‘Out of Season.’
‘Oh, I beg its pardon. I mean, nobody shoots themselves. In Chekhov they do shoot themselves.’
‘Offstage.’
‘All right, offstage. What I’m getting at is, what’s your novel got to offer a young kid brought up on Pulp Fiction?’
‘What I’m interested in’ – Felix began a speech which had seen him through dozens of interviews and guest appearances on ‘Start the Week’ – ‘are those unguarded moments which allow us to see, through the smallest crack in the door, the tragedy of a lifetime. If you know Chekhov (he restrained himself from saying ‘If you know so bloody much about Chekhov!’), you’ll remember the moment when Uncle Vanya comes into the room with a few late roses for the woman he loves and finds her kissing another man. So he simply drops the roses on the sofa and –’
‘Goes out to get a loaded revolver, from what I can remember. Which he fires.’
Once again Felix felt the boot put in by the literature course his interviewer had taken but he fought back with, ‘All right, he fires. But he misses.’
‘So it’s all right if he misses, is it?’ Denny, clearly not in the best of moods, decided to end the game. ‘Let’s turn you over to the punters. Tania from Tunbridge Wells, good morning. What’s your question to my breakfast guest?’
‘Good morning, Denny. Good morning, Felix.’ The voice, quiet and motherly, came out of a loudspeaker fixed to the wall.
‘Good morning, Tania!’ Felix called out with an unexpected heartiness and Brenda studied her fingernails in embarrassment.
‘What I want to know about your writing, Felix,’ Tania asked anxiously, ‘is whether you use a word processor?’
Felix confessed that he had no mechanical skills or time for many inventions since the introduction of the ring-binder.
‘So, Felix, could you please tell me, do you write with a pen or a pencil?’
Tania asked the question as though her life depended on it, and the right answer would enable her to finish a book which would get a mention on ‘Good Morning, Thames Estuary’. Felix, not wanting to pursue the secrets of his modified success, played a defensive stroke. ‘If you want to know what I write with,’ he said, ‘I must be honest and tell you that I write with difficulty.’ This was a saying which he had used at more literary lunches than Brenda Bodkin cared to remember. He punctuated it with an encouraging chuckle but there was no laugh from the loudspeaker. Brenda was groping into the depths of her handbag for a cigarette and Denny Densher looked increasingly grumpy.
‘All right, Tania. That seems to be all the information you’re going to get out of my breakfast-time celebrity. So you can get on with the ironing, darling. Now, who’s next?’ There was a moment’s awkward silence. Then Denny muttered, What do you write with? Bloody Tania! I know her sort. Probably writes with a poison pen. Nothing better to do in sodding Gravesend.’ With which he bit savagely into what was left of his Danish and glared at the microphone when it said ‘My name’s Gavin.’
‘Where are you from, Gavin?’ Denny managed to splutter through the crème pâtissèrie.
‘Good morning, Denny. As a matter of fact, and to be honest, I’m from the contraflow. And, I’ll tell you something else, Denny.’
‘Get on with it!’
‘I’m a first-time caller.’ The voice was ostentatiously modest, as though its owner had just won the lottery or got the OBE for services to animals injured on the motorway.
‘I don’t give a damn if you’re a thousandth-time caller! I’m not going to treat you with kid gloves, Gavin. I’m not going to send you a commemorative card and a slice of cake. I’m going to treat you just as I would any other caller. No better. No worse. Is that clearly understood?’ Denny Densher sounded as though he wished to God the breakfast show would come to an end and he could get on with lunch.
The voice said, ‘I get the message, Denny.’
‘OK. So what’s your question to Mr Felix Morsom? And keep it short.’
‘Thank you. Good morning, Felix.’
‘Good morning, Gavin.’ At least this first-time caller would be easier to deal with than the distinctly stroppy Denny Densher.
‘I just wanted to ask you one question, Felix.’
‘Ask it for God’s sake! We can’t spend all day with you stuck in the contraflow.’ Denny sighed heavily and searched for another record.
‘Let me first say I am a terrific admirer of your books, having gone through each and every one of them, page by page. I love your work, Felix.’
‘Well, thank you very much, Gavin.’ Felix was starting to enjoy the breakfast show but Denny’s finger was on the switch and his voice rose in a warning, ‘Your time’s running out, first-time caller.’
‘I’m coming to my point, Felix. And my point is this. Denny put it to you very straight when he said your books don’t have sensational events. No shooting or violence, or happenings of such description. Didn’t you put that to him, Denny?’
‘Yes, I did,’ Mr Densher had to admit. ‘And now your question to my celebrity guest, please!’
‘Very well. Understood. Now here’s my question, Felix. You must have had dramatic events in your own life. Not shooting perhaps. Not guns. But highly dramatic events. Of great importance. Moments of passion. Times when you lost your usual self-control. Why don’t you write about some of these times, Felix? I feel sure they would be of interest to your readers.’
‘I think a writer has to make a choice. I suppose I’m not one for the big moments. I just hint at them through glimpses of everyday life in a seaside town.’ Felix ended with another small laugh, a nervous one this time. The disembodied voice of the first-time caller spoke again.
‘Or do you rely on other people to have the big, dramatic moments for you?’
The question hung in the air of the shabby little studio, unanswered. Denny had switched off Gavin and was slipping a CD into its slot as he announced his verdict to the entire Thames Estuary area. ‘Damn cheek! Asking that sort of kinky question to my celebrity guest! It’ll be a time before he calls here again, I’ll tell you. Kinky callers. At breakfast time! I ask you. Now let’s get back to something serious . . .’
‘Price and publisher!’ Brenda, bolt upright and pale with anger, hissed in a whisper that would be audible from the Isle of Dogs to the Goodwin Sands.
‘I am reminded’ – Mr Densher lowered his head in mock contrition – ‘the work we have been discussing is Out of Season by Felix Morsom, published by Llama Books for a mere sixteen pounds ninety-nine p.’ Then further conversation was submerged by the Stone Roses performing I Wanna Be Adored.
In the car Brenda lit a cigarette and held it by one end, waving it vaguely about like a blind man’s stick. ‘I thought,’ she said, ‘Denny gave you a bit of a hard time this morning.’ Felix didn’t answer her. He remembered where he had heard the voice of the first-time caller. It had come, unexpectedly, out of his Orpheus sound system and had seemed to deal, exclusively, with the big, dramatic moments.
Chapter Three
It was not that Felix’s life had been without drama. There was a story that he had folded up, sealed in an envelope and locked in a drawer of his mind. He had never used any part of it in the books he had written and hardly allowed himself to remember it at all. When the memory came it was of the sweet, sickening smell of hospital corridors as he walked away from the sight of a woman dying. Perhaps he had given up thinking about Anne because, like most of science, computer technology and higher mathematics, she was something that existed outside the field of his understanding. She was an occurrence he couldn’t explain.
They met during her first term at the University of the South Coast (in those days the Coldsands Polytechnic) where he taught English, where he lived in his parents’ house on Imperial Parade, where he had turned his childhood bedroom into a writer’s workplace, so that he could still look out of the window and see the seagulls circling and the distant blur of ships passing, where sky and sea became indis
tinguishable. It was the year his third novel had been compared to Chekhov and its success, like some strong medication, had numbed the ache of anxiety which usually troubled him. Anne came regularly to his lectures but he hardly noticed her.
With her sandy clothes, hair and eyebrows she was, he thought, even after they had got to know each other, as hard to pick out against the beige of the Poly walls as the flat, colourless fish that lay on the bottom of the tank in the aquarium. Perhaps he would have gone on not noticing Anne if she hadn’t, suddenly and unexpectedly, sent him a Valentine’s Day card, in which she had, breaking all the rules governing such communications, ostentatiously signed her name.
Feeling that he owed her something (he had received no other Valentines), he invited her to come with him to a performance of Endgame by the Saltsea Strolling Players. After it they bought fish and chips and went back to the room at the top of his mother’s house. He was talking to her about ambiguity in literature, hinting at greater mysteries which don’t necessarily have to be understood by the audience, or indeed by the writer, when she moved to unzip his trousers. She had seemed so colourless and yet he was astonished by the vitality with which she made love. Locked away in that store of memories not to be visited was the sound of the sea, the smell of fish and chip paper, and the sharpness of her small and even teeth.
Five years after they were married, she told him she no longer loved him and was to go away with Huw Hotchkiss who was head of Media Studies and had been offered a job in Singapore. Then three months later she said that she couldn’t leave because the result of a test she had undergone showed that she had little time left to live and ‘It wouldn’t be fair on Huw.’ Felix had taken her in his arms and promised to look after her, and they continued to make love while she still had the strength. After he had walked away from her for the last time, down the corridor which smelled of rubber and sickly sweet disinfectant, his life became uneventful and he locked away these memories.
His longing for Ms Brenda Bodkin remained comfortingly unfulfilled.
‘What I really admire about you, Mr Morsom, is your deep understanding of women.’
‘Of women?’ Felix, who had failed to fathom his wife Anne from the first to the very last, was taken by surprise.
‘I mean the women characters in your books.’
‘Oh, yes. Of course. Them.’
Felix looked round at the crowd, predominantly women, who filled the seats at the Sentinel lunch in the ballroom of the Rubicon Hotel. They had come, he admitted reluctantly, to hear a woman. Sandra Tantamount, her hair frozen into position, her wrists jangling with gold bracelets and dangling charms, was sitting at the top table. She had brought her own champagne and a small pot of caviar which she was spooning on to toast whilst the editor, who had arrived at the Sentinel from the Newcastle Echo, was giving her the benefit of his no nonsense, north country, one hundred per cent sincere admiration. As Sandra raised the black, glittering pile to her carmine mouth, Felix stared down at his unyielding slice of unripe melon and the scarlet cherry planted in it like a sign of danger.
‘So many male novelists undervalue women.’
‘Yes.’
‘And turn them into fantasy figures. Dreams to jerk off to.’
Felix, who had been watching Ms Bodkin in animated conversation at one of the less than top tables, turned back to his neighbour. The woman beside him was tall and greyhaired, with a delicate nose and a porcelain complexion. She wore a black suit with a brooch in the lapel. She might have been an excellent aunt or a sensible grandmother to very young children. ‘Women don’t do that?’
‘Jerk off? Oh, certainly. From time to time. But at least they live in the real world. Men won’t face up to their responsibilities.’
‘All men?’ Felix felt one of the outcasts, having fallen below the standards of the handsome grandmother.
‘Not you, of course.’ She smiled at him in a forgiving way. ‘You live up to your responsibilities as a writer. And such a successful one.’
‘Well, not all that successful.’
‘Yes, surely?’
‘I’ve been criticized lately.’
‘Who criticized you?’
‘A man on the radio. He thought more should happen in my books. More violent events. Murders, probably.’
‘You should have told that man on the radio he was being very silly.’
‘Should I?’
‘Everyone thinks murder’s interesting. When I was a gel I thought murder was strange and exotic and really rather glamorous. My head was full of Sherlock Holmes and Dorothy Sayers and Father Brown stories. I was as excited by murder as the other gels were by thoughts of sex. When they were marking passages like “He slid gently into her and her world exploded”, I was reading about the Malay dagger he slid into her or of the single shot that rang out. Now, I know that murder’s a pretty mundane business, really. About as glamorous as washing-up.’
‘You know that now?’ Felix asked her in some surprise. ‘Of course. Now that I’ve done so many.’
‘Done? You mean written about them?’
‘Oh, no! I don’t write about murder at all. Although I am into a novel at the moment. I call it Here on This Molehill. You know Henry VI?’
Felix was not sure he did.
‘The king’s sitting on a molehill, looking at the distant battle. Isn’t that what novelists do? Sit on molehills and look at events? By the way, I must find a decent publisher. Who’s yours?’
Felix told her about Llama Books. Then she turned away from him as the sharp-faced man on her other side, wearing the chain of some civic dignitary, said on a high note of complaint, ‘Appalling way little sods from North Kensington are putting paid to civilization as we know it.’
‘What can we do?’ She had her hand on the man’s sleeve and was speaking as gently as she had been on the subject of murder. ‘Except wait until they get bored with violence. In the good old days, I suppose, we would have packed them all off to the colonies.’
‘No respect for authority,’ the man was saying. ‘They don’t stop short of vandalizing the mayoral Daimler.’
‘I think you’ll find they do us a very acceptable coq au vin at the Rubicon.’ The editor had felt it his duty to tear himself away from Sandra Tantamount and speak to Felix with north country candour. ‘I’ve not actually read your book. But my wife’s got through it and praise from her doesn’t come easily,
I can tell you that.’
‘So, did she praise it?’ Felix was foolish enough to ask.
‘I can’t remember if it was yours she praised. Not if I’m honest. Of course, she couldn’t put down Sandra’s effort.’ The editor turned back to Mrs Tantamount, who was opening a plastic box which contained her own goat’s cheese and wild mushrooms, nestling on a salad of radicchio.
After the lunch came the signing. Felix stood by the life-size cut-out picture of himself, a person, he felt, who looked nothing like him. He thought he looked quizzical, detached and as amused as Chekhov on the verandah steps with his dog. The cardboard doppelgänger who stood beside him had an apologetic, furtive look and an unconvincing smile, as though he were concealing some guilty secret. He did his best to ignore it and looked across at Sandra Tantamount whose cardboard cut-out looked as well-groomed as the original.
Felix had to admit that the Tantamount queue was longer but his was, at least, respectable. He engaged his readers in chat about their holiday plans, their children, what the weather was doing and the M20 contraflow – the sort of questions that hairdressers ask. So his line moved more slowly than Sandra’s because she scribbled her name with no questions asked and with the quick mirthless smile of an air-hostess. He wasn’t humiliated. In his speech he had done the one about writing with difficulty and the handsome Grandma had let out a laugh like a chime of bells. Now she held out the copy of Out of Season she had bought and said, ‘Do go on writing this marvellous stuff. Don’t waste your time on murder.’
‘A book signed is a book sold�
�� was Brenda Bodkin’s philosophy of life, and Felix remembered it as the handsome would-be authoress moved away, leaving behind her a faint, perfectly healthy smell of lavender talcum powder, a card with her name and address and the hope that they might meet again.
When the signing was over Felix took Brenda and Terry down to the Island in the Sun saloon in the Rubicon Hotel and there, to the tune of piped calypsos, he bought them Margaritas which he only drank on book tours. As Ms Bodkin put out a pink tongue to taste the salt rim on the edge of the glass, a macho feeling came over Felix and, for an enjoyable moment, he felt more a Hemingway than a Chekhov.
‘Fantastic ring!’ Brenda, making conversation with Terry, was looking at his hand as it clutched the margarita glass. A silver-plated sphinx stared up at her from Terry’s middle finger. ‘Magnus Merryweather gave me that. . .’ Terry seemed proud of it. ‘Remember when we did the tour of his Nearer God’s Heart?’ Felix wasn’t paying attention to this exchange. He had dug in his back pocket for money and brought out, among the five pound notes, his lunchtime neighbour’s card. She was, he was surprised to discover, Detective Chief Inspector Elizabeth Cowling, OBE, attached to Paddington Green police station.
Chapter Four
‘The Sunday Telegraph was good.’
‘Did you really think so?’
‘I’d count that as a good review.’
‘ “Those who enjoy Felix Morsom’s work may like his new seaside portrait in pastel shades.”’
‘Well, you can’t say that’s bad.’
‘I suppose not. What about the Guardian?’
‘I strongly advise you not to look at the Guardian.’
‘Well, all right then.’
Felix in the Underworld Page 2