by Tom Sharpe
It came at ten and at half-past Frensic shuffled into the Typing Agency. Miss Bogden was waiting for him. So were twelve awful women sitting at typewriters.
‘Girls,’ Miss Bogden called euphemistically as Frensic peered anxiously into the office, ‘I want you all to meet my fiancé, Mr Geoffrey Corkadale.’
The women all rose from the seats and gaggled congratulations on Frensic while Miss Bogden suppurated happiness.
‘And now the ring,’ she said when the congratulations died down. She led the way out of the office and Frensic followed. The bloody woman would want a ring. Just so long as it wasn’t too expensive. It was.
‘I think I like the solitaire,’ she told the jeweller in the Broad. Frensic flinched at the price and was about to put his entire scheme in jeopardy when he was struck by a brilliant thought. After all, what was five hundred pounds when his entire future was at stake?
‘Oughtn’t we to have it engraved?’ he said as Cynthia put it on her finger and admired its brilliance.
‘What with?’ she cooed.
Frensic simpered. ‘Something secret,’ he whispered. ‘Something we two alone will understand. A code d’amour.’
‘Oh you are awful,’ said Miss Bogden. ‘Fancy thinking of something like that.’ Frensic glanced at the jeweller uncomfortably and applied his lips to the perm again.
‘A code of love,’ he explained.
‘A code of love?’ echoed Miss Bogden. ‘What sort of code?’
‘A number,’ said Frensic, and paused. ‘Some number that only we would know had brought us together.’
‘You mean …?’
‘Exactly,’ said Frensic forestalling any alternatives, ‘after all, you typed the book and I published it.’
‘Couldn’t we just have Till Death Do Us Part?’
‘Too much like the TV series,’ said Frensic, who had very much earlier intentions. He was saved by the jeweller.
‘You’d never get that inside the ring. Not Till Death Do Us Part. Too many letters.’
‘But you could do numbers?’ said Frensic.
‘Depends how many.’
Frensic looked inquiringly at Miss Bogden. ‘Five,’ she said after a moment’s hesitation.
‘Five,’ said Frensic. ‘Five teeny weeny little numbers that are our code of love, our own, our very own itsy bitsy secret.’ It was his last desperate act of heroism. Miss Bogden succumbed. For a moment she had … but no, a man who could in the presence of an austere jeweller By Appointment to Her Majesty talk openly about five teeny weeny itsy bitsy numbers that were their code of love, such a man was above suspicion.
‘Two oh three five seven,’ she simpered.
‘Two oh three five seven,’ said Frensic loudly. ‘You’re quite sure? We don’t want to make any mistakes.’
‘Of course I’m sure,’ said Miss Bogden, ‘I’m not in the habit of making mistakes.’
‘Right,’ said Frensic, plucking the ring from her finger and handing it to the jeweller, ‘stick them on the inside of the thing, I’ll be back to collect it this afternoon,’ and taking Miss Bogden firmly by the arm he steered her towards the door.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ said the jeweller, ‘but if you don’t mind …’
‘Mind what?’ said Frensic.
‘I would prefer it if you paid now, sir. With engraving we have to …’
Frensic understood all too well. He released Miss Bogden and sidled back to the counter.
‘Er … well …’ he began, but Miss Bogden was still between him and the door. This was no time for half-measures. Frensic took out his cheque book.
‘I’ll be with you in a moment, dear,’ he called. ‘You just go over the road and look at dresses.’
Cynthia Bogden obeyed her instincts and stayed where she was.
‘You do have a cheque card, sir?’ said the jeweller.
Frensic looked at him gratefully. ‘As a matter of fact, I don’t. Not on me.’
‘Then I’m afraid it will have to be cash, sir.’
‘Cash?’ said Frensic. ‘In that case …’
‘We’ll go to the bank,’ said Miss Bogden firmly. They went to the bank in the High Street. Miss Bogden seated herself while Frensic conferred at the counter.
‘Five hundred pounds?’ said the teller. ‘We’ll have to have proof of identity and telephone your own branch.
Frensic glanced at Miss Bogden and lowered his voice. ‘Frensic,’ he said nervously, ‘Frederick Frensic, Glass Walk, Hampstead but my business account is with the branch in Covent Garden.’
‘We’ll call you when we have confirmation,’ said the teller.
Frensic blanched. ‘I’d be grateful if you didn’t …’ he began.
‘Didn’t what?’
‘Never mind,’ said Frensic and went back to Miss Bogden. He had to get her out of the bank before that blasted teller started hollering for Mr Frensic.
‘This is going to take some time, darling. Why don’t you toddle back to …’
‘But I’ve taken the day off and I thought …’
‘Taken the day off?’ said Frensic. If this sort of stress went on much longer it would take years off. ‘But …’
‘But what?’ said Miss Bogden.
‘But I’m supposed to be meeting an author for lunch. Professor Dubrowitz. From Warsaw. He’s only over for the day and …’ He hustled her out of the bank promising to come to the office just as soon as he could. Then with a sigh of relief he went back and collected five hundred pounds.
‘Now for the nearest telephone,’ he said to himself as he pocketed the money and descended the steps. Cynthia Bogden was still there.
‘But …’ Frensic began and gave up. With Miss Bogden there were no buts.
‘I thought we’d just go and get the ring first,’ she said taking his arm, ‘then you can go and have lunch with your boring old professor.’
They went back to the jewellers and Frensic paid £500. Only then did Miss Bogden allow him to escape.
‘Call me as soon as you’ve finished,’ she said pecking his cheek. Frensic promised to and hurried off to the main post office. In a foul temper he dialled 23507.
‘The Bombay Duck Restaurant,’ said an Indian who was unlikely to have written Pause. Frensic slammed the phone down and tried another combination of the digits in the ring. This time he got MacLoughlin’s Fish Emporium. Then he ran out of change. He went across to the main counter and handed over a five-pound note for a 6½p stamp and returned with a pocketful of coins. The phone booth was occupied. Frensic stood beside it looking belligerent while an apparently sub-normal youth plighted his acned troth to a girl who giggled audibly. Frensic spent the time trying to remember the exact number and by the time the youth had finished he had got it. Frensic went in and dialled 20357. There was a long pause and the sound of the ringing tone before anyone answered. Frensic plunged a coin into the machine.
‘Yes,’ said a thin querulous voice, ‘who is it?’
Frensic hesitated a moment and then coarsened his voice. ‘This is the General Post Office, telephone faults department,’ he said. ‘We are trying to trace a crossed connection in a junction box. If you would just give me your name and address.’
‘Fault?’ said the voice. ‘We haven’t had any faults.’
‘You soon will have. There’s a burst water main and we need your name and address.’
‘But I thought you said you had a crossed connection?’ said the voice peevishly. ‘Now you say there’s a water main …’
‘Madam,’ said Frensic officiously, ‘the burst water main is affecting the junction box and we need your help to locate it. Now if you will be so good as to give me your name and address …’ There was a long pause during which Frensic gnawed a nail.
‘Oh well if you must,’ said the voice at long last, ‘the name is Dr Louth and the address is 44 Cowpasture Gardens … Hello, are you there?’
But Frensic was miles away in a world of terrible conjecture. Without another word he replac
ed the receiver and staggered out into the street.
*
In Lanyard Lane Sonia sat at her typewriter and stared at the calendar. She had returned from Somerset, satisfied that Bernie the Beaver would use less forceful language in future, to find two messages for her. The first was from Frensic saying that he would be out of town on business for a few days and would she mind coping. That was queer enough. Frensic usually left fuller explanations and a telephone number where she could call him in case of emergencies. The second message was even more peculiar and in the shape of a long telegram from Hutchmeyer: POLICE ESTABLISHED DEATHS PIPER AND BABY ACCIDENTAL NO RESPONSIBILITY TERRORISTS RUNNING AWAY WITH EACH OTHER CRAZY ABOUT YOU ARRIVING THURSDAY ALL MY LOVE HUTCHMEYER.
Sonia studied the message and found it at first incomprehensible. Deaths accidental? No responsibility terrorists running away with each other? What on earth did it mean? For a moment she hesitated and then dialled International and was put through to New York and Hutchmeyer Press. She got MacMordie.
‘He’s in Brasilia right now,’ he said.
‘What’s all this business about Piper’s death being accidental?’ she asked.
‘That’s the theory the police have come up with,’ said MacMordie, ‘like they were eloping some place with all that fuel on board when she blew.’
‘Eloping? Piper and that bitch eloping? In the middle of the night with a cabin cruiser? Somebody’s out of their mind.’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ said MacMordie, ‘all I’m saying is what the cops and the insurance company have come up with. And that Piper had this big thing for old women. I mean, take his book. It shows.’
‘Like hell it does,’ said Sonia before recalling that MacMordie didn’t know Piper hadn’t written it.
‘If you don’t believe me, call the cops in Maine or the insurers. They’ll tell you.’
Sonia called the insurers. They were more likely to come up with the truth. They had money at stake. She was put through to Mr Synstrom.
‘And you really believe he was running off with Mrs Hutchmeyer and it was all an accident?’ she said when he had given his version of the event. ‘I mean you’re not having me on?’
‘This is the Claims Department,’ said Mr Synstrom firmly. ‘We don’t have people on. It’s not our line of business.’
‘Well it sounds crazy to me,’ said Sonia, ‘she was old enough to be his mother.’
‘If you want further delineation of the circumstances surrounding the accident I suggest you speak to the Maine State police,’ said Mr Synstrom and ended the conversation.
Sonia sat stunned by this new development. That Piper had preferred that awful old hag … From being in love with his memory one minute she was out of it the next. Piper had betrayed her and with the knowledge there came a new sense of bitterness and reality. In life, now that she came to think about it, he had been a bit dreary and her love had been less for him as a man than for his aptitude as a husband. Given the chance she could have made something of him. Even before his death she had made him famous as an author and had he lived they would have gone on to greater things. It was not for nothing that Brahms was her favourite composer. There would have been little Pipers, each to be helped towards a suitable career by a woman who was at the same time a mother and a literary agent. That dream had ended. Piper had died with a surgically preserved bitch in a mink coat.
Sonia looked at the telegram again. It had a new message for her now. Piper was not the only man ever to have found her attractive. There was still Hutchmeyer, a widowed Hutchmeyer whose wife had stolen her darling from her. There was a fine irony in the thought that by her action, Baby had made it possible for Hutchmeyer to marry again. And marry her he would. It was marriage or nothing. There would be no messing.
Sonia reached for a sheet of paper and put it in the typewriter. Frenzy would have to be told. Poor old Frenzy, she would miss him but wedlock called and she must respond. She would explain her reasons and then leave. It seemed the best thing to do. There would be no recriminations and in a way she was sacrificing herself for him. But where on earth had he got to, and why?
20
Frensic was in Blackwell’s bookshop. Half hidden among the stacks of English literary criticism he stood with a copy of The Great Pursuit in his hand and Pause propped up on the shelf in front of him. The Great Pursuit was Dr Sydney Louth’s latest, a collection of essays dedicated to F. R. Leavis and a monument to a lifetime’s execration of the shallow, the obscene, the immature and the non-significant in English literature. Generations of undergraduates had sat mesmerized by the turgid inelegance of her style while she denounced the modern novel, the contemporary world and the values of a sick and dying civilization. Frensic had been among those undergraduates and had imbibed the truisms on which Dr Louth’s reputation as a scholar and a critic had been founded. She had praised the obviously great and cursed the rest and for that simple formula she was known as a great scholar. And all this in language which was the antithesis of the stylistic brilliance of the writers she praised. But it was her anathema which had stuck in Frensic’s mind, those bitter graceless curses she had heaped on other critics and those who disagreed with her. By her denunciations she had implanted the inhibitions which had spoilt Frensic and so many others like him who had wanted to write. To appease her he had adopted the grotesque syntax of her lectures and essays. By their style Louthians were instantly recognizable. And by their sterility.
For three decades, her influence on English literature had been malignant. And all her imprecations on the present had been hallowed by the great past which, had she been a living influence at the time, would never have existed. Like some religious fanatic she had consecrated the already sacred and had bred an intellectual intolerance that denied a living to the less than best. There were only saints in Dr Louth’s calendar, saints and devils who failed the test of greatness. Hardy, Forster, Galsworthy, Moore and Meredith, even Peacock consigned to outer darkness and oblivion because they did not measure up to Conrad or Henry James. And what about poor Trollope and Thackeray? More devils. The less than best. And Fielding … The list was endless. And for the present generation the only hope of salvation was to genuflect to her opinions and learn by rote the answers to her literary catechism. And this arid bitch had written Pause O Men for the Virgin. Frensic inverted the title and found it wholly appropriate. Dr Louth had given birth to nothing. The stillborn opinions in The Moral Novel and now The Great Pursuit would moulder and decompose upon the shelves a few more years and be forgotten. And she had known it and had written Pause to seek an anonymous immortality. The clues were there to be seen. Frensic wondered how he could have missed them. On page 269 of Pause: ‘And so inexorably their livingness became lovingness, a rhythmic lovingness that placed them within a new dimension of feeling so that the really real became an …’ Frensic shut the book before he came to ‘apprehended totality’. How many times in his youth had he heard her use those fearful words? And used them himself in his essays for her. That ‘placed’ too was proof enough, but followed by so many meaningless abstractions and a ‘really real’ it was conclusive. He thrust both books under his arm and went to the counter to pay for them. There were no doubts left, and everything was explained, the obsessive precautions to preserve the author’s anonymity, the readiness to allow Piper to act as substitute … But now Piper was claiming to have written Pause.
Frensic walked more slowly across the Parks deep in thought. Two authors for the same book? And Piper had been a devotee of Dr Louth. The Moral Novel was his scripture. In which case he could well have … No. Miss Bogden had not been lying. Frensic increased his pace and strode beside the river towards Cowpasture Gardens. Dr Louth was going to learn that she had made a bad mistake in sending her manuscript to one of her former pupils. Because that was what it was all about. In her conceit she had chosen Frensic out of a hundred other agents. The irony of her gesture would have appealed to her. She had never had much time for him. ‘A medio
cre mind’, she had once written at the end of one of his essays. Frensic had never forgiven her. He was going to get his revenge.
He left the Parks and entered Cowpasture Gardens. Dr Louth’s house stood at the far end, a large Victorian mansion with an air of deliberate desuetude as if the inhabitants were too committed intellectually to notice overgrown borders and untended lawns. And there had been, Frensic recalled, cats.
There were still cats. Two sat on a window-ledge and watched as Frensic walked to the front door and rang the bell. He stood waiting and looked around. If anything the garden had regressed still further towards the pastoral which Dr Louth had so extolled in literature. And the Monkey Puzzle tree stood there as unclimbable as ever. How often had he looked out of the window at that Monkey Puzzle tree while Dr Louth intoned the need for a mature moral purpose in all art. Frensic was about to fall into a nostalgic reverie when the door opened and Miss Christian peered out at him uncertainly.
‘If you’re from the telephone people …’ she began, but Frensic shook his head.
‘My name is …’ he hesitated as he tried to recall a favoured pupil. ‘Bartlett. I was a student of hers in 1955.’
Miss Christian pursed her lips. ‘She isn’t seeing anyone,’ she said.
Frensic smiled. ‘I just wanted to pay my respects. I’ve always regarded her as the greatest influence in my development. Seminal you know.’