The Great Pursuit

by Tom Sharpe

  ‘The late Mr Bygraves. He died of a heart attack climbing Snowdon at Easter.’

  Frensic slumped in his chair. ‘He had a heart attack climbing Snowdon,’ he muttered.

  ‘So you see, I don’t think he’s going to be able to help us very much,’ continued Mr Cadwalladine, ‘and anyway banks are very reticent about disclosing the names of their clients. You have to have a warrant, you know.’

  Frensic did know. It was one of too few things about banks he had previously admired. But there was something else that Mr Cadwalladine had said earlier … something about a typing agency. ‘You said the manuscript came from a typing agency,’ he said. ‘Have you any idea which one?’

  ‘No. But I daresay I could find out if you’ll give me time.’ Frensic sat holding the receiver while Mr Cadwalladine found out. ‘It’s the Cynthia Bogden Typing Service,’ he told Frensic at long last. He sounded distinctly subdued.

  ‘Now we’re getting somewhere,’ said Frensic. ‘Ring her up and ask where …’

  ‘I’d rather not,’ said Mr Cadwalladine.

  ‘You’d rather not? Here we are in the middle of a libel action which is probably going to cost you your reputation and …’

  ‘It’s not that,’ interrupted Mr Cadwalladine. ‘You see, I handled the divorce case …’

  ‘Well that’s all right …’

  ‘I was acting for her ex-husband,’ said Mr Cadwalladine. ‘I don’t think she’d appreciate my …’

  ‘Oh all right, I’ll do it,’ said Frensic. ‘Give me her number.’ He wrote it down, replaced the receiver and dialled again.

  ‘The Cynthia Bogden Typing Service,’ said a voice, coyly professional.

  ‘I’m trying to trace the owner of a manuscript that was typed by your agency …’ Frensic began, but the voice cut him short.

  ‘We do not divulge the names of our clients,’ it said.

  ‘But I’m only asking because a friend of mine …’

  ‘Under no circumstances are we prepared to confide confidential information of the sort …’

  ‘Perhaps if I spoke to Mrs Bogden,’ said Frensic.

  ‘You are,’ said the voice and rang off. Frensic sat at his desk and cursed.

  ‘Confidential information my foot,’ he said and slammed the phone down. He sat thinking dark thoughts about Mrs Bogden for a while and then called Mr Cadwalladine again.

  ‘This Bogden woman,’ he said, ‘how old is she?’

  ‘Around forty-five,’ said Mr Cadwalladine, ‘why do you ask?’

  ‘Never mind,’ said Frensic.

  *

  That evening, having left a note on Sonia Futtle’s desk saying that urgent business would keep him out of town for a day or two, Frensic travelled by train to Oxford. He was wearing a lightweight tropical suit, dark glasses and a Panama hat. The sandals were in his dustbin at home. He carried with him in a suitcase the xeroxed manuscript of Pause, a letter written by Piper and a pair of striped pyjamas. Dressed in the last he climbed into bed at eleven in the Randolph Hotel. His room had been booked for Professor Facit.

  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 the 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 cowcatchers 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 screen 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?’

  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 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 house-burning 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 feeling 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, née 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 silicone 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.

  *

  In Oxford Frensic was up and about and finding it when Baby returned to her own compartment and left Piper sleeping exhaustedly next door. Frensic had got up early and had breakfasted before eight. By half-past he had found the Cynthia Bogden Typing Service in Fenet Street. With what he hoped was the expectant look of an American tourist he haunted the church opposite and sat in one of the pews staring back through the open door at the entrance to the Bogden Bureau. If he knew anything about middle-aged women who were divorced and ran their own businesses, Miss Bogden would be the first to arrive in the morning and the last to leave at night. By quarter past nine Frensic certainly hoped so. The trail of women he had seen entering the office were not at all to his taste but at least the first to arrive had been the most presentable. She had been a large woman but Frensic’s brief glimpse had told him that her legs were good and that if Mr Cadwalladine had been right about her being forty-five she didn’t look it. Frensic left the church and pondered his next step. There was no point in going into the Agency and asking Miss Bogden point blank who had sent her Pause. Her tone the previous day had indicated that more subtle tactics were necessary.

  Frensic made his next move. He found a flower shop and went inside. Twenty minutes later two dozen red roses were delivered to the Bogden Typing Service with a note which said simply, ‘To Miss Bogden from an Admirer.’ Frensic had thought of adding ‘ardent’ but had decided against it. Two dozen expensive red roses argued an ardency by themselves. Miss Bodgen, or more properly Mrs Bogden, and the reversion indicated a romantic direction to that lady’s thoughts, would supply the adjective. Frensic wandered round Oxford, had coffee in the Ship and lunch back at the Randolph. Then, gauging that enough time had elapsed for Miss Bogden to have digested the implications of the roses, he went to Professor Facit’s room and phoned the Agency. As before, Miss Bogden answered. Frensic took a deep breath, swallowed and presently heard himself asking with an agony of unaffected coyness if she would do him the honour and privilege of having dinner with him at the Elizabeth. There was a sibilant pause before Miss Bogden replied.

  ‘Do I know you?’ she asked archly. Frensic squirmed.

  ‘An admirer,’ he murmured.

  ‘Oo,’ said Miss Bogden. There was another pause while she observed the proprieties of hesitation.

  ‘Roses,’ said Frensic garrottedly.

  ‘Are you quite sure? I mean it’s rather unusual …’

  Frensic silently agreed that it was. ‘It’s just that …’ he began and then took the plunge, ‘I haven’t had the nerve before and …’ The garrotte tightened.

  Miss Bogden on the other hand breathed sympathy. ‘Better late than never,’ she said softly.

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ said Frensic, who didn’t.

  ‘And you did say the Elizabeth?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Frensic, ‘shall we say eight in the bar?’

  ‘How will I know you?’

  ‘I know you,’ said Frensic and giggled involuntarily. Miss Bogden took it as a compliment.

  ‘You haven’t told me your name.’

  Frensic hesitated. He couldn’t use his own and Facit was in Pause. It had to be someone else. ‘Corkadale,’ he muttered finally, ‘Geoffrey Corkadale.’

  ‘Not the Geoffrey Corkadale?’ said Miss Bogden.

  ‘Yes,’ stammered Frensic, hoping to hell that Geoffrey’s epicene reputation hadn’t reached her ears. It hadn’t. Miss Bogden cooed.

  ‘Well in that case …’ She left the rest unsaid.

  ‘Till eight,’ said Frensic.

  ‘Till eight,’ echoed Miss Bogden. Frensic put the phone down and sat limply on the bed.

  Then he lay down and had a long nap. He woke at four and went downstairs. There was one last thing to do. He didn’t know Miss Bogden and there must be no mistake. He made his way to Fenet Street and stationed himself in the church. He was there at five-thirty when the trail of awful women came out of the office. Frensic sighed with relief. None of them was carrying a bunch of red roses. Finally the large woman appeared and locked the door. She clutched roses to her ample bosom and hurried off down the street. Frensic emerged from the church and watched her go. Miss Bogden was definitely well preserved. From her permed head to her pink shoes by way of a turquoise costume there was a tastelessness about the woman that was almost inspired. Frensic went back to the hotel and had a stiff gin. Then he had another, took a bath and rehearsed various approaches that seemed likely to elicit from Miss Bogden the name of the author of Pause.

  *

  On the other side of Oxford, Cynthia Bogden prepared herself for the evening with the same thoroughness with which she did everything. It had been some years since her divorce and to be asked to dine at the Elizabeth by a publisher augured well. So did the roses, carefully arranged in a vase, and the nervousness of her admirer. There had been nothing brash about the voice on the telephone. It had been an educated voice and Corkadales were most respectable publishers. And in any case Cynthia Bogden was in need of admirers. She selected her most seductive costume, sprayed herself in various places with various aerosols, fixed her face and set out prepared to be wined, dined and, not to put too fine a point on it, fucked. She entered the foyer of the Elizabeth exuding an uncertain hauteur and was somewhat startled when a short baggy man sidled up to her and took her hand.

  ‘Miss Bogden,’ he murmured, ‘your fond admirer.’

&nbs
p; Miss Bogden looked down at her fond admirer dubiously. She was still looking down at him half an hour and three pink gins later as they made their way to the table Frensic had reserved in the farthest corner of the restaurant. He held her chair for her and then, conscious that perhaps he hadn’t come as far up to her expectations as he might have done, threw himself into the part of fond admirer with a desperate gallantry and inventiveness that surprised them both.

  ‘I first glimpsed you a year ago when I was up for a conference,’ he told her, having ordered the wine waiter to bring them a bottle of not too dry champagne, ‘I saw you in the street and followed you to your office.’

  ‘You should have introduced yourself,’ said Miss Bogden.

  Frensic blushed convincingly. ‘I was too shy,’ he murmured, ‘and besides I thought you were …’

  ‘Married?’ said Miss Bogden helpfully.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Frensic, ‘or shall we say attached. A woman as … er … beautiful … er …’

  It was Miss Bogden’s turn to blush. Frensic plunged on. ‘I was overcome. Your charm, your air of quiet reserve, your … how shall I put it …’ There was no need to put it. While Frensic burrowed into an avocado pear, Cynthia Bogden savoured a shrimp. Baggy this little man might be but he was clearly a gentleman and a man of the world. Champagne at twelve pounds a bottle was sufficient indication of his honourable intentions. When Frensic ordered a second, Miss Bogden protested feebly.

  ‘Special occasion,’ said Frensic, wondering if he wasn’t overdoing things a bit, ‘and besides we have something to celebrate.’

  ‘We do?’

  ‘Our meeting for one thing,’ said Frensic, ‘and the success of a mutual venture.’

  ‘Mutual venture?’ said Miss Bogden, her thoughts veering sharply to the altar.

  ‘Something we both had a hand in,’ continued Frensic, ‘I mean we don’t usually publish that sort of book but I must say it’s been a great success.’

  Miss Bogden’s thoughts turned away from the altar. Frensic helped himself to more champagne. ‘We’re a very traditional publishing house,’ he said, ‘but Pause O Men for the Virgin is what the public demands these days.’