'On one condition,' he said as Frensic opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate the occasion.
'What's that?' said Frensic.
'That Miss Futtle comes with me,' said Piper. There was a bang as the champagne cork hit the ceiling. On the sofa Sonia laughed gaily. 'I second that motion,' she said.
Frensic carried it. Later he carried a very drunk Piper through to his spare room and put him to bed.
Piper smiled happily in his sleep.
Chapter 5
Piper awoke next morning and lay in bed with a feeling of elation. He was going to be published. He was going to America. He was in love. Suddenly everything he had dreamt of had come true in the most miraculous fashion. Piper had no qualms. He got up and washed and looked at himself in the bathroom mirror with a new appreciation of his previously unrecognized gifts. The fact that his sudden good fortune was derived from the misfortune of an author with terminal arthritis no longer disturbed him. His genius deserved a break and this was it. Besides, the long years of frustration had anaesthetized those moral principles which so informed his novels. A chance reading of Benvenuto Cellini's Autobiography helped too. 'One's duty is to one's art,' Piper told his reflection in the bathroom mirror as he shaved, adding that there was a tide in the affairs of men which taken at its flood led on to fortune. Finally there was Sonia Futtle.
Piper's dedication to his art had left him little time for real feelings for real people and that little time he had devoted to avoiding the predatory advances of several of his landladies or to worshipping at a distance attractive young women who stayed at the boarding-houses he frequented. And those girls he had taken out had proved, on acquaintance, to be uninterested in literature. Piper had reserved himself for the great love affair, one that would equal in intensity the affairs he had read about in great novels, a meeting of literary minds. In Sonia Futtle he felt he had found a woman who truly appreciated what he had to offer and one with whom he could enter into a genuine relationship. If anything more was needed to convince him that he need have no hesitation in going to America to promote someone else's work it was the knowledge that Sonia was going with him. Piper finished shaving and went out into the kitchen to find a note from Frensic saying he had gone to the office and telling Piper to make himself at home. Piper made himself at home. He had breakfast and then, taking his diary and bottle of evaporated ink through to Frensic's study, settled down at the desk to write his radiant perceptions of Sonia Futtle in his diary.
But if Piper was radiant, Frensic wasn't. 'This thing could blow up in our faces,' he told Sonia when she arrived. 'We got the poor sod drunk and he signed the contract but what happens if he changes his mind?'
'No way,' said Sonia. 'We make a down-payment on the tour and you take him round to Corkadales this afternoon and get him to sign for Search. That way we sew him up good and tight.'
'Methinks I hear the voice of Hutchmeyer speaking,' said Frensic. 'Sew him up good and tight. Tight being the operative word. Good I have doubts about.'
'It's for his own,' said Sonia. 'Name me some other way he's ever going to see Search in print.'
Frensic nodded his agreement. 'Geoffrey is going to have a fit when he sees what he's agreed to publish. The Magic Mountain in East Finchley. The mind boggles. You should have read Piper's version of Nostromo, likewise set in East Finchley.'
'I'll wait for the reviews,' said Sonia. 'In the meantime we'll have made a cool quarter of a million. Pounds, Frenzy, not dollars. Think of that.'
'I have thought of that,' said Frensic. 'I have also thought what will happen if this thing goes wrong. We'll be out of business.'
