The Great Pursuit (26 page)

He did. 'I don't know who the author of this awful book is,' he admitted in faltering tones
when he rang up half an hour later.

'You don't know?' said Frensic, faltering incredulously himself. 'You must know. You sent me
the book in the first place. You gave me the authorization to send Piper to the States. If you
didn't know you had no right...' Mr Cadwalladine made negative noises. 'But I've got a letter
here from you saying...'

'I know you have,' said Mr Cadwalladine faintly. 'The author gave his consent and...'

'But you've just said you don't know who the bloody author is,' shouted Frensic, 'and now you
tell me he gave his consent. His written consent?'

'Yes,' said Mr Cadwalladine.

'In that case you've got to know who he is.'

'But I don't,' said Mr Cadwalladine. 'You see I've always dealt with him through Lloyds
Bank.'

Frensic's mind boggled. 'Lloyds Bank?' he muttered. 'You did say Lloyds Bank?'

'Yes. Care of the manager. It's such a very respectable bank and I never for one moment
supposed...'

He left the sentence unfinished. There was no need to end it. Frensic was already ahead of
him. 'So what you're saying is that whoever wrote this bloody novel sent the thing to you by way
of Lloyds Bank in Oxford and that whenever you've wanted to correspond with him you've had to do
so through the bank. Is that right?'

'Precisely,' said Mr Cadwalladine, 'and now that this frightful libel case has come up I think
I know why. It puts me in a dreadful situation. My reputation...'

'Stuff your reputation,' shouted Frensic, 'what about mine? I've been acting in good faith on
behalf of a client who doesn't exist and on your instructions and now we've got a murder on our
hands and...'

'This terrible libel action,' said Mr Cadwalladine. 'Mr Corkadale told me that the damages are
bound to amount to something astronomical.'

But Frensic wasn't listening. If Mr Cadwalladine's client had to correspond with him through
Lloyds Bank the bastard must have something to hide. Unless of course it was Piper. Frensic
groped for a clue. 'When the novel first came to you there must have been a covering letter.'

'The manuscript came from a typing agency,' said Mr Cadwalladine. 'The covering letter was
sent a few days earlier via Lloyd's Bank.'

'With a signature?' said Frensic.

'The signature of the bank manager,' said Mr Cadwalladine.

'That's all I need,' said Frensic. 'What is his name?'

Mr Cadwalladine hesitated. 'I don't think...' he began but Frensic lost patience.

'Damn your scruples, man,' he snarled, 'the name of the bank manager and quick.'

'The late Mr Bygraves,' said Mr Cadwalladine sadly.

'The what?'

'The late Mr Bygraves. He died of a heart attack climbing Snowdon at Easter.'

Frensic slumped in his chair. 'He had a heart attack climbing Snowdon,' he muttered.

'So you see, I don't think he's going to be able to help us very much,' continued Mr
Cadwalladine, 'and anyway banks are very reticent about disclosing the names of their clients.
You have to have a warrant, you know.'

Frensic did know. It was one of the few things about banks he had previously admired. But
there was something else that Mr Cadwalladine had said earlier...something about a typing agency.
'You said the manuscript came from a typing agency,' he said. 'Have you any idea which one?'

'No. But I daresay I could find out if you'll give me time.' Frensic sat holding the receiver
while Mr Cadwalladine found out. 'It's the Cynthia Bogden Typing Service,' he told Frensic at
long last. He sounded distinctly subdued.

'Now we're getting somewhere,' said Frensic. 'Ring her up and ask where...'

'I'd rather not,' said Mr Cadwalladine.

'You'd rather not? Here we are in the middle of a libel action which is probably going to cost
you your reputation and...'

'It's not that,' interrupted Mr Cadwalladine. 'You see, I handled the divorce case...'

'Well that's all right...'

'I was acting for her ex-husband,' said Mr Cadwalladine. 'I don't think she'd appreciate
my...'

'Oh all right, I'll do it,' said Frensic. 'Give me her number.' He wrote it down, replaced the
receiver and dialled again.

'The Cynthia Bogden Typing Service,' said a voice, coyly professional.

'I'm trying to trace the owner of a manuscript that was typed by your agency...' Frensic began
but the voice cut him short.

'We do not divulge the names of our clients,' it said.

'But I'm only asking because a friend of mine...'

'Under no circumstances are we prepared to confide confidential information of the
sort...'

'Perhaps if I spoke to Mrs Bogden,' said Frensic.

'You are,' said the voice and rang off. Frensic sat at his desk and cursed.

'Confidential information my foot,' he said and slammed the phone down. He sat thinking dark
thoughts about Mrs Bogden for a while and then called Mr Cadwalladine again.

'This Bogden woman,' he said, 'how old is she?'

'Around forty-five,' said Mr Cadwalladine, 'why do you ask?'

'Never mind,' said Frensic.

That evening, having left a note on Sonia Futtle's desk saying that urgent business would keep
him out of town for a day or two, Frensic travelled by train to Oxford. He was wearing a
lightweight tropical suit, dark glasses and a Panama hat. The sandals were in his dustbin at
home. He carried with him a suitcase the Xeroxed manuscript of Pause, a letter written by Piper
and a pair of striped pyjamas. Dressed in the last he climbed into bed at eleven in the Randolph
Hotel. His room had been booked for Professor Facit.

In Chattanooga Baby had fulfilled her ambition. She had seen the Choo Choo. Installed in
Pullman Car Number Nine, she lay on the brass bedstead and stared out of the window at the
illuminated fountain playing across the tracks. Above the main building of the station tube
lighting emblazoned the night sky with words Hilton Choo Choo and below, in what had once been
the waiting-room, dinner was being served. Beside the restaurant there was a crafts shop and in
front of them both stood huge locomotives of a bygone era, their cow-catchers freshly painted and
their smokestacks gleaming as if in anticipation of some great journey. In fact they were going
nowhere. Their fireboxes were cold and empty and their pistons would never move again. Only in
the imagination of those who stayed the night in the ornate and divided Pullman cars, now motel
bedrooms, was it still possible to entertain the illusion that they would presently pull out of
the station and begin the long haul north or west. The place was part museum, part fantasy and
wholly commercial. At the entrance to the car park uniformed guards sat in a small cabin watching
the television screens on which each platform and each dark corner of the station was displayed
for the protection of the guests. Outside the perimeter of the station Chattanooga spread dark
and seedy with boarded hotel windows and derelict buildings, a victim of the shopping precincts
beyond the ring of suburbs.

But Baby wasn't thinking about Chattanooga or even the Choo Choo. They had joined the
illusions of her retarded youth. Age had caught up with her and she felt tired and empty of hope.
All the romance of life had gone. Piper had seen to that. Travelling day after day with a
self-confessed genius whose thoughts were centred on literary immortality to the exclusion of all
else had given Baby a new insight into the monotony of Piper's mind. By comparison Hutchmeyer's
obsession with money and power and wheeling and dealing now seemed positively healthy. Piper
evinced no interest in the countryside nor the towns they passed through and the fact that they
were now in, or at least on the frontier of, the Deep South and that wild country of Baby's
soft-corn imagination appeared to mean nothing to him. He had hardly glanced at the locomotives
drawn up in the station and seemed only surprised that they weren't travelling anywhere on them.
Once that had been impressed on him he had retreated to his stateroom and had started work again
on his second version of Pause.

'For a great novelist you've just got to be the least observant,' Baby said when they met in
the restaurant for dinner. 'I mean don't you ever look around and wonder what it's all
about.'

Piper looked around. 'Seems an odd place to put a restaurant,' he said. 'Still, it's nice and
cool.'

'That just happens to be the air-conditioning,' said Baby irritably.

'Oh, is that what it is,' said Piper. 'I wondered.'

'He wondered. And what about all the people who have sat right here waiting to take the train
north to New York and Detroit and Chicago to make their fortunes instead of scratching a living
from a patch of dirt? Doesn't that mean anything to you?'

'There don't seem many of them about,' said Piper looking idly at a woman with an obesity
problem and tartan shorts, 'and anyway I thought you said the trains weren't running any
more.'

'Oh my God,' said Baby, 'I sometimes wonder what century you're living in. And I suppose it
doesn't mean a thing to you that there was a battle here in the Civil War?'

'No,' said Piper. 'Battles don't figure in great literature.'

'They don't? What about Gone With The Wind and War and Peace? I suppose they aren't great
literature.'

'Not English literature,' said Piper. 'What matters in English literature is the relationships
people have with one another.'

Baby dug into her steak. 'And people don't relate to one another in battles? Is that it?'

Piper nodded.

'So when one guy kills another that's not relating in a way that matters?'

'Only transitorily,' said Piper.

'And when Sherman's troops go looting and burning and raping their way from Atlanta to the sea
and leave behind them homeless families and burning mansions that isn't altering relationships
either so you don't write about it?'

'The best novelists wouldn't,' said Piper. 'It didn't happen to them and therefore they
couldn't.'

'Couldn't what?'

'Write about it.'

'Are you telling me a writer can only write what has really happened to him? Is that what
you're saying?' said Baby with a new edge to her voice.

'Yes,' said Piper, 'you see it would be outside the range of his experience and
therefore...'

He spoke at length from The Moral Novel while Baby slowly chewed her way through her steak and
thought dark thoughts about Piper's theory.

'In that case you're going to need a lot more experience is all I can say.'

Piper pricked up his ears. 'Now wait a minute,' he said, 'if you think I want to be involved
in any more houseburning and boat-exploding and that sort of thing '

'I wasn't thinking of that sort of experience. I mean things like burning houses don't count
do they? It's relationships that matter. What you need is experience in relating.'

Piper ate uneasily. The conversation had taken a distasteful turn. They finished their meal in
silence. Afterwards Piper returned to his stateroom and wrote five hundred more words about his
tortured adolescence and his feelings for Gwendolen/Miss Pears. Finally he turned out the
electric oil lamp that hung above his brass bedstead and undressed. In the next compartment Baby
readied herself for Piper's first lesson in relationships. She put on a very little nightdress
and a great deal of perfume and opened the door to Piper's stateroom.

'For God's sake,' squawked Piper as she climbed into bed with him.

'This is where it all begins, baby,' said Baby, 'relationshipwise.'

'No, it doesn't,' said Piper. 'It's '

Baby's hand closed over his mouth and her voice whispered in his ear.

'And don't think you're going to get out of here. They've got TV cameras on every platform and
you go hobbling out there in the raw the guards are going to want to know what's been going
on.'

'But I'm not in the raw,' said Piper as Baby's hand left his mouth.

'You soon will be, honey,' Baby whispered as her hands deftly untied his pyjamas.

'Please,' said Piper plaintively.

'I aim to, honey, I aim to,' said Baby. She lifted her nightdress and her great breasts dug
into Piper's chest. For the next two hours the brass bedstead heaved and creaked as Baby
Hutchmeyer, née Sugg, Miss Penobscot 1935, put all the expertise of her years to work on Piper.
And in spite of himself and his invocation of the precepts in The Moral Novel, Piper was for the
first time lost to the world of letters and moved by an inchoate passion. He writhed beneath her,
he pounded on top, his mouth sucked at her silicon breasts and slithered across the minute scars
on her stomach. All the time Baby's fingers caressed and dug and scratched and squeezed until
Piper's back was torn and his buttocks marked by the curve of her nails and all the time Baby
stared into the dimness of the stateroom dispassionately and wondered at her own boredom. 'Youth
must have its fling,' she thought to herself as Piper hurled himself into her yet again. But she
was no longer young and flinging without feeling was not her scene. There was more to life than
fucking. Much more, and she was going to find it.

In Oxford Frensic was up and about and finding it when Baby returned to her own compartment
and left Piper sleeping exhaustedly next door. Frensic had got up early and had breakfasted
before eight. By half past he had found the Cynthia Bogden Typing Service in Fenet Street. With
what he hoped was the expectant look of an American tourist he haunted the church opposite and
sat in one of the pews staring back through the open door at the entrance to the Bogden bureau.
If he knew anything about middle-aged women who were divorced and ran their own businesses, Miss
Bogden would be the first to arrive in the morning and the last to leave at night. By quarter
past nine Frensic certainly hoped so. The trail of women he had seen entering the office were not
at all to his taste but at least the first to arrive had been the most presentable. She had been
a large woman but Frensic's brief glimpse had told him that her legs were good and that if Mr
Cadwalladine had been right about her being forty-five she didn't look it. Frensic left the
church and pondered his next step. There was no point in going into the Agency and asking Miss
Bogden point blank who had sent her Pause. Her tone the previous day had indicated that more
subtle tactics were necessary.