The Great Pursuit

by Tom Sharpe

  ‘It was rather awful, wasn’t it?’ said Miss Bogden, ‘I typed it myself you know.’

  ‘Really?’ said Frensic.

  ‘Well I didn’t like my girls having to do it and the author was so peculiar about it.’

  ‘Was he?’

  ‘I had to phone up every so often,’ said Miss Bogden. ‘But you don’t want to hear about that.’

  Frensic did but Miss Bogden was adamant. ‘We mustn’t spoil our first evening talking shop,’ she said, and in spite of more champagne and a large Cointreau all Frensic’s attempts to steer the conversation back to the subject failed. Miss Bogden wanted to hear about Corkadales. The name seemed to appeal to her.

  ‘Why don’t you come back to my place?’ she asked as they walked beside the river after dinner. ‘For a nightcap.’

  ‘That’s frightfully kind of you,’ said Frensic, prepared to pursue his quarry to the bitter end. ‘Are you sure I wouldn’t be imposing on you?’

  ‘I’d like that,’ said Miss Bogden with a giggle and took his arm, ‘to be imposed on by you.’ She steered him to the car park and a light blue MG. Frensic gaped at the car. It did not accord with his notion of what a forty-five-year-old head of a typing bureau should drive and besides he was unused to bucket seats. Frensic squeezed in and was forced to allow Miss Bogden to fasten his safety belt. Then they drove rather faster than he liked along the Banbury Road and into a hinterland of semidetached houses. Miss Bogden lived at 33 Viewpark Avenue, a mixture of pebbledash and Tudor. She pulled up in front of the garage. Frensic fumbled for the catch of his safety belt but Cynthia Bogden was there before him and leaning expectantly. Frensic nerved himself for the inevitable and took her in his arms. It was a long kiss and a passionate one, made even less enjoyable for Frensic by the presence of the gear lever in his right kidney. By the time they had finished and climbed out of the car he was having third and fourth thoughts about the whole enterprise. But there was too much at stake to falter now. Frensic followed her into the house. Miss Bogden switched on the hall light.

  ‘Would you like a drinkie?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ said Frensic with a fervour that came largely from the conviction that she would offer him cooking sherry. Miss Bogden took his refusal as a compliment and once more they grappled, this time in the company of a hat stand. Then, taking his hand, she led the way upstairs.

  ‘The you-know-what’s in there,’ she said helpfully. Frensic staggered into the bathroom and shut the door. He spent several minutes staring at his reflection in the mirror and wondering why it was that only the most predatory women found him attractive and wishing to hell they didn’t and then, having promised himself that he would never again be rude about Geoffrey Corkadale’s preferences, he came out and went into the bedroom. Cynthia Bogden’s bedroom was pink. The curtains were pink, the carpet pink, the padded and quilted bedhead pink and the lampshade beside it pink. And finally there was a pink Frensic wrestling with the intricacies of Cynthia Bogden’s pink underwear while muttering pinkish endearments in her pink ear.

  An hour later Frensic was no longer pink. Against the pink sheets he was puce and having palpitations to boot. His efforts to get into her good books among other less savoury things had done something to his circulatory system and Miss Bogden’s sexual skills, nurtured in a justifiably broken marriage and gleaned, Frensic suspected, from some frightful manual on how to make sex an adventure, had led him to contortions which would have defied the imaginations of his most sexually obsessed authors. As he lay panting, alternately thanking God it was all over and wondering if he was going to have a coronary, Cynthia bent her permed head over him.

  ‘Satisfied?’ she asked. Frensic stared at her and nodded frantically. Any other answer would have invited suicide.

  ‘And now we’ll have a little drinkie,’ she said and skipping to Frensic’s amazement lightly off the bed she went downstairs and returned with a bottle of whisky. She sat down on the edge of the bed and poured two tots.

  ‘To us,’ she said. Frensic drank deeply and held out his glass for more. Cynthia smiled and handed him the bottle.

  *

  In New York Hutchmeyer was having problems too. They were of a different sort to Frensic’s but since they involved three and a half million dollars the effect was much the same.

  ‘What do you mean they aren’t prepared to pay?’ he yelled at MacMordie who had reported that the insurance company were holding back on compensation. ‘They got to pay. I mean why should I insure my property if they aren’t going to pay when it’s arsonized?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said MacMordie, ‘I’m just telling you what Mr Synstrom said.’

  ‘Get me Synstrom,’ yelled Hutchmeyer. MacMordie got Synstrom. He came up to Hutchmeyer’s office and sat blandly regarding the great publisher through steel-rimmed glasses.

  ‘Now I don’t know what you’re trying to get at—’ Hutchmeyer began.

  ‘The truth,’ said Mr Synstrom. ‘Just the plain truth.’

  ‘That’s okay by me,’ said Hutchmeyer, ‘just so long as you pay up when you’ve got it.’

  ‘The thing is, Mr Hutchmeyer, we know how that fire started.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Someone deliberately lit the house with a can of gasolene. And that someone was your wife …’

  ‘You know that?’

  ‘Mr Hutchmeyer, we’ve got analysts who can figure out the nail varnish your wife was wearing when she opened that safe and took out that quarter of a million dollars you had stashed there.’

  Hutchmeyer eyed him suspiciously. ‘You can?’ he said.

  ‘Sure. And we know too she loaded that cruiser of yours with fifty gallons of gasolene. She and that Piper. He carried the cans down and we’ve got their prints.’

  ‘What the hell would she do that for?’

  ‘We thought you might have the answer to that one,’ said Mr Synstrom.

  ‘Me? I was out in the middle of the goddam bay. How should I know what was going on back at my house?’

  ‘We wouldn’t know that, Mr Hutchmeyer. Just seems a kind of coincidence you go sailing with Miss Futtle in a storm and your wife is setting out to burn your house down and fake her own death.’

  Hutchmeyer paled. ‘Fake her own death? Did you say …’

  Mr Synstrom nodded. ‘We call it the Stonehouse syndrome in the trade,’ he said. ‘It happens every once in a while someone wants the world to think they’re dead so they disappear and leave their nearest and dearest to claim the insurance. Now you’ve put in a claim for three and a half million dollars and we’ve got no proof your wife isn’t alive some place.’

  Hutchmeyer stared miserably at him. He was considering the awful possibility that Baby was still around and with her she was carrying all that evidence of his tax evasions, bribes and illegal dealings that could send him to prison. By comparison the forfeiture of three and a half million dollars was peanuts.

  ‘I just can’t believe she’d do a thing like that,’ he said finally. ‘I mean we had a happy marriage. No problems. I gave her everything she asked for …’

  ‘Like young men?’ said Mr Synstrom.

  ‘No, not like young men,’ shouted Hutchmeyer, and felt his pulse.

  ‘Now this Piper writer was a young man,’ said Mr Synstrom, ‘and from what I’ve heard Mrs Hutchmeyer had a taste for …’

  ‘Are you accusing my wife of … My God, I’ll …’

  ‘We’re not accusing anyone of anything, Mr Hutchmeyer. Like I’ve said we’re trying to get at the truth.’

  ‘And are you telling me that my wife, my own dear little Baby, filled that cruiser with gasolene and deliberately tried to murder me by aiming it at my yacht in the middle of—’

  ‘That’s exactly what I’m saying. Mind you, that could have been an accident,’ said Mr Synstrom, ‘the cruiser blowing up where she did.’

  ‘Yeah, well from where I was standing it didn’t look like an accident. You can believe it didn’t,’ said Hutchmeyer. ‘Yo
u want to have a cruiser come out of the night straight for you before you go round making allegations like you’ve just done.’

  Mr Synstrom got to his feet. ‘So you still want us to continue with our investigations?’ he said.

  Hutchmeyer hesitated. If Baby was still alive the last thing he wanted was investigations. ‘I just don’t believe my Baby would have done a thing like that is all,’ he said.

  Mr Synstrom sat down again. ‘If she did and we can prove it I’m afraid Mrs Hutchmeyer would stand trial. Arson, attempted murder, defrauding an insurance company. And then there’s Mr Piper. He’s an accessory. Bestselling author, I hear. I guess he could always get a job in the prison library. Make a sensational trial too. Now if you don’t want all of that …’

  Hutchmeyer didn’t want any of that. Sensational trials with Baby in the box pleading that … Oh no! Definitely not. And Pause was selling by the hundred thousand, had passed the million mark and with the movie of the book in production the computer was overheating with the stupendous forecasts. Sensational trials were out.

  ‘What’s the alternative?’ he asked.

  Mr Synstrom leant forward. ‘We could come to an arrangement,’ he said.

  ‘We could,’ Hutchmeyer agreed, ‘but that still leaves the cops …’

  Mr Synstrom shook his head. ‘They’re sitting around waiting to see what we come up with. Now the way I see it …’

  By the time he had finished Hutchmeyer saw it that way too. The insurance company would announce that the claim had been met in full and in return Hutchmeyer would write a disclaimer. Hutchmeyer did. Three and a half million dollars was worth every cent for keeping Baby ‘dead’.

  ‘What happens if you’re right and she turns up out of the blue?’ Hutchmeyer asked as Synstrom got up to leave.

  ‘Then you’ve really got problems,’ he said. ‘That’s what I’d say.’

  He left and Hutchmeyer sat back and considered those problems. The only consolation he could find was that if Baby was still alive she had problems too. Like coming back to life and going to prison. She wasn’t fool enough to do that. Which left Hutchmeyer free to go his own way. He could even marry again. His thoughts turned to Sonia Futtle. Now there was a real woman.

  19

  Two thousand miles to the south Baby’s problems had taken on a new dimension. Her attempt to give Piper the experience he needed relationshipwise had succeeded too well and where before he had thrown himself into Work in Regress he now insisted on throwing himself into her as well. The years of his celibacy were over and Piper was making up for them in a hurry. As he lay each night kissing her reinforced breasts and gripping her degreased thighs Piper experienced an ecstasy he could never have found with another woman. Baby’s artificiality was entirely to his taste. Lacking so many original parts she had none of those natural physiological disadvantages he had found in Sonia. She had, as it were, been expurgated and Piper, himself in the process of expurgating Pause, derived enormous satisfaction from the fact that with Baby he could act out the role he had been assigned as a narrator in the book and with a woman who if she was much older than him didn’t look it. And Baby’s response added to his pleasure. She combined lack of fervour with sexual expertise so that he didn’t feel threatened by her passion. She was simply there to be enjoyed and didn’t interfere with his writing by demanding his constant attention. Finally her intimate knowledge of the novel meant that she could respond word-perfect to his cues. When he murmured, ‘Darling, we’re being so heuristically creative,’ at the penultimate moment of ecstasy, Baby, feeling nothing, could reply, ‘Constating, my baby,’ in unison with her prototype the ancient Gwendolen on page 185, and thus maintain quite literally the fiction that was the essential core of Piper’s being.

  But if Baby met Piper’s requirements as the ideal lover the reverse was not true. Baby found it unflattering to know that she was merely a stand-in for a figment of his imagination and not even his own imagination but that of the real author of Pause. Knowing this, Piper’s ardour took on an almost ghoulish quality so that Baby, staring over his shoulder at the ceiling, had the horrid feeling that she might just as well not have been present. At such moments she saw herself as something that had coalesced from the pages of Pause, a phantom of the opus which was Piper’s pretentious name for what he was now doing in Work in Regress and intended to continue in another version. Her future seemed destined to be the recipient of his derived feelings, a sexual artefact compiled from words upon pages to be ejaculated into and then set aside while he put pen to paper. Even the routine of their days had altered. Piper insisted on writing each morning and driving through the heat of the day and stopping early at a motel so that he could read to her what he had written that morning and then relate.

  ‘Can’t you just say “fuck” once in a while?’ Baby asked one evening at a motel in Tuscaloosa. ‘I mean that’s what we’re doing so why not name it right?’

  But Piper wouldn’t. The word wasn’t in Pause and ‘relating’ was an approved term in The Moral Novel.

  ‘What I feel for you …’ he began, but Baby stopped him.

  ‘So I read the original. I don’t need to see the movie.’

  ‘I was saying,’ said Piper, ‘what I feel for you is …’

  ‘Zero,’ said Baby, ‘absolute zero. You’ve got more feelings towards that ink bottle you’re always sticking your pen in than you have towards me.’

  ‘Well, I like that …’ said Piper.

  ‘I don’t,’ said Baby and there was a new note of desperation in her voice. For a moment she thought of leaving Piper there in the motel and going off on her own. But the moment passed. She was tied by the irrevocable act of the fire and her disappearance to this literary moron whose notion of great writing was to step backwards in time in futile imitation of novelists long dead. Worst of all, she saw in Piper’s obsession with past glories a mirror-image of herself. For forty years she too had waged a war with time and had by surgical recession maintained the outward appearance of the foolish beauty who had been Miss Penobscot 1935. They had so much in common and Piper served to remind her of her own stupidity. All that gone now, the longing to be young again and the sense of knowing she was still sexually attractive. Only death remained and the certainty that when she died there would be no call for the embalmer. She had seen to that in advance.

  She had seen to more than that. She had already died by fire, by water, by the bizarre circumstances of her own romantic madness. Which gave her something more in common with Piper. They were both nonentities moving in a limbo of monotonous motels, he with his ledgers and her body but she with nothing more than a sense of meaninglessness and a desperate futility. That night while Piper related, Baby, inanimate beneath him, made up her mind. They would leave the beaten track of motels and drive down dirt roads into the hinterland of the Deep South. What happened to them there would be beyond her choosing.

  *

  What was happening to Frensic was definitely beyond his choosing. He sat at the Formica-topped table in Cynthia Bogden’s kitchen and tried to eat his cornflakes and forget what had occurred towards dawn. Driven frantic by Cynthia’s omnivorous sexuality he had proposed to the woman. It had seemed in his whisky-sodden state the only defence against a fatal coronary and means of getting her to tell him who had sent her Pause. But Miss Bogden had been too overwhelmed to discuss minor matters of that sort in the middle of the night. In the end Frensic had snatched a few hours’ sleep and had been woken by a radiant Cynthia with a cup of tea. Frensic had staggered through to the bathroom and had shaved with someone else’s razor and had come down to breakfast determined to force the issue. But Miss Bogden’s thoughts were confined to their wedding day.

  ‘Shall we have a church wedding?’ she asked as Frensic toyed biliously with a boiled egg.

  ‘What? Oh. Yes.’

  ‘I’ve always wanted a church wedding.’

  ‘So have I,’ said Frensic with as much enthusiasm as if she had suggested a cr
ematorium. He savaged the egg and decided on the direct approach. ‘By the way did you ever meet the author of Pause O Men for the Virgin?’

  Miss Bogden dragged her thoughts away from aisles, altars and Mendelssohn. ‘No,’ she said, ‘the manuscript came by post.’

  ‘By post?’ said Frensic, dropping his spoon. ‘Isn’t that rather unusual?’

  ‘You’re not eating your egg,’ said Miss Bogden. Frensic took a spoonful of egg into his dry mouth.

  ‘Where did it come from?’

  ‘Lloyds Bank,’ said Miss Bogden, and poured herself another cup of tea. ‘Another cup for you?’

  Frensic nodded. He needed something to wash the egg down with. ‘Lloyds Bank?’ he said finally. ‘But there must have been words you couldn’t read. What did you do then?’

  ‘Oh I just rang up and asked.’

  ‘You phoned? You mean you phoned Lloyds Bank and they’d …’

  ‘Oh you are silly, Geoffrey,’ said Miss Bogden, ‘I didn’t phone Lloyds Bank. I had this other number.’

  ‘What other number?’

  ‘The one I had to ring, silly,’ said Miss Bogden and looked at her watch. ‘Oh look at the time. It’s almost nine. You’ve made me late, you naughty boy.’ And she rushed out of the kitchen. When she returned she was dressed for the day. ‘You can call a taxi when you’re ready,’ she said, ‘we’ll meet at the office.’ She kissed Frensic passionately on his egg-filled mouth and went out.

  Frensic got to his feet and spat the egg into the sink and turned the tap on. Then he took a pinch of snuff, helped himself to some more tea and tried to think. A phone number she had to ring? The whole business became more extraordinary the further he delved into it. And for once delved was the right word. In looking for the source of Pause he had dug himself … Frensic shuddered. Dug was the right word too. In the plural it was exact. He went through to the lavatory and sat there miserably for ten minutes trying to concentrate on his next move. A phone number? An author who insisted on making corrections by telephone? There was an insanity about all this that made his own actions over the past few days look positively rational. And there was absolutely nothing rational about proposing to Miss Cynthia Bogden. Frensic finished his business in the lavatory and came out. On a small table in the hall stood a telephone. Frensic crossed to it and looked through Miss Bogden’s private list of numbers but there was nothing there to indicate the author. Frensic returned to the kitchen, made himself a cup of instant coffee, took some more snuff and finally telephoned for a taxi.