Felix in the Underworld

by John Mortimer

  ‘Well, keep your nose out of trouble, my boy. I happen to be a fan.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A great admirer of your work.’

  ‘Well, that is a compliment, coming from you. ’ In fact Felix had read as little of Ernest Thessaley as Sir Ernest had of Morsom but he felt that one kind word deserved another.

  ‘So why don’t you order a bottle of the club’s champagne? To celebrate our mutual admiration.’

  ‘I’m only a guest here.’

  ‘Put it on Seppy’s bill. He can afford it.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Absolutely sure.’

  ‘All right then. Charlie, a bottle of the club’s champagne.’

  ‘Bubbly coming up right away, sirs.’ The waiter was more relaxed with Septimus out of the way.

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ Sir Ernest said before the cork popped, ‘they don’t make enough fuss of you. I thought that was a pretty dire notice you got in the Guardian.’

  ‘Was it?’ Felix took a hurried gulp of champagne. ‘I didn’t read it.’

  ‘Did you not? “Virginia Woolf and piss”, I think that was the expression. I may have a copy at home. I’ll send you a photostat.’

  ‘Please. Don’t trouble.’

  ‘No trouble at all. I believe the fellow who wrote that review went to Winchester.’

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘Perfectly decent school. You know what you need to do if you want good notices?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Die. Get increasingly poor notices, or no notice at all, as you grow old. But you’ve only got to die and poof! You’re a bloody genius. That’s what I intend to do. Die. That’ll make them change their bloody tune!’

  When Septimus came back he said, ‘Hullo, Ernest. I see you’ve ordered champagne.’

  ‘No, you have. I’ve been chewing the fat with young Morsom here.’

  ‘Oh, yes? And what have you two literary giants been talking about? “Whither the novel?”?’

  ‘Not at all! Morsom here was discussing murder.’

  ‘Were you, by God!’ Septimus raised his glass to Felix. ‘If you ever think of doing anything like that, just give us a ring. We’ll put out the red carpet and get you the best silk in England.’

  Chapter Seven

  Ken Savage, Senior Collection

  Officer Parental Rights and Obligations Department

  St Anthony’s Tower

  Lambeth

  London SE1 7JU

  Your ref: 0149638924 BIB 472

  re: Ian Bowker, infant

  25th May

  Dear Mr Savage

  I received your letter suggesting that I owe arrears of maintenance for the above child. Since I have never met the mother and know nothing of her or her son, and have never been responsible for his maintenance, I feel sure that this request was caused by some clerical error in your department. I hope this mistake will be rectified and I will hear no more of the matter.

  Your sincerely

  Felix Morsom

  It was three weeks since he had posted this letter and he was encouraged by the prolonged silence. It was something, like the death of his wife, which he could file away in a never-opened drawer. When he was writing the letter he knew that, in saying he had never met Miriam Bowker, he was slipping from fact into fiction. But he decided that a casual encounter at Millstream’s, Bath, hardly counted as a meeting.

  Since Felix wrote his letter to Mr Savage the weather had changed. At the end of August, a ferocious late summer had set in. Standing at his window, he watched the seagulls float lazily down to settle on the sluggish green sea. Even the pier, half boarded up and in desperate need of paint (the palmist and the summer shows had long since deserted it and the ghost train was permanently out of order), looked inviting and romantic in the sunshine. Girls in bikinis lay on towels spread on the damp sand, as though they were in an advertisement for Caribbean holidays. Fat couples in shorts wobbled as they jogged down the promenade, or panted as they stood in a queue for ice-cream. The roadmenders had stripped off their shirts and, bent over a spade or electric drill, displayed half their buttocks to the great amusement of a small group undergoing care in the community. Watching all this, knowing that he should sit down and start to drip words from the top of his pen, Felix noticed a smart, businesslike woman with scraped back hair. She walked as though preceded by some sort of herald in the shape of a pale child, a boy wearing spectacles.

  Felix saw the woman hesitate on the pavement opposite while the boy strode recklessly and relentlessly on to the crossing, causing a bus to brake so suddenly a party of senior citizens lurched in their seats. A small red car skidded to a standstill and a cyclist swerved and fell. The child marched on and found a place on the bench next to a grey-haired man who was conducting an invisible orchestra in a silent performance of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. Now the woman, safely across the road, was trying to persuade the child to get up and continue their journey but her pleas and eventual frustrated anger failed to dislodge him. She moved away, nearer to the houses in Imperial Parade. And then Felix heard a ring at his doorbell.

  ‘You don’t remember me?’ The woman was standing on his doorstep. Behind her Felix saw the boy on the bench watching them with what looked like contempt.

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Millstream’s bookshop. With Gavin. I’m sure you remember. And before that, long before. I’m Miriam. Miriam Bowker.’

  ‘I didn’t recognize you.’

  ‘You’ve got a short memory, Felix. Of course I was dressed different. Gavin likes to see me in something bright. He doesn’t get much brightness in his life, poor bugger.’

  Felix looked again at the woman who might have been a solicitor or a PA in a firm of mortgage brokers in her grey suit and with her hair, now brown, gathered in a scrunchy. (He was careful to learn such words to help with his writing.) Perhaps distracted by the brightness of her clothes, he hadn’t noticed her face in detail. He remembered the forward-looking teeth but not the large eyes that also protruded slightly, the statuesque chin that gave her the look of a Victorian heroine, and the lines of laughter or exhaustion. She said, ‘This respectable outfit’s quite new. I only stole it yesterday. I’m joking, of course. I put it on to come and see you.’

  ‘I’m afraid I’m terribly busy. I’m writing.’

  ‘No, you’re not. I saw you. You were staring out of the window.’

  ‘I know. I have got to get on with it. So . . .’

  ‘Don’t shut the door in our faces, Felix. Ian’s been eagerly looking forward to today.’

  ‘Ian?’

  ‘Your son Ian. He’s sat there on the bench with a mind of his own.’

  Felix looked at the child who sat with his hands folded, staring out to sea and pretending that he had no connection with the persistent woman on the doorstep or her outrageous requests. All the same, he felt they had both come to undermine his stability, to throw his life into confusion, to prevent him for ever from doing the only thing he knew how to do, which was to sit alone and write. The twenty-thousand-pound demand was ridiculous and when he thought that he could get rid of both of them for ever for five hundred pounds he was, for a moment, sorely tempted. And then he remembered Septimus Roache’s second, less daring solution and plumped for it.

  ‘It’s a quarter to one,’ he said. ‘Why don’t I take you out to a rattling good lunch?’

  ‘Well, Felix!’ The woman smiled. ‘I can see we’re going to get on ever so well.’

  ‘Will he come too?’

  She turned towards the child on the bench who refused to look at her. ‘I suppose,’ she said, and her smile turned to a look of fear, ‘he might condescend.’

  ‘I do like a nice lunch set out with a silver service,’ Miriam said.

  ‘Don’t say that, Mum.’ The child sounded severe.

  ‘Why ever not? I’m sure Felix wants us to appreciate the treat.’

  ‘It’s embarrassing.’

  Fel
ix thought the boy had a point but his mother apologized for him. ‘Ian’s changed school so many times,’ she said, ‘he learnt no manners, really. You see, we’ve always been on the move. Never been able to settle, worse luck!’

  ‘Look here, darling.’ Felix remembered how Septimus had instructed him to start. Then, thinking he had gone too far too soon, changed rapidly to ‘Look here, Miriam.’

  ‘Darling’s OK by me, but I’m Mirry.’

  ‘Well, then. Look here, Mirry. Do you know, do you have any idea, that I’ve just been sent a bill for twenty thousand pounds by PROD?’

  ‘Prod?’ Mirry started to laugh. It seemed to Felix that he had hit on a subject she greatly enjoyed. ‘Rather an appropriate name, if you come to think about it. Ian, do Mummy a favour won’t you?’

  ‘What?’ The child’s loud question was full of suspicion.

  ‘Just go and sit at one of those empty tables and draw a nice picture. You don’t know that he can draw really well, do you, Felix?’

  The Princess Beatrice Hotel, Coldsands-on-Sea, had been, Felix had thought in his childhood, a place of unbelievable luxury and splendour. It was where his father’s golf club held its annual dinner-dance, to which he was allowed to come, wearing a small, rented dinner-jacket that smelled of mothballs. Once a year, on his summertime birthday, his parents took him to lunch there, after which they went to a performance given by the Airy Nothings who did an annual summer show on the end of the pier. He remembered a short-haired, blonde girl who slipped off her pierrette costume to reveal a spangled bikini and who did a dance during which she was thrown about like a tennis ball by two men dressed in caps and baggy trousers, billed as Les Apaches. At the end of the dance, Les Apaches appeared to toss the girl into the audience and for a moment she came flying towards the lap of the twelve-year-old

  Felix until she was caught by the wrist and ankles and restored to her low-life lovers. As a result of this theatrical moment Felix achieved a surprising and prolonged erection and was afraid to stand up for ‘God Save the Queen’ in case his mother noticed.

  At that time the Princess Beatrice was full, prosperous and smelt of floor polish, brown Windsor soup, brandy and cigars. Members of the Rotary Club slapped each other on the back in the bar, laughed loudly and stood rounds. Honeymoon couples held hands at breakfast and only looked at each other a little less passionately than those on illicit weekends. A pianist in a white dinner-jacket played selections from South Pacific during the cocktail hour and there were always cucumber sandwiches and scones and cream at teatime. Now the town had fallen on evil days. The holidaymakers, fleeing from the rain, preferred Torremolinos and Lanzarote. The businessmen no longer supported the Rotary Club. McDonald’s and the Thai takeaways did good business but the tables in the Princess Beatrice dining-room stood white and empty as ice floes in a polar sea. In an effort to attract some new and classy custom the food had become elaborate without being good. Gone was the comforting brown Windsor soup, the roast beef and Yorkshire, the fried plaice and chips. Mirry and Felix started with ‘grilled goat’s cheese de Coldsands avec son salade verte’. After this Ian had called for chicken nuggets but, these delicacies being unavailable, he joined his mother and Felix in ‘pintade à la mode paysanne avec son vin rouge’ – a stringy fowl in a slightly vinous gravy, accompanied by a side plate of barely cooked string beans, carrots and bulletlike potatoes. ‘It’s a real treat,’ Mirry had said, ‘eating out à la Française.’

  ‘All that PROD stuff, ’ Felix said. ‘You know it’s nonsense?’

  ‘Ian, I said, will you please go to an empty table and draw a picture?’ Mirry gave this order with surprising firmness and, even more surprisingly, Ian went.

  ‘You see,’ she said when the child had gone, ‘I’ve changed my hair colour since Bath.’

  ‘Yes, I noticed that.’

  ‘You notice quite a lot of things, don’t you, Felix?’

  ‘It’s my job.’

  ‘I thought you found the Titian Russet a bit startling.’

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘So now it’s the colour it was when we first met. All those years ago.’

  ‘Miriam,’ he said, trying to smile and refilling her glass with the champagne he had ordered to carry out Septimus Roache’s idea of a rattling good meal, ‘you know we never met at all those years ago. We first met at Millstream’s all those weeks ago.’

  She looked at him, smiling kindly, and said, ‘You’re a liar, aren’t you, Felix?’

  ‘That’s not altogether true!’ Felix did lie a little.

  ‘Oh, but you are. When we met at Bath . . .’

  ‘Yes. We met then.’

  ‘Gavin said, “Surely you remember Miriam Bowker?” Didn’t Gavin say that? Weren’t they his very words?’

  ‘Well, yes, I think they were.’ Felix had the feeling that he was walking, blindfold, towards some deep and bottomless pit.

  ‘And what did you say to that?’

  He became deliberately vague. ‘I can’t quite remember.’

  ‘Let me remind you, Felix. You said, “Well, yes. Yes, of course.” Those were your very words. So you’re a liar, aren’t you, darling?’

  ‘I was a liar then,’ he admitted, ‘when I said, “Yes, I remember you.” ’

  ‘Why did you say it?’

  ‘To be polite.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Not to hurt your feelings.’

  ‘Very considerate, I must say.’

  ‘And because I might have met you. At some bookshop or lecture.’

  ‘Or party?’

  ‘I suppose it might’ve been a party. So, I thought I’d say yes I’d remembered you, just until we talked a bit and then you’d remind me exactly when it was.’

  She put the back of her hand to her mouth to block laughter. ‘That is the most ridiculous story.’

  ‘I often do it.’ Felix agreed with her that it did sound unconvincing, as the truth usually does.

  ‘And were you just being polite when you wrote to PROD three weeks ago and said you’d never met me and you knew damn well we’d had that little chat at Bath?’

  ‘You saw the letter?’ Being without a defence he took refuge in an accusation. ‘You’re behind this ridiculous demand?’

  ‘Of course I saw it. I keep in close touch with Ken.’

  ‘Ken?’

  ‘Ken Savage. The bloke you wrote to. He’s been very helpful.’

  ‘Oh, I’m glad he’s helpful!’

  ‘I’m glad you’re glad.’

  ‘You put him up to this!’

  ‘I was very hurt when I saw what you wrote to Ken. You know what he said? Ken said, “There now. He’s told you another porky. We’ve got him down as ‘liar’ in our computer system.” I defended you. I said your job was making up stories. I said you’re not a habitual liar. Only sometimes.’

  ‘I’m not a liar!’ Felix looked over at the child who was drawing quietly on the back of a menu, his head down and his tongue out in concentration. ‘He’s nothing,’ he whispered, ‘to do with me.’

  ‘There’s two lies we’ve nailed down already. Now what about the third?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Where we first met?’

  ‘First?’

  ‘Here. At Coldsands. Right here.’

  ‘In this hotel?’ He wondered what she would invent.

  ‘Course not. We couldn’t afford hotels like this. Not in those days. Not when we’re that much younger. It was at a party. An outdoor party. On the beach.’

  The barbecue. The dark photograph. His wife with a string of sausages around her neck, waving a wooden spoon. A shadowy figure in the background which couldn’t possibly have been the woman who sat in front of him, crinkling her nose as she drank unaccustomed champagne. Huw Hotchkiss, a man with a deep chest and sturdy, athletic legs, wearing black swimming trunks and a chef’s hat. ‘Who gave the party?’ he asked, hoping she wouldn’t know. ‘Who gave it?’

  ‘Huw, of course. He gave all the
parties.’ She smiled and he felt something like despair and asked, with only a glimmer of hope that she wouldn’t know the answer, ‘Huw what?’

  ‘Hotchkiss. You should remember his name, considering his relationship with your wife, which they didn’t bother to hide particularly.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Where did we do it?’

  ‘Ssh, Felix! Not in front of him,’ Miriam said in a piercing whisper, which Ian disregarded.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Beside a breakwater, so far as I remember. On a lilo someone had brought.’

  ‘And after that?’

  ‘It’s up to you to remember.’

  ‘I told you, I don’t remember any of it.’

  ‘I’d never have had a chance to remind you, would I? Not if Gavin hadn’t brought us together.’ She laid her hand on his and looked as though she were profoundly amused.

  ‘Who is this Gavin, anyway?’ Felix withdrew his hand.

  ‘Gavin Piercey. Don’t you remember anything?’

  ‘Nothing much that you tell me, I have to admit. Piercey, you say?’

  ‘He used to hang round Media Studies at the university. Trying a part-time course. We’ve kept in touch, Gavin and I have. He believes in keeping in touch more than you do, I must say.’

  ‘Odd way of keeping in touch. He sent me an extraordinary tape and then he kept turning up like the voice of doom uttering vague threats.’

  ‘I think he wanted to warn you.’

  ‘Warn me?’

  ‘Gavin had a bad experience.’

  ‘So I believe.’

  ‘Got in wrong with PROD about a child. You see, he didn’t answer their letters. Just didn’t open the envelopes. So they got a court order. Threw him in the slammer!’ Miriam covered her mouth with her hand again to trap laughter, which was exploding as though she had just said something both comic and obscene.

  ‘Whose child was it?’