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

almost off by heart. With Sons and Lovers he was word-perfect.

By thus confining his reading to only the greatest masters of fiction he ensured that lesser

novelists would not exercise a malign influence on his own work.
    Besides these few masterpieces he drew inspiration from The Moral Novel. It lay on his bedside

table and before turning out the light he would read a page or two and mull Miss Louth's

adjurations over in his mind. She was particularly keen on 'the placing of characters within an

emotional framework, a context as it were of mature and interrelated susceptibilities, which

corresponds to the reality of the experience of the novelist in his own time and thus enhances

the reality of his fictional creations'. Since Piper's own experience had been limited to

eighteen years of family life in Finchley, the death of his parents in a car crash, and ten years

of boarding-houses, he found it difficult in his work to provide a context of mature and

interrelated susceptibilities. But he did his best and subjected the unsatisfactory marriage of

the late Mr and Mrs Piper to the minutest examination in order to imbue them with the maturity

and insightfulness Miss Louth demanded. They emerged from this emotional exhumation with feelings

they had never felt and insights they had never had. In real life Mr Piper had been a competent

plumber. In Search he was an insightful one with tuberculosis and a great number of startlingly

ambiguous feelings towards his wife. Mrs Piper came out, if anything, rather worse. Modelled on

Frau Chauchat out of Isabel Archer she was given to philosophical disquisitions, to slamming

doors, to displaying bare shoulders and to private sexual feelings for her son and the man next

door which would have horrified her. For her husband she had only contempt mixed with disgust.

And finally there was Piper himself, a prodigy of fourteen burdened by a degree of self-knowledge

and an insight into his parents' true feelings for one another that would, had he in fact

possessed them, have made his presence in the house utterly unbearable. Fortunately for the

sanity of the late Mr and Mrs Piper and for the safety of Piper himself, he had at fourteen been

a singularly dull child and with none of the perceptions he subsequently claimed for himself.

What few feelings he had were concentrated on the person of his English mistress at school, a

Miss Pears, who, in an unguarded moment, had complimented little Peter on a short story he had in

fact copied almost verbatim from an old copy of Horizon he had found in a school cupboard. From

this early derived promise Piper had gained his literary ambitions and from the fatigue of a

tanker driver who, four years later, had fallen asleep at the wheel of his lorry, crossed a main

road at sixty miles an hour and obliterated Mr and Mrs Piper who were doing thirty on their way

to visit friends in Amersham, he had acquired the wherewithal to pursue them. At eighteen he had

inherited the house in Finchley, a substantial sum from the insurance company, and his parents'

savings. Piper had sold the house, had banked all his capital and, to provide himself with a

pecuniary motive to write, had lived off the capital ever since. After ten years and several

million unsold words he was practically penniless.
    He was therefore delighted to receive a telegram from London which said URGENT SEE YOU RE SALE

OF NOVEL ETC ONE THOUSAND POUNDS ADVANCE PLEASE PHONE IMMEDIATELY FRENSIC.
    Piper phoned immediately and caught the midday train in a state of wild anticipation. His

moment of recognition had arrived at last.
    In London Frensic and Sonia were also into a state of anticipation, less wild and with sombre

overtones.
    'What happens if he refuses?' asked Sonia as Frensic paced his office.
    'God alone knows,' said Frensic. 'You heard what Cadwalladine said, "Do what you please but in

no way involve my client." So it's Piper