Felix in the Underworld by John Mortimer Page B

it. Ian, do Mummy a favour won’t you?’
    â€˜What?’ The child’s loud question was full of suspicion.
    â€˜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
    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.’
    â€˜All that PROD stuff, ’ Felix said. ‘You know it’s nonsense?’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜You see,’ she said when the child had gone, ‘I’ve changed my hair colour since Bath.’
    â€˜Yes, I noticed that.’
    â€˜You notice quite a lot of things, don’t you, Felix?’
    â€˜It’s my job.’
    â€˜I thought you found the Titian Russet a bit startling.’
    â€˜A bit.’
    â€˜So now it’s the colour it was when we first met. All those years ago.’
    â€˜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