Felix in the Underworld (12 page)

The lights seemed unnecessarily bright when he stood waiting to buy a ticket for Coldsands. He slapped what he thought was the breast-pocket of his jacket to make sure he had money and realized that he had no jacket, no wallet and no credit cards. He was wearing the clothes he wrote in, dressed as he was when he left the house, it seemed a lifetime ago, to buy the
Meteor –
blue shirt and sweater, suede shoes and grey corduroy trousers. It was his habit to keep his credit cards in his wallet, his bank notes in the back pocket of his trousers, his change in his trouser pocket and his cheque book in the top left-hand drawer of his desk. He now remembered that he had paid for his ticket to London with money because entrance to his house was barred by the Furies. He had given his last wadge of notes to Miriam for spare ribs, seaweed and beer, Peking duck, sweet and sour pork, mixed vegetables and sake. Now all he had in his trousers were four pound coins and two fifty ps.

Felix's father had a minimal influence on his son. He failed to pass on to the young Morsom his reverence for golf, bridge, cricket commentaries, the Conservative Party and the South Coast Bank. He did, however, give him one piece of advice

Felix respected: ‘If you want to telephone or pee while out, always go to the best hotel. Don't use the same facilities as the great unwashed. Telephone kiosks and urinals are much the same to them. When in need slip into the Princess Beatrice Hotel or somewhere similar. Treat yourself to the best. The hall porter will respect you for it.' Felix came up the black marble stairs that led to the Station Hotel, keeping as far as possible in the shadows and walking quickly with his face turned to the wall. He chose a stall far away from the only other inhabitant of the Gents and then slipped quickly into the telephone box in the hall. He put in fifty p, because he didn't want to ask the hall porter for change, and rang Brenda Bodkin's number.

It rang five times and Felix was about to put the phone down when a voice, male and Australian said, ‘Yep?'

‘Oh, is Brenda there?'

‘Brenda's shot through. What can I do for you?'

‘Well . . . It's Felix Morsom.'

‘Bloody hell! Not
the
Felix Morsom?'

‘Well . . .
A
Felix Morsom.'

‘Not Felix Morsom, the novelist
extraordinaire
?'

‘I'm a novelist. Yes.'

‘Not Felix Morsom, well-known pen-pusher who does book signings?'

‘I do. Yes. Sometimes.'

‘And shoots off round the country with Brenda?'

‘That's right. You could say.'

‘Just tell me one thing, Mr Morsom.'

‘What's that?'

‘Is Brenda Bodkin a good fuck?'

His instinct was to try to laugh it off but his laughter sounded hollow. He said, ‘I honestly wouldn't know.'

‘No, I didn't think you would.' The phone was disconnected and purred loudly.

Felix sat in an armchair in the comer of the lounge. A waiter came up to him and he ordered a large brandy which cost him four pounds. He drank it, fingering the last coin in his pocket, and then, unusually exhausted by fear, alcohol and love, fell asleep.

He dreamed that the bald policeman was standing over him, wearing some kind of ornate uniform and shaking him by the shoulder, and then he saw, more clearly, that it was the hall porter saying, ‘I'm sure you don't want to stay here all night, sir. We can't have that, you know.'

‘No, of course not. Thank you for waking me.' Felix wondered if this were all part of his dream.

‘You're travelling, are you, sir?' The porter was not completely bald but had strands of black hair fixed across his skull. He had small, beady eyes and, Felix thought, a cruel mouth. He smelled of boiled sweets.

‘Yes, of course, I'm travelling. Thank you. Thank you very much.' He didn't believe he was completely awake when he walked back down the stairs, although he could hear his footsteps echoing across the station and the rumble and clatter of a distant truck. Far away in the shadows someone was whistling.

He stumbled over a pile of newspapers stacked outside a shuttered bookshop and looked down to see his own face peering over the title of the
Meteor
and read:
‘NOVELIST'S LOVE-CHILD. SEE CENTRE PAGES'.
He pulled until he extricated a copy from the tight string and, still unsure if he wasn't half-asleep, crossed to a table in front of a dark cafe and opened the paper, the first thing he had ever stolen in his life. The faces stared up at him as though in a dream: Ian and Miriam, himself as a boy, himself ten years ago and himself now – the author portrait from the back of his book. There was even the barbecue snap, dark and blurred, reproduced and captioned
THE BEACH LOVE-IN WHERE THEY MET.
He remembered the broken downstairs window of his house and that he had never looked to see if anything was missing from his box of photographs. He read:

Prestigious novelist Felix Morsom, once nominated for the Booker Prize, refuses to acknowledge and support his love-child. ‘When will Daddy come to see me?' ten-year-old Ian asks mum, Miriam Bowker, 30, who is desperately trying to make ends meet on National Assistance and part-time waitressing. The truth in Felix's life is a great deal more colourful, it seems, than his highbrow fiction.

Felix didn't feel called on to read further. Lucasta's story seemed no longer important. What turned his dream into a nightmare was the face of the man Detective Chief Inspector Cowling wanted to help her and this would be pushed through the country's letter-boxes and seen by millions on their way to work. He folded the paper neatly and went in search of the nearest rubbish bin.

He got rid of the
Meteor
and straightened up. About fifty yards away a man was standing in a pool of light by an empty platform. Although still young, his hair was receding. He had a pale face and metal glasses perched on a girlishly turned-up nose. As Felix watched the man moved away into the shadows.

Felix was as sure as he could be of anything that what he had seen was the living Gavin Piercey.

‘A Mr Felix Morsom is ringing you from a call-box and wishes you to accept the charge.'

‘What?'

‘Will you accept the charge?'

‘Yes?' Septimus Roache, his hair standing on end and his eyes swollen with sleep, had straightened up in his bed, wearing the sort of striped flannel pyjamas which were obligatory in the school dormitory where he had once been happy. His Yes? was a question meaning I'm here and bloody well explain yourself, can't you?, not I'll pay for the call. However, the result of it was a click and an urgent and excited voice.

‘Mr Roache, I'm sorry to call you so early.'

‘It's bloody near two o'clock in the morning.'

‘Felix Morsom here. You remember giving me lunch at your club?'

‘Look, if you just want a friendly chat, piss off. Write me a thank you letter.'

‘You remember I was in a spot of trouble?'

‘Spawned a bastard? Nothing much to boast about. Most authors could do better.'

‘No. This is rather more serious. It seems I'm wanted on a charge of murder.'

There was a pause. Septimus switched on his bedside light and put on a thick-framed pair of reading glasses. Now he could see better, he felt he could hear. ‘That
is
most interesting,' was what he said.

‘I think I've got a defence.'

‘Everyone, however unattractive,' Septimus assured him, ‘has got a defence of some sort. If not, they can be given one.'

‘The man I'm meant to have killed was found beaten to death in his van in Bayswater.'

‘Which man?'

‘Gavin Piercey.'

‘I think I read something. . .'

‘Well, I just saw him get on to a bus.'

Septimus was silent, struck dumb once again by the inability of clients to dream up defences which have anything more than a snowball's chance in Hades.

‘You saw,' he said, ‘the deceased man, whom you may be suspected of doing in, getting out of a bus?'

‘On to a bus.'

‘When?'

‘This morning. Five minutes ago.'

‘An early riser. Up with the lark. How did he die?'

‘His head was beaten in with some blunt instrument. Apparently there were also wounds to the face.'

‘This character you saw getting on to a bus, this ghost, this revenant, this resurrection specialist, did you see his face?'

‘For a moment I did.'

‘Horribly injured?'

‘Not at all. He looked, well, perfectly normal.'

‘So you have woken me at this ungodly hour for the pleasure of telling me you've seen a miracle?'

‘I could have sworn it was Gavin . . .' Felix sounded less certain.

‘I suppose' – Septimus's voice was icy – ‘there's some sort of biblical authority for what you're suggesting? Where was this?'

‘On the Embankment.'

‘Hardly
the road to Emmaus.'

‘But if it was Gavin, I mean, surely I'd have a defence?' Felix had, at best, a sketchy knowledge of the law.

‘It's been a miracle to get some people off.' Septimus never thought it necessary to talk about law to clients. ‘But I've never had to rely on a miracle as a defence. You'd better come into the office. I'm always there by nine thirty.'

‘I can't do that.'

‘Why not?'

‘I might be caught.'

‘That's bound to happen sooner or later.'

‘Not till I've got the evidence.'

‘What's the evidence?'

‘Gavin Piercey.'

‘Where are you now?'

‘I told you. On the Embankment. There are some people here getting fed.'

‘At the Savoy?'

‘No. Near the Savoy. I'll call you later.'

Felix was gone. Septimus put down the phone, then lifted it, dialled another number and left a short message. Then he looked at the sleeping face of a boy only known to him as Yorkie Bar, whom he had attracted by the simple expedient of waving a fifty-pound note through the car window outside the Golden Pavement amusement arcade on his way home from the club. Septimus thought that he had never seen such innocence as there was in the face of the sleeping Yorkie, a look as pure as that of the child Septimus when he first shivered in his striped flannel pyjamas in the icy dormitory at the school from which he had never completely recovered.

‘Gavin!' Felix had called out to his persecutor, a man who was certainly dead, as though to an old friend, the person who, most in the world, he would have wanted to meet in the small hours of a morning on Victoria Station. And then a porter, driving a long chain of swaying, rattling trucks, turned to stare at him and he shrank into the shadows.

Felix had the idea that the figure, the spectre, the double or even, perhaps (and this was his single hope), the living Gavin, had left the station. He found himself running, something he hardly ever did, but it had been a night of physical exercise. He was panting, gasping, muttering ‘Gavin' and occasionally shouting it. In the entrance hall he passed a little posse of cleaners who looked after him as though he were mad, a sleepless Englishman driven crazy by loneliness and fear.

Gavin, or the ghost of Gavin, had not, Felix was sure, been wearing his inevitable blue business suit. His legs were encased in grey, shapeless material, perhaps the bottom of a tracksuit, and he wore a maroon anorak which, when he turned, had a dangling hood like a monk's. Felix ran out of Victoria Street with no idea whether to start up towards the park or down towards the river. Either way seemed equally hopeful or hopeless. Then he remembered that Gavin had told him at an author event which now seemed to have taken place long ago and in another life that he knew what it was to doss down in doorways. One of the sayings of Felix's father, words of warning or advice which he heard echoing from his childhood, was that more people could be found sleeping on the Embankment because they didn't lead out trumps. In his childhood, before he knew much of London, he had a picture of a high sandbank in front of a dark sea, with crowds of ragged and penniless card-players sleeping on it. He knew that the Embankment was where people bedded down for the night so he turned towards it.

He was still running past sleeping blocks of flats and offices, past a dark Chinese restaurant and a lit shop window in which brightly coloured fish swam lazily and pointlessly under a notice, Tasteful Tropicals. Halfway down Victoria Street a man lurched out of the darkness and collided with Felix who apologized profusely. The man shouted, ‘Idiot! You know how many cells you had in your brain the day you were born? Three hundred thousand, would you believe it?' Felix was looking across the road. He could be sure he saw, far down on the other side of the street, in the cold glare of another light, a figure in a maroon anorak which was not running but strutting very rapidly, with its elbows tucked into its sides as though in a walking race. When he tried to move away he found the expert on brain cells attached to his arm. ‘And how many have you got left today? How many, my friend? Let me tell you. Precisely three!' As the man started to laugh, Felix shook him off and ran across the road but somewhere down a side-street or in a doorway the maroon anorak was hiding from him.

At the end of Victoria Street, before he caught sight of the stone fretwork of the Abbey, Felix saw letters on a glass door:
PARENTAL RIGHTS AND OBLIGATIONS DEPARTMENT.
High above it there still seemed to be lights in several windows. Were they at work all night, ruthlessly pursuing careless, delinquent and disappearing fathers? He had no time to worry about them. Soon, he was sure, somewhere by the Sphinx and Cleopatra's Needle, on a bench or a wall, or under a black lamp-post with an iron dolphin twisted about it, he would see Gavin for a third time and be out of danger. He went on, sometimes running, sometimes walking, filled with the single-minded enthusiasm he felt when he hit on a watertight plot, a workable story and had only to summon up his strength and keep going to achieve some sort of success. The idea would become reality as it did when he passed Cleopatra's Needle and found, near Waterloo Bridge, what he now knew would be there.