Felix in the Underworld (7 page)

Felix until she was caught by the wrist and ankles and restored to her low-life lovers. As a result of this theatrical moment Felix achieved a surprising and prolonged erection and was afraid to stand up for ‘God Save the Queen' in case his mother noticed.

At that time the Princess Beatrice was full, prosperous and smelt of floor polish, brown Windsor soup, brandy and cigars. Members of the Rotary Club slapped each other on the back in the bar, laughed loudly and stood rounds. Honeymoon couples held hands at breakfast and only looked at each other a little less passionately than those on illicit weekends. A pianist in a white dinner-jacket played selections from
South Pacific
during the cocktail hour and there were always cucumber sandwiches and scones and cream at teatime. Now the town had fallen on evil days. The holidaymakers, fleeing from the rain, preferred Torremolinos and Lanzarote. The businessmen no longer supported the Rotary Club. McDonald's and the Thai takeaways did good business but the tables in the Princess Beatrice dining-room stood white and empty as ice floes in a polar sea. In an effort to attract some new and classy custom the food had become elaborate without being good. Gone was the comforting brown Windsor soup, the roast beef and Yorkshire, the fried plaice and chips. Mirry and Felix started with ‘grilled goat's cheese de Coldsands avec son salade verte'. After this Ian had called for chicken nuggets but, these delicacies being unavailable, he joined his mother and Felix in ‘pintade à la mode paysanne avec son vin rouge' – a stringy fowl in a slightly vinous gravy, accompanied by a side plate of barely cooked string beans, carrots and bulletlike potatoes. ‘It's a real treat,' Mirry had said, ‘eating out
à la Française.'

‘All that
PROD
stuff, ' Felix said. ‘You know it's nonsense?'

‘Ian, I said, will you please go to an empty table and draw a picture?' Mirry gave this order with surprising firmness and, even more surprisingly, Ian went.

‘You see,' she said when the child had gone, ‘I've changed my hair colour since Bath.'

‘Yes, I noticed that.'

‘You notice quite a lot of things, don't you, Felix?'

‘It's my job.'

‘I thought you found the Titian Russet a bit startling.'

‘A bit.'

‘So now it's the colour it was when we first met. All those years ago.'

‘Miriam,' he said, trying to smile and refilling her glass with the champagne he had ordered to carry out Septimus Roache's idea of a rattling good meal, ‘you know we never met at all those years ago. We first met at Millstream's all those weeks ago.'

She looked at him, smiling kindly, and said, ‘You're a liar, aren't you, Felix?'

‘That's not altogether true!' Felix did lie a little.

‘Oh, but you are. When we met at Bath . . .'

‘Yes. We met then.'

‘Gavin said, “Surely you remember Miriam Bowker?” Didn't Gavin say that? Weren't they his very words?'

‘Well, yes, I think they were.' Felix had the feeling that he was walking, blindfold, towards some deep and bottomless pit.

‘And what did you say to that?'

He became deliberately vague. ‘I can't quite remember.'

‘Let me remind you, Felix. You said, “Well, yes. Yes, of course.” Those were your very words. So you're a liar, aren't you, darling?'

‘I was a liar
then
,' he admitted, ‘when I said, “Yes, I remember you.” '

‘Why did you say it?'

‘To be polite.'

‘What?'

‘Not to hurt your feelings.'

‘Very considerate, I must say.'

‘And because I
might
have met you. At some bookshop or lecture.'

‘Or party?'

‘I suppose it might've been a party. So, I thought I'd say yes I'd remembered you, just until we talked a bit and then you'd remind me exactly when it was.'

She put the back of her hand to her mouth to block laughter. ‘That is the most ridiculous story.'

‘I often do it.' Felix agreed with her that it did sound unconvincing, as the truth usually does.

‘And were you just being polite when you wrote to
PROD
three weeks ago and said you'd never met me and you knew damn well we'd had that little chat at Bath?'

‘You saw the letter?' Being without a defence he took refuge in an accusation. ‘
You're
behind this ridiculous demand?'

‘Of course I saw it. I keep in close touch with Ken.'

‘Ken?'

‘Ken Savage. The bloke you wrote to. He's been very helpful.'

‘Oh, I'm glad he's helpful!'

‘I'm glad you're glad.'

‘You put him up to this!'

‘I was very hurt when I saw what you wrote to Ken. You know what he said? Ken said, “There now. He's told you another porky. We've got him down as ‘liar' in our computer system.” I defended you. I said your job was making up stories. I said you're not a habitual liar. Only sometimes.'

‘I'm not a liar!' Felix looked over at the child who was drawing quietly on the back of a menu, his head down and his tongue out in concentration. ‘He's nothing,' he whispered, ‘to do with me.'

‘There's
two
lies we've nailed down already. Now what about the third?'

‘What's that?'

‘Where we first met?'

‘First?'

‘Here. At Coldsands. Right here.'

‘In this hotel?' He wondered what she would invent.

‘Course not. We couldn't afford hotels like this. Not in those days. Not when we're that much younger. It was at a party. An outdoor party. On the beach.'

The barbecue. The dark photograph. His wife with a string of sausages around her neck, waving a wooden spoon. A shadowy figure in the background which couldn't possibly have been the woman who sat in front of him, crinkling her nose as she drank unaccustomed champagne. Huw Hotchkiss, a man with a deep chest and sturdy, athletic legs, wearing black swimming trunks and a chef's hat. ‘Who gave the party?' he asked, hoping she wouldn't know. ‘Who gave it?'

‘Huw, of course. He gave all the parties.' She smiled and he felt something like despair and asked, with only a glimmer of hope that she wouldn't know the answer, ‘Huw what?'

‘Hotchkiss. You should remember his name, considering his relationship with your wife, which they didn't bother to hide particularly.'

‘Where?'

‘What?'

‘Where did we do it?'

‘Ssh, Felix! Not in front of
him
,' Miriam said in a piercing whisper, which Ian disregarded.

‘Well?'

‘Beside a breakwater, so far as I remember. On a lilo someone had brought.'

‘And after that?'

‘It's up to you to remember.'

‘I told you, I don't remember any of it.'

‘I'd never have had a chance to remind you, would I? Not if Gavin hadn't brought us together.' She laid her hand on his and looked as though she were profoundly amused.

‘Who is this Gavin, anyway?' Felix withdrew his hand.

‘Gavin Piercey. Don't you remember
anything
?'

‘Nothing much that you tell me, I have to admit. Piercey, you say?'

‘He used to hang round Media Studies at the university. Trying a part-time course. We've kept in touch, Gavin and I have. He believes in keeping in touch more than you do, I must say.'

‘Odd way of keeping in touch. He sent me an extraordinary tape and then he kept turning up like the voice of doom uttering vague threats.'

‘I think he wanted to warn you.'

‘Warn me?'

‘Gavin had a bad experience.'

‘So I believe.'

‘Got in wrong with
PROD
about a child. You see, he didn't answer their letters. Just didn't open the envelopes. So they got a court order. Threw him in the slammer!' Miriam covered her mouth with her hand again to trap laughter, which was exploding as though she had just said something both comic and obscene.

‘Whose child was it?'

‘Not Gavin's.'

‘Not?'

‘No. That was the whole point of it. It turned out not to be his child at all!'

‘Sounds familiar.'

‘So
PROD
stopped chasing him and he's in the clear now and he's got his job back. He's in your business, actually.'

‘You mean he's a novelist?'

‘Not as grand as you. He drives around selling books. Well, delivering them to bookshops. For Epsilon Books. I think people have to pay to be published by them.' She looked at him, deeply concerned. ‘You did answer
PROD's
letter, didn't you? It doesn't do not to answer.'

‘I told you I wrote and said it wasn't my child either.'

‘Of course. You told them a few more porkies.'

‘Miriam,' he started.

‘Mirry.'

‘All right. Mirry, I don't know what you've told
PROD
, but now you've got to tell them you've made a mistake. You are utterly and completely mistaken. Of course, if you're really in trouble, I could help you out. To a certain extent. I wouldn't mind doing that. What do you say?'

‘I'm not in trouble, Felix, and I don't want you to be either. But you've got to face up to the truth. You've only got to look at Ian to tell you what that is.'

He looked at Ian. The child had finished drawing and returned to his mother. She looked at the menu he had decorated and handed it to Felix. It was a distorted child's vision of himself, his hair standing on end, his spectacles askew and his shoelaces undone. Under it was a single word, Dad.

‘Is this where it was?'

The summer had vanished ten days after it arrived. Now the wind whipped up froth on the heavy sea, loaded with rubbish. The beach was empty except for elderly couples, their raincoats blown flat against their bodies, calling after wet dogs who bounded off to sniff and clamber on each other. The mess of the short summer – bottles, Coke cans, cardboard plates from takeaways, and the wrapping of contraceptives – lingered among the hillocks of sand. Two men walked along the beach: one with thinning hair disturbed by the wind, lifting to expose bald patches; the other square, short and dark, broad-shouldered and Celtic. They were Felix and Huw Hotchkiss, head of Media Studies and one-time county player of rugby football. Huw was a man who smelled, Felix remembered, of old leather chairs. With his fingers he made a square like a viewfinder and squinted through it, as though planning a shot of the damp breakwater and the litter-strewn sand.

‘“Exterior. Empty beach. Day. Grey sky. Rain. Sound. Laughter. Party chatter. Dissolve to exterior breakwater and beach. Night. There is a party in progress. Huw is barbecuing a chop. Anne Morsom is wearing a necklace of sausages. Assorted students and hangers on are eating, laying out food or getting laid behind the breakwater.” It's all visual. You can do that sort of thing on film. Caxton's dead and buried. The age of the book is over.'

‘Do you remember that party?'

‘Of course I remember.'

‘Was there a lilo put there, do you remember?'

‘A lilo? Oh, you mean an
airbed.
' The Welshman in Media Studies sometimes pretended he could only understand American – the language of the visual arts. ‘Oh, loads of them. Those that didn't bring a steak, or a bottle of red, brought an airbed. It's good to see you, boyo!' Huw put his arm around Felix and squeezed his shoulder painfully. They hadn't met since Anne's funeral and when Huw was embarrassed he became very Welsh, called people boyo and either embraced them or punched them hard in the ribs. In moments of extreme embarrassment he had been known to bring even women down with a flying rugby tackle.

‘It's good to see you too.' Felix was lying again; he had avoided all contact with Huw for years. The strange Miriam had forced him into a meeting with the man who now said, ‘We both lost her, didn't we?'

‘I don't want to talk about Anne.'

‘I understand that, Felix. I understand that completely. She was a beautiful girl and we couldn't keep her.'

‘I want to ask you about another woman.'

‘You've found someone new? Oh, I'm sincerely happy. From the bottom of my heart I'm happy for you, boyo. I won't take this one from you, I promise.'

‘I haven't found her. She's found me. And, as far as I'm concerned, you're welcome to her.'

‘You're bitter about me, boyo.' Huw looked hurt. ‘I can hear the note of bitterness in your voice. But I say this from the bottom of my heart. I wish you every happiness.'

‘Do you remember anyone called Miriam? Or Mirry?' Felix was determined to concentrate on the question he had to ask.

‘There were so many girls about. Students. Friends of students. Wannabe students. We had a whole crowd from central casting. It was a big scene, Felix. A big, vibrant scene in the picture. What was she like?'

‘I'm not sure.'

‘What's she like now?'

‘Either someone from a travelling circus or a quiet, serene-looking secretary.'

‘Make up your mind!' Huw laughed.

‘Whatever she looks like, her name's Miriam Bowker. What I want to know is, was I on a – whatever you call it – an airbed with her at any time during the party?'

‘I don't know. Do you think you were?'

‘From what I remember I was on an airbed making love.'

‘With this circus person?'

‘No, with my wife.'

‘You couldn't have been, I'm sorry to have to tell you.'

‘Why not?'

‘Because I was. There now. Bloody hell, I've hurt your feelings!' Huw punched Felix on the upper arm.

‘It doesn't matter. Do you remember anyone called Gavin Piercey?'