The Great Pursuit

by Tom Sharpe

  ‘Cynthia here,’ said that pebbledashed voice. Frensic slammed the phone down. A moment later, to prevent her calling again, he picked it up and dialled Geoffrey’s number.

  ‘Geoffrey, my dear fellow,’ he said when Corkadale answered, ‘I wonder if …’

  But Geoffrey didn’t let him finish. ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you all afternoon,’ he said. ‘I’ve had the most extraordinary manuscript sent to me. You’re not going to believe this but there’s some lunatic in a place called of all things Bibliopolis … I mean can you beat that? Bibliopolis, Alabama … Well anyway, he calmly announces that he is our late Peter Piper and will we kindly quote fulfil the obligations incurred in my contract unquote and publish his novel, Search for a Lost Childhood. I mean, it’s incredible and the signature …’

  ‘Geoffrey dear,’ said Frensic, lapsing into the affectionate as a prophylactic against Miss Bogden’s feminine charms and as a means of preparing Corkadale for the worst, ‘I wonder if you would do me a favour …’

  He spoke fluently for five minutes and rang off. With amazing rapidity he packed two suitcases, telephoned for a taxi, left a note for the milkman cancelling his two pints a day, took his cheque book, his passport and a briefcase containing copies of all Piper’s manuscripts, and half an hour later was carrying his belongings into Geoffrey Corkadale’s house. Behind him the flat in Glass Walk was locked and when Cynthia Bogden arrived and rang the bell there was no reply. Frensic was sitting in Geoffrey Corkadale’s withdrawing-room sipping a large brandy and implicating his host in the plot to deceive Hutchmeyer. Geoffrey stared at him with bulging eyes.

  ‘You mean you deliberately lied to Hutchmeyer and to me for that matter and told him that this Piper madman had written the book?’ he said.

  ‘I had to,’ said Frensic miserably. ‘If I hadn’t, the whole deal would have fallen through. Hutchmeyer would have backed out and where would we have been then?’

  ‘We wouldn’t be in the ghastly position we are now, that I do know.’

  ‘You’d have gone out of business,’ said Frensic. ‘Pause saved you. You’ve done very nicely out of the book and I’ve sent you others. Corkadales is a name to be reckoned with now.’

  ‘Well, I suppose that’s true,’ said Geoffrey, slightly mollified, ‘but it’s going to be a name that will stink if it gets out that Piper is still alive and didn’t write …’

  ‘It isn’t going to get out,’ said Frensic, ‘I promise you that.’ Geoffrey looked at him doubtfully. ‘Your promises …’ he began.

  ‘You’ll just have to trust me,’ said Frensic.

  ‘Trust you? After this? You can rest assured that if there’s one thing I’m not going to do …’

  ‘You’ll have to. Remember that contract you signed? The one saying you had paid fifty thousand pounds advance for Pause?’

  ‘You tore that up,’ said Geoffrey, ‘I saw you do it.’

  Frensic nodded. ‘But Hutchmeyer didn’t,’ he said. ‘He had photocopies made and if this thing comes to court you’re going to have a hard time explaining why you signed two contracts with the same author for the same book. It isn’t going to look good, Geoffrey, not good at all.’

  Geoffrey could see that. He sat down.

  ‘What do you want?’ he asked.

  ‘A bed for the night,’ said Frensic, ‘and tomorrow morning I shall go to the American Embassy for a visa.’

  ‘I can’t see why you’ve got to spend the night here,’ said Geoffrey.

  ‘You would if you saw her,’ said Frensic man-to-man. Geoffrey poured him another brandy.

  ‘I’ll have to explain to Sven,’ he said, ‘he’s obsessively jealous. By the way, who did write Pause?’ But Frensic shook his head. ‘I can’t tell you. There are some things it’s best for you not to know. Just let’s say the late Peter Piper.’

  ‘The late?’ said Geoffrey with a shudder. ‘It’s a curious expression to apply to the living.’

  ‘It’s a curious expression to apply to the dead,’ said Frensic, ‘It seems to suggest that they may yet turn up. Better late than never.’

  ‘I wish I could share your optimism,’ said Geoffrey.

  *

  Next morning, after a restless night in a strange bed, Frensic went to the American Embassy and got his visa. He visited his bank and he bought a return ticket to Florida. That night he left Heathrow. He spent the crossing in a drunken stupor and boarded the flight from Miami to Atlanta the next day feeling hot, ill and filled with foreboding. To delay matters he spent the next night in a hotel and studied a map of Alabama. It was a detailed map but he couldn’t find Bibliopolis. He tried the desk clerk but the man had never heard of it.

  ‘You’d best go to Selma and ask there,’ he told Frensic. Frensic caught the Greyhound to Selma and inquired at the Post Office.

  ‘The sticks. A wide place in the road over Mississippi way,’ he was told. ‘Swamp country on the Ptomaine River. Take Route 80 about a hundred miles and go north. Are you from New England?’

  ‘Old England,’ said Frensic, ‘why do you ask?’

  ‘Just that they don’t take too kindly to Northern strangers in those parts. Damn Yankees they call them. They’re still living in the past.’

  ‘So is the man I want to see,’ said Frensic, and went out to rent a car. The man at the office increased his apprehension.

  ‘You’re going out along Blood Alley you want to take care,’ he said.

  ‘Blood Alley?’ said Frensic anxiously.

  ‘That what they call Route 80 through to Meridian. That road’s seen a whole heap of deaths.’

  ‘Isn’t there a more direct route to Bibliopolis?’

  ‘You can go through the backwoods but you could get lost. Blood Alley’s your best route.’

  Frensic hesitated. ‘I don’t suppose I could hire a driver?’ he asked.

  ‘Too late now,’ said the man, ‘Saturday afternoon this time everyone’s gone home and tomorrow being Sunday …’

  Frensic left the office and drove to a motel. He wasn’t going to drive to Bibliopolis along Blood Alley at nightfall. He would go in the morning.

  *

  Next day he was up early and on the road. The sun shone down out of a cloudless sky and the day was bright and beautiful. Frensic wasn’t. The desperate resolution with which he had left London had faded and with each mile westward it diminished still further. Woods closed in on the road and by the time he reached the sign with the faded inscription BIBLIOPOLIS 15 MILES he almost turned back. But a pinch of snuff and the thought of what would happen if Piper continued his campaign of literary revival gave him the courage he needed. Frensic turned right and followed the dirt road into the woods, trying not to look at the black water and the trees strangled with vines. And, like Piper those many months before, he was relieved when he came to the meadows and the cattle grazing in the long grass. But still the abandoned shacks depressed him and the occasional glimpse of the river, a brown flurry in the distance fringed by veiled trees, did nothing for his morale. The Ptomaine looked aptly named. Finally the road veered down to the left and, across the water, Frensic looked at Bibliopolis. A wide place in the road, the girl in Selma had called it, but she had quite evidently never seen it. Besides, the road stopped at the river. The little town huddled round the square and looked old and unchanged from some time in the nineteenth century. And the ferry which presently moved towards him with an old man pulling on the rope was from some bygone age. Frensic thought he knew now why Bibliopolis was said to be in the sticks. By the Styx would have done as well. Frensic drove the car carefully on to the ferry and got out.

  ‘I’m looking for a man called Piper,’ he told the ferryman.

  The man nodded. ‘Guessed you might be,’ he said. ‘They come from all over to hear him preach. And if it isn’t him it’s the Reverend Baby up at the Church.’

  ‘Preach?’ said Frensic, ‘Mr Piper preaches?’

  ‘Sure does. Preaching and teaching the good word.’

/>   Frensic raised his eyebrows. Piper as preacher was a new one to him. ‘Where will I find him?’ he asked.

  ‘Down Pellagra.’

  ‘Down with pellagra?’ said Frensic hopefully.

  ‘At Pellagra,’ said the old man, ‘the house.’ He nodded in the direction of a large house fronted by tall white columns. ‘There’s Pellagra. Used to be the Stopes’s place but they all died off.’

  ‘Hardly surprising,’ said Frensic, his intellectual compass spinning between vitamin deficiency, advocates of birth control, the Monkey Trial and Yotnapatawpha County. He gave the man a dollar and drove down the drive to an open gate. On one side a sign in large italic said THE PIPER SCHOOL OF PENMANSHIP while on the other an inscribed finger pointed to the CHURCH OF THE GREAT PURSUIT. Frensic stopped the car and stared at the enormous finger. The Church of The Great Pursuit? The Church of … There could be no doubting that he had come to the right place. But what sort of religious mania was Piper suffering from now? He drove on and parked beside several other cars in front of the large white building with a wrought-iron balcony extending forward to the columns from the first-floor rooms. Frensic got out and walked up the steps to the front door. It was open. Frensic peered into the hall. A door to the left had painted on it THE SCRIPTORIUM while from a room on the right there came the drone of an insistent voice. Frensic crossed the marble floor and listened. There was no mistaking that voice. It was Piper’s, but the old hesitant quality had gone and in its place there was a new strident intensity. If the voice was familiar, so were the words.

  ‘And we must not (the “must” here presupposing explicitly a sustained seriousness of purpose and an undeviating moral duty) allow ourselves to be deluded by the seeming naïvety so frequently ascribed by other less perceptive critics to the presentation of Little Nell. Sentiment not sentimentality as we must understand it is cognizant …’

  Frensic shied away from the door. He knew now what the Church of The Great Pursuit had for its gospel. Piper was reading aloud from Dr Louth’s essay ‘How We must Approach The Old Curiosity Shop’. Even his religion was derived. Frensic found a chair and sat down filled with a mounting anger. ‘The unoriginal little sod,’ he muttered, and cursed Dr Louth into the bargain. The apotheosis of that dreadful woman, the cause of all his troubles, was taking place here in the heart of the Bible belt. Frensic’s anger turned to fury. The Bible belt! Bibliopolis and the Bible. And instead of that magnificent prose, Piper was disseminating her graceless style, her angular inverted syntax, her arid puritanism and her denunciations against pleasure and the joy of reading. And all this from a man who couldn’t write to save his soul! For a moment Frensic felt that he was at the heart of a great conspiracy against life. But that was paranoia. There had been no conscious purpose in the circumstances that led to Piper’s missionary zeal. Only the accident of literary mutation which had turned Frensic himself from a would-be novelist into a successful agent and, by the way of The Moral Novel, had mutilated what little talent for writing Piper might once have possessed. And now like some carrier of literary death he was passing the infection on. By the time the droning voice stopped and the little congregation filed out, their faces taut with moral intensity, and made their way to the cars, Frensic was in a murderous mood.

  He crossed the hall and entered the Church of The Great Pursuit. Piper was putting the book away with all the reverence of a priest handling the Host. Frensic stood in the doorway and waited. He had come a long way for this moment. Piper shut the cupboard and turned. The look of reverence faded from his face.

  ‘You,’ he said faintly.

  ‘Who else?’ said Frensic loudly to exorcize the atmosphere of sanctity that pervaded the room. ‘Or were you expecting Conrad?’

  Piper’s face paled. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Want?’ said Frensic, and sat down in one of the pews and took a pinch of snuff. ‘Just to put an end to this bloody game of hide-and-seek.’ He wiped his nose with a red handkerchief.

  Piper hesitated and then headed for the door. ‘We can’t talk in here,’ he muttered.

  ‘Why not?’ said Frensic. ‘It seems as good a place as any.’

  ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ said Piper and went out. Frensic blew his nose coarsely and then followed.

  ‘For a horrid little blackmailer you’ve got a hell of a lot of pretensions,’ he said as they stood in the hall, ‘all that crap in there about The Old Curiosity Shop.’

  ‘It isn’t crap,’ said Piper, ‘and don’t call me a blackmailer. You started this. And that’s the truth.’

  ‘Truth?’ said Frensic with a nasty laugh. ‘If you want the truth you’re going to get it. That’s what I’ve come here for.’ He looked across at the door marked SCRIPTORIUM. ‘What’s in there?’

  ‘That’s where I teach people to write,’ said Piper.

  Frensic stared at him and laughed again. ‘You’re joking,’ he said and opened the door. Inside the room was filled with desks, desks on which stood bottles of ink and pens, and each desk tilted at an angle. On the walls were framed examples of script and, in front, a blackboard. Frensic glanced round.

  ‘Charming. The Scriptorium. And I suppose you’ve got a Plagiarium too?’

  ‘A what?’ said Piper.

  ‘A special room for plagiarism. Or do you combine the process in here? I mean, there’s nothing like going the whole hog. How do you go about it? Do you give each student a bestseller to alter and then flog it as your own work?’

  ‘Coming from you, that’s a dirty crack,’ said Piper. ‘I do all my own writing in my study. Down here I teach my students how to write. Not what.’

  ‘How? You teach them how to write?’ He picked up a bottle of ink and shook it. The sludge moved slowly. ‘Still on the evaporated ink, I see.’

  ‘It gives the greatest density,’ said Piper, but Frensic had put the bottle down and turned back to the door.

  ‘And where’s your study?’ he asked. Piper led the way slowly upstairs and opened another door. Frensic stepped inside. The walls were lined with shelves and a big desk stood in front of a window which looked out across the drive towards the river. Frensic studied the books. They were bound in calf. Dickens, Conrad, James …

  ‘The old testament,’ he said and reached for Middle-march. Piper took it brusquely from him and put it back.

  ‘This year’s model?’ asked Frensic.

  ‘A world, a universe beyond your tawdry imagination,’ said Piper angrily. Frensic shrugged. There was a pathos about Piper’s tenseness that was weakening his resolve. Frensic steeled himself to be coarse.

  ‘Bloody cosy little billet you’ve got yourself here,’ he said, seating himself at the desk and putting his feet up. Behind him Piper’s face whitened at the sacrilege. ‘Curator of a museum, counterfeiter of other people’s novels, a bit of blackmail on the side – and what do you do about sex?’ He hesitated and picked up a paperknife for safety’s sake. If he was going to put the boot in there was no knowing what Piper might do. ‘Screw the late Mrs Hutchmeyer?’

  There was a hiss behind him and Frensic swung round. Piper was facing him with his pinched face and narrow eyes blazing with hatred. Frensic’s grip tightened on the paperknife. He was frightened but the thing had to be done. He had come too far to go back now.

  ‘It’s none of my business, I daresay,’ he said as Piper stared, ‘but necrophilia seems to be your forte. First you rob dead authors, then you put the bite on me for two million dollars, what do you do to the late Mrs Hutch—’

  ‘Don’t you dare say it,’ shouted Piper, his voice shrill with fury.

  ‘Why not?’ said Frensic. ‘There’s nothing like confession for cleansing the soul.’

  ‘It isn’t true,’ said Piper. His breathing was audible.

  Frensic smiled cynically. ‘What isn’t? The truth will out, as the saying goes. That’s why I’m here.’ He stood up with assumed menace and Piper shrank back.

  ‘Stop it. Stop it. I don’t want to hear any mor
e. Just go away and leave me alone.’

  Frensic shook his head. ‘And have you send me yet another manuscript and tell me to sell it? Oh no, those days are over. You’re going to learn the truth if I have to ram it down your snivelling—’

  Piper covered his ears with his hands. ‘I won’t,’ he shouted, ‘I won’t listen to you.’

  Frensic reached in his pocket and took out Dr Louth’s letter.

  ‘You don’t have to listen. Just read this.’

  He thrust the letter forward and Piper took it. Frensic sat down in the chair. The crisis was over. He was no longer afraid. Piper might be mad but his madness was self-directed and held no threat for Frensic. He watched him read the letter with a new sense of pity. He was looking at a nonentity, the archetypal author for whom only words had any reality, and one who couldn’t write. Piper finished the letter and looked up.

  ‘What does it mean?’ he asked.

  ‘What it doesn’t say,’ said Frensic. ‘That the great Dr Louth wrote Pause. That’s what it means.’

  Piper looked down at the letter again. ‘But it says here she didn’t.’

  Frensic smiled. ‘Quite. And why should she have written that? Ask yourself that question. Why deny what nobody had ever supposed?’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Piper, ‘it doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘It does if you accept that she was being blackmailed,’ said Frensic.

  ‘Blackmailed? But by whom?’

  Frensic helped himself to snuff. ‘By you. You threatened me and I threatened her.’

  ‘But …’ Piper wrestled with this incomprehensible sequence. It was beyond his simple philosophy.

  ‘You threatened to expose me and I passed the message on,’ said Frensic. ‘Dr Sydney Louth paid two million dollars not to be revealed as the author of Pause. The price of her sacred reputation.’

  Piper’s eyes were glazed. ‘I don’t believe you,’ he muttered.

  ‘Don’t,’ said Frensic. ‘Believe what you bloody well like. All you’ve got to do is resurrect yourself and tell Hutchmeyer you’re still alive and kicking and the media will do the rest. It will all come out. My role, your role, the whole damned story and at the end of it, your Dr Louth with her reputation as a critic in ruins. The bitch will be the laughing-stock of the literary world. Mind you, you’ll be in prison. And I dare say I’ll be bankrupt too, but at least I won’t have to put up with the impossible task of trying to sell your rotten Search for a Lost Childhood. That’ll be some compensation.’