The Great Pursuit

by Tom Sharpe

  *

  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 wash-basin 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 première 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 leatherbound 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 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 depredations, 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.’

  22

  ‘The man must be out of his bloody mind,’ muttered Frensic a week later. ‘I can see no reason why this arrangement should be negated.’ Frensic could. ‘The sod can’t seriously suppose I can go round to Corkadales and force them to publish a book by a corpse.’

  But it was evident from the tone of the letter that Piper supposed exactly that. Over the months Frensic had received four xeroxed and altered drafts of Piper’s novel and had consigned them to a filing cabinet which he kept carefully locked. If Piper wanted to waste his own time reworking the damned book until every element that had made Pause the least bit readable had been eliminated he was welcome to do so. Frensic felt under no obligation to hawk his rubbish round publishing houses. But the threat to deal direct with Corkadales was, to put it mildly, a different kettle of fish. Piper was dead and buried and he was being well paid for it. Every month Frensic saw that the proceeds from the sale of Pause went into account number 478776, and wondered at the extraordinary inefficiency of the American tax system that didn’t seem to mind that a taxpayer was supposedly dead. Doubtless Piper paid his taxes promptly or perhaps Baby Hutchmeyer had made complicated accountancy arrangements for his royalties to be laundered. That was none of Frensic’s business. He took his commission and paid the rest over. But it was certainly his business when Piper made threats about going to Corkadales or another agent. That arrangement had definitely to be negated.

  Frensic turned the letter over and studied the postmark on the envelope. It came from a place called Bibliopolis, Alabama. ‘Just the sort of idiotic town Piper would choose,’ he thought miserably and wondered how to reply. Or whether he should reply at all. Perhaps the best thing would be to ignore the threat. He certainly had no intention of committing to paper any words that could be used in court to prove that he knew of Piper’s continued afterdeath. ‘The next thing he’ll come up with is a request for me to go and see him and discuss the matter. And fat chance there is of that.’ Frensic had had his fill of pursuing phantom authors.

  *

  Miss Bogden on the other hand had not given up her pursuit of the man who had asked her to marry him. After the terrible telephone conversation she had had with Geoffrey Corkadale she had wept briefly, had made up her face, and had continued business as usual. For several weeks she had lived in hope that he would phone again, or that another bunch of red roses would suddenly appear, but those hopes had dwindled. Only the diamond solitaire gleaming on her finger kept her spirits up – that and the need to maintain the fiction before her staff that the engagement was still on. To that end she invented long weekends with her fiancé and reasons for the delayed wedding. But as weeks became months Cynthia’s disappointment turned to determination. She had been had, and while being had was in some respects better than not being had at all, being made to look foolish in the eyes of her staff was infuriating. Miss Bogden applied her mind to the problem of finding her fiancé. While his disappearance was proof that he hadn’t wanted her, the five hundred pounds he had spent on the ring was indication that he had wanted something else. Again Miss Bogden’s business sense told her that the favours she had bestowed bodywise on her lover during the night hardly merited the expense of the engagement ring. Only a madman would make such a quixotic gesture and her pride refused the notion that the one man to propose to her since her divorce had been off his head.

  No, there had to be another motive and as she recalled the events of those splendid twenty-four hours it slowly dawned on her that the one consistent theme had been the novel Pause O Men for the Virgin. In the first place her fiancé had posed as Geoffrey Corkadale, in the second he had reverted to the question of the typescript too frequently for it to be coincidental, and thirdly there had been the code d’amour. And the code d’amour had been the telephone number she had had to call for information while typing the novel. Cynthia Bogden called the number again but there was no reply, and when a week later she tried again the line had been disconnected. She looked up the name Piper in the phone directory but no one of that name had the number 20357. She called Directory Enquiries and asked for the address and name of the number but was refused the information. Defeated in that direction, she turned to another. Her instructions had been to forward the completed typescript to Cadwalladine & Dimkins, Solicitors and to return the handwritten draft to Lloyds Bank. Miss Bogden phoned Mr Cadwalladine and was puzzled by his apparent inability to remember having received the typescript. ‘We may have done,’ he said, ‘but I’m afraid we handle so much business that …’

  Miss Bogden pressed him further and was finally told that it was unethical for solicitors to disclose confidential information. Miss Bogden was not satisfied with this answer. With each rebuttal her determination grew and was reinforced by the snide inquiries of her girls. Her mind worked slowly but it worked steadily too. She followed the line from the bank to her typing service and from there to Mr Cadwalladine and from Mr Cadwalladine to Corkadales, the publishers. The secrecy with which the entire transaction had been surrounded intrigued her too. An author who had to be contacted by phone, a solicitor … With less flair than Frensic, but with as much perseverance, she followed the trail as far as she could, and late one evening she realized the full implications of Mr Cadwalladine’s refusal to tell her where the typescript had been sent. And yet Corkadales had published the book. There had to be someone in between Cadwalladine and Corkadales and that someone was almost certainly a literary agent. That night Cynthia Bogden lay awake filled with a sense of discovery. She had found the missing link in the chain. The next morning she was up early and at the office at half past eight. At nine she telephoned Corkadales and asked to speak to the editor who had handled Pause. The editor wasn’t in. She called again at ten. He still hadn’t arrived. It was only at a quarter to eleven that she got through to him and by then she had had time to devise her approach. It was a straightforward one.

  ‘I run a typing bureau,’ she said, ‘and I have typed a novel for a friend who is anxious to send it to a good literary agent and I wondered if …’

  ‘I’m afraid we can’t advise you on that sort of thing,’ said Mr Tate.

  ‘Oh I do understand that,’ said Miss Bogden sweetly, ‘but you published that wonderful novel Pause O Men for the Virgin and my friend wanted to send her novel to the same agent. It would be so good of you if you could …’

  Responding to flattery Mr Tate did.

  ‘Frensic & Futtle of Lanyard Lane?’ she repeated.

  ‘Well, Frensic now,’ said Mr Tate, ‘Miss Futtle is no longer there.’

  Nor was Miss Bogden. She had put the phone down and was picking it up to dial Directory Enquiries. A few minutes later she had Frensic’s number. Her intuition told her that she was getting close to home. She sat for a while staring into the depths of the solitaire for inspiration. Should she phone or … Mr Cadwalladine’s refusal to say where the manuscript had gone persuaded her. She got up from her typewriter, asked her senior ‘girl’ to take over for the day, drove to the station and caught the 11.15 to London. Two hours later she walked down Lanyard Lane to Number 36 and climbed the stairs to Frensic’s office.

  *

  It was fortunate for Frensic that he was lunching with a promising new author in the Italian restaurant round the corner when Miss Bogden arrived. They came out at two-fifteen and walked back to the office. As they climbed the stairs Frensic stopped on the first landing.

  ‘You go on up,’ he said, ‘I’ll be with you in a moment.’ He went into the lavatory and shut the door. The promising new author climbed the second flight. Frensic finished his business and came out and he was about to go on up when he heard a voice.

  ‘Are you Mr Frensic?’ it asked. F
rensic stopped in his tracks.

  ‘Me?’ said the promising young author with a laugh. ‘No, I’m here with a book. Mr Frensic’s downstairs. He’ll be up in a minute.’

  But Frensic wasn’t. He shot down to the ground floor again and out into the street. That ghastly woman had tracked him down. What the hell to do now? He went back to the Italian restaurant and sat in a corner. How on earth had she managed to find him? Had that Cadbloodywalladine … Never mind how. The thing was what to do about it. He couldn’t sit in the restaurant all day and he was no more going to confront Miss Bogden than fly. Fly? The word took on a new significance for him. If he didn’t turn up at the office the promising young author would … To hell with promising young authors. He had asked that dreadful woman to marry him and … Frensic signalled to a waiter.

  ‘A piece of paper please.’ He scribbled a note of apology to the author, saying he had been taken ill and handed it with a five pound note to the waiter, asking him to deliver it for him. As the man went out Frensic followed and hailed a taxi. ‘Glass Walk, Hampstead,’ he said and got in. Not that going home would do him any good. Miss Bogden’s tracking powers would soon lead her there. All right, he wouldn’t answer the door. But what then? A woman with the perseverance of Miss Bogden, a woman of forty-five who had painstakingly worked her way towards her quarry over the months … such a woman held terrors for him. She wouldn’t stop now. By the time he reached his flat he was panic-stricken. He went inside and locked and bolted the door. Then he sat down in his study and tried to think. He was interrupted by the phone. Unthinkingly he picked it up. ‘Frensic here,’ he said.