The Great Pursuit

'It sounds insane,' said Geoffrey but Miss Beazley would have none of it.

'Go on,' she said encouragingly.

'Well, what I do now is I get a bottle of Midnight Black and let it dry out a bit and then when it's sort of gooey if you see what I mean I dip my nib in and...' Piper faltered to a stop.

'How very interesting,' said Miss Beazley.

'Well at least he's said something even if it wasn't very edifying,' said Geoffrey. Beside him Frensic stared at the set forlornly. He could see now that he should never have allowed himself to be persuaded to agree to the scheme. It was bound to end in disaster. So was the programme. Miss Beazley tried to get back to the book.

'When I read your novel,' she said, 'I was struck by your understanding of the need for a mature woman's sexuality to find expression physically. Would I be wrong to suppose that there is an autobiographical element in your writing?'

Piper goggled at her vindictively. That he should be supposed to have written Pause O Men for the beastly Virgin was bad enough, to be taken for the main protagonist in the drama of perversion was more than he could bear. Frensic felt for him and cringed in his chair.

'What did you say?' yelled Piper reverting to his earlier explosive mode of expression. This time he combined it with fluency. 'Do you really think I approve of the filthy book?'

'Well naturally I thought...' Miss Beazley began but Piper swept her objections aside.

'The whole thing's disgusting. A boy and an eighty-year-old woman. It debases the very foundations of English literature. It's a vile monstrous degenerate book and it should never have been published and if you think '

But viewers of the 'Books To Be Read' programme were never to hear what Piper supposed Miss Beazley to have thought. A figure interposed itself between the camera and the couple in the chairs, a large figure and clearly a very disturbed one that shouted 'Cut! Cut!' and waved its hands horribly in the air.

'God Almighty,' gasped Geoffrey, 'what the hell's going on?'

Frensic said nothing. He shut his eyes to avoid the sight of Sonia Futtle hurling herself about the studio in a frantic attempt to prevent Piper's terrible confession from reaching its enormous audience. There was an even more startling crackle from the TV set. Frensic opened his eyes again in time to catch a glimpse of the microphone in mid-air and then in the silence that followed watched the ensuing chaos. In the understandable belief that a lunatic had somehow got into the studio and was about to attack her, Miss Beazley shot out of her chair and dived for the door. Piper stared wildly round while Sonia, catching her foot in a cable, crashed forward across the glass-topped table and sprawled revealingly on the floor. For a moment she lay there kicking and then the screen went blank and a sign appeared. It said OWING TO CIRCUMSTANCES BEYOND OUR CONTROL TRANSMISSION HAS BEEN TEMPORARILY SUSPENDED. Frensic regarded it balefully. It seemed gratuitous. That circumstances were now beyond anyone's control was perfectly obvious. Thanks to Piper's high-mindedness and Sonia Futtle's ghastly intervention his career as a literary agent was done for. The morning papers would be filled with the exposé of The Author Who Wasn't. Hutchmeyer would cancel the contract and almost certainly sue for damages. The possibilities were endless and all of them awful. Frensic turned to find Geoffrey looking at him curiously.

'That was Miss Futtle, wasn't it?' he said.

Frensic nodded dumbly.

'What on earth was she doing hurling herself about like that for? I've never seen anything so extraordinary in my life. A bloody author starts lambasting his own novel. What did he say it was? A vile monstrous degenerate book debasing the very foundations of English literature. And the next thing you know is his own agent behaving like a gargantuan banshee, yelling "Cut!" and hurling mikes about the place. Something out of a nightmare.'

Frensic sought frantically for an explanation. 'I suppose you could call it a happening,' he muttered.

'A happening?'

'You know, a sort of random, inconsequential occurrence,' said Frensic lamely.

'A random...inconsequential...?' said Geoffrey. 'If you think there aren't going to be any consequences...'

Frensic tried not to think of them. 'It certainly made it a very memorable interview,' he said.

Geoffrey goggled at him. 'Memorable? I should think it will go down in history.' He stopped and regarded Frensic open-mouthed. 'A happening? You said a happening. Good Lord, you mean to say you put them up to it?'

'I what?' said Frensic.

'Put them up to it. You deliberately stage-managed that shambles. You got Piper to say all those extraordinary things about his own novel and then Miss Futtle bursts in and goes berserk and you've pulled the biggest publicity stunt...'

Frensic considered this explanation and found it better than the truth. 'I suppose it was rather good publicity,' he said modestly. 'I mean most of those interviews are rather tame.'

Geoffrey helped himself to some more whisky. 'Well I must take my hat off to you,' he said. 'I wouldn't have had the nerve to dream up a thing like that. Mind you, that Eleanor Beazley has had it coming to her for years.'

Frensic began to relax. If only he could get hold of Sonia before she was arrested or whatever they did to people who burst into TV studios and disrupted programmes, and before Piper could do any more damage with his literary high-mindedness, he might be able to save something from the catastrophe.

In the event there was no need. Sonia and Piper had already left the studio in a hurry followed by Eleanor Beazley's shrill voice uttering threats and imprecations and the programme producer's still shriller promise to take legal action. They fled down the corridor and into an elevator and shut the door.

'What did you mean by ' Piper began as they descended.

'Drop dead,' said Sonia. 'If it hadn't been for me you'd have landed us all in it up to the eyeballs, shooting your mouth off like that.'

'Well, she said '

'The hell with what she said,' shouted Sonia, 'it was what you were saying that got to me. Looks great, an author telling half a million viewers that his own novel stinks.'

'But it isn't my own novel,' said Piper.

'Oh yes it is. It is now. Wait till you see tomorrow's papers. They're going to have headlines to make you famous, AUTHOR SLAMS OWN NOVEL ON TV. You may not have written Pause but you're going to have a hard time proving it.'

'Oh God,' said Piper. 'What are we to do?'

'Get the hell out of here fast,' said Sonia as the lift doors opened. They crossed the foyer and went out to the car. Sonia drove and twenty minutes later they were back at her flat.

'Now pack,' she said. 'We're moving out of here before the press get on to us.'

Piper packed, his mind racing with conflicting emotions. He was saddled with the authorship of a dreadful book, there was no backing out, he was committed to a promotional tour of the States and he was in love with Sonia. When he had finished he made one last attempt at resistance.

'Look, I really don't think I can go on with this,' he said as Sonia lugged her suitcases to the door. 'I mean my nerves can't stand it.'

'You think mine are any better and what about Frenzy? A shock like that could have killed him. He's got a heart condition.'

'A heart condition?' said Piper. 'I had no idea.'

Nor had Frensic when she phoned him from a call box an hour later.

'I have a what?' he said. 'You wake me in the middle of the night to tell me I've got a heart condition?'

'It was the only way to stop him backing out. That Beazley woman blew his mind.'