The Great Pursuit

He crossed the hall and entered the Church of The Great Pursuit. Piper was putting the book away with all the reverence of a priest handling the Host. Frensic stood in the doorway and waited. He had come a long way for this moment. Piper shut the cupboard and turned. The look of reverence faded from his face.

'You,' he said faintly.

'Who else?' said Frensic loudly to exorcize the atmosphere of sanctity that pervaded the room. 'Or were you expecting Conrad?' Piper's face paled. 'What do you want?'

'Want?' said Frensic and sat down in one of the pews and took a pinch of snuff. 'Just to put an end to this bloody game of hide-and-seek.' He wiped his nose with a red handkerchief.

Piper hesitated and then headed for the door. 'We can't talk in here,' he muttered.

'Why not?' said Frensic. 'It seems as good a place as any.'

'You wouldn't understand,' said Piper and went out. Frensic blew his nose coarsely and then followed.

'For a horrid little blackmailer you've got a hell of a lot of pretensions,' he said as they stood in the hall, 'all that crap in there about The Old Curiosity Shop.'

'It isn't crap,' said Piper, 'and don't call me a blackmailer. You started this. And that's the truth.'

'Truth?' said Frensic with a nasty laugh. 'If you want the truth you're going to get it. That's what I've come here for.' He looked across at the door marked SCRIPTORIUM. 'What's in there?'

'That's where I teach people to write.' said Piper.

Frensic stared at him and laughed again. 'You're joking,' he said and opened the door. Inside the room was filled with desks, desks on which stood bottles of ink and pens, and each desk tilted at an angle. On the walls were framed examples of script and, in front, a blackboard. Frensic glanced round.

'Charming. The Scriptorium. And I suppose you've got a Plagiarium too?'

'A what?' said Piper.

'A special room for plagiarism. Or do you combine the process in here? I mean there's nothing like going the whole hog. How do you go about it? Do you give each student a bestseller to alter and then flog it as your own work?'

'Coming from you, that's a dirty crack,' said Piper. 'I do all my own writing in my study. Down here I teach my students how to write. Not what.'

'How? You teach them how to write?' He picked up a bottle of ink and shook it. The sludge moved slowly. 'Still on the evaporated ink, I see.'

'It gives the greatest density,' said Piper but Frensic had put the bottle down and turned back to the door.

'And where's your study?' he asked. Piper led the way slowly upstairs and opened another door. Frensic stepped inside. The walls were lined with shelves and a big desk stood in front of a window which looked out across the drive towards the river. Frensic studied the books. They were bound in calf. Dickens, Conrad, James...

'The old testament,' he said and reached for Middlemarch. Piper took it brusquely from him and put it back.

'This year's model?' asked Frensic.

'A world, a universe beyond your tawdry imagination,' said Piper angrily. Frensic shrugged. There was a pathos about Piper's tenseness that was weakening his resolve. Frensic steeled himself to be coarse.

'Bloody cosy little billet you've got yourself here,' he said, seating himself at the desk and putting his feet up. Behind him Piper's face whitened at the sacrilege. 'Curator of a museum, counterfeiter of other people's novels, a bit of blackmail on the side and what do you do about sex?' He hesitated and picked up a paperknife for safety's sake. If he was going to put the boot in there was no knowing what Piper might do. 'Screw the late Mrs Hutchmeyer?'

There was a hiss behind him and Frensic swung round. Piper was facing him with his pinched face and narrow eyes blazing with hatred. Frensic's grip tightened on the paperknife. He was frightened but the thing had to be done. He had come too far to go back now.

'It's none of my business, I daresay,' he said as Piper stared, 'but necrophilia seems to be your forte. First you rob dead authors, then you put the bite on me for two million dollars, what do you do to the late Mrs Hutch '

'Don't you dare say it,' shouted Piper, his voice shrill with fury.

'Why not?' said Frensic. 'There's nothing like confession for cleansing the soul.'

'It isn't true,' said Piper. His breathing was audible.

Frensic smiled cynically. 'What isn't? The truth will out, as the saying goes. That's why I'm here.' He stood up with assumed menace and Piper shrank back.

'Stop it. Stop it. I don't want to hear any more. Just go away and leave me alone.'

Frensic shook his head. 'And have you send me yet another manuscript and tell me to sell it? Oh no, those days are over. You're going to learn the truth if I have to ram it down your snivelling '

Piper covered his ears with his hands. 'I won't,' he shouted, 'I won't listen to you.'

Frensic reached in his pocket and took out Dr Louth's letter.

'You don't have to listen. Just read this.'

He thrust the letter forward and Piper took it. Frensic sat down in the chair. The crisis was over. He was no longer afraid. Piper might be mad but his madness was self-directed and held no threat for Frensic. He watched him read the letter with a new sense of pity. He was looking at a nonentity, the archetypal author for whom only words had any reality, and one who couldn't write. Piper finished the letter and looked up.

'What does it mean?' he asked.

'What it doesn't say,' said Frensic. 'That the great Dr Louth wrote Pause. That's what it means.'

Piper looked down at the letter again. 'But it says here she didn't.'

Frensic smiled. 'Quite. And why should she have written that? Ask yourself that question. Why deny what nobody had ever supposed?'

'I don't understand,' said Piper, 'it doesn't make sense.'

'It does if you accept that she was being blackmailed,' said Frensic.

'Blackmailed? But by whom?'

Frensic helped himself to snuff. 'By you. You threatened me and I threatened her.'

'But...' Piper wrestled with this incomprehensible sequence. It was beyond his simple philosophy.

'You threatened to expose me and I passed the message on,' said Frensic. 'Dr Sydney Louth paid two million dollars not to be revealed as the author of Pause. The price of her sacred reputation.'

Piper's eyes were glazed. 'I don't believe you,' he muttered.

'Don't,' said Frensic. 'Believe what you bloody well like. All you've got to do is resurrect yourself and tell Hutchmeyer you're still alive and kicking and the media will do the rest. It will all come out. My role, your role, the whole damned story and at the end of it, your Dr Louth with her reputation as a critic in ruins. The bitch will be the laughing-stock of the literary world. Mind you, you'll be in prison. And I dare say I'll be bankrupt too, but at least I won't have to put up with the impossible task of trying to sell your rotten Search for a Lost Childhood. That'll be some compensation.'

Piper sat down limply in a chair.

'Well?' said Frensic, but Piper simply shook his head. Frensic took the letter from him and turned to the window. He had called the little sod's bluff. There would be no more threats, no more manuscripts. Piper was broken. It was time to leave. Frensic stared out at the dark river and the forest beyond, a strange foreign landscape, dangerously lush, and far from the comfortable little world he had come to protect. He crossed to the door and went down the broad staircase and across the hall. All that was needed now was to get home as quickly as possible.