'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.