The Great Pursuit (33 page)

'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.'

Chapter 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 enquiries 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 it...'

'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 11.55 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. Frensic 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.

'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 chequebook, 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.