Felix in the Underworld Read online

  ‘We shan’t always be in England.’

  ‘Shan’t we?’

  ‘If we ever went abroad for the book that’d be all right, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose it would.’

  ‘We’ve got a date then?’

  ‘Yes. We’ve got a date.’

  She put her small mouth to his and her lips seemed dry and brittle, like the body of an exotic insect. Then a green light glowed on her door and she left him in a mood of unusual triumph. The lonely days and solitary nights, the hours of staring at the grey sea and white paper, the arranging of objects on his desk, the walks to the end of the pier in search of stories – all these aspects of his working-life seemed gloriously worthwhile to Felix when he thought of abroad and the joke he would one day dare to tell Brenda, quoting Hamlet, about making his ‘quietus with a bare bodkin’.

  This high mood stayed with him as he started to undress. He emptied his pockets and found the brown envelope Miriam Bowker had given him and opened it, expecting a fan letter or a request for literary advice. What he found was the photograph of a child, a small boy, perhaps nine or ten years old. Felix had little experience of children. The boy in question was standing on a beach under a grey and threatening sky. If he was on holiday, the child didn’t seem to be extracting much pleasure from it. He peered at the world from behind spectacles which were too large for his face and looked as though he had seen a great deal in his short life and didn’t expect much good to come of it.

  Felix only puzzled over the photograph for a moment and then put it back in its envelope. But when he closed his eyes that night, strangely enough it wasn’t Brenda Bodkin in her eagerly anticipated nakedness that he saw but the myopic child standing on the beach by the sea, where he didn’t seem to be playing.

  Chapter Five

  Felix had boxes for everything and he had three big files full of photographs. After his book tour he should have been catching up with the new novel but he was wasting time in his room shuffling through his memories. His dead father stared up at him, a man caught on holiday, wearing a small moustache, a white open-necked shirt and a blazer decorated with the crest of the South Coast Bank golfing society: crossed clubs on a tee argent and the motto Mens sana in corpore sano. He was squinting angrily at the sun as though hating it for being so bloody cheerful when he was filled with disgust at the boredom of his life as manager of the Coldsands branch. He had urged Felix to get a secure job with a bank, not wishing his son to escape what he had endured so painfully. When Felix chose a writer’s life he was as resentful as those fathers, tied to an ageing and unsympathetic spouse, who watch, with horror and envy, their children revelling in transitory romances with beautiful and interesting girls from Sussex University. His father’s job turned out to be less safe than Felix’s. Many employees of the Coldsands branch were sacked in a ‘slimming-down operation’ and replaced by stacks of machines and computers which bleeped messages, ate people’s bank cards, confused the accounts, charged them usurious rates of interest and stole their money without any human supervision. Felix, who had adopted the risky life of an author, had to keep his father in pink gins, subscriptions to the golf club and Spanish holidays until the Guvnor, or Guv as he liked to be called (‘I always gave my father that title and what was good enough for the old man’s good enough for me’), died of terminal disappointment at the age of sixty-three.

  He was looking at his mother now, standing at his father’s side with her arm through his and making the best of it. When the Guv died she was released from all anxiety and, proud of her son’s career, adopted a strange vie de bohème – or as much of it as could be had in the environment of Coldsands. She took to wearing large and improbable hats, many-coloured shawls and enrolled as a mature student at the Coldsands university. There she flowered considerably, became an important member of the Union and had a circle of admirers among the gay and lesbian students whom she entertained in the local wine bar, where they enjoyed her increasingly ruthless jokes at the expense of the faculty. Although Felix was no longer teaching, he felt bound, from a bewildered love for his mother and a feeling of respect for the extent to which she had benefited from his father’s death, to accept her constant invitations to speak to the Fiction Club or the Creative Writing Society, and he would stand, embarrassed, in some sparsely attended lecture hall with his mother spread out in the front row, flanked by her supercilious circle, taking copious notes and calling him Felix when she asked him questions about authors of whom he had scarcely heard.

  He saw his father laughing at Felix’s wedding-party at the golf club, and Anne joining him, her head bowed, her hand on the arm of his Moss Bros tailed coat to steady herself. He could remember none of this and wondered what they had both found so comical about his marriage. And then there were a number of uncommunicative pictures of a night barbecue on the beach when Anne was still a student. He recognized Huw Hotchkiss, with whom she had fallen in love, wearing a pair of swimming trunks and a chef’s hat, and his wife with a string of sausages round her neck, waving a wooden spoon. He saw faces he no longer remembered, lit from below like devils by the driftwood fire and a blurred woman, brightly dressed and shadowy in the background, with a bottle raised to her lips. It might have been his mother.

  And then came a black and white picture of a boy, perhaps ten years old, a solemn child wearing spectacles, standing on the sand under a cloudy sky and not looking as though he were enjoying it. For a moment he thought it was the photograph Miriam Bowker had handed him in the bookshop but then he remembered that was in colour and the child was wearing jeans. The boy in the picture he held was wearing longish shorts, kept up by an S-buckled belt. Peering at it more closely, he realized that it was himself.

  He heard the front-door flap rattle and the thud of letters falling into the hallway. He came downstairs, as always half hopeful, half in dread, to confront his post. It didn’t look particularly promising. There were two invitations to parties for other people’s books, a letter from someone called Kurt in Hamburg who wanted the Herr Doktor’s autograph, and a sheaf of poems from prison which he had agreed to judge for a competition.

  He opened the long brown envelope with the letters PROD and the official stamp last. He had hoped it might be a cheque from some public library at which he had spoken. He read its contents, at first with amazement, then with laughter and finally with rage. It had been a long while since he had gone through so many emotions in half a minute. The letter was short and the names and the amount of money filled in on some sort of printed form. The Parental Rights and Obligations Department required the immediate payment by Felix Morsom of the sum of twenty thousand pounds for the maintenance, over the last ten years, of the infant Ian Bowker. Cheques were to be made out to the Ministry of Social Welfare and crossed PROD Account. Failure to pay would result in the immediate commencement of legal proceedings.

  Chapter Six

  ‘Young Morsom’s my guest at luncheon.’

  Septimus Roache stood in the hall of the Sheridan Club on that square island of carpet which is reserved for the feet of members only and shouted up an immense staircase. Above him dangled a figure with one hand gripping the balustrade, another in charge of a walking-stick which splayed out like a third and spindly leg, motionless on the white marble stair like a dark spider in its web. Sir Ernest Thessaley, the distinguished author of The Light of Evening, a trilogy dealing with the life and times from wistful boyhood up to his present state of near immobility of a character indistinguishable from himself, called back without turning his head, ‘Is he a member here?’

  ‘He’s in your line of business, Ernest.’

  ‘What business is that?’ The great man appeared to have forgotten.

  ‘Storyteller. Wordsmith. Mythmaker. Oh, for God’s sake! He’s a bloody novelist.’

  ‘What was his name again?’

  ‘Felix Morsom.’

  ‘I thought that was it. Never heard of him. Anyway, I can’t stand the stuff he writes. Frien
d of yours, is he?’

  ‘No, he’s come to me for a bit of advice.’

  ‘I should think he needs it. Writing like that. Virginia Woolf and piss.’

  ‘Read him then?’

  ‘Read him? Of course I don’t read him! Life’s too short to read Morsom. Why on earth are you having him to lunch?’

  ‘I told you,’ Septimus Roache shouted gleefully, ‘he’s in a spot of trouble!’

  Members were struggling up to the bar for drinks. Other members came clattering down on their way to lunch while others stood in the entrance hall, warming themselves in front of the fire, reading the evening paper or the news on the tickertape, and waiting for their guests. Some of them may not have known who Felix Morsom was but now they all knew he was in a spot of trouble.

  ‘Don’t step on this bit of carpet.’ Septimus Roache’s voice was deep and somehow disembodied, so it was difficult to associate his warning rumble with his rare smile of welcome. ‘Members only!’ Felix, who had advanced with an outstretched hand and a polite ‘Mr Roache, isn’t it?’, skipped back from the minefield the members’ carpet no doubt represented.

  ‘Yes, I’m Seppy Roache.’ The rumble was more gentle now, as though the explosive device had been temporarily defused.

  Felix said, ‘Simon Tubal-Smith at Llama told me you specialize in authors’ troubles?’

  Septimus Roache’s grandfather had been articled to the firm of C.O. Humphries, Son & Kershaw, which acted for Oscar Wilde when he took his disastrous journey through three trials to Reading Gaol. Young Artemus Roache had been no more than a silent spectator at these proceedings, having been sent out of the office to fetch hock and seltzer to quench the thirst of the nervous literary martyr. However, it gave him the idea that artists, particularly literary artists, were vulnerable creatures, usually with secrets to hide, who might

  be lured into costly and unwise litigation. He started his own firm, Roache, Pertwee & Musselbaum, in which he was succeeded by his son and grandson. Writers as diverse as Somerset Maugham, Mrs Radcliffe-Hall, Agatha Christie, Henry Miller and Edgar Wallace would wander casually, and as though they never quite meant to, into the old house in Bedford Square and discuss everything from infringement of copyright and wills to blackmail, gross indecency contrary to the Criminal Law Amendment Act and, on one or two surprising occasions, murder.

  So Septimus (he was so called not because he was the seventh son but because he was seventh in a long line of frustrated hopes, imaginary pregnancies, miscarriages and other disappointments – and the only child to fight, argue and cheat his way into existence with an aggression to which he owed his success in the law) carried on the family tradition and managed to grab from his partners (the descendants of Pertwee and Musselbaum) all the exotic cases arising from the aberrant behaviour of poets, novelists, playwrights and the occasional painter or composer. He was already an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was shortly to be knighted for services to the arts. He was a short-legged, square man with wide shoulders, the face of a discontented Pekinese and wiry grey hair which sprouted, not only around his bald patch, but from his nostrils, his ears and on the backs of his fingers. He wore a bow-tie, a black suit with a wide chalk line, and a monocle dangled round his neck like a foreign order.

  ‘Well, young fellow,’ he said to his prospective client as they sat together at a table by the high window, ‘what’ve you been up to exactly?’

  ‘As a matter of fact I’ve just got a new book out, Out of Season.’

  ‘You’ll have the brains?’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure that writing a novel requires brains exactly. I mean, as I’m sure you’ll know, you’ve got to find a theme. Something you can get a feeling about and then, well, just hope a story can sort of grow out of it.’

  ‘No, I meant brains. I hope you’re going to eat them?’

  Felix looked round the room as though searching for a way of escape. Was eating brains a rule of this mysterious club, like not standing on the carpet? Several elderly men were crouched over a white mess on their plates. The voice of Septimus boomed in his ear. ‘At last, I’ve persuaded chef to do offal. Or would you prefer liver, sweetbreads, black pudding? Next month we’re going to introduce members and guests to chitterlings dressed up as andouillettes. Charlie!’

  An alarmed Indian waiter, whose short white jacket revealed the ends of his braces, stepped forward and smiled nervously. ‘Yes, Mr Ross?’

  ‘Roache. Septimus Roache. Try and get it right, Charlie. I will have the brains, please.’

  ‘Brains?’

  ‘Yes, brains!’ Septimus roared. And my guest will take . . .What will you take, Morsom?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Felix hesitated, in search of the least disgusting parts of the menu, ‘pasta.’

  ‘Pasta!’ Septimus spat out the word as though it were a shameful disease. ‘With meat sauce?’

  ‘Perhaps tomato.’

  ‘I suppose you can drink a carafe of the club’s burgundy without going green about the gills?’ Septimus Roache opened one eye wide to allow the monocle to drop to the end of its string, put away the menu and said, ‘Now what particular skylarking have you been up to, my lad? I understand you’re in a bit of a scrape?’ At which Felix started to pull the letter from PROD from his pocket and was greeted by the horrified look an unreconstructed bishop might give to a couple of choirboys he found comparing sizes behind the high altar. ‘Put that away at once!’ was exactly what Septimus said.

  ‘Really? Why?’

  ‘Because you can’t give me papers in this club.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Why is that?’

  ‘Because we’re not allowed to conduct business in this club.’

  Felix wondered what they were going to talk about for the next hour. ‘I thought you wanted to know what sort of trouble . . .’

  ‘We can talk about that, of course. We can talk about anything. Charlie’s knowledge of the English language is strictly limited and, if we can keep our voices down, I can make a date to bugger you on the snooker table and no one’ll be any the wiser. But pull out papers and we’ll be drummed out of this club and that’s all there is to it. Now then. Who did you prod?’

  ‘Nobody. I had a letter.’

  ‘Shut up about the letter!’

  ‘I heard from the Parental Rights and Obligations Department. They want me to pay twenty thousand pounds for a child.’

  ‘Seems steep! There must be parts of the world where you can pick up a child for a fraction of that money.’ Felix had a horrible suspicion that this appalling lawyer, who was now leaning too close to him for comfort, one hand cupped round a hairy ear so that he might miss none of Felix’s secrets, was not joking.

  ‘It’s meant to be my maintenance for a child.’

  ‘The child’s a big spender?’

  ‘Over ten years.’

  ‘Whose child is it?’

  ‘They say it’s mine.’

  Septimus let out a loud and unexpected laugh. ‘Your little bastard, your by-blow, your wrong side of the blanket?’

  Felix’s nature was such that he felt immediately protective of this unseen child who seemed likely to cause him so much trouble. ‘I know nothing of the child,’ he said. ‘And I only met the mother last week.’

  ‘Hardly time to produce a ten-year-old child.’

  ‘Hardly.’

  ‘But who was this mother?’

  ‘She said her name was Miriam Bowker. She gave me a photograph of a small boy.’

  ‘Your boy?’

  ‘Certainly not mine.’

  ‘A boy you didn’t recognize?’

  Felix hesitated for a moment, remembering the picture of himself, and then opted for ‘Yes.’

  ‘You don’t sound too sure about it.’

  ‘I’m sure that extraordinary woman isn’t the mother of my child.’

  ‘Extraordinary?’

  ‘Dressed like a sort of clown.’

  ‘All women are extraordinary if you want my
opinion.’ Septimus was lapping up his brains with a spoon. Felix turned from this spectacle as firmly as he looked away from poverty.

  ‘Anyway, this one has some sort of financial claim against you?’

  ‘So she says.’

  ‘What do you want me to do about it?’

  ‘My publisher thought you might give me legal advice.’

  ‘Legal advice? For a little scrap in the Magistrates’ Court? What did Tubal-Smith want me to do? Engage counsel at vast expense? Call experts on the medical side? Have the woman watched by some professional dickhead at two hundred pounds an hour to find out who the real father is? Use your common sense! It’d be cheaper to pay it. Cheaper still to hire a contract killer.’

  ‘You mean’ – Felix froze, a forkful of dripping tagliatelle poised in the air – ‘kill the child?’

  ‘Both. Mother and child. You could get a contract for two at around five hundred. Yes, what do you want, Charlie?’ The waiter, whose name was Aziz and not Charlie, had come up to tell Septimus that he was wanted on the telephone.

  ‘If you don’t want to go to that expense’ – Septimus was laboriously pushing his way out of his chair – ‘take her out to a rattling good lunch and say, “Look here, darling. Tell me who’s the real father of the little bastard.” Poke her if you have to, or whatever you do to women. Distasteful business from all I’ve heard of it.’

  ‘Extraordinary!’ Felix said aloud, his mouth full of pasta, to Septimus’s retreating back.

  ‘What’s extraordinary?’ Sir Ernest Thessaley had arrived at the table and, rearranging his leg and walking-stick, folded himself like a lanky insect into a vacant chair.

  ‘That you can arrange to kill two people for five hundred pounds.’

  ‘Can you, by jove?’ Sir Ernest laughed, a sound like a dry gargle. ‘I might get that done to Pikestaff on the Indy. He gave a horrible notice to my memoir. Called me an old snob. Typical of someone who went to a minor place like Oundle. And who are you planning to do in?’ Felix, feeling inexplicably guilty, said, ‘No one, really. No one at all. . .’ He thought his voice lacked all conviction.