The Great Pursuit

'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.