Felix in the Underworld (3 page)

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.

‘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.'

‘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.