The Great Pursuit (24 page)

'It all seems most peculiar,' he said when she had finished. 'One can only suppose that
whoever did it made a terrible mistake and got the wrong person. Now if Hutchmeyer had been
murdered...'

'I would have been murdered too,' said Sonia through her tears.

'We must be grateful for small mercies,' said Frensic.

Next morning Sonia Futtle resumed her duties in the office. A fresh batch of animal stories
had come in during her absence and while Frensic congratulated himself on his tactics and sat at
his desk silently praying that there would be no further repercussions Sonia busied herself with
Bernie the Beaver. It needed a bit of rewriting but the story had promise.

In a cabin in the Smokey Mountains Piper held the same opinion about Pause. He sat out on the
stoop and looked down at the lake where Baby was swimming and had to admit that his first
impression of the novel had been wrong. He had been misled by the passages of explicit sex. But
now that he had copied it out word for word he could see that the essential structure of the
story was sound. In fact there were large sections of the book which dealt meaningfully with
matters of great significance. Subtract the age difference between Gwendolen and Anthony, the
narrator, and eradicate the pornography and Pause O Men for the Virgin had the makings of great
literature. It examined in considerable depth the meaning of life, the writer's role in
contemporary society, the anonymity of the individual in the urban collective and the need to
return to the values of earlier, more civilized times. It was particularly good on the miseries
of adolescence and the satisfaction to be found in the craftsmanship of furniture-making.
'Gwendolen ran her fingers along the gnarled and knotted oak with a sensual touch that belied her
years. "The hardiness of time has tamed the wildness of the wood," she said. "You will carve
against the grain and give form to what has been formless and insensate."' Piper nodded
approvingly. Passages like that had genuine merit and better still they served as an inspiration
to him. He too would cut against the grain of this novel and give form to it, so that in the
revised version the grossness of the bestseller would be eliminated, all the sexual addenda which
defiled the very essence of the book would be removed and it would stand as a monument to his
literary gifts. Posthumously perhaps, but at least his reputation would be retrieved. In years to
come critics would compare the two versions and deduce from his deletions that in its earlier
uncommercial form the original intentions of the author had been of the highest literary quality
and that the novel had subsequently been altered to meet the demands of Frensic and Hutchmeyer
and their perverse view of public taste. The blame for the bestseller would lie with them and he
would be exonerated. More, he would be acclaimed. He closed the ledger and stood up as Baby came
out of the water and walked up the beach to the cabin.

'Finished?' she asked. Piper nodded.

'I shall start the second version tomorrow,' he said.

'While you're doing that I'll take the first down into Ashville and get it copied. The sooner
Frensic gets it the sooner we're going to light a fire under him.'

'I wish you wouldn't use that expression,' said Piper, 'lighting fires. And anyway where are
you going to mail it from? They could trace us from the postmark.'

'We shan't be here from the day after tomorrow. We rented the cabin for a week. I'll drive
down to Charlotte and catch a flight to New York and mail it there. I'll be back tomorrow night
and we move on the day after.'

'I wish we didn't have to move all the time,' said Piper, 'I like it here. There's been nobody
to bother us and I've had time to write. Why can't we just stay on?'

'Because this isn't the Deep South,' said Baby, 'and when I said Deep I meant it. There are
places down Alabama, Mississippi, that just nobody has ever heard of and I want to see them.'

'And from what I've read about Mississippi they aren't partial to strangers,' said Piper,
'they are going to ask questions.'

'You've read too many Faulkners,' said Baby, 'and where we're going a quarter of a million
dollars buys a lot of answers.'

She went inside and changed. After lunch Piper swam in the lake and walked along the shore,
his mind filled with possible changes he was going to make in Pause Two. Already he had decided
to change the title. He would call it Work In Regress. There was a touch of Finnegans Wake about
it which appealed to his sense of the literary. And after all Joyce had worked and reworked his
novels over and over again with no thought for their commercial worth. And in exile from his
native land. For a moment Piper saw himself following in Joyce's footsteps, incognito and
endlessly revising the same book, with the difference that he could never emerge from obscurity
into fame in his own lifetime. Unless of course his work was of such an indisputable genius that
the little matter of the fire and the burning boats and even his apparent death would become part
of the mystique of a great author. Yes, greatness would absolve him. Piper turned and hurried
back along the shore to the cabin. He would start work at once on Work in Regress. But when he
got back he found that Baby had already taken the car and his first manuscript and driven into
Ashville. There was a note for him on the table. It said simply, 'Gone today. Here tomorrow. Stay
with it. Baby.'

Piper stayed with it. He spent the afternoon with a pen going through Pause changing all
references to age. Gwendolen lost fifty-five years and became twenty-five and Anthony gained ten
which made him twenty-seven. And in between times Piper scored out all those references to
peculiar sexual activities which had ensured the book's popular appeal. He did this with
particular vigour and by the time he had finished was filled with a sense of righteousness which
he conveyed to his notebook of Ideas. 'The commercialization of sex as a thing to be bought and
sold is at the root of the present debasement of civilization. In my writing I have striven to
eradicate the Thingness of sex and to encapsulate the essential relationship of humanity.'
Finally he made himself supper and went to bed.

In the morning he was up early and at his table on the stoop. In front of him the first page
of his new ledger lay blank and empty waiting for his imprint. He dipped his pen in the ink
bottle and began to write. 'The house stood on a knoll. Surrounded by three elms, a beech and
a...' Piper stopped. He wasn't sure what a deodar was and he had no dictionary to help him. He
changed it to 'oak' and stopped again. Did oak have horizontal branches? Presumably some oaks
did. Details like that didn't matter. The essential thing was to get down to an analysis of the
relationship between Gwendolen and the narrator. Great books didn't bother with trees. They were
about people, what people felt about people and what they thought about them. Insight was what
really mattered and trees didn't contribute to insight. The deodar might just as well stay where
it was. He crossed out 'oak' and put 'deodar' above it. He continued the description for half a
page and then hit another problem. How could the narrator, Anthony, be on holiday from school
when he was now twenty-seven. Unless of course he was a schoolmaster in which case he would have
to teach something and that meant knowing about it. Piper tried to remember his own schooldays
and a model on which to base Anthony, but the masters at his school had been nondescript men and
had left little impression on him. There was only Miss Pears and she had been a mistress.

Piper put down his pen and thought about Miss Pears. Now if she had been a man...or if she
were Gwendolen and he was Anthony...and if instead of being twenty-seven Anthony had been
fourteen...or better still if his parents had lived in a house on a knoll surrounded by three
elms, a beech and a...Piper stood up and paced the stoop, his mind alive with new inspiration. It
had suddenly come to him that from the raw material of Pause O Men for the Virgin it might be
possible to distil the essence of Search for a Lost Childhood. Or if not distil, at least
amalgamate the two. There would have to be considerable alterations. After all tuberculotic
plumbers didn't live on knolls. On the other hand his father hadn't actually had tuberculosis. He
had got it from Lawrence and Thomas Mann. And a love affair between a schoolboy and his teacher
was a very natural occurrence, provided of course that it didn't become physical. Yes, that was
it. He would write Work In Regress as Search. He sat down at the table and picked up his pen and
began to copy. There was no need now to worry about changing the main shape of the story. The
deodar and the house on the knoll and all the descriptions of houses and places could remain the
same. The new ingredient would be the addition of his troubled adolescence and the presence of
his tormented parents. And Miss Pears as Gwendolen, his mentor, adviser and teacher with whom he
would develop a significant relationship, meaningfully sexual and without sex.

And so once more the words formed indelibly black upon the page with all the old elegance of
shape that had so satisfied him in the past. Below him the lake shone in the summer sunlight and
a breeze ruffled the trees around the cabin, but Piper was oblivious to his surroundings. He had
picked up the thread of his existence where it had broken in the Gleneagle Guest House in Exforth
and was back into Search.

When Baby returned that evening from her flight to New York with the copy of his first
manuscript now safely mailed to Frensic & Futtle, Lanyard Lane, London, she found Piper his
old self. The trauma of the fire and their flight had been forgotten.

'You see, what I am doing is combining my own novel with Pause,' he explained as she poured
herself a drink. 'Instead of Gwendolen being...'

'Tell me about it in the morning,' said Baby. 'Right now I've had a tiring day and tomorrow
we've got to be on the road again.'

'I see you've bought another car,' said Piper looking out at a red Pontiac.

'Air-conditioned and with South Carolina plates. Anyone thinks they're going to come looking
for us, they're going to have a hard time. I didn't even trade in this time. Sold the Ford in
Beanville and took a Greyhound to Charlotte and bought this in Ashville on the way back. We'll
change again farther south. We're covering our tracks.'

'Not by sending copies of Pause to Frensic, we aren't,' said Piper, 'I mean he's bound to know
I haven't died.'

'That reminds me. I sent him a telegram in your name.'

'You did what?' squawked Piper.

'Sent him a telegram.'

'Saying what?'

'Just, quote Transfer advance royalties care of First National Bank of New York account number
478776 love Piper unquote.'

'But I haven't got an account...'

'You have now, honey. I opened one for you and made the first deposit. One thousand dollars.
Now when Frensic gets that birthday greeting '

'Birthday greeting? You send a telegram demanding money and you call that a birthday
greeting?'

'Had to delay it somehow till he'd had time to read the original of Pause,' said Baby, 'so I
said he had a birthday on the 19th and they're holding it over.'

'Christ,' said Piper, 'some damned birthday greeting. I suppose you realize he's got a heart
condition? I mean shocks like this could kill him.'

'Makes two of you,' said Baby. 'He's effectively killed you...'

'He did nothing of the sort. You were the one to sign my death certificate and end my career
as a novelist.'

Baby finished her drink and sighed. 'There's gratitude for you. Your career as a novelist is
just about to begin.'

'Posthumously,' said Piper bitterly.

'Well, better late than never,' said Baby, and took herself off to bed.

The next morning the red Pontiac left the cabin and wound up the curving mountain road in the
direction of Tennessee.

'We'll go west as far as Memphis,' said Baby, 'and ditch the car there and double back by
Greyhound to Chattanooga. I've always wanted to see the Choo Choo.'

Piper said nothing. He had just realized how he had met Miss Pears/Gwendolen. It had been one
summer holiday when his parents had taken him down to Exforth and instead of sitting on the beach
with them he had gone to the public library and there...The house no longer stood on a knoll. It
was at the top of the hill by the cliffs and its windows stared out to sea. Perhaps that wasn't
such a good idea. Not in the second version. No, he would leave it where it was and concentrate
on the relationships. In that way there would be more consistency between Pause and Work In
Regress, more authenticity. But in the third revision he would work on the setting and the house
would stand on the cliffs above Exforth. And with each succeeding draft he would approximate a
little more closely to that great novel on which he had been working for ten years. Piper smiled
to himself at this realization. As the author of Pause O Men for the Virgin he had been given the
fame he had always sought, had had fame forced upon him, and now by slow, persistent rewriting of
that book he would reproduce the literary masterpiece that had been his life's work. And there
was absolutely nothing Frensic could do about it.

That night they slept in separate motels in Memphis and next morning met at the bus depot and
took the Greyhound to Nashville. The red Pontiac had gone. Piper didn't even bother to enquire
how Baby had disposed of it. He had more important things on his mind. What, for instance, would
happen if Frensic produced the real original manuscript of Pause and admitted that he had sent
Piper to America as the substitute author?

'Two million dollars,' said Baby succinctly when he put this possibility to her.

'I don't see what they have to do with it,' said Piper.

'That's the price of the risk he took playing people poker with Hutch. You stake two million
on a bluff you've got to have good reasons.'