'It's no good,' he said, 'I keep thinking about you all the time. You are so beautiful, so pure, so...so...'
'You've too much time on your hands,' said Baby. 'Now if you had something more to do...'
'Such as?'
Baby looked at the beautiful script upon the page. 'Like you could teach people to write,' she said.
'I can't even write myself,' said Piper. It was one of his self-pitying days.
'But you can. Look at the way you form your "f"s and this lovely tail to your "y". If you can't teach people to write, who can?'
'Oh you mean "write",' said Piper, 'I suppose I could do that. But who would want to learn?'
'Lots of people. You'd be surprised. When I was a girl there were schools of penmanship in almost every town. You'd be doing something useful.'
'Useful?' said Piper, attenuating that word with melancholy. 'All I want to do is '
'Write,' said Baby, hurriedly forestalling his sexual suggestion. 'Well, this way you can combine artistry with education. You can hold classes every afternoon and it will take your mind off yourself.'
'My mind isn't on myself. It's on you. I love you...'
'We must all love one another,' said Baby sententiously and left.
A week later the School of Penmanship opened and instead of brooding all afternoon by the sluggish waters of the Ptomaine River, Piper stood in front of his pupils and taught them to write beautifully. The classes were mostly of children but later adults came too and sat there pens in hand and bottles of Higgins Eternal Evaporated Ink at the ready while Piper explained that a diagonal ligature required an upstroke and that a wavy serif was obtrusive. Over the months his reputation grew and with it there came theory. To visitors from as far away as Selma and Meridian Piper expounded the doctrine of the word made perfect. He called it Logosophy, and won adherents. It was as if the process by which he had failed as a novelist had reversed itself in his Writing. In the old days of his obsession with the great novel theory had preceded and indeed pre-empted practice. What The Moral Novel had condemned Piper had avoided. With penmanship Piper was his own practitioner and theorist. But still the old ambition to see his novel in print remained and as each newly expurgated version of Pause was finished he mailed it to Frensic. At first he sent it to New York to be readdressed and forwarded to Lanyard Lane but as the months passed his confidence in his new life grew and with it forgetfulness and he sent it direct. And every month he ordered Books & Bookmen and the Times Literary Supplement and scanned the lists of new novels only to be disappointed. Search for a Lost Childhood was never there.
Finally, late one night when the moon was full, he decided on a fresh approach and taking up his pen wrote to Frensic. His letter was blunt and to the point. Unless Frensic & Futtle as his literary agents were prepared to guarantee that his novel was published he would be forced to ask some other literary agent to handle his work in future.
'In fact I am seriously considering sending my manuscript direct to Corkadales,' he wrote. 'As you will remember I signed a contract with them to publish my second novel and I can see no good reason why this specific agreement should be negated. Yours sincerely, Peter Piper.'
Chapter 22
The man must be out of his bloody mind,' muttered Frensic a week later. 'I can see no reason why this arrangement should be negated.' Frensic could. The sod can't seriously suppose I can go round to Corkadales and force them to publish a book by a corpse.'
But it was evident from the tone of the letter that Piper supposed exactly that. Over the months Frensic had received four Xeroxed and altered drafts of Piper's novel and had consigned them to a filing cabinet which he kept carefully locked. If Piper wanted to waste his own time reworking the damned book until every element that had made Pause the least bit readable had been eliminated he was welcome to do so. Frensic felt under no obligation to hawk his rubbish round publishing houses. But the threat to deal direct with Corkadales was, to put it mildly, a different kettle of fish. Piper was dead and buried and he was being well paid for it. Every month Frensic saw that the proceeds from the sale of Pause went into account number 478776, and wondered at the extraordinary inefficiency of the American tax system that didn't seem to mind that a taxpayer was supposedly dead. Doubtless Piper paid his taxes promptly or perhaps Baby Hutchmeyer had made complicated accountancy arrangements for his royalties to be laundered. That was none of Frensic's business. He took his commission and paid the rest over. But it was certainly his business when Piper made threats about going to Corkadales or another agent. That arrangement had definitely to be negated.
Frensic turned the letter over and studied the postmark on the envelope. It came from a place called Bibliopolis, Alabama. 'Just the sort of idiotic town Piper would choose,' he thought miserably and wondered how to reply. Or whether he should reply at all. Perhaps the best thing would be to ignore the threat. He certainly had no intention of committing to paper any words that could be used in court to prove that he knew of Piper's continued afterdeath. The next thing he'll come up with is a request for me to go and see him and discuss the matter. And fat chance there is of that.' Frensic had had his fill of pursuing phantom authors.
Miss Bogden on the other hand had not given up her pursuit of the man who had asked her to marry him. After the terrible telephone conversation she had had with Geoffrey Corkadale she had wept briefly, had made up her face, and had continued business as usual. For several weeks she had lived in hope that he would phone again, or that another bunch of red roses would suddenly appear, but those hopes had dwindled. Only the diamond solitaire gleaming on her finger kept her spirits up that and the need to maintain the fiction before her staff that the engagement was still on. To that end she invented long weekends with her fiancé and reasons for the delayed wedding. But as weeks became months Cynthia's disappointment turned to determination. She had been had, and while being had was in some respects better than not being had at all, being made to look foolish in the eyes of her staff was infuriating. Miss Bogden applied her mind to the problem of finding her fiancé. While his disappearance was proof that he hadn't wanted her, the five hundred pounds he had spent on the ring was indication that he had wanted something else. Again Miss Bogden's business sense told her that the favours she had bestowed bodywise on her lover during the night hardly merited the expense of the engagement ring. Only a madman would make such a quixotic gesture and her pride refused the notion that the one man to propose to her since her divorce had been off his head.
No, there had to be another motive and as she recalled the events of those splendid twenty-four hours it slowly dawned on her that the one consistent theme had been the novel Pause O Men for the Virgin. In the first place her fiancé had posed as Geoffrey Corkadale, in the second he had reverted to the question of the typescript too frequently for it to be coincidental, and thirdly there had been the code d'amour. And the code d'amour had been the telephone number she had had to call for information while typing the novel. Cynthia Bogden called the number again but there was no reply, and when a week later she tried again the line had been disconnected. She looked up the name Piper in the phone directory but no one of that name had the number 20357. She called Directory Enquiries and asked for the address and name of the number but was refused the information. Defeated in that direction, she turned to another. Her instructions had been to forward the completed typescript to Cadwalladine & Dimkins, Solicitors and to return the handwritten draft to Lloyds Bank. Miss Bogden phoned Mr Cadwalladine and was puzzled by his apparent inability to remember having received the typescript. 'We may have done,' he said, 'but I'm afraid we handle so much business that...'