The Great Pursuit (30 page)

'If you're from the telephone people...' she began but Frensic shook his head.

'My name is...' he hesitated as he tried to recall a favoured pupil. 'Bartlett. I was a
student of hers in 1955.'

Miss Christian pursed her lips. 'She isn't seeing anyone,' she said.

Frensic smiled. 'I just wanted to pay my respects. I've always regarded her as the greatest
influence in my development. Seminal you know.'

Miss Christian savoured 'seminal'. It was the password. 'In 1955?'

'The year she published The Intuitive Felicity,' said Frensic to bring out the bouquet of that
vintage.

'So it was. It seems so long ago now,' said Miss Christian and opened the door wider. Frensic
stepped into the dark hall where the stained-glass windows on the stairs added to the air of
sanctity. Two more cats sat on chairs.

'What did you say your name was?' said Miss Christian.

'Bartlett,' said Frensic. (Bartlett had got a First.)

'Ah, yes, Bartlett,' said Miss Christian. 'I'll just go and ask her if she will see you.'

She went away down a threadworn passage to the study. Frensic stood and gritted his teeth
against the odour of cats and the almost palpable atmosphere of intellectual high-mindedness and
moral intensity. On the whole he preferred the cats.

Miss Christian shuffled back. 'She will see you,' she said. 'She seldom sees visitors now but
she will see you. You know the way.'

Frensic nodded. He knew the way. He went down the length of worn carpet and opened the
door.

Inside the study it was 1955. In twenty years nothing had changed. Dr Sydney Louth sat in an
armchair beside a small fire, a pile of papers on her lap, a cigarette tilted on the lip of an
ashtray and a cup of cold half-finished tea on the table at her elbow. She did not look up as
Frensic entered. That was an old habit too, the mark of an inner concentration so profound that
to disturb it was the highest privilege. A red ballpen wriggled illegibly in the margin of the
essay. Frensic took his seat opposite her and waited. There were advantages to be gained from her
arrogance. He laid the copy of Pause, still in its Blackwell's wrapping, on his knees and studied
the bowed head and busy hand. It was all exactly as he had remembered it. Then the hand stopped
writing, dropped the ballpen and reached for the cigarette.

'Bartlett, dear Bartlett,' she said and looked up. She stared at him dimly and Frensic stared
back. He had been wrong. Things had changed. The face he looked at was not the face he
remembered. Then it had been smooth and slightly plump. Now it was swollen and corrugated. A
plexus of dropsical wrinkles bagged under the eyes and scored her cheeks, and from the lip of
this reticulated mask there hung the cigarette. Only the expression in the eyes remained the
same, dimmer but burning with the certainty of her own rightness.

The conviction faded as Frensic watched. 'I thought...' she began and looked at him more
closely, 'Miss Christian precisely said...'

'Frensic. You were my supervisor in 1955,' said Frensic.

'Frensic?' The eyes filled with conjecture now. 'But you said Bartlett...'

'A little deceit,' said Frensic, 'to guarantee this interview. I'm a literary agent now.
Frensic & Futtle. You won't have heard of us.'

But Dr Louth had. The eyes flickered. 'No. I'm afraid I haven't.'

Frensic hesitated and chose a circuitous approach. 'And since...well...since you were my
supervisor I was wondering, well, if you would consider...I mean it would be a great favour to
ask...' Frensic paraded deference.

'What do you want?' said Dr Louth.

Frensic unwrapped the packet on his lap. 'You see we have a novel and if you would write a
piece...'

'A novel?' The eyes behind the wrinkles glinted at the wrapping paper. 'What novel?'

'This,' said Frensic, and passed her Pause O Men for the Virgin. For a moment Dr Louth stared
at the book and the cigarette slouched on her lip. Then she cringed in her chair.

'That?' she whispered. The cigarette dropped from her lip and smouldered on the essay on her
lap. 'That?'

Frensic nodded and leaning forward removed the cigarette and put the book down. 'It seemed
your sort of book,' he said.

'My sort of book?'

Frensic sat back in his chair. The centre of power had passed to him. 'Since you wrote it,' he
said, 'I thought it only fair...'

'How did you know?' She was staring at him with a new intensity. There was no high moral
purpose in that intensity now. Only fear and hatred. Frensic basked in it. He crossed his legs
and looked out at the Monkey Puzzle tree. He had climbed it.

'Mainly through the style,' he said, 'and to be perfectly frank, by critical analysis. You
used the same words too often in your books and I placed them. You taught me that, you see.'

There was a long pause while Dr Louth lit another cigarette. 'And you expect me to review it?'
she said at last.

'Not really,' said Frensic, 'it's unethical for an author to review her own work. I just
wanted to discuss how best we could announce the news to the world.'

'What news?'

'That Dr Sydney Louth, the eminent critic, had written both Pause and The Great Pursuit. I
thought an article in the Times Literary Supplement would do to start the controversy raging.
After all, it's not every day that a scholar produces a bestseller, particularly the sort of book
she has spent her life denouncing as obscene...'

'I forbid it,' Dr Louth gasped. 'As my agent...'

'As your agent it is my business to see that the book sells. And I can assure you that the
literary scandal the announcement will provoke in circles where your name has previously been
revered...'

'No,' said Dr Louth, 'that must never happen.'

'You're thinking of your reputation?' enquired Frensic gently. Dr Louth did not reply.

'You should have thought of that before. As it is you have placed me in a very awkward
situation. I have a reputation to maintain too.'

'Your reputation? What sort of reputation is that?' She spat the words at him.

Frensic leant forward. 'An immaculate one,' he snarled, 'beyond your comprehension.'

Dr Louth tried to smile. 'Grub Street,' she muttered.

'Yes, Grub Street,' said Frensic, 'and proud of it. Where people write without hypocrisy for
money.'

'Lucre, filthy lucre.'

Frensic grinned. 'And what did you write for?'

The mask looked at him venomously. 'To prove that I could,' she said, 'that I could write the
sort of trash that sells. They thought I couldn't. A sterile critic, impotent, an academic. I
proved them wrong.' Her voice rose.

Frensic shrugged. 'Hardly,' he said. 'Your name is not upon the title page. Until it is no one
will ever know.'

'No one must ever know.'

'But I intend to tell them,' said Frensic. 'It will make fascinating reading. The anonymous
author, Lloyds Bank, the Typing Service, Mr Cadwalladine, Corkadales, your American
publisher...'

'You mustn't,' she whimpered, 'no one must ever know. I tell you I forbid it.'

'It's no longer in your hands,' said Frensic, 'it's in mine and I will not sully them with
your hypocrisy. Besides I have another client.'

'Another client?'

'The scapegoat Piper who went to America for you. He has a reputation too, you know.'

Dr Louth sniggered. 'Like yours, immaculate I suppose.'

'In conception, yes,' said Frensic.

'But which he was prepared to put in jeopardy for money.'

'If you like. He wanted to write and he needed the money. You, I take it, don't. You mentioned
lucre, filthy lucre. I am prepared to bargain.'

'Blackmail,' snapped Dr Louth and stubbed out her cigarette.

Frensic looked at her with a new disgust. 'For a moral coward who hides behind a nom de plume
your language is imprecise. Had you come to me in the first place I would not have engaged Piper
but since you chose anonymity at the expense of honesty I am now in the position of having to
choose between two authors.'

'Two? Why two?'

'Because Piper claims he wrote the book.'

'Let him claim. He accepted the onus, let him bear it.'

'He also claims the money.'

Dr Louth glared at the smouldering fire. 'He has been paid,' she said finally. 'What more does
he want?'

'Everything,' said Frensic.

'And you're prepared to let him have it?'

'Yes,' said Frensic. 'My reputation is at stake too. If there's a scandal I will suffer.'

'A scandal,' Dr Louth shook her head. 'There must be no scandal.'

'But there will be,' said Frensic. 'You see, Piper is dead.'

Dr Louth shivered suddenly. 'Dead? But you said just now...'

'There is the estate to be wound up. It will go to court and with two million dollars...Need I
say more?'

Dr Louth shook her head. 'What do you want me to do?' she asked.

Frensic relaxed. The crisis was over. He had broken the bitch. 'Write a letter to me denying
that you ever wrote the book. Now.'

'Will that suffice?'

'To begin with,' said Frensic. Dr Louth got up and crossed to her desk. For a minute or two
she sat there writing. When she had finished she handed Frensic the letter. He read it through
and was satisfied.

'And now the manuscript,' he said, 'the original manuscript in your own handwriting and any
copies you may have made.'

'No,' she said, 'I will destroy it.'

'We will destroy it,' said Frensic, 'before I leave.'

Dr Louth turned back to the desk and unlocked a drawer and took out a box. She crossed to her
chair by the fire and sat down. Then she opened the box and took the pages out. Frensic glanced
at the top one. It began 'The house stood on a knoll. Surrounded by three elms, a beech and a
deodar whose horizontal branches...' He was looking at the original of Pause. A moment later the
page was on the fire and blazing up into the chimney. Frensic sat and watched as one by one the
pages flared up, crinkled to black so that the words upon them stood out like white lace, broke
and caught in the draught and were swept up the chimney. And as they blazed Frensic seemed to
catch out of the corner of his eye the gleam of tears in the runnels of Dr Louth's cheeks. For a
moment he faltered. The woman was cremating her own work. Trash she had called it and yet she was
crying over it now. He would never understand writers and the contradictory impulses that were
the source of their invention.

As the last page disappeared he got up. She was still huddled over the grate. For a second
time Frensic was tempted to ask her why she had written the book. To prove her critics wrong.
That wasn't the answer. There was more to it than that, the sex, the ardent love affair...He
would never learn from her. He left the room quietly and went down the passage to the front door.
Outside the air was filled with small black flakes falling from the chimney and near the gate a
young cat jumped up clawing at a fragment which danced in the breeze.

Frensic took a deep breath of fresh air and hurried down the road. He had his things to
collect from the hotel and then a train to catch to London.

Somewhere south of Tuscaloosa Baby dropped the road map out of the window of the car. It
fluttered behind them in the dust and was gone. As usual Piper noticed nothing. His mind was
intent on Work In Regress. He had reached page 178 and the book was going well. In another
fortnight of hard work he would have finished it. And then he would start the third revision, the
one in which not only the characters were changed but the setting of every scene. He had decided
to call it Postscript to A Childhood as a precursor to his final, commercially unadulterated
novel Search for a Lost Childhood which was to be considered in retrospect as the very first
draft of Pause by those same critics who had acclaimed that obnoxious novel. In this way his
reputation would have been rescued from the oblivion of facile success and scholars would be able
to trace the insidious influence of Frensic's commercial recommendations upon his original
talent. Piper smiled to himself at his own ingenuity. And after all there could be other yet to
be discovered novels. He would go on writing 'posthumously' and every few years another novel
would turn up on Frensic's desk to be released to the world. There was nothing Frensic could do
about it. Baby was right. By deceiving Hutchmeyer Frensic & Futtle had made themselves
vulnerable. Frensic would have to do what he was told. Piper closed his eyes and lay back in his
seat contentedly. Half an hour later he opened them again and sat up. The car, a Ford that Baby
had bought in Rossville, was lurching on a bad road surface. Piper looked out and saw they were
driving along a road built on an embankment. On either side tall trees stood in dark
water.

'Where are we?' he asked.

'I've no idea,' said Baby.

'No idea? You've got to know where we are heading.'

'Into the sticks is all I know. And when we get some place we'll find out.'

Piper looked down at the dark water beneath the trees. The forest had a sinister quality to it
that he didn't like. Always before they had travelled along homely, cheerful roads with only the
occasional stretch of kudzu vine crawling across trees and banks to suggest wild natural growth.
But this was different. There were no billboards, no houses, no gas stations, none of those
amenities which had signified civilization. This was a wilderness.

'And what happens if when we do get some place there isn't a motel?' he asked.

'Then we'll have to make do with what there is,' said Baby, 'I told you we were coming to the
Deep South and this is where it's at.'

'Where what's at?' said Piper staring down at the black water and thinking of alligators.

'That's what I've come to find out,' said Baby enigmatically and braked the car to a
standstill at a cross roads. Piper peered through the windshield at a sign. Its faded letters
said BIBLIOPOLIS 15 MILES.