The Great Pursuit (29 page)

'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, you understand, 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 6-1/2p 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.'

'A 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 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...Hullo, are you there?'

But Frensic was miles away in a world of terrible conjecture. Without another word he replaced
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 Peter 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?

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 mediocre 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.