The Great Pursuit

by Tom Sharpe

  ‘No way,’ said the surgeon, true to his medical principles.

  ‘A thousand dollars,’ said MacMordie and went to fetch Piper. He came reluctantly and clutching Sonia’s arm pathetically. By the time he emerged and went outside with Sonia on one side and a nurse on the other only two frightened eyes and his nostrils were visible.

  ‘Mr Piper has nothing to say,’ said MacMordie quite unnecessarily. Several million viewers could see that. Piper’s bandaged face had no mouth. For them he could have been the invisible man. The cameras zoomed in for close-ups and MacMordie spoke.

  ‘Mr Piper has authorized me to say that he had no idea his great novel Pause O Men for the Virgin would arouse the degree of public controversy that has marked the start of his lecture tour of this country …’

  ‘His what?’ demanded a reporter.

  ‘Mr Piper is Britain’s greatest novelist: His novel Pause O Men for the Virgin, published by Hutchmeyer Press and available at seven dollars ninety –’

  ‘You mean his novel caused all this?’ said an interviewer.

  MacMordie nodded. ‘Pause O Men for the Virgin is the most controversial novel of this century. Read it and see what has caused this terrible sacrifice on Mr Piper’s part …’

  Beside him Piper swayed groggily and had to be helped down the steps to the waiting car.

  ‘Where are you taking him to now?’

  ‘He’s being flown to a private clinic for diagnostic treatment,’ said MacMordie and the car moved off. In the back seat Piper whimpered through his bandages.

  ‘What’s that, darling?’ Sonia asked. But Piper’s mumble was incomprehensible.

  ‘What was all that about a diagnostic treatment?’ Sonia asked MacMordie. ‘He doesn’t need—’

  ‘Just to throw the press and media off the trail. Mr Hutchmeyer wants you to stay with him at his residence in Maine. We’re going to the airport. Mr Hutchmeyer’s private plane is waiting.’

  ‘I’ll have something to say to Mr Goddam Hutchmeyer when I see him,’ said Sonia. ‘It’s a wonder you didn’t get us all killed.’

  MacMordie turned in his seat. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘you try promoting a foreign writer. He’s got to have a gimmick like he’s won the Nobel Prize or been tortured in the Lubianka or something. Charisma. Now what’s this Piper got? Nothing. So we build him up. We have ourselves a little riot, a bit of blood and all and overnight he’s charismatic. And with those bandages he’s going to be in every home tonight on TV. Sell a million copies on that face alone.’

  They drove to the airport and Sonia and Piper climbed aboard Imprint One. Only when they had taken off did Sonia remove the bandages from Piper’s face.

  ‘We’ll have to leave the rest on till your hair starts to grow again,’ she said. Piper nodded his bandaged head.

  *

  From Maine Hutchmeyer phoned his congratulations to MacMordie. ‘That scene outside the hospital was the greatest,’ he said. ‘That’s going to blow a million viewers’ minds. Why we’ve made a martyr out of him. Like a sacrificial lamb on the altar of great literature. I tell you, MacMordie, for this you get a bonus.’

  ‘It was nothing,’ said MacMordie modestly.

  ‘How did he take it?’ asked Hutchmeyer.

  ‘Well he seemed a little confused is all,’ said MacMordie. ‘He’ll get over it.’

  ‘All authors have confused minds,’ said Hutchmeyer, ‘it’s natural with them.’

  10

  And Piper spent the flight in a confused state of mind. He still wasn’t sure what had hit him or why and his mixed reception as O’Piper, Piparfat, Peipmann, Piperovsky et al added to the problems already confronting him as the supposititious author of Pause. And in any case as a putative genius Piper had assumed so many different identities that past personae compounded those of the present. So did shock, MacMordie’s bloodbath, suffocation, resuscitation, and the fact that he was wearing a turban of bandages over an unscathed scalp. He stared out of the window and wondered what Conrad or Lawrence or George Eliot would have done in his position. Apart from the certainty that they wouldn’t have been in it, he could think of nothing. And Sonia was no great help. Her mind seemed set on making the financial most from his ordeal.

  ‘Either way we’ve got him over a barrel,’ she said as the plane began to descend over Bangor. ‘You’re too sick to go through with this tour.’

  ‘I absolutely agree,’ said Piper.

  Sonia crushed his hopes. ‘He won’t wear that one,’ she said. ‘With Hutchmeyer it’s the contract counts. You could be on an intravenous drip and you’d still have to make appearances. So we sting him for compensation. Like another twenty-five thousand dollars.’

  ‘I think I would rather go home,’ said Piper.

  ‘The way I’m going to play it you’ll go home with fifty grand.’

  Piper raised objections. ‘But won’t Mr Hutchmeyer be very cross?’

  ‘Cross? He’ll blow his top.’

  Piper considered the prospect of Mr Hutchmeyer blowing his top and disliked it. It added yet another awful ingredient to a situation that was already sufficiently alarming. By the time the plane landed he was in a state of acute anxiety and it took all Sonia’s coaxing to get him down the steps and into the waiting car. Presently they were speeding through pine forests towards the man whom Frensic in an unguarded moment had spoken of as the Al Capone of the publishing world.

  ‘Now you leave all the talking to me,’ said Sonia, ‘and just remember that you’re a shy introverted author. Modesty is the line to take.’

  The car turned down a drive towards a house that had proclaimed itself by the gate as ‘The Hutchmeyer Residence’.

  ‘No one can call that modest,’ said Piper staring out at the house. It stood in fifty acres of park and garden, birch and pine, an ornate shingle-style monument to the romantic eclecticism of the late nineteenth century as embodied in wood by Peabody and Stearns, Architects. Sprouting towers, dormer windows, turrets with dovecotes, piazzas with oval windows cut in their latticework, convoluted chimneys and angled balconies, the Residence was awe-inspiring. They drove under a porte-cochère into a courtyard already crammed with cars and got out. A moment later the enormous front door opened and a large red-faced man bounded down the steps.

  ‘Sonia baby,’ he bawled and hugged her to his Hawaiian shirt, ‘and this must be Mr Piper.’ He crunched Piper’s hand and stared fiercely into his face. ‘This is a great honour, Mr Piper, a very great honour to have you with us.’ Still holding Piper’s hand he propelled him up the steps and through the door. Inside, the house was as remarkable as the exterior. A vast hall incorporated a thirteenth-century fireplace, a Renaissance staircase, a minstrels’ gallery, an excruciatingly ferocious portrait of Hutchmeyer in the pose of J. P. Morgan as photographed by Steichner, and underfoot a mosaic floor depicting a great many stages in the manufacture of paper. Piper stepped cautiously across falling trees, a log jam and a vat of boiling wood pulp and up several more steps at the top of which stood a woman of breathtaking shape.

  ‘Baby,’ said Hutchmeyer, ‘I want you to meet Mr Peter Piper. Mr Piper, my wife, Baby.’

  ‘Dear Mr Piper,’ murmured Baby huskily, taking his hand and smiling as far as the surgeons had permitted, ‘I’ve been just dying to meet you. I think your novel is just the loveliest book I’ve been privileged to read.’

  Piper gazed into the limpid azure contact lenses of Miss Penobscot 1935 and simpered. ‘You’re too kind,’ he murmured. Baby tucked his hand under her arm and together they went into the piazza lounge.

  ‘Does he always wear a turban?’ Hutchmeyer asked Sonia as they followed.

  ‘Only when he gets hit with a frisbee,’ said Sonia coldly.

  ‘Only when he gets hit with a frisbee,’ bawled Hutchmeyer roaring with laughter. ‘You hear that, Baby. Mr Piper only wears a turban when he gets hit with a frisbee. Isn’t that the greatest?’

  ‘Edged with razor blades, Hutch. With goddam razor blades!’ said
Sonia.

  ‘Yeah, well that’s different of course,’ said Hutchmeyer deflating. ‘With razor blades is different.’

  Inside the piazza lounge stood a hundred people. They clutched glasses and were talking at the tops of their voices.

  ‘Folks,’ bawled Hutchmeyer and stilled the din. ‘I want you all to meet Mr Peter Piper, the greatest novelist to come out of England since Frederick Forsyth.’

  Piper smiled inanely and shook his head with unaffected modesty. He was not the greatest novelist to come out of England. Not yet. His greatness lay in the future and it was on the point of his tongue to state this clearly when the crowd closed round him eager to make his acquaintance. Baby had chosen her guests with care. Against their geriatric backdrop her own reconstituted charms would stand out all the more alluringly. Cataracts and fallen arches abounded. So did bosoms, as opposed to breasts, dentures, girdles, surgical stockings and the protuberant tracery of varicose veins. And strung round every puckered neck and blotchy wrist were jewels, an armoury of pearls and diamonds and gold that hung and wobbled and glistened to detract the eye from the lost battle with time.

  ‘Oh, Mr Piper, I just want to say how much pleasure …’

  ‘I can’t tell you how much it means to me to …’

  ‘I think it’s fascinating to meet a real …’

  ‘If you would just sign my copy …’

  ‘You’ve done so much to bring people together …’

  With Baby on his arm Piper was swallowed up in the adulating crowd.

  ‘Boy, he’s really going over big,’ said Hutchmeyer, ‘and this is Maine. What’s he going to do to the cities?’

  ‘I hate to think,’ said Sonia, watching anxiously as Piper’s turban bobbed among the hairdos.

  ‘Wow them. Zap them. We’ll sell two million copies if this is anything to indicate. I got a computer forecast after the welcome he got in New York and—’

  ‘Welcome? You call that riot a welcome?’ said Sonia bitterly. ‘You could have got us killed.’

  ‘Great copy,’ said Hutchmeyer, ‘I’m going to give MacMordie a bonus. That boy’s got talent. And while we’re on the subject let me say I’ve got a proposition to make to you.’

  ‘I’ve heard your propositions, Hutch, and the answer is still no.’

  ‘Sure but this is different.’ He steered Sonia over to the bar.

  *

  By the time he had signed fifty copies of Pause O Men for the Virgin and drunk, unthinkingly, four Martinis, Piper’s earlier apprehensions had entirely vanished. The enthusiasm with which he was being greeted had the merit that it didn’t require him to say anything. He was bombarded from all sides by compliments and opinions. They seemed to come in two sizes. The thin women were intense, the ones with obesity problems cooed. No one expected Piper to contribute more than the favour of his smile. Only one woman broached the subject of his novel and Baby immediately intervened.

  ‘Knock you up, Chloe?’ she said. ‘Now why should Mr Piper want to do that? He’s got a very tight schedule to meet.’

  ‘So not everyone’s had the benefit of a pussy lift,’ said Chloe with a hideous wink at Piper. ‘Now the way I read it Mr Piper’s book is about going into the natural in a big way …’

  But Baby dragged Piper away before he could hear what Chloe had to say about going into the natural in a big way.

  ‘What’s a pussy lift?’ he asked.

  ‘That Chloe’s just a cat,’ said Baby, leaving Piper under the happy illusion that pussy lifts were things cats went up and down in. By the time the party broke up Piper was exhausted.

  ‘I’ve put you in the Boudoir bedroom,’ said Baby as she and Sonia escorted him up the Renaissance staircase. ‘It’s got a wonderful view of the bay.’

  Piper went into the Boudoir bedroom and looked around. Originally designed to combine convenience with medieval simplicity, it had been refurbished by Baby with an eye to the supposedly sensual. A heart-shaped bed stood on a carpet of intermingled rainbows which competed for radiance with a furbelowed stool and an Art Deco dressing-table. To complete the ensemble a large and evidently demented Spanish gipsy supported a tasselled lampshade on a bedside table while a black glass chest of drawers gleamed darkly against the Wedgwood blue walls. Piper sat down on the bed and looked up at the great timber rafters. There was a solid craftsmanship about them that contrasted with the ephemeral brilliance of the furnishings. He undressed and brushed his teeth and climbed into bed. Five minutes later he was asleep.

  An hour later he was wide awake again. There were voices coming through the wall behind his quilted bedhead. For a moment Piper wondered where on earth he was. The voices soon told him. The Hutchmeyers’ bedroom was evidently next to his and their bathroom had a connecting door. During the next half an hour Piper learnt to his disgust that Hutchmeyer wore a truss, that Baby objected to his use of the wash-basin as a urinal, that Hutchmeyer didn’t give a damn what she objected to, that Baby’s late and unlamented mother, Mrs Sugg, would have done the world a service by having an abortion before Baby was born, and finally that on one traumatic occasion Baby had washed down a sleeping pill with Dentaclene from a glass containing Hutchmeyer’s false teeth so would he kindly not leave the things in the medicine cabinet. From these distressing domestic details the conversation veered to personalities. Hutchmeyer thought Sonia mighty attractive. Baby didn’t. All Sonia Futtle had got were her hooks into a cute little innocent. It took Piper a moment or two to recognize himself in this description and he was just wondering if he liked being called little and cute when Hutchmeyer riposted by saying he was an asslicking motherfucking Limey who just happened to have written a book that would sell. Piper most definitely didn’t like that. He sat up in bed, fumbled with the anatomy of the Spanish gipsy and switched the light on. But the Hutchmeyers had warred themselves to sleep.

  Piper got out of bed and waded across the carpet to the window. Outside in the darkness he could just make out the shapes of a yacht and a large cruiser lying out at the end of a long narrow jetty. Beyond them across the bay a mountain was silhouetted against the starry sky and the lights of a small town shone faintly. Water slapped on the rocky beach below the house and in any other circumstances Piper would have felt the need to muse on the beauties of nature and their possible use in some future novel. Hutchmeyer’s opinion of him had driven such thoughts from his mind. He got out his diary and committed to paper his observations that Hutchmeyer was the epitome of everything that was vulgar, debased, stupid and crassly commercial about modern America and that Baby Hutchmeyer was a woman of sensitivity and beauty, and deserved something better than to be married to a coarse brute. Then he got back into bed, read a chapter of The Moral Novel to restore his faith in human nature, and fell asleep.

  *

  Breakfast next morning proved a further ordeal. Sonia wasn’t up and Hutchmeyer was in his friendliest mood.

  ‘What I like about you is you give your readers a good fuck fantasy,’ he told Piper, who was trying to make up his mind which breakfast cereal to try.

  ‘Wheatgerm is great for Vitamin E,’ said Baby.

  ‘That’s for potency,’ said Hutchmeyer. ‘Piper’s potent already, eh Piper? What he needs is roughage.’

  ‘I’m sure he’ll get all he needs of roughage from you,’ said Baby. Piper poured himself a plateful of Wheatgerm.

  ‘Now like I was saying,’ Hutchmeyer continued, ‘what readers want is—’

  ‘I’m sure Mr Piper knows already what readers want,’ said Baby, ‘he doesn’t have to hear it over breakfast.’

  Hutchmeyer ignored her. ‘A guy comes home from work what’s he to do? Has himself a beer and watches TV, eats and goes to bed too tired to lay his wife so he reads a book—’

  ‘If he’s that tired why does he need to read a book?’ asked Baby.

  ‘He’s too damned tired to sleep. Needs something to send him off. So he picks up a book and has fantasies he’s not in the Bronx but in … where did you set your bo
ok?’

  ‘East Finchley,’ said Piper, having trouble with a mouthful of Wheatgerm.

  ‘Devon,’ said Baby, ‘the book is set in Devon.’

  ‘Devon?’ said Hutchmeyer. ‘He says it’s set in East Finchley, he ought to know for Chrissake. He wrote the goddam thing.’

  ‘It’s set in Devon and Oxford,’ said Baby stubbornly. ‘She has this big house and he—’

  ‘Devon’s right,’ said Piper, ‘I was thinking of my second book.’

  Hutchmeyer glowered. ‘Yeah, well, wherever. So this guy in the Bronx has fantasies he’s in Devon with this old broad who’s crazy about him and before he knows it he’s asleep.’

  ‘That’s a great recommendation,’ said Baby, ‘and I don’t think Mr Piper writes his books with insomniacs in the Bronx in mind. He portrays a developing relationship …’

  ‘Sure, sure he does but—’

  ‘The hesitations and uncertainties of a young man whose feelings and emotional responses deviate from the socially accepted norms of his socio-sexual age grouping.’

  ‘Right,’ said Hutchmeyer, ‘no question about it. He’s a deviant and—’

  ‘He is not a deviant,’ said Baby, ‘he is a very gifted adolescent with an identity problem and Gwendolen …’

  While Piper munched his Wheatgerm the battle about his intentions in writing Pause raged on. Since Piper hadn’t written the book and Hutchmeyer hadn’t read it, Baby came out on top. Hutchmeyer retreated to his study and Piper found himself alone with a woman who, for quite the wrong reasons, shared his own opinion that he was a great writer. And cute. Piper had reservations about being called cute by a woman whose own attractions were sufficiently at odds with one another to be disturbing. In the dim light of the party the night before he had supposed her to be thirty-five. Now he was less sure. Beneath her blouse her bra-less breasts pointed to the early twenties. Her hands didn’t. Finally there was her face. It had a masklike quality, a lack of anything remotely individual, irregular or out of harmony with the faces of the two-dimensional women he had seen staring so fixedly from the pages of women’s magazines like Vogue. Taut, impersonal and characterless it held a strange fascination for him, while her limpid azure eyes … Piper found himself thinking of Yeats’s Sailing to Byzantium and the artifice of jewelled birds that sang. To steady himself he read the label on the Wheatgerm jar and found that he had just consumed 740 milligrammes of phosphorus, 550 of potassium, together with vast quantities of other essential minerals and every Vitamin B under the sun.