The Great Pursuit by Tom Sharpe Read Free Book Online Page A

it,' said Frensic, 'much better than Pause. Now you can have it for

practically nothing just so long as you sign this contract for Hutchmeyer.'
    'Oh all right,' said Geoffrey, 'I'll just have to trust you.'
    'If you don't get it back within the week to tear up you can go to Hutchmeyer and tell him

it's a fraud,' said Frensic. 'That's your guarantee.'
    And so in the bathroom of Geoffrey Corkadale's house the two contracts were signed. Frensic

staggered home exhausted and next morning Sonia showed Hutchmeyer the Corkadale contract. The

deal was on.

Chapter 4
    In the Gleneagle Guest House in Exforth Peter Piper's nib described neat black circles and

loops on the forty-fifth page of his notebook. Next door Mrs Oakley's vacuum cleaner roared back

and forth making it difficult for Piper to concentrate on this his eighth version of his

autobiographical novel. The fact that his new attempt was modelled on The Magic Mountain did not

help. Thomas Mann's tendency to build complex sentences and to elaborate his ironic perceptions

with a multitude of exact details did not transfer at all easily to a description of family life

in Finchley in 1953 but Piper persisted with the task. It was, he knew, the hallmark of genius to

persist and he knew just as certainly that he had genius. Unrecognized genius to be sure but one

day, thanks to his capacity for taking infinite pains, the world would acclaim it. And so, in

spite of the vacuum cleaner and the cold wind blowing from the sea through the cracks in the

window, he wrote.
    Around him on the table were the tools of his trade. A notebook in which he put down ideas and

phrases which might come in handy, a diary in which he recorded his deepest insights into the

nature of existence and a list of each day's activities, a tray of fountain pens and a bottle of

partially evaporated black ink. The latter was Piper's own invention. Since he was writing for

posterity it was essential that what he wrote should last indefinitely and without fading. For a

while he had imitated Kipling in the use of Indian ink but it tended to clog his pen and to dry

before he could even write one word. The accidental discovery that a bottle of Waterman's

Midnight Black left open in a dry room acquired a density surpassing Indian ink while still

remaining sufficiently fluid to enable him to write an entire sentence without recourse to his

handkerchief had led to his use of evaporated ink. It gleamed on the page with a patina that gave

substance to his words, and to ensure that his work had infinite longevity he bought

leather-bound ledgers, normally used by old-fashioned firms of accountants or solicitors, and

ignoring their various vertical lines, wrote his novels in them. By the time he had filled a

ledger it was in its own way a work of art. Piper's handwriting was small and extremely regular

and flowed for page after page with hardly a break. Since there was very little conversation in

any of his novels, and that only of the meaningful and significant kind requiring long sentences,

there were very few pages with broken lines or unfilled spaces. And Piper kept his ledgers. One

day, perhaps when he was dead, certainly when his genius was recognized, scholars would trace the

course of his development through these encrusted pages. Posterity was not to be ignored.
    On the other hand the vacuum cleaner next door and the various intrusions of landladies and

cleaners had to be ignored. Piper refused to allow his mornings to be interrupted. It was then

that he wrote. After lunch he took a walk along whatever promenade he happened to be living

opposite at the time. After tea he wrote again and after supper he read, first what he had

written during the day and second from the novel that was serving as his present model. Since he

read rather more quickly than he wrote he knew Hard Times, Nostromo, The Portrait of A Lady,

Middlemarch and The Magic Mountain