The Great Pursuit (32 page)

And as he dressed the problem became more and more complicated. Even if Baby Hutchmeyer didn't
decide to go in for self-exhumation there was every chance that she would be discovered by some
nosey reporter who might at this very moment be hungrily tracking her down. What the hell would
happen if Piper told the truth? Frensic tried to foresee the outcome of his revelations, and was
just making himself some coffee when he remembered the manuscript. The manuscript in Piper's
handwriting. Or at least the copy. That was the way out. He could always deny Piper's allegation
that he hadn't written Pause and produce that manuscript copy as proof. And even if the psychotic
Baby backed Piper up, nobody would believe her. Frensic sighed with relief. He had found a way
out of the dilemma. After breakfast he walked up the hill to the tube station and caught a train
in a thoroughly good mood. He was a clever fellow and it would take more than the benighted Piper
and Baby Hutchmeyer to put one across him.

He arrived at Lanyard Lane to find the office locked. That was odd. Sonia Futtle should have
been back from Bernie the Beaver the previous day. Frensic unlocked the door and went in. No sign
of Sonia. He crossed to his desk and there lying neatly separated from the rest of his mail was
an envelope. It was addressed in Sonia's handwriting to him. Frensic sat down and opened it.
Inside was a long letter which began 'Dearest Frenzy' and ended, 'Your loving Sonia.' In between
these endearments Sonia explained with a wealth of nauseating sentimentality and self-deception
how Hutchmeyer had asked her to marry him and why she had accepted. Frensic was flabbergasted.
And only a week before the girl had been crying her eyes out over Piper. Frensic took out his
snuff box and red spotted handkerchief and thanked God he was still a bachelor. The ways and
wiles of women were quite beyond him.

They were quite beyond Geoffrey Corkadale too. He was still in a state of nervous agitation
over the threatened libel suit of Professor Facit versus the author, publisher and printer of
Pause O Men for the Virgin when he received a telephone call from Miss Bogden.

'I did what?' he asked with a mixture of total incredulity and disgust. 'And stop calling me
darling. I don't know you from a bar of soap.'

'But Geoffrey sweetheart,' said Miss Bogden, 'you were so passionate, so manly...'

'I was not!' shouted Geoffrey. 'You've got the wrong number. You can't say these things.'

Miss Bogden could and did. In detail. Geoffrey Corkadale curdled.

'Stop,' he yelled, 'I don't know what the hell has been going on but if you think for one
moment that I spent the night before last in your beastly arms...dear God...you must be out of
your bloody mind.'

'And I suppose you didn't ask me to marry you,' screamed Miss Bogden, 'and buy me an
engagement ring and...'

Geoffrey slammed the phone down to shut out this appalling catalogue. The situation was
sufficently desperate on the legal front without demented women claiming he had asked them to
marry him. Then, to forestall any resumption of Miss Bogden's accusations, he left the office and
made his way to his solicitors to discuss a possible defence in the libel action.

They were singularly unhelpful. 'It isn't as if the defamation of Professor Facit was
accidental,' they told him. 'This man Piper evidently set out with deliberate malice to ruin the
reputation of the Professor. There can be no other explanation. In our opinion the author is
entirely culpable.'

'He also happens to be dead,' said Geoffrey.

'In that case it rather looks as though you are going to have to bear the entire costs of this
action and, frankly, we would advise you to settle.'

Geoffrey Corkadale left the solicitors' office in despair. It was all that bloody man
Frensic's fault. He should have known better than to have dealt with a literary agent who had
already been involved in one disastrous libel action. Frensic was libel-prone. There was no other
way of looking at it. Geoffrey took a cab to Lanyard Lane. He was going to tell Frensic what he
thought of him. He found Frensic in an unusually affable mood.

'My dear Geoffrey, how very nice to see you,' he said.

'I haven't come to exchange compliments,' said Geoffrey, 'I've come to tell you that you've
landed me in the most appalling mess and...'

Frensic raised a hand.

'You mean Professor Facit? Oh I shouldn't worry too much...'

'Worry too much? I've got every right to worry and as for too much, with bankruptcy staring me
in the face just how much is too much?'

'I've been making some private enquiries,' said Frensic, 'in Oxford.'

'You have?' said Geoffrey. 'You don't mean to say he actually did do all those frightful
things? That ghastly Pekinese for instance?'

'I mean,' said Frensic pontifically, 'that no one in Oxford has ever heard of a Professor
Facit. I've checked with the Lodging House Syndicate and the university library and they have no
records of any Professor Facit ever having applied for a ticket to use the library. And as for
his statement that he once lived in De Frytville Avenue, it's quite untrue.'

'Good Lord,' said Geoffrey, 'if nobody up there has ever heard of him...'

'It rather looks as if Messrs Ridley, Coverup, Makeweight and Jones have just tried to
ambulance-chase once too often and are hoist with their own petard.'

'My dear fellow, this calls for a celebration,' said Geoffrey. 'And you mean to say you went
up there and found all this out...'

But Frensic was modesty itself. 'You see, I knew Piper pretty well. After all he had been
sending me stuff for years,' he said as they went downstairs, 'and he wasn't the sort of fellow
to set out to libel someone deliberately.'

'But I thought you told me that Pause was his first book,' said Geoffrey.

Frensic regretted his indiscretion. 'His first real book,' he said. 'The rest was just...well,
a bit derivative. Not the sort of stuff I could ever have sold.'

They strolled across to Wheeler's for lunch. Talking of Oxford,' said Geoffrey when they had
ordered, 'I had the most extraordinary phone call this morning from some lunatic woman called
Bogden.'

'Really?' said Frensic, spilling dry Martini down his shirt front. 'What did she want?'

'She claimed I'd asked her to marry me. It was absolutely awful.'

'It must have been,' said Frensic, finishing his drink and ordering another. 'Mind you, some
women will go to any lengths...'

'From what I could gather I was the one to have gone to any lengths. Said I'd bought her an
engagement ring.'

'I hope you told her to go to hell,' said Frensic, 'and talking of marriages I've got some
news too. Sonia Futtle is going to marry Hutchmeyer.'

'Marry Hutchmeyer?' said Geoffrey. 'But the man's only just lost his wife. You'd think he'd
have the decency to wait a bit before sticking his head in the noose again.'

'An apt metaphor,' said Frensic with a smile, and raised his glass.

His worries were over. He had just realized that in marrying Hutchmeyer Sonia had acted more
wisely than she knew. She had effectively spiked the enemy's guns. A bigamous Hutchmeyer was no
threat, and besides, a man who could find Sonia physically attractive must be besotted and a
besotted Hutch would never believe his new wife had once been party to a conspiracy to deceive
him. All that remained was to implicate Piper financially. After an excellent lunch Frensic
walked back to Lanyard Lane and thence to the bank. There he subtracted Corkadales' 10 per cent
and his own commission and despatched one million four hundred thousand dollars to account number
478776 in the First National Bank Of New York. He had honoured his side of the contract. Frensic
went home by taxi. He was a rich and happy man.

So was Hutchmeyer. Sonia's whirlwind acceptance of his whirlwind proposal had taken him by
surprise. The thighs that had over the years so entranced him were his at last. Her ample body
was entirely to his taste. It bore no scars, none of the surgical modifications that in Baby's
case had served to remind him of his faithlessness and the artificiality of their relationship.
With Sonia he could be himself. There was no need to assert himself by peeing in the washbasin
every night or to prove his virility by badgering strange girls in Rome and Paris and Las Vegas.
He could relapse into domestic happiness with a woman who had energy enough for both of them.
They were married in Cannes and that night as Hutchmeyer lay supine between those hustling thighs
he gazed up at her breasts and knew that this was for real. Sonia smiled down at his contented
face and was contented herself. She was a married woman at long last.

And married to a rich man. The next night Hutchmeyer celebrated by losing forty grand at Monte
Carlo and then, in memory of the good fortune that had brought them together, chartered a vast
yacht with an experienced skipper and a competent crew. They cruised in the Aegean. They explored
the ruins of ancient Greece and, more profitably, a deal involving supertankers which were going
cheap. And finally they flew back to New York for the premiere of the film, Pause.

There in the darkness, garlanded with diamonds, Sonia finally broke down and wept Beside her
Hutchmeyer understood. It was a deeply moving movie with fashionable radicals playing Gwendolen
and Anthony and combined Lost Horizon, Sunset Boulevard and Deep Throat with Tom Jones. Under
MacMordie's financial tutelage the critics raved. And all the time the profits from the novel
poured in. The movie boosted sales and there was even talk of a Broadway musical with Maria
Callas in the leading role. To keep sales moving ever upwards Hutchmeyer consulted the computer
and ordered a new cover for the book with the result that people who had bought the book before
found themselves buying it yet again. After the musical some would doubtless buy it a third time.
The Book Club sales were enormous and the leather-bound Baby Hutchmeyer Memorial edition with
gold tooling sold out in a week. All over the country Pause left its mark. Elderly women emerged
from the seclusion of bridge clubs and beauty parlours to inveigle young men into bed. The
vasectomy index fell rapidly. And finally, to crown Hutchmeyer's success, Sonia announced that
she was pregnant.

In Bibliopolis, Alabama, things had changed too. The funeral of the victims of the unscheduled
serpentizing took place among the live oaks that bordered the Ptomaine River. There were seven in
all, though only two from snake bite. Three had been crushed in the stampede for the door. The
Reverend Gideon had succumbed to heart failure, and Mrs Mathervitie to outraged shock on
awakening from her faint to find Baby standing topless in the pulpit. Out of this terrible
infestation Baby had emerged with a remarkable reputation. It was due as much to the perfection
of her breasts as to their immunity; taken together the two were irresistible. Never before had
Bibliopolis witnessed so complete a demonstration of faith, and in the absence of the late
Reverend Gideon Baby was offered the ministry. She accepted gratefully. It put an end to Piper's
sexual depradations, and besides she had found her forte. From the pulpit she could denounce the
sins of the flesh with a relish that endeared her to the womenfolk and excited the men, and
having spent so much of her life in Hutchmeyer's company she could speak about hell from
experience. Above all she was free to be what remained of herself. And so as the coffins were
lowered into the ground the Reverend Hutchmeyer led the congregation in 'Shall we Gather by the
River' and the little population of Bibliopolis bowed their heads and raised their voices. Even
the snakes, hissing as they were emptied from the sack into the Ptomaine, had benefited. Baby had
abolished serpentizing in a long sermon about Eve and The Apple in which she had pointed out that
they were creatures of Satan. The relatives of the deceased tended to agree. And finally there
was the problem of Piper. Having found her faith Baby felt obliged to the man who had so
fortuitously led her to it.

With the advance royalties from Pause she restored Pellagra House to its ante-bellum glory and
installed Piper there to continue work on his third version, Postscript to a Lost Childhood. As
the days passed into weeks and the weeks into months, Piper wrote steadily on and resumed the
routine of his life at the Gleneagle Guest House. In the afternoons he walked by the banks of the
Ptomaine and in the evening read passages from The Moral Novel and the great classics it
commended. With so much money at his disposal Piper had ordered them all. They lined the shelves
of his study at Pellagra, icons of that literary religion to which he had dedicated his life.
Jane Austen, Conrad, George Eliot, Dickens, Henry James, Lawrence, Mann, they were all there to
spur him on. His one sorrow was that the only woman he could ever love was sexually inaccessible.
As preacher Baby had made it plain she could no longer sleep with him.

'You'll just have to sublimate,' she told him. Piper tried to sublimate but the yearning
remained as constant as his ambition to become a great novelist.

'It's no good,' he said, 'I keep thinking about you all the time. You are so beautiful, so
pure, so...so...'

'You've too much time on your hands,' said Baby. 'Now if you had something more to do...'

'Such as?'

Baby looked at the beautiful script upon the page. 'Like you could teach people to write,' she
said.

'I can't even write myself,' said Piper. It was one of his self-pitying days.

'But you can. Look at the way you form your "f"s and this lovely tail to your "y". If you
can't teach people to write, who can?'

'Oh you mean "write",' said Piper, 'I suppose I could do that. But who would want to
learn?'

'Lots of people. You'd be surprised. When I was a girl there were schools of penmanship in
almost every town. You'd be doing something useful.'

'Useful?' said Piper, attenuating that word with melancholy. 'All I want to do is '