Felix in the Underworld (6 page)

‘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.

‘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.'

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.'

Felix 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