs Baby Hutchmeyer. If Piper, who was supposed to have died with her, was still alive there was every reason to believe that Baby Hutchmeyer had survived with him. Frensic tried to analyse the psychology of Hutchmeyer's wife. To have endured forty years of marriage to that monster argued either masochism or resilience beyond the ordinary. And then to burn an enormous house to the ground, blow up a cruiser and sink a yacht, all of them belonging to her husband and all in a matter of twenty minutes...Clearly the woman was insane and couldn't be relied upon. At any moment she might resurrect herself and drag from his temporary grave the wretched Piper. What would follow this momentous event blew Frensic's mind. Hutchmeyer would go litigiously berserk and sue everyone in sight. Piper would be dragged through the courts and the entire story of his substitution for the real author would be announced to the world. Frensic got out of the bath and dried himself to ward off the spectre of Piper in the witness box.

And as he dressed the problem became more and more complicated. Even if Baby Hutchmeyer didn't decide to go in for self-exhumation there was every chance that she would be discovered by some nosey reporter who might at this very moment be hungrily tracking her down. What the hell would happen if Piper told the truth? Frensic tried to foresee the outcome of his revelations, and was just making himself some coffee when he remembered the manuscript. The manuscript in Piper's handwriting. Or at least the copy. That was the way out. He could always deny Piper's allegation that he hadn't written Pause and produce that manuscript copy as proof. And even if the psychotic Baby backed Piper up, nobody would believe her. Frensic sighed with relief. He had found a way out of the dilemma. After breakfast he walked up the hill to the tube station and caught a train in a thoroughly good mood. He was a clever fellow and it would take more than the benighted Piper and Baby Hutchmeyer to put one across him.

He arrived at Lanyard Lane to find the office locked. That was odd. Sonia Futtle should have been back from Bernie the Beaver the previous day. Frensic unlocked the door and went in. No sign of Sonia. He crossed to his desk and there lying neatly separated from the rest of his mail was an envelope. It was addressed in Sonia's handwriting to him. Frensic sat down and opened it. Inside was a long letter which began 'Dearest Frenzy' and ended, 'Your loving Sonia.' In between these endearments Sonia explained with a wealth of nauseating sentimentality and self-deception how Hutchmeyer had asked her to marry him and why she had accepted. Frensic was flabbergasted. And only a week before the girl had been crying her eyes out over Piper. Frensic took out his snuff box and red spotted handkerchief and thanked God he was still a bachelor. The ways and wiles of women were quite beyond him.

They were quite beyond Geoffrey Corkadale too. He was still in a state of nervous agitation over the threatened libel suit of Professor Facit versus the author, publisher and printer of Pause O Men for the Virgin when he received a telephone call from Miss Bogden.

'I did what?' he asked with a mixture of total incredulity and disgust. 'And stop calling me darling. I don't know you from a bar of soap.'

'But Geoffrey sweetheart,' said Miss Bogden, 'you were so passionate, so manly...'

'I was not!' shouted Geoffrey. 'You've got the wrong number. You can't say these things.'

Miss Bogden could and did. In detail. Geoffrey Corkadale curdled.

'Stop,' he yelled, 'I don't know what the hell has been going on but if you think for one moment that I spent the night before last in your beastly arms...dear God...you must be out of your bloody mind.'

'And I suppose you didn't ask me to marry you,' screamed Miss Bogden, 'and buy me an engagement ring and...'

Geoffrey slammed the phone down to shut out this appalling catalogue. The situation was sufficently desperate on the legal front without demented women claiming he had asked them to marry him. Then, to forestall any resumption of Miss Bogden's accusations, he left the office and made his way to his solicitors to discuss a possible defence in the libel action.

They were singularly unhelpful. 'It isn't as if the defamation of Professor Facit was accidental,' they told him. 'This man Piper evidently set out with deliberate malice to ruin the reputation of the Professor. There can be no other explanation. In our opinion the author is entirely culpable.'

'He also happens to be dead,' said Geoffrey.

'In that case it rather looks as though you are going to have to bear the entire costs of this action and, frankly, we would advise you to settle.'

Geoffrey Corkadale left the solicitors' office in despair. It was all that bloody man Frensic's fault. He should have known better than to have dealt with a literary agent who had already been involved in one disastrous libel action. Frensic was libel-prone. There was no other way of looking at it. Geoffrey took a cab to Lanyard Lane. He was going to tell Frensic what he thought of him. He found Frensic in an unusually affable mood.

'My dear Geoffrey, how very nice to see you,' he said.

'I haven't come to exchange compliments,' said Geoffrey, 'I've come to tell you that you've landed me in the most appalling mess and...'

Frensic raised a hand.

'You mean Professor Facit? Oh I shouldn't worry too much...'

'Worry too much? I've got every right to worry and as for too much, with bankruptcy staring me in the face just how much is too much?'

'I've been making some private enquiries,' said Frensic, 'in Oxford.'

'You have?' said Geoffrey. 'You don't mean to say he actually did do all those frightful things? That ghastly Pekinese for instance?'

'I mean,' said Frensic pontifically, 'that no one in Oxford has ever heard of a Professor Facit. I've checked with the Lodging House Syndicate and the university library and they have no records of any Professor Facit ever having applied for a ticket to use the library. And as for his statement that he once lived in De Frytville Avenue, it's quite untrue.'

'Good Lord,' said Geoffrey, 'if nobody up there has ever heard of him...'

'It rather looks as if Messrs Ridley, Coverup, Makeweight and Jones have just tried to ambulance-chase once too often and are hoist with their own petard.'

'My dear fellow, this calls for a celebration,' said Geoffrey. 'And you mean to say you went up there and found all this out...'

But Frensic was modesty itself. 'You see, I knew Piper pretty well. After all he had been sending me stuff for years,' he said as they went downstairs, 'and he wasn't the sort of fellow to set out to libel someone deliberately.'

'But I thought you told me that Pause was his first book,' said Geoffrey.

Frensic regretted his indiscretion. 'His first real book,' he said. 'The rest was just...well, a bit derivative. Not the sort of stuff I could ever have sold.'

They strolled across to Wheeler's for lunch. Talking of Oxford,' said Geoffrey when they had ordered, 'I had the most extraordinary phone call this morning from some lunatic woman called Bogden.'

'Really?' said Frensic, spilling dry Martini down his shirt front. 'What did she want?'

'She claimed I'd asked her to marry me. It was absolutely awful.'

'It must have been,' said Frensic, finishing his drink and ordering another. 'Mind you, some women will go to any lengths...'

'From what I could gather I was the one to have gone to any lengths. Said I'd bought her an engagement ring.'

'I hope you told her to go to hell,' said Frensic, 'and talking of marriages I've got some news too. Sonia Futtle is going to marry Hutchmeyer.'

'Marry Hutchmeyer?' said Geoffrey. 'But the man's only just lost his wife. You'd think he'd have the decency to wait a bit before sticking his head in the noose again.'

'An apt metaphor,' said Frensic with a smile, and raised his glass.

His worries were over. He had just realized that in marrying Hutchmeyer Sonia had acted more wisely than she knew. She had effectively spiked the enemy's guns. A bigamous Hutchmeyer was no threat, and besides, a man who could find Sonia physically attractive must be besotted and a besotted Hutch would never believe his new wife had once been party to a conspiracy to deceive him. All that remained was to implicate Piper financially. After an excellent lunch Frensic walked back to Lanyard Lane and thence to the bank. There he subtracted Corkadales' 10 per cent and his own commission and despatched one million four hundred thousand dollars to account number 478776 in the First National Bank Of New York. He had honoured his side of the contract. Frensic went home by taxi. He was a rich and happy man.

So was Hutchmeyer. Sonia's whirlwind acceptance of his whirlwind proposal had taken him by surprise. The thighs that had over the years so entranced him were his at last. Her ample body was entirely to his taste. It bore no scars, none of the surgical modifications that in Baby's case had served to remind him of his faithlessness and the artificiality of their relationship. With Sonia he could be himself. There was no need to assert himself by peeing in the washbasin every night or to prove his virility by badgering strange girls in Rome and Paris and Las Vegas. He could relapse into domestic happiness with a woman who had energy enough for both of them. They were married in Cannes and that night as Hutchmeyer lay supine between those hustling thighs he gazed up at her breasts and knew that this was for real. Sonia smiled down at his contented face and was contented herself. She was a married woman at long last.

And married to a rich man. The next night Hutchmeyer celebrated by losing forty grand at Monte Carlo and then, in memory of the good fortune that had brought them together, chartered a vast yacht with an experienced skipper and a competent crew. They cruised in the Aegean. They explored the ruins of ancient Greece and, more profitably, a deal involving supertankers which were going cheap. And finally they flew back to New York for the premiere of the film, Pause.

There in the darkness, garlanded with diamonds, Sonia finally broke down and wept Beside her Hutchmeyer understood. It was a deeply moving movie with fashionable radicals playing Gwendolen and Anthony and combined Lost Horizon, Sunset Boulevard and Deep Throat with Tom Jones. Under MacMordie's financial tutelage the critics raved. And all the time the profits from the novel poured in. The movie boosted sales and there was even talk of a Broadway musical with Maria Callas in the leading role. To keep sales moving ever upwards Hutchmeyer consulted the computer and ordered a new cover for the book with the result that people who had bought the book before found themselves buying it yet again. After the musical some would doubtless buy it a third time. The Book Club sales were enormous and the leather-bound Baby Hutchmeyer Memorial edition with gold tooling sold out in a week. All over the country Pause left its mark. Elderly women emerged from the seclusion of bridge clubs and beauty parlours to inveigle young men into bed. The vasectomy index fell rapidly. And finally, to crown Hutchmeyer's success, Sonia announced that she was pregnant.

In Bibliopolis, Alabama, things had changed too. The funeral of the victims of the unscheduled serpentizing took place among the live oaks that bordered the Ptomaine River. There were seven in all, though only two from snake bite. Three had been crushed in the stampede for the door. The Reverend Gideon had succumbed to heart failure, and Mrs Mathervitie to outraged shock on awakening from her faint to find Baby standing topless in the pulpit. Out of this terrible infestation Baby had emerged with a remarkable reputation. It was due as much to the perfection of her breasts as to their immunity; taken together the two were irresistible. Never before had Bibliopolis witnessed so complete a demonstration of faith, and in the absence of the late Reverend Gideon Baby was offered the ministry. She accepted gratefully. It put an end to Piper's sexual depradations, and besides she had found her forte. From the pulpit she could denounce the sins of the flesh with a relish that endeared her to the womenfolk and excited the men, and having spent so much of her life in Hutchmeyer's company she could speak about hell from experience. Above all she was free to be what remained of herself. And so as the coffins were lowered into the ground the Reverend Hutchmeyer led the congregation in 'Shall we Gather by the River' and the little population of Bibliopolis bowed their heads and raised their voices. Even the snakes, hissing as they were emptied from the sack into the Ptomaine, had benefited. Baby had abolished serpentizing in a long sermon about Eve and The Apple in which she had pointed out that they were creatures of Satan. The relatives of the deceased tended to agree. And finally there was the problem of Piper. Having found her faith Baby felt obliged to the man who had so fortuitously led her to it.

With the advance royalties from Pause she restored Pellagra House to its ante-bellum glory and installed Piper there to continue work on his third version, Postscript to a Lost Childhood. As the days passed into weeks and the weeks into months, Piper wrote steadily on and resumed the routine of his life at the Gleneagle Guest House. In the afternoons he walked by the banks of the Ptomaine and in the evening read passages from The Moral Novel and the great classics it commended. With so much money at his disposal Piper had ordered them all. They lined the shelves of his study at Pellagra, icons of that literary religion to which he had dedicated his life. Jane Austen, Conrad, George Eliot, Dickens, Henry James, Lawrence, Mann, they were all there to spur him on. His one sorrow was that the only woman he could ever love was sexually inaccessible. As preacher Baby had made it plain she could no longer sleep with him.

'You'll just have to sublimate,' she told him. Piper tried to sublimate but the yearning remained as constant as his ambition to become a great novelist.

'It's no good,' he said, 'I keep thinking about you all the time. You are so beautiful, so pure, so...so...'

'You've too much time on your hands,' said Baby. 'Now if you had something more to do...'

'Such as?'

Baby looked at the beautiful script upon the page. 'Like you could teach people to write,' she said.

'I can't even write myself,' said Piper. It was one of his self-pitying days.

'But you can. Look at the way you form your "f"s and this lovely tail to your "y". If you can't teach people to write, who can?'

'Oh you mean "write",' said Piper, 'I suppose I could do that. But who would want to learn?'

'Lots of people. You'd be surprised. When I was a girl there were schools of penmanship in almost every town. You'd be doing something useful.'

'Useful?' said Piper, attenuating that word with melancholy. 'All I want to do is '

'Write,' said Baby, hurriedly forestalling his sexual suggestion. 'Well, this way you can combine artistry with education. You can hold classes every afternoon and it will take your mind off yourself.'

'My mind isn't on myself. It's on you. I love you...'

'We must all love one another,' said Baby sententiously and left.

A week later the School of Penmanship opened and instead of brooding all afternoon by the sluggish waters of the Ptomaine River, Piper stood in front of his pupils and taught them to write beautifully. The classes were mostly of children but later adults came too and sat there pens in hand and bottles of Higgins Eternal Evaporated Ink at the ready while Piper explained that a diagonal ligature required an upstroke and that a wavy serif was obtrusive. Over the months his reputation grew and with it there came theory. To visitors from as far away as Selma and Meridian Piper expounded the doctrine of the word made perfect. He called it Logosophy, and won adherents. It was as if the process by which he had failed as a novelist had reversed itself in his Writing. In the old days of his obsession with the great novel theory had preceded and indeed pre-empted practice. What The Moral Novel had condemned Piper had avoided. With penmanship Piper was his own practitioner and theorist. But still the old ambition to see his novel in print remained and as each newly expurgated version of Pause was finished he mailed it to Frensic. At first he sent it to New York to be readdressed and forwarded to Lanyard Lane but as the months passed his confidence in his new life grew and with it forgetfulness and he sent it direct. And every month he ordered Books & Bookmen and the Times Literary Supplement and scanned the lists of new novels only to be disappointed. Search for a Lost Childhood was never there.

Finally, late one night when the moon was full, he decided on a fresh approach and taking up his pen wrote to Frensic. His letter was blunt and to the point. Unless Frensic & Futtle as his literary agents were prepared to guarantee that his novel was published he would be forced to ask some other literary agent to handle his work in future.

'In fact I am seriously considering sending my manuscript direct to Corkadales,' he wrote. 'As you will remember I signed a contract with them to publish my second novel and I can see no good reason why this specific agreement should be negated. Yours sincerely, Peter Piper.'