Felix in the Underworld by John Mortimer

think that was the expression. I may have a copy at home. I’ll send you a photostat.’
    â€˜Please. Don’t trouble.’
    â€˜No trouble at all. I believe the fellow who wrote that review went to Winchester.’
    â€˜Did he?’
    â€˜Perfectly decent school. You know what you need to do if you want good notices?’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜No, you have. I’ve been chewing the fat with young Morsom here.’
    â€˜Oh, yes? And what have you two literary giants been talking about? “Whither the novel?”?’
    â€˜Not at all! Morsom here was discussing murder.’
    â€˜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.’

Chapter Seven
    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