'No,' said Piper, 'it gums up the nib. I tried diluting it with ordinary ink but it still wouldn't work. It got in the ducts and blocked them up.' He stopped suddenly and stared at Miss Beazley.
'Ducts? It blocks the ducts?' she said, evidently supposing Piper to be referring to some strange conduit of inspiration. 'You mean you found your...' she groped for a less old-fashioned alternative but gave up the struggle to remain contemporary, 'you found your muse wouldn't...'
'Daemon,' said Piper abruptly, still in the role of Kipling.
Miss Beazley took the insult in her stride. 'You were talking about ink,' she said.
'I said it blocked the ducts of the fountain pen. I couldn't write more than one word at a time.'
'That's hardly surprising,' said Geoffrey. 'It would be bloody odd if he could.'
It was evidently a thought that had occurred to Piper too. 'I mean I had to keep stopping and wiping the nib all the time,' he explained. 'So what I do now is I...' He stopped. 'It sounds silly.'
'It sounds insane,' said Geoffrey but Miss Beazley would have none of it.
'Go on,' she said encouragingly.
'Well, what I do now is I get a bottle of Midnight Black and let it dry out a bit and then when it's sort of gooey if you see what I mean I dip my nib in and...' Piper faltered to a stop.
'How very interesting,' said Miss Beazley.
'Well at least he's said something even if it wasn't very edifying,' said Geoffrey. Beside him Frensic stared at the set forlornly. He could see now that he should never have allowed himself to be persuaded to agree to the scheme. It was bound to end in disaster. So was the programme. Miss Beazley tried to get back to the book.
'When I read your novel,' she said, 'I was struck by your understanding of the need for a mature woman's sexuality to find expression physically. Would I be wrong to suppose that there is an autobiographical element in your writing?'
Piper goggled at her vindictively. That he should be supposed to have written Pause O Men for the beastly Virgin was bad enough, to be taken for the main protagonist in the drama of perversion was more than he could bear. Frensic felt for him and cringed in his chair.
'What did you say?' yelled Piper reverting to his earlier explosive mode of expression. This time he combined it with fluency. 'Do you really think I approve of the filthy book?'
'Well naturally I thought...' Miss Beazley began but Piper swept her objections aside.
'The whole thing's disgusting. A boy and an eighty-year-old woman. It debases the very foundations of English literature. It's a vile monstrous degenerate book and it should never have been published and if you think '
But viewers of the 'Books To Be Read' programme were never to hear what Piper supposed Miss Beazley to have thought. A figure interposed itself between the camera and the couple in the chairs, a large figure and clearly a very disturbed one that shouted 'Cut! Cut!' and waved its hands horribly in the air.
'God Almighty,' gasped Geoffrey, 'what the hell's going on?'
Frensic said nothing. He shut his eyes to avoid the sight of Sonia Futtle hurling herself about the studio in a frantic attempt to prevent Piper's terrible confession from reaching its enormous audience. There was an even more startling crackle from the TV set. Frensic opened his eyes again in time to catch a glimpse of the microphone in mid-air and then in the silence that followed watched the ensuing chaos. In the understandable belief that a lunatic had somehow got into the studio and was about to attack her, Miss Beazley shot out of her chair and dived for the door. Piper stared wildly round while Sonia, catching her foot in a cable, crashed forward across the glass-topped table and sprawled revealingly on the floor. For a moment she lay there kicking
