'No,' cried Frensic, 'never. I'd rather...' He stopped. He wouldn't rather. There was a look on Baby's face that told him that. 'I don't see why I've got to confess to all those things,' he said.
Baby relaxed. 'You took his good name away from him. Now you're going to give it back to him.'
'His good name?' said Frensic.
'By putting it on the cover of that dirty novel,' said Baby.
'He didn't have any sort of name till we did that,' said Frensic, 'he had never published anything and now he's so-called dead he isn't going to.'
'Oh yes, he is,' said Baby leaning forward. 'You're going to give him your name. Like Search for a Lost Childhood by Frederick Frensic.'
Frensic stared at her. The woman was mad as a March hare. 'Search by me?' he said. 'You don't understand. I've hawked that blasted book round every publisher in London and no one wants to know. It's unreadable.'
Baby smiled. Unpleasantly.
'That's your problem. You're going to get it published and you're going to get all his future books published under your own name. It's that or the chain gang.'
She glanced significantly out of the window at the horizon of trees and the empty sky and Frensic following her glance gazed into a terrible future and an early death. He'd have to humour her. 'All right,' he said, 'I'll do my best.'
'You'll do better than that. You'll do exactly what I say.' She took a sheet of paper from a drawer and handed him a pen. 'Now write,' she said.
Frensic hitched his chair forward and began to write very shakily. By the time he had finished he had confessed to having evaded British income tax by paying two million dollars plus royalties into Account Number 478776 in the First National Bank of New York and to having incited his partner, the former Miss Futtle, to arsonize the Hutchmeyer residence. The whole statement was such an amalgam of things he had done and things he hadn't that, cross-examined by a competent lawyer, he would never be able to disentangle himself. Baby read it through and witnessed his signature. Then she called Herb in and he witnessed it too.
'That should keep you on the straight and narrow,' she said as the sheriff left the room. 'One squeak out of you and one attempt to evade your obligation to publish Mr Piper's novels and this goes straight to Hutchmeyer, the insurance company, the FBI and the tax authorities, and you can wipe that smile off your face.' But Frensic wasn't smiling. He had developed a nervous tic. 'Because if you think you can worm your way out of this by going to the authorities yourself and telling them to look me up in Bibliopolis you can forget it. I've got friends round here and no one talks if I say no. You understand that?'
Frensic nodded. 'I quite understand,' he said.
Baby stood up and took off her robe. 'Well, just in case you don't, you're going to be saved,' she said. They went out into the hall where the group of gaunt men waited.
'We've got a convert, boys,' she said. 'See you all in Church.'
Frensic sat in the front row of the little Church of The Servants of The Lord. Before him, radiant and serene, Baby conducted the service. The church was packed and Herb sat next to Frensic and shared his hymnbook with him. They sang 'Telephoning to Glory' and 'Rock of Ages' and 'Shall we Gather by the River', and with Herb's nudging Frensic sang as loudly as the rest. Finally Baby delivered a virulent sermon on the text 'Behold a man gluttonous, and a winebibber, a friend of publishers and sinners,' her gaze fixed pointedly on Frensic throughout, and the congregation launched into 'Bibliopolis we Hold Thee Dear.' It was time for Frensic to be saved. He moved shakily forward and knelt. Snakes might no longer infest Bibliopolis, but Frensic was still petrified. Above him Baby's face was radiant. She had triumphed once again.
'Swear by the Lord to keep the covenant,' she said. And Frensic swore.
He was still swearing an hour later as he sat in his car and the ferry crossed the river. Frensic glanced across at Pellagra. The light was burning on the upper floor. Piper was doubtless at work on some terrible novel that Frensic would have to sell under his own name. He drove off the ferry recklessly and the hired car bucketed down the dirt road and the headlights picked out the dark water gleaming beneath the entwined trees. After Bibliopolis the grim landscape held no menace for him. It was a natural world full of natural dangers and Frensic could cope with them. With Baby Hutchmeyer there had been no coping. Frensic swore again.
In his study in Pellagra Piper sat silently at his desk. He was not writing. He was looking at the guarantee Frensic had written promising to publish Search for a Lost Childhood even at his own expense. Piper was going to be published at long last. Never mind that the name on the cover would be Frensic. One day the world would learn the truth. Or better still, perhaps, would be an unanswered question. After all who knew who Shakespeare was or who had written Hamlet? No one.
Chapter 23
Nine months later Search for a Lost Childhood by Frederick Frensic, published by Corkadales, price £3.90, came out in Britain. In America it was published by Hutchmeyer Press. Frensic had had to apply some direct pressure in both directions and it was only the threat of exposure that had persuaded Geoffrey to accept the book. Sonia had been influenced by feelings of loyalty, and Hutchmeyer had needed no urging. The sound of a familiar female voice on the telephone had sufficed. And so the review copies had gone out with Frensic's name on the title-page and the dust jacket. A short biography at the back said he had once been a literary agent. He was one no longer. The name on the door of the office in Lanyard Lane still lingered but the office was empty and Frensic had moved from Glass Walk to a cottage in Sussex without a telephone.
There, safe from Mrs Bogden, he was Piper's amanuensis. Day after day he typed out the manuscripts Piper sent him and night after night lurked in the corner of the village pub and drowned his sorrows. His friends in London saw him seldom. From necessity he visited Geoffrey and occasionally went out to lunch with him. But for the most part he spent his days at his typewriter, cultivated his garden and went for long walks sunk in melancholy thought.
Not that his thoughts were always depressed. There remained a deep core of deviousness in Frensic which nagged at the problem of his predicament and sought ways to escape. But none came to mind. His imagination had been anaesthetized by his terrible experience and each day Piper's dreary prose reinforced the effect. Distilled from so many sources, it acted on Frensic's literary nerve and kept him in a state of disorientation so that he had no sooner recognized a sentence from Mann than he was flung a chunk of Faulkner to be followed by a mot from Proust or a slice of Middlemarch. After such a paragraph Frensic would get up and reel into the garden to escape his associations by mowing the lawn. At night before going to sleep he would excise the memory of Bibliopolis by reading a page or two of The Wind in the Willows and wish he could potter about in boats like the Water Rat. Anything to escape the ordeal he had been set.
And now it was Sunday and the reviews of Search would be in the papers. In spite of himself Frensic was drawn to the little shop in the village to buy the Sunday Times and the Observer. He bought them both and didn't wait until he got home to read the worst. It was best to get the agony over and done with. He stood in the lane and opened the Sunday Times Review and turned to the book page and there it was. At the top of the list. Frensic leant against a gatepost and read the review and as he read his world turned topsy turvy once again. Linda Gormley 'loved' the book and devoted two columns to its praise. She called it 'the most honest and original appraisal of the adolescent trauma I have read for a very long time'. Frensic stared at the words in disbelief. Then he rummaged in the Observer. It was the same there. 'For a first novel it has not only freshness but a deeply intuitive insight into family relationships...a masterpiece...' Frensic shut the paper hurriedly. A masterpiece? He looked again. The word was still there, and further down there was even worse. 'If one can say of a novel that it is a work of genius...' Frensic clutched the gatepost. He felt weak. Search for a Lost Childhood was being acclaimed. He staggered on up the lane with a fresh sense of loss. His nose, his infallible nose, had betrayed him. Piper had been right all along. Either that or the plague of The Moral Novel had spread and the days of the novel of entertainment were over, supplanted by the religion of literature. People no longer read for pleasure. If they liked Search they couldn't. There wasn't an ounce of enjoyment to be got from the book. Frensic had painstakingly (and the word was precise) typed the manuscript out page by ghastly page and from those pages there had emanated a whining self-pity, an arrogantly self-directed sycophancy that had sickened him. And this wretched puke of words was what the reviewers called originality and freshness and a work of genius. Genius! Frensic spat the word. It had lost all meaning.