he?'
'Yes, I suppose so,' said Frensic edging towards the safety of admitting he didn't know who had written it and that he had been hoodwinked by Piper. It didn't seem a very safe position to adopt.
'What do you mean 'You suppose so'? I send him proofs of his own book to correct and I get this abusive letter back. Anyone would think he'd never read the damned thing before. Is the man mad or something?'
'Yes,' said Frensic for whom the suggestion came as a God-send, 'the strain of the past few weeks...nervous breakdown. Very highly strung you know. He gets into these states.'
Geoffrey Corkadale's fury abated a little. 'I can't say I'm at all surprised,' he admitted. 'Anyone who can go to bed with an eighty-year-old woman must have something mentally wrong with him. What do you want me to do with these proofs?'
'Send them round to me and I'll see he corrects them,' said Frensic. 'And in future I suggest you deal with Piper through me here. I think I understand him.'
'I'm glad someone does,' said Geoffrey. 'I don't want any more letters like this one.'
Frensic put the phone down and turned on Sonia. 'Right,' he yelled, 'I knew it. I just knew it would happen. You heard what he said?'
Sonia nodded sadly. 'It was our mistake,' she said. 'We should have told them to send the proofs here.'
'Never mind the bloody proofs,' snarled Frensic, 'our mistake was coming up with Piper in the first place. Why Piper? The world is full of normal, sane, financially motivated, healthily commercial authors who would be glad to stick their name to any old trash, and you had to come up with Piper.'
'There's no need to go on about it,' said Sonia, 'look what he's said in this telegram.'
Frensic looked and slumped into a chair. ''Yours ineluctably Piper'? In a telegram? I wouldn't have believed it...Well at least he's put us out of our misery though how the hell we're going to explain to Geoffrey that the Hutchmeyer deal is off...'
'It isn't off,' said Sonia.
'But Piper says '
'Screw what he says. He's going to the States if I have to carry him. We've paid him good money, we've sold his lousy book and he's under obligation to go. He's not going to back out on that contract now. I'm going down to Exforth to talk with him.'
'Leave well alone,' said Frensic, 'that's my advice. That young man can ' but the phone rang and by the time he had spent ten minutes discussing the new ending of Final Fling with Miss Gold, Sonia had left.
'Hell hath no fury...' he muttered, and returned to his own office.
Piper took his afternoon walk along the promenade like some late migrating bird whose biological clock had let it down. It was summer and he should have gone inland to cheaper climes but the atmosphere of Exforth held him. The little resort was nicely Edwardian and rather prim and served in its old-fashioned way to help bridge the gap between Davos and East Finchley. Thomas Mann, he felt, would have appreciated Exforth with its botanical gardens, its clock golf, its pier and tesselated toilets, its bandstand and its rows of balustraded boarding houses staring south towards France. There were even some palm trees in the little park that separated the Gleneagle Guest House from the promenade. Piper strolled beneath them and climbed the steps in time for tea.
Instead he found Sonia Futtle waiting for him in the hall. She had driven down at high speed from London, had rehearsed her tactics on the way and a brief encounter with Mrs Oakley on the question of coffee for non-residents had whetted her temper. Besides, Piper had rejected her not only as an agent but as a woman, and as a woman she wasn't to be trifled with.
'Now you just listen to me,' she said in decibels that made it certain that everyone in the
