by Tom Sharpe
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 oiled 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 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 book 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?’ inquired 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.’
‘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 crossroads. Piper peered through the windshield at a sign. Its faded letters said BIBLIOPOLIS 15 MILES.
‘Looks like your kind of town,’ said Baby and turned the car on to the side road. Presently the dark water forest thinned and they came out into an open landscape with lush meadows hazy with heat where cattle grazed in long grass and clumps of trees stood apart. There was something almost English about this scenery, an English parkland gone to seed, luxuriant yet immanent with half-remembered possibilities. Everywhere the distance faded into haze blurring the horizon. Piper, looking across the meadows, felt easier in his mind. There was a sense of domesticity here that was reassuring. Occasionally they passed a wooden shack part-hidden by vegetation and seemingly unoccupied. And finally there was Bibliopolis itself, a town, almost a hamlet, with a river running sluggishly beside an abandoned quay. Baby drove down to the riverside and stopped. There was no bridge. On the far side an ancient rope ferry provided the only means of crossing.
‘Okay, go ring the bell,’ said Baby. Piper got out and rang a bell that hung from a post.
‘Harder,’ said Baby as Piper pulled on the rope. Presently a man appeared on the far shore and the ferry began to move across.
‘You wanting something?’ said the man when the ferry grounded.
‘We’re looking for somewhere to stay,’ said Baby. The man peered at the licence plate on the Ford and seemed reassured. It read Georgia.
‘There ain’t no motel in Bibliopolis,’ said the man. ‘You’d best go back to Selma.’
‘There must be somewhere,’ said Baby as the man still hesitated.
‘Mrs Mathervitie’s Tourist Home,’ said the man and stepped aside. Baby drove on to the ferry and got out.
‘Is this the Alabama River?’ she asked. The man shook his head.
‘The Ptomaine River, ma’am,’ he said and pulled on the rope.
‘And that?’ asked Baby, pointing to a large dilapidated mansion that was evidently ante-bellum.
‘That’s Pellagra. Nobody lives there now. They all died off.’
Piper sat in the car and stared gloomily at the sluggish river. The trees along its bank were veiled with Spanish moss like widows’ weeds and the dilapidated mansion below the town put him in mind of Miss Havisham. But Baby, when she got back into the car and drove off the ferry, was clearly elated by the atmosphere.
‘I told you this was where it�
�s at,’ she said triumphantly. ‘And now for Mrs Mathervitie’s Tourist Home.’
They drove down a tree-lined street and stopped outside a house. A signboard said Welcome. Mrs Mathervitie was less effusive. Sitting in the shadow of a porch she watched them get out of the car.
‘You folks looking for some place?’ she asked, her glasses glinting in the sunset.
‘Mrs Mathervitie’s Tourist Home,’ said Baby.
‘Selling or staying? Cos if it’s cosmetics I ain’t in the market.’
‘Staying,’ said Baby.
Mrs Mathervitie studied them critically with the air of a connoisseur of irregular relationships.
‘I only got singles,’ she said and spat into the hub of a sun flower, ‘no doubles.’
‘Praise be the Lord,’ said Baby involuntarily.
‘Amen,’ said Mrs Mathervitie.
They went into the house and down a passage.
‘This is yourn,’ said Mrs Mathervitie to Piper and opened a door. The room looked out on to a patch of corn. On the wall there was an oleograph of Christ scourging the moneylenders from the Temple and a cardboard sign that decreed NO BROWNBAGGING. Piper looked at it dubiously. It seemed a thoroughly unnecessary injunction.
‘Well?’ said Mrs Mathervitie.
‘Very nice,’ said Piper, who had spotted a row of books on a shelf. He looked at them and found they were all Bibles.
‘Good Lord,’ he muttered.
‘Amen,’ said Mrs Mathervitie and went off with Baby down the passage leaving Piper to consider the sinister implications of NO BROWNBAGGING. By the time they returned he was no nearer a solution to the riddle.
‘The Reverend and I are happy to accept your hospitality,’ said Baby. ‘Aren’t we, Reverend?’
‘What?’ said Piper. Mrs Mathervitie was looking at him with new interest.
‘I was just telling Mrs Mathervitie how interested you are in American religion,’ said Baby. Piper swallowed and tried to think what to say.
‘Yes,’ seemed the safest.
There was an extremely awkward silence broken finally by Mrs Mathervitie’s business sense.
