by Tom Sharpe
MacMordie left the room and put through the call to London. He returned twenty minutes later with the news that Frensic was being uncooperative.
‘He says he doesn’t know anything,’ he told a glowering Hutchmeyer. ‘Seems this Piper just sent in the book, Frensic read it, sent it to Corkadales, they liked it and bought and that’s about the sum total. No background. Nothing.’
‘There’s got to be something. He was born some place, wasn’t he? And his mother …’
‘No relatives. Parents dead in a car smash. I mean it’s like he never had an existence.’
‘Shit,’ said Hutchmeyer.
*
Which was more or less the word that sprang to Frensic’s mind as he put the phone down after MacMordie’s call. It was bad enough losing an author who hadn’t written a book without having demands for background material on his life. The next thing would be the press, some damned woman reporter hot on the trail of Piper’s tragic childhood. Frensic went into Sonia’s office and hunted through the filing cabinet for Piper’s correspondence. It was, as he expected, voluminous. Frensic took the file back to his desk and sat there wondering what to do with the thing. His first inclination to burn it was dissipated by the realization that if Piper had written scores of letters to him from almost as many different boarding-houses over the years, he had replied as often. The copies of Frensic’s replies were there in the file. The originals were presumably still in safe keeping somewhere. With an aunt? Or some ghastly boarding-house keeper? Frensic sat and sweated. He had told MacMordie that Piper had no relatives, but what if it turned out that he had an entire lineage of avaricious aunts, uncles and cousins anxious to cash in on royalties? And what about a will? Knowing Piper as well as he did, Frensic thought it unlikely he had made one. In which case the matter of his legacy might well end up in the courts and then … Frensic foresaw appalling consequences. On the one hand the anonymous author demanding his advance, and on the other … And in the middle the name of Frensic & Futtle being dragged through the mud, exposed as the perpetrators of fraud, sued by Hutchmeyer, sued by Piper’s relatives, forced to pay enormous damages and vast legal costs and finally bankrupted. And all because some demented client of Cadwalladine had insisted on preserving his anonymity.
Having reached this ghastly conclusion Frensic took the file back to the cabinet, re-labelled it Mr Smith as a mild precaution against intruding eyes and tried to think of some defence. The only one seemed to be that he had merely acted on the instructions of Mr Cadwalladine and since Cadwalladine & Dimkins were eminently respectable solicitors they would be as anxious to avoid a legal scandal as he was. And so presumably would the genuine author. It was small consolation. Let Hutchmeyer get a whiff of the impersonation and all hell would be let loose. And finally there was Sonia, who, if her attitude on the phone had been anything to go by, was in a highly emotional state and likely to say something rash. Frensic reached for the phone and dialled International to put through a call to the Gramercy Park Hotel. It was time Sonia Futtle came back to England. When he got through it was to learn that Miss Futtle had already left, and should, according to the desk clerk, be in mid-Atlantic.
‘“Is” and “above”,’ corrected Frensic before realizing that there was something to be said for American usage.
That afternoon Sonia landed at Heathrow and took a taxi straight to Lanyard Lane. She found Frensic in a mood of apparently deep mourning.
‘I blame myself,’ he said, forestalling her lament, ‘I should never have allowed poor Piper to have jeopardized his career by going over in the first place. Our only consolation must be that his name as a novelist has been made. It is doubtful if he would ever have written a better book had he lived.’
‘But he didn’t write this one,’ said Sonia.
Frensic nodded. ‘I know. I know,’ he murmured, ‘but at least it established his reputation. He would have appreciated the irony. He was a great admirer of Thomas Mann you know. Our best memorial to him must be silence.’
Having thus pre-empted Sonia’s recriminations Frensic allowed her to work off her feelings by telling the story of the night of the tragedy and Hutchmeyer’s subsequent reaction. At the end he was none the wiser.
‘It all seems most peculiar,’ he said when she had finished. ‘You can only suppose that whoever did it made a terrible mistake and got the wrong person. Now if Hutchmeyer had been murdered …’
‘I would have been murdered too,’ said Sonia through her tears.
‘We must be grateful for small mercies,’ said Frensic.
*
Next morning Sonia Futtle resumed her duties in the office. A fresh batch of animal stories had come in during her absence and while Frensic congratulated himself on his tactics and sat at his desk silently praying that there would be no further repercussions Sonia busied herself with Bernie the Beaver. It needed a bit of rewriting but the story had promise.
17
In a cabin in the Smoky Mountains Piper held the same opinion about Pause. He sat out on the stoop and looked down at the lake where Baby was swimming and had to admit that his first impression of the novel had been wrong. He had been misled by the passages of explicit sex. But now that he had copied it out word for word he could see that the essential structure of the story was sound. In fact there were large sections of the book which dealt meaningfully with matters of great significance. Subtract the age difference between Gwendolen and Anthony, the narrator, and eradicate the pornography and Pause O Men for the Virgin had the makings of great literature. It examined in considerable depth the meaning of life, the writer’s role in contemporary society, the anonymity of the individual in the urban collective and the need to return to the values of earlier, more civilized times. It was particularly good on the miseries of adolescence and the satisfaction to be found in the craftsmanship of furniture-making. ‘Gwendolen ran her fingers along the gnarled and knotted oak with a sensual touch that belied her years. “The hardiness of time has tamed the wildness of the wood,” she said. “You will carve against the grain and give form to what has been formless and insensate.”’ Piper nodded approvingly. Passages like that had genuine merit and better still they served as an inspiration to him. He too would cut against the grain of this novel and give form to it, so that in the revised version the grossness of the bestseller would be eliminated, and the sexual addenda which defiled the very essence of the book would be removed and it would stand as a monument to his literary gifts. Posthumously perhaps, but at least his reputation would be retrieved. In years to come critics would compare the two versions and deduce from his deletions that in its earlier uncommercial form the original intentions of the author had been of the highest literary quality and that the novel had subsequently been altered to meet the demands of Frensic and Hutchmeyer and their perverse view of public taste. The blame for the bestseller would lie with them and he would be exonerated. More, he would be acclaimed. He closed the ledger and stood up as Baby came out of the water and walked up the beach to the cabin.
‘Finished?’ she asked. Piper nodded.
‘I shall start the second version tomorrow,’ he said.
‘While you’re doing that I’ll take the first down into Ashville and get it copied. The sooner Frensic gets it the sooner we’re going to light a fire under him.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t use that expression,’ said Piper, ‘lighting fires. And anyway where are you going to mail it from? They could trace us from the postmark.’
‘We shan’t be here from the day after tomorrow. We rented the cabin for a week. We’ll drive down to Charlotte and catch a flight to New York and mail it there. I’ll be back tomorrow night and we move on the day after.’
‘I wish we didn’t have to move all the time,’ said Piper, ‘I like it here. There’s been nobody to bother us and I’ve had time to write. Why can’t we just stay on?’
‘Because this isn’t the Deep South,’ said Baby, ‘and when I said Deep I meant it. There are places down Al
abama, Mississippi, that just nobody has ever heard of and I want to see them.’
‘And from what I’ve read about Mississippi they aren’t partial to strangers,’ said Piper, ‘they are going to ask questions.’
‘You’ve read too many Faulkners,’ said Baby, ‘and where we’re going a quarter of a million dollars buys a lot of answers.’
She went inside and changed. After lunch Piper swam in the lake and walked along the shore, his mind filled with possible changes he was going to make to Pause Two. Already he had decided to change the title. He would call it Work in Regress. There was a touch of Finnegans Wake about it which appealed to his sense of the literary. And after all Joyce had worked and reworked his novels over and over again with no thought for their commercial worth. And in exile from his native land. For a moment Piper saw himself following in Joyce’s footsteps, incognito and endlessly revising the same book, with the difference that he could never emerge from obscurity into fame in his own lifetime. Unless of course his work was of such an indisputable genius that the little matter of the fire and the burning boats and even his apparent death would become part of the mystique of a great author. Yes, greatness would absolve him. Piper turned and hurried back along the shore to the cabin. He would start work at once on Work in Regress. But when he got back he found that Baby had already taken the car and his first manuscript and driven into Ashville. There was a note for him on the table. It said simply, ‘Gone today. Here tomorrow. Stay with it. Baby.’
Piper stayed with it. He spent the afternoon with a pen going through Pause changing all references to age. Gwendolen lost fifty-five years and became twenty-five and Anthony gained ten which made him twenty-seven. And in between times Piper scored out all those references to peculiar sexual activities which had ensured the book’s popular appeal. He did this with particular vigour and by the time he had finished was filled with a sense of righteousness which he conveyed to his notebook of Ideas. ‘The commercialization of sex as a thing to be bought and sold is at the root of the present debasement of civilization. In my writing I have striven to eradicate the Thingness of sex and to encapsulate the essential relationship of humanity.’ Finally he made himself supper and went to bed.
In the morning he was up early and at his table on the stoop. In front of him the first page of his new ledger lay blank and empty waiting for his imprint. He dipped his pen in the ink bottle and began to write. ‘The house stood on a knoll. Surrounded by three elms, a beech and a …’ Piper stopped. He wasn’t sure what a deodar was and he had no dictionary to help him. He changed it to ‘oak’ and stopped again. Did oak have horizontal branches? Presumably some oaks did. Details like that didn’t matter. The essential thing was to get down to an analysis of the relationship between Gwendolen and the narrator. Great books didn’t bother with trees. They were about people, what people felt about people and what they thought about them. Insight was what really mattered and trees didn’t contribute to insight. The deodar might just as well stay where it was. He crossed out ‘oak’ and put ‘deodar’ above it. He continued the description for half a page and then hit another problem. How could the narrator, Anthony, be on holiday from school when he was now twenty-seven? Unless of course he was a schoolmaster in which case he would have to teach something and that meant knowing about it. Piper tried to remember his own schooldays and a model on which to base Anthony, but the masters at his school had been nondescript men and had left little impression on him. There was only Miss Pears and she had been a mistress.
Piper put down his pen and thought about Miss Pears. Now if she had been a man … or if she were Gwendolen and he was Anthony … and if instead of being twenty-seven Anthony had been fourteen … or better still if his parents had lived in a house on a knoll surrounded by three elms, a beech and a … Piper stood up and paced the stoop, his mind alive with new inspiration. It had suddenly come to him that from the raw material of Pause O Men for the Virgin it might be possible to distil the essence of Search for a Lost Childhood. Or if not distil, at least amalgamate the two. There would have to be considerable alterations. After all tuberculotic plumbers didn’t live on knolls. On the other hand his father hadn’t actually had tuberculosis. He had got it from Lawrence and Thomas Mann. And a love affair between a schoolboy and teacher was a very natural occurrence, provided of course that it didn’t become physical. Yes, that was it. He would write Work in Regress as Search. He sat down at the table and picked up his pen and began to copy. There was no need now to worry about changing the main shape of the story. The deodar and the house on the knoll and all the descriptions of houses and places could remain the same. The new ingredient would be the addition of his troubled adolescence and the presence of his tormented parents. And Miss Pears as Gwendolen, his mentor, adviser and teacher with whom he would develop a significant relationship, meaningfully sexual and without sex.
And so once more the words formed indelibly black upon the page with all the old elegance of shape that had so satisfied him in the past. Below him the lake shone in the sunlight and a breeze ruffled the trees around the cabin, but Piper was oblivious to his surroundings. He had picked up the thread of his existence where it had broken in the Gleneagle Guest House in Exforth and was back into Search.
*
When Baby returned that evening from her flight to New York with the copy of his first manuscript now safely mailed to Frensic & Futtle, Lanyard Lane, London, she found Piper his old self. The trauma of the fire and their flight had been forgotten.
‘You see, what I am doing is combining my own novel with Pause,’ he explained as she poured herself a drink. ‘Instead of Gwendolen being …’
‘Tell me about it in the morning,’ said Baby. ‘Right now I’ve had a tiring day and tomorrow we’ve got to be on the road again.’
‘I see you’ve bought another car,’ said Piper looking out at a red Pontiac.
‘Air-conditioned and with South Carolina plates. Anyone thinks they’re going to come looking for us, they’re going to have a hard time. I didn’t even trade in this time. Sold the Ford in Beanville and took a Greyhound to Charlotte and bought this in Ashville on the way back. We’ll change again farther south. We’re covering our tracks.’
‘Not by sending copies of Pause to Frensic, we aren’t,’ said Piper, ‘I mean he’s bound to know I haven’t died.’
‘That reminds me. I sent him a telegram in your name.’
‘You did what?’ squawked Piper.
‘Sent him a telegram.’
‘Saying what?’
‘Just, quote Transfer advance royalties care of First National Bank of New York account number 478776 love Piper unquote.’
‘But I haven’t got an account …’
‘You have now, honey. I opened one for you and made the first deposit. One thousand dollars. Now when Frensic gets that birthday greeting—’
‘Birthday greeting? You send a telegram demanding money and you call that a birthday greeting?’
‘Had to delay it somehow till he’d had time to read the original of Pause,’ said Baby, ‘so I said he had a birthday on the 19th and they’re holding it over.’
‘Christ,’ said Piper, ‘some damned birthday greeting. I suppose you realize he’s got a heart condition? I mean shocks like this could kill him.’
‘Makes two of you,’ said Baby. ‘He’s effectively killed you …’
‘He did nothing of the sort. You were the one to sign my death certificate and end my career as a novelist.’
Baby finished her drink and sighed. ‘There’s gratitude for you. Your career as a novelist is just about to begin.’
‘Posthumously,’ said Piper bitterly.
‘Well, better late than never,’ said Baby, and took herself off to bed.
The next morning the red Pontiac left the cabin and wound up the curving mountain road in the direction of Tennessee.
‘We’ll go west as far as Memphis,’ said Baby, ‘and ditch the car there and double back by Greyhound to Chat
tanooga. I’ve always wanted to see the Choo Choo.’
Piper said nothing. He had just realized how he had met Miss Pears/Gwendolen. It had been one summer holiday when his parents had taken him down to Exforth and instead of sitting on the beach with them he had gone to the public library and there … The house no longer stood on a knoll. It was at the top of the hill by the cliffs and its windows stared out to sea. Perhaps that wasn’t such a good idea. Not in the second version. No, he would leave it where it was and concentrate on relationships. In that way there would be more consistency between Pause and Work in Regress, more authenticity. But in the third revision he would work on the setting and the house would stand on the cliffs above Exforth. And with each succeeding draft he would approximate a little more closely to that great novel on which he had been working for ten years. Piper smiled to himself at this realization. As the author of Pause O Men for the Virgin he had been given the fame he had always sought, had had fame forced upon him, and now by slow, persistent rewriting of that book he would reproduce the literary masterpiece that had been his life’s work. And there was absolutely nothing Frensic could do about it.
That night they slept in separate motels in Memphis and next morning met at the bus depot and took the Greyhound to Nashville. The red Pontiac had gone. Piper didn’t even bother to inquire how Baby had disposed of it. He had more important things on his mind. What, for instance, would happen if Frensic produced the real original manuscript of Pause and admitted that he had sent Piper to America as the substitute author?
‘Two million dollars,’ said Baby succinctly when he put the possibility to her.
‘I don’t see what they have to do with it,’ said Piper.
‘That’s the price of the risk he took playing people poker with Hutch. You stake two million on a bluff you’ve got to have good reasons.’