It said simply PAUSE O MEN FOR THE VIRGIN, A Novel. There was no author's name and no return address. Odd. Frensic opened the envelope and read the letter inside. It was brief and impersonal and mystifying.
Cadwalladine & Dimkins Solicitors
596 St Andrew's Street Oxford
Dear Sir,
All communications concerning the possible sale, publication and copyright of the enclosed manuscript should be addressed to this office marked for the Personal Attention of P. Cadwalladine.
The author, who wishes to remain strictly anonymous, leaves the matter of terms of sale and choice of a suitable nom de plume and related matters entirely in your hands.
Yours faithfully,
Percy Cadwalladine.
Frensic read the letter through several times before turning his attention to the manuscript. It was a very odd letter. An author who wished to remain strictly anonymous? Left everything concerning sale and choice of nom de plume and related matters entirely in his hands? Considering that all the authors he had ever dealt with were notoriously egotistical and interfering there was a lot to be said for one who was so self-effacing. Positively endearing, in fact. With the silent wish that Mr Jamesforth had left everything in his hands Frensic turned the title page of Pause O Men for the Virgin and began to read.
He was still reading an hour later, his snuff box open on the desk and his waistcoat and the creases of his trousers powdered with snuff. Frensic reached unthinkingly for the box and took another large pinch and wiped his nose with his third handkerchief. In the next office the phone rang. People climbed the stairs and knocked on Sonia's door. Traffic rumbled outside in the street. Frensic was oblivious to these extraneous sounds. He turned another page and read on.
It was half past six when Sonia Futtle finished for the day and prepared to leave. The door of Frensic's office was shut and she hadn't heard him go. She opened it and peered inside. Frensic was sitting at his desk staring fixedly through the window over the dark roofs of Covent Garden with a slight smile on his face. It was an attitude she recognized, the posture of triumphant discovery.
'I don't believe it,' she said standing in the doorway.
'Read it,' said Frensic. 'Don't believe me. Read it for yourself.' His hand flicked dismissively towards the manuscript.
'A good one?'
'A bestseller.'
'Are you sure?'
'Positive.'
'And of course it's a novel?'
'One hopes so,' said Frensic, 'fervently.'
'A dirty book,' said Sonia, who recognized the symptoms.
'Dirty,' said Frensic, 'is hardly adequate. The mind that penned if minds can pen this odyssey of lust is of a prurience indescribable.' He got up and handed her the manuscript.
'I will value your opinion,' he said with the air of a man who had regained his authority.
But if it was a jaunty Frensic who went home to his flat in Hampstead that night, it was a wary one who came back next morning and wrote a note on Sonia's scratch pad. 'Will discuss the novel with you over lunch. Not to be disturbed.' He went into his office and shut the door.
For the rest of the morning there was little to indicate that Frensic had anything more important on his mind than a vague interest in the antics of the pigeons on the roof opposite. He sat at his desk staring out of the window, occasionally reaching for the phone or jotting something on a piece of paper. For the most part he just sat. But external appearances were misleading. Frensic's mind was on the move, journeying across the internal landscape which he knew so well and in which each publishing house in London was a halt for bargaining, a crossroads
