Felix in the Underworld (11 page)

Ian said, ‘Quiet, Mum! I'm doing my homework.' He was reading a book, his head pillowed on one arm, his spectacled eyes very near the page. Miriam said, ‘If you don't want to listen to us, Ian, please go to your room.'

‘What are you reading, Ian?' Felix felt sorry for the boy who had been ordered out.

‘A book called
Where's My Left Sock?
'

‘I don't believe it!'

‘It's by Sonia Foot.'

There was a moment's stunned silence. Miriam looked unforgiving. Then Felix laughed. In fact he thought it was quite funny.

‘I read another one.' Ian gazed solemnly at their visitor. ‘
How to Make Easy Money.
'

‘Who wrote that, then?'

‘Robin Banks! And
Falling off the Cliff
by . . .'

‘That's
quite
enough of that.' Miriam was running out of patience. ‘Please go to your room. I won't ask again.'

‘. . . Eileen Dover. I'm bored with my room.' Felix had seen it and knew what he meant. Ian had been given the only bedroom but, apart from a single bed, it looked unfurnished. Stuck to the wall was a small author photograph cut from the dust-jacket of
Out of Season.
The sight of it filled Felix with fear and embarrassment but also a strange gratitude. Miriam had found the remains of a bottle of white Rioja in her fridge and he was given what seemed to be the only glass. She was drinking out of a cup and had become calm. He asked, ‘You went to see Gavin?'

‘He'd asked me round.'

‘What for?'

‘You're as bad as the police!' When she smiled he thought she looked momentarily attractive. He didn't mind the forward-looking teeth; her top lip no longer seemed to be pulled back in any kind of sneer. ‘He wanted to talk.'

‘What about?'

‘He said about you being after him all the time. Trying to get at him.'

‘I thought it was the other way round. He was always after me. Did you tell the police that?'

‘He said you went after him at his work. Yes, I had to tell them the truth.'

‘I suppose you did.' He took a gulp of the cold white wine which did little to steady his nerves. ‘I was there a few nights ago. I couldn't find him. I kept on ringing. . .'

‘I was there the night before last. I'm afraid I did find him.'

‘How?'

‘Ian? Please, darling. Will you finish your homework in your room?'

‘
All right!
Ian shouted with unexpected rage. He slapped his books together, took a long time filling his pencil-case and then banged the door as he left them. Miriam said, ‘He didn't answer the bell so, for some reason, I thought I'd look inside the van.'

‘What time was this?'

‘Oh, late. Past eleven o'clock.'

‘So it was dark?'

‘Yes. I suppose that's why no one noticed him before.'

‘You were out at eleven?'

‘Yes.'

‘Who was looking after Ian?'

‘Ian looks after himself. Why are you asking me all these questions?'

‘Someone killed Gavin. I just wondered who.'

She was looking at him, no longer smiling. ‘Yes. I wonder who it was.'

‘The van wasn't locked?'

‘No. But I could see inside it. He'd fallen over the steering-wheel. There was blood. I could see so much blood.' She said it calmly, still looking at him. ‘I went to a call-box and rang the police.'

‘It must have been terrible for you.'

‘Pretty terrible. Particularly when I had to go with them to identify Gavin. I don't know why they needed that. It was his van. He had his driving licence, all his stuff in his pockets. I don't know why they had to put me through that at all.' She got up and searched the room for a cigarette, found the last Marlboro in a jacket swinging from the broom handle and lit it by switching on the gas cooker, holding back her hair to save it from the flame. As she straightened up, she said, ‘Are you hungry at all, Felix?'

He didn't answer but said, ‘Who could have done that to him? Did Gavin have enemies?'

‘I don't know. I didn't know him all that well.'

‘You didn't know him all that well and you said he was the father of your child?' It was, as he had suspected, an accusation she flung at the merest acquaintances.

‘I knew him. Of course I knew him. When we were all young. When we all hung round the university.'

‘And you slept with him?'

‘If you call it sleeping. He was enthusiastic, Gavin was.' She laughed. ‘You could say that for him. Over-enthusiastic at times.'

Felix felt a moment of embarrassment for the dead Gavin and was angered at Miriam's laughter. ‘Made up in enthusiasm for what he lacked in experience. You could put it like that,' she said.

‘And afterwards?'

‘He kept in touch. I didn't want him to particularly. Christmas. Always remembered my birthday and Ian's. Helped me out from time to time, I've got to admit it.'

‘So you shopped him to
PROD?
'

‘Did Gavin tell you that?'

‘As good as.'

‘They were on at me to name a father. On and on. Remorseless. I had to give them a name. I gave them his.'

‘Not mine?'

‘I didn't want to cause you trouble.'

‘But you changed your mind?'

‘Because of what they did to Gavin. Locking him up. That wasn't fair.'

‘So you lied to get him out of trouble?'

‘I had Ian to consider. So I told them the truth.'

‘Even if it happened. Even if anything like that happened' – he was standing up, but keeping his voice down, remembering the silent boy behind the door – ‘on a lilo. On the beach. Once. Why should that mean . . . ?'

‘Because I knew. I knew as soon as it was over. That's it, I thought. Women always know.'

‘Women don't!'

‘In your books they might not. I know what I felt. None better.'

‘And all these years. You've never said a word.'

‘Like I said I didn't want to worry you.'

‘Worry me? Do you know what I saw? Today? Policemen. Two of them at my front door. Remember what happened to Gavin? Two men came to arrest me. Because of Ian.'

There was a long silence and then she said, ‘I don't think it was because of Ian.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘I think it was because of Gavin. You want to stay and talk about it? Why don't you buy your little family a Chinese meal?'

His mind raced through the past weeks. Sometimes it seemed like days, sometimes years, since he had listened to Gavin's tape. As he talked, Miriam became gentler and he found it harder to maintain his anger. It had, after all, she explained, been Gavin's idea to finger Felix to
PROD.
She had gone along with it, she said, but always reluctantly and with Ian's best interests at heart. And, once the suggestion was made, of course, she understood why he denied it. Anyone would have wanted to meet Gavin, to have it out with him, to come, perhaps, to some sensible compromise. That wasn't suspicious. In Miriam's opinion that wasn't enough to make him a suspect in the matter of Gavin's unusual and sudden death.

Soothed after a while by the new and reasonable Miriam, Felix gave her money to go out and buy a Chinese takeaway for three, in which might be included six cans of beer and a bottle of sake. He stifled a phrase which floated disconcertingly into his mind: ‘The condemned man ate a hearty breakfast.'

The light faded outside the uncurtained windows; Mirry switched on two lamps with plastic, art-deco patterned shades which gave the chaotic room an almost festive appearance. She lit joss-sticks in a jam jar on the mantelpiece which wafted Felix back to his first days at university. The television was taken off the bed and turned on in a comer of the room, where it glowed and burbled, a meaninglessly talking light. The food in the silvery cardboard dishes gave off a strong smell of monosodium glutamate. Ian, dressed in striped pyjamas, said the Chinese dinner was cool and ate solidly. Felix drank three beers and most of the bottle of sake as his anxieties dwindled. After a while Ian went to bed. Mirry followed to say good night to him and when she came back Felix stood and said he ought to be going.

‘It's late,' she said. ‘And you're a bit pissed, quite honestly. Also, those coppers might be waiting for you.'

‘I suppose they might.'

‘Why not stay? You can decide what to do in the morning.'

‘No room.' He looked down at the pile of jumble which was her bed.

‘I'll make some room.'

She worked at it, moving armfuls of her clothes and dumping them on chairs or beside the television. He lay down in surprising comfort and she lay beside him. He closed his eyes and felt he was back, years before Huw Hotchkiss's beach party, to the time when he had smelled incense and tried to stretch out in too small, inconvenient beds, in lodgings or halls of residence, and stumbled on unforgettable excitement and suddenly revealed happiness. Miriam was undressing him with the efficiency of a nurse and then she changed character as she pulled the sweater over her head. He had expected, even feared, dirty bra straps but her small breasts were free, her body was white, without any individual smell to it. Her face was near his, her eyes full of what seemed to be genuine concern. Deliberately and with unexpected pleasure, he did what he might or might not ever have done before. Then they both fell asleep.

An hour later he was awake with a dry mouth and a headache. He turned over, disentangling himself from the embrace of the sleeping Miriam, and looked at his watch, surprised to see it was only a quarter past ten. He found himself staring at the bright light of the portable television. A grey-haired, handsome woman he recognized was standing outside Paddington Green police station talking to reporters: ‘Our inquiries have led us to believe that Gavin Piercey was receiving death threats,' she said in the gentle but enthusiastic tones of a headmistress announcing the results of the sixth form relay races. ‘We are still looking out for a man we believe can help us with our inquiries. We should be able to name him shortly. No further questions!'

Felix crawled out of the floor-level bed and switched off the television, causing Miriam to turn over, almost woken by the sudden silence. He stood motionless until she was sleeping securely again and then dressed and let himself out of the flat, stifling the feeling that he ought, in some way, to have said goodbye to Ian.

As he turned the dark comer to reach the last flight of stairs, he could see, lit by a weak bulb in a clouded glass, a tall, bald-headed man with a shorter companion. The shorter had his finger on the lift button and the taller was angrily telling the empty space that fucking twelve-year-old yob vandals had fucked up the lift. On the dark stairway Felix froze again like one of Sleeping Beauty's attendants. And then with a furious rattle and a jolt the lift unexpectedly arrived and yawned open, as though to disprove the charge of criminal damage against minors. As soon as the men had been carried away, Felix left the building and, setting off towards the World's End, broke into an unaccustomed trot.

If the Furies were after him; if, at the whim of the Gods, the bald man and the man, as Gavin would have said, casually dressed, had gone to search for him at the World's End, they couldn't be in Coldsands. So surely, at least, he was safe to go home, to make plans, to collect his thoughts. In the house where he had been a child, where he could have a bath and sleep in his own bed, get up early and look out as the sun rose over the unconcerned sea, he would be able to discover a sensible course of action, as he found consistent behaviour for the characters in his books. The worst that could happen to him would be that he'd have to lose a pile of cash to satisfy
PROD
– the advance on a new novel perhaps. If he was really up against it, he could find money for Ian as he'd had to find it to keep his mother, silent and smiling, in the Evening Star Rest and Retirement Home.

But then, as he sat on top of a bus creeping along the King's Road on a late summer evening, where crowds were standing outside the pubs, drinking, laughing, quarrelling and sitting on walls, where drivers were trying to back into impossible parking spaces outside bistros and a man with a shaven head was leading a taller man on a chain and dog-collar, Felix remembered that his present difficulties couldn't be solved by a hefty slice of a publisher's advance. ‘I don't think it was because of Ian,' Miriam had said when he told her about the Furies, ‘I think it was because of Gavin.'

Gavin. Everything started and ended with Gavin. Gavin had sent him the tape and dogged his footsteps on his book tour. Gavin, found dead in a car with his head battered in, was still pursuing him. The police were looking for a man who could help them with their inquiries, and men from whom the police sought assistance were soon, Felix knew, in serious trouble. What had the policewoman with literary leanings said on the television news? ‘Our inquiries have led us to believe that Gavin Piercey was receiving death threats. . .' Could she believe that a novelist without a stain on his character, once described as the Chekhov of Coldsands-on-Sea, would utter death threats to a publisher's rep who was, as he had constantly shown, a devoted admirer of that novelist's work? The idea was absurd. Did it become less absurd because the novelist, after drinking champagne in a London club, had been led into a fatuous conversation about a contract killing with an elderly solicitor who fed himself on brains?

For a moment he wondered if he shouldn't go straight to Paddington Green police station and seek an interview with the headmistress. But then his thoughts, straying irresponsibly, wandered to his message on Gavin's answering machine: ‘If you won't withdraw your story at once, I shall be compelled to take steps to silence you.'

He hadn't said that, had he? That wasn't an accurate quotation. But then he was afraid he had said
exactly
that. Well, if he had, could such words be construed as a death threat by the porcelain-faced Chief Inspector? When he asked himself this question the disloyal voice within him answered, Let's face it, that's exactly what she thinks. Looking round, he thought the woman with beads and a long nose, sitting on the other side of the aisle, was staring at him curiously. He picked up the sports page of the paper which had been left on the next seat and held it to hide his face all the way to Victoria Station.