Felix in the Underworld Read online

  ‘Don’t think about it. Try and think about something else.’

  They were having the full afternoon tea in the Beau Nash room of the Bath Hotel. Brenda dissected a scone, shovelled on a dollop of clotted cream with her knife and surmounted it with a neat cairn of strawberry jam.

  ‘All right, I’ll try.’ Felix admired her dexterity. He was afraid that, undertaking the same operation, he would drop jam on his voracious pullover. There was a silence between them and then she asked, ‘Well, what else are you thinking about?’ She had, he was pleased to see, a small blob of cream hanging from her upper lip.

  ‘My bathroom,’ he told her.

  ‘I told them you were a famous author.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘No problem. So they gave you the Aquae Sulis suite. It’s the one usually kept for Sandra Tantamount.’

  ‘I was thinking about the jacuzzi.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ She sounded, he thought, insufficiently interested. ‘What were you thinking about it?’

  ‘Well, it’s huge. With marble steps leading up to it. And golden lions’ heads with open mouths spouting hot and cold. And soap on a rope. And a glass shelf for pot-pourri and cotton-wool balls. And every sort of fragrancy by courtesy of the management.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘I was just thinking’ – he put his cards face upwards on the table – ‘we might possibly twiddle round in the jacuzzi together?’

  She looked at him and seemed to be smiling. He thought he might clinch the argument by adopting a literary approach as he always found writing about life easier than living it. ‘It would help me enormously in my work.’

  ‘Your work?’

  ‘I mean, I can’t go on writing for ever about the view from Coldsands pier. I do need some sort of drama in my life.’

  ‘What sort of drama?’

  ‘You and I in the bathroom,’ he told her. ‘It’d be an experience.’

  ‘Something for you to write about?’

  ‘Well . . . yes,’ Felix had to admit it and felt he was losing any advantage he might have had.

  ‘That’s all you want me for, isn’t it?’ She looked pained. ‘To bung me into a book?’

  ‘No, it isn’t. Honestly, it isn’t.’ Not for the first time he noticed that the introduction of the word ‘honestly’ robbed the sentence of all conviction. Brenda added hot water to the pot, stirred it and poured out tea in an alarmingly maternal fashion.

  ‘Felix, I really like you. . .’

  ‘Well, that’s a start.’

  ‘And we get on extremely well together.’

  ‘Of course we do.’ Felix was encouraged.

  ‘So, it’s just as though we’d already done it!’

  ‘Done what?’ Felix was surprised.

  ‘All that sex stuff!’

  ‘Have we?’ Felix was puzzled. ‘I never noticed.’

  ‘I mean, we did it in our heads. In our imagination. That’s where all the important things in your life go on, isn’t it?’

  ‘Of course not!’ He denied it more vehemently because he recognized the truth of what she’d said. At least, in so far as it related to him.

  ‘So let’s keep it that way, shall we?’ She was holding her cup with both pale hands to warm them and looking at him across the little lake of almost colourless tea, as though she were doing him a huge favour. ‘Don’t let’s spoil it all by struggling around naked in a bath or anything revolting like that.’

  Felix wouldn’t have minded spoiling it all but he didn’t like to say so.

  Millstream’s were undoubtedly the best booksellers. Their dark, panelled shops tinkled with baroque music and were staffed by knowledgeable graduates. The young men, often shaven-headed and pierced in various parts of their bodies, were supervised by girls who peered out from under their fringes or over their spectacles, both sexes being dressed in the black clothing favoured by stagehands changing scenery when the curtain is not lowered. The shops were always open late and on Sundays. Each month Millstream’s in Bath staged an author event. Felix, introducing his new book, was that month’s attraction.

  He stood with his notes resting on a high pile of Sandra Tantamount’s novel, facing an audience of about fifty on folding-chairs. ‘Not standing or sitting on the stairs as they did when we had Sandra,’ the manageress had murmured from under her fringe. ‘But not a total humiliation.’ Behind them tables were laid with refreshments for the meet-the-author session. Bottles of Carafino white, jugs of orange juice, samosas and sausages on sticks, sausage rolls and slices of quiche nestled among the bestsellers and piles of paper table napkins. The audience, turned towards Felix, couldn’t see this spread or the glass doors and the rain-soaked, palely lit street.

  As Felix talked he could see these doors open and the little cluster of doorway sleepers, the homeless and dispossessed, silently enter. They wore layers of clothing, scarves and balaclavas or bobble hats. Felix had seen them, or some like them, under a line of eighteenth-century arches on a windswept pavement they had furnished with bundles and boxes and sleeping-bags. Now they advanced, slowly, remorselessly, on the food, less like locusts than blundering bumble-bees, and stretched out for it with mittened fingers reddened from the cold.

  They didn’t clear every plate, which would have exposed their theft, but picked a few sausages, a sandwich here and there, a selection of samosas, and a modest swig from a bottle of white wine. Felix wished them well and tried to hold the attention of his audience, and the staff of the bookshop, while they ate. By the time he had finished his speech, to a gentle shower of applause, the swarm had vanished and the plates, though depleted, looked undisturbed.

  When the queue formed for booksignings, however, an alarming smell approached him. That part of life which Felix feared most came first to him by way of his nose, which was now filled with a cocktail of stale urine, dirty feet, bad breath, fried food and, somewhere in the background, the dry, musty all-enveloping smell of shit. Standing in front of him, parcelled into a collection of wrappings fastened with binder twine, was a dumpy woman of unfathomable age.

  ‘Put your name on there, Felix. Sorry I can’t afford a book.’ The woman was holding out a sheet, yellowing with age and brittle, of the Western Mail.

  ‘What name is it?’ Felix was trying to speak whilst holding his breath so that he sounded like a ventriloquist’s doll.

  ‘Evangeline. And you can put “With love from Felix” and I shan’t mind.’

  He put that and watched her go. What should he have given her? Money, a bottle of the Carafino, a free copy of Out of Season? Whatever he should have done, he had missed his chance. She was on her way to the door and another book, opened at the flyleaf, was being pushed in front of him. He asked, as he always did, ‘What name shall I write?’

  ‘Just your signature would be an honour, Mr Morsom. Dated, of course, if you’d care to oblige.’

  It was the voice he had come to recognize. The voice he was hearing for the third time. ‘You’re sure you don’t want me to write your name?’

  ‘It’s your name that’s important, Mr Morsom. Your name and your book. I’m quite simply a member of the public. No more and no less.’

  Felix’s signing of the book produced a small flash of light. The member of the public had handed a camera to the next person in the queue, who had snapped author and fan chatting at a literary event. This member of the public looked younger than Felix. Perhaps he was not yet thirty but his hair was already receding. He had a pale face and a delicate turned-up nose. Although young he had the look, both anxious and resigned, of middle age. He wore a blue suit and a tie with a crest on it. Felix thought it might have been the tie of a Rotary club or the rowing club of a bank. Watching him recover his camera, Felix said, ‘You’re a member of the public who seems to have been in some terrible trouble. Didn’t you send me a tape?’

  ‘A tape? You think I’d send you a tape?’ The member of the public looked at Felix with sympathetic concern.

  ‘I’m sur
e you did. And you spoke to me on “Good Morning, Thames Estuary”.’

  ‘Good morning, what?’

  ‘Thames Estuary.’

  The member of the public shook his head, still apparently bewildered.

  ‘The Denny Densher show. You were a first-time caller,’ Felix reminded him.

  ‘It puzzles me’ – the member of the public frowned – ‘that a writer of your stamp, sir, should be listening to such a programme.’

  ‘I wasn’t listening to it!’ Felix was losing patience with this lugubrious person who spoke extremely slowly. ‘I was on it!’

  ‘Oh, of course. I should have remembered that you were the star. As you are here, tonight.’

  ‘I recognize your voice.’ Felix had no doubt about it. ‘You sent me a tape describing a terrible experience! You were arrested.’

  ‘You mean someone sent you a tape. I expect they thought it might be useful to you. It might give you some idea of what goes on in the real world. Writers have to learn from somewhere, don’t they? Oh, by the way, I’ve brought an old friend to see you.’

  ‘I’m sorry’ – Felix signed his name hurriedly on the proffered book to end a dialogue which seemed to be getting nowhere – ‘there are a few more people who want books.’

  ‘Oh, she can wait. Heaven knows, she’s waited long enough already. But, of course, your many admirers must come first.’

  So the member of the public stood, palely at attention, while Felix signed books for grey-haired men in anoraks and grey-haired women in trousers, school teachers, civil servants and social workers – and an occasional lawyer. As they gave him their names he wrote to Carol or William, or Annette or even Justin, and when the last book had been signed the silent watcher said, ‘I did so admire the courteous way you treated your public, Mr Morsom. Even those who came in from sleeping rough. I noticed your courtesy to them. I speak as one who knows what it is to doss down in a doorway. I have been reduced to that, Mr Morsom, in the ups and downs of my own past.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Felix felt he ought to say.

  ‘No, you’re not, Mr Morsom. Why should you be sorry? You hardly know me as yet. Now, let me take you over to Miriam. I well know what a busy man you are but I think you owe her five minutes of your valuable time.’

  Felix looked round for Brenda’s help but he saw her far away in Gender Studies, wearing her long green dress and laughing with the darkly clothed bookselling staff. So, alone and defenceless, he allowed himself to be led to an alcove where, beneath a notice which read Foreign Travel, a woman sat fast asleep.

  ‘Miriam.’ The member of the public spoke in the firm but gentle voice of someone who’s taken a long journey to visit a friend in hospital. ‘Wake up, Mirry. Felix is here to see you.’

  Nothing stirred, then the woman dragged open heavy lids shadowed with blue make-up. ‘Felix,’ she murmured. ‘At last! Such a long, long time no see.’ Then she smiled and he noticed that her quite seriously protruding teeth were coloured with scarlet lipstick.

  ‘So,’ she said, ‘Gavin’s brought you to see me at last?’

  ‘You remember her, don’t you?’ said the hitherto anonymous man she had called Gavin. ‘Surely you remember Miriam Bowker?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ Felix lied politely. ‘Yes, of course. When was it exactly?’ His way of dealing with such situations, which happened frequently on book tours, was to feign total recall and keep the conversation going until some dropped hint, some lightly touched reminiscence, focused his memory and a clear picture emerged.

  ‘When? I should’ve thought you’d remember when. Ten years ago, Felix. Can you believe it! How time flies.’

  ‘Ten years ago,’ Gavin agreed. ‘Isn’t it a birthday, Miriam?’

  ‘Your birthday?’ Felix tried to think back ten years but all was confusion. He had always been hopeless at dates.

  ‘Not my birthday. You should know when my birthday is. Although I’m not admitting to a day over thirty!’ She laughed then, nervously, shaking her shoulders, and he blinked, dazzled by the colours that she wore. When she was still, her clothes were less obtrusive, but when she moved, it was like staring at a brilliantly lit asymmetrical kaleidoscope. A red high-heeled shoe, half off, hung at the end of pink tights decorated with a hole exposing a circle of pale thigh. He took in the purple mini, electric green shirt and blue velvet jacket sewn with sequins. Her hair, dyed a deep, chemical red, was stiff and brittle, as though made of spun sugar, and her face was pale and weary. Her bright clothes were crumpled, stained and grubby, so that she looked like a court jester who had been made to sleep in the straw above a cold stable and was still suffering from it. Her voice was curiously high and full of breath like the voice of a child. ‘I hope you’re happy, Felix,’ she said. ‘I think of you so often and I hope you’re happy.’

  ‘I’m fairly happy.’ Felix felt he had to say this because she looked genuinely concerned. It would be hard to say that shut in the safety of his room, staring at the sea, tracing in black ink, when he was lucky, a thousand words a day, he was either spectacularly joyful or unbearably miserable. But with the distraction of a book tour and the possibility of Ms Brenda Bodkin, it would be hard to pretend he wasn’t content. ‘And you?’ he was polite enough to ask her.

  ‘I have my moments,’ she said. ‘I’m proud to say I still have my moments. Now that we’ve found each other again, stay in touch. Will you promise me that?’

  ‘If he doesn’t stay in touch with you,’ Gavin said, Felix thought quite unhelpfully, ‘I’m sure you’ll stay in touch with him.’

  ‘Well. . .’ Felix had decided to wind up the conversation. ‘Great meeting you again and I hope you enjoyed the talk.’

  ‘Oh, I wasn’t listening to the talk!’ He had the uneasy feeling that she was laughing again. ‘I was too busy looking at you. And as you stood there, so serious, I couldn’t help mentioning it to Gavin, you looked exactly like Ian.’

  Who on earth was Ian? Felix felt panic stirring, faced with yet another character he couldn’t remember. He looked round for Brenda and there she was at last, dependable and ready to rescue him. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, ‘I must tear him away. We’re going to dinner with the Millstream’s people.’

  ‘Goodbye,’ Gavin said. ‘And thank you for your time.’

  ‘Goodbye.’ Felix remembered the tape, the slow, unperturbed voice describing suffering. ‘I’m glad your troubles are over.’

  ‘Oh, my troubles are quite over now. Thank you, Mr Morsom.’

  ‘Goodbye, Felix. Don’t let it be so long next time. Oh and I want you to have this.’ Miriam delved into a multi-coloured velvet handbag and produced a brown envelope. ‘At least it’ll help you remember.’ He took it, relieved that it couldn’t be a novel or even a short story – at worst a lyric poem. He found himself thanking her as he slipped it into his pocket.

  ‘Who on earth were that Gothic couple?’ Brenda asked as she led him away. ‘Extraordinary friends you have!’ Felix had to admit that he hadn’t the remotest idea who they were, except that the man had been in some sort of trouble with the police.

  ‘And the woman looked like trouble for everybody. What a complete mess she was! Offputting.’ Beauty, Felix thought, is handed out far more unfairly than talent or money and those, like Brenda, who are blessed with it, condescend to the overweight, long-nosed, hairy-handed, pinch-mouthed and less attractive majority. ‘It’s a horrible thought but do you think they’re an item?’ He said he didn’t know what they were and didn’t care if he never found out.

  The Millstream’s workers drove them to a bistro, where they ate grilled monkfish, the pale, black-clad manager opted for the vegetarian platter, and Brenda ordered more and more bottles of Australian Long Flat Red on Llama expenses. She was particularly sparkling, as though to underline the horror of the Gothic fans from whom she had rescued Felix, and amused the table with the adventures she and her author had on their many book tours. She told them how she pinned the Booker winner’s name on Felix at a s
ales conference and assured the half-intoxicated reps that the prizewinning author had changed her sex; how she had been bursting for a pee while they were marooned round Spaghetti Junction and Felix had nobly drunk up the Methode Champenoise presented to them by a Writers’ Circle in Stoke-on-Trent. Felix remembered with a stab of lust that she had held the bottle decorously under her skirt and he had heard the splash and little gasp of relief above the sullen murmur of traffic. She told them that Felix had stood signing books in Harrods with his zip undone, and later he had shown an unsavoury interest in an insolent girl with pert breasts from the Godalming Times until she had ordered him, with the full authority of a publicist from Llama Books, to ‘put her down because you never know where she’s been’. At all these literary anecdotes the table laughed, another bottle of the Long Flat Red was uncorked, and Felix revelled in the legend that his life had contained a strange and exciting number of events.

  Later, as they went up in the hotel lift together, a contraption lined and quilted like the inside of a sedan chair, Brenda was still giggling at the memory of some incident in the course of their invasion of the country’s bookshops. Felix found the courage to say, ‘You’ve told them all the things we did. What about the things we haven’t done?’

  ‘You’re not inviting me to your jacuzzi again?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I’m exhausted.’ She put the back of one slim-fingered hand to her mouth and acted an enormous yawn. ‘Do you think I’m being unfair?’

  ‘We can’t just leave it in our imagination.’ He fell back, as usual, on a literary argument. ‘I mean, my books have to get written. They just can’t float about in my brain for ever.’

  ‘But isn’t it hard work writing them?’ They’d reached the third floor. His arm was round her waist and she wasn’t altogether steady on her feet.

  ‘Sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s quite enjoyable.’

  ‘Sometimes?’ She gave him her wistful look, as though gazing back at a distant and ever-receding point.

  ‘You don’t think we ever will?’ They had reached her door and she fumbled in her bag for the key which was no longer a key but a piece of plastic which caused lights to flash and the door to buzz open. She said, ‘It’s against Llama Books’ policy for publicists to sleep with authors. In England, anyway.’