authorship of Pause with what is termed the maximum exposure. One can hardly see him backing out after that.'
'Frenzy dear,' said Sonia, 'you are a born worrier. It's going to work out all right.'
'I just hope you're right,' said Frensic, 'but I shall be relieved when you leave for the States. There's many a slip 'twixt cup and lip, and '
'Not this cup and these lips,' said Sonia smugly, 'no way. Piper will go on the box...'
'Like a lamb to the slaughter?' suggested Frensic.
It was an apt simile and one that had already occurred to Piper who had begun to have qualms.
'Not that I doubt my love for Sonia,' he confided to his diary which, now that he had moved into Sonia's flat, had taken the place of Search as his main mode of self-expression. 'But it is surely arguable that my honesty as an artist is at stake whatever Sonia may say about Villon.'
And in any case Villon's end didn't commend itself to Piper. To calm his conscience he turned once again to the Faulkner interview in Writers at Work. Mr Faulkner's view on the artist was most reassuring. 'He is completely amoral,' Piper read, 'in that he will rob, borrow, beg or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.' Piper read right through the interview and came to the conclusion that perhaps he had been wrong to abandon his Yoknapatawpha version of Search in favour of The Magic Mountain. Frensic had disapproved on the grounds that the prose had seemed a bit clotted for the story of adolescence. But then Frensic was so commercial. It had come as a considerable surprise to Piper to learn that Frensic had so much faith in him. He had begun to suspect that Frensic was merely fobbing him off with his annual lunches but Sonia had reassured him. Dear Sonia. She was such a comfort. Piper made an ecstatic note of the fact in his diary and then turned on the television set. It was time he decided what sort of image he wanted to present on the 'Books To Be Read' programme. Sonia said image was very important and with his usual gift for derivation Piper finally adopted Herbert Herbison as his model. Sonia came home that night to find him muttering alliterative cliches to his reflection in her dressing-table mirror.
'You've just got to be yourself,' she told him. 'It's no use trying to copy other people.'
'Myself?' said Piper.
'Natural. Like you are with me.'
'You think it will be all right like that?'
'Darling, it will be fine. I've had a word with Eleanor Beazley and she'll go easy on you. You can tell her all about your work methods and pens and things.'
'Just so long as she doesn't ask me why I wrote that bloody book,' said Piper gloomily.
'You'll be great,' said Sonia confidently. She was still insisting that everything would be just fine when three days later at Shepherd's Bush Piper was led away to be made up for the interview.
For once she was wrong. Even Geoffrey Corkadale, whose authors seldom achieved a circulation sufficient to warrant their appearance on 'Books To Be Read' and who therefore tended to ignore the programme, could see that Piper was, to put it mildly, not himself. He said as much to Frensic who had invited him over for the evening in case the need should arise for a fresh explanation as to who had actually written Pause O Men for the Virgin.
'Come to think of it, I don't suppose he is,' said Frensic staring nervously at the image on the screen. Certainly Piper had a stricken look about him as he sat opposite Eleanor Beazley and the title faded.
Tonight I have in the studio with me Mr Peter Piper,' said Miss Beazley addressing the camera, 'the author of a first novel, Pause O Men for the Virgin, which will shortly be published by Corkadales, price ?3.95, and which has been bought for the unheard-of sum of...' (there was a loud thump as Piper kicked the microphone) 'by an American publisher.'
'Unheard-of is about right,' said Frensic. 'We could have done with that bit of
