Felix in the Underworld Read Online Free PDF Page A

meet-the-author session. Bottles of Carafino white, jugs of orange juice, samosas and sausages on sticks, sausage rolls and slices of quiche nestled among the bestsellers and piles of paper table napkins. The audience, turned towards Felix, couldn’t see this spread or the glass doors and the rain-soaked, palely lit street.
    As Felix talked he could see these doors open and the little cluster of doorway sleepers, the homeless and dispossessed, silently enter. They wore layers of clothing, scarves and balaclavas or bobble hats. Felix had seen them, or some like them, under a line of eighteenth-century arches on a windswept pavement they had furnished with bundles and boxes and sleeping-bags. Now they advanced, slowly, remorselessly, on the food, less like locusts than blundering bumble-bees, and stretched out for it with mittened fingers reddened from the cold.
    They didn’t clear every plate, which would have exposed their theft, but picked a few sausages, a sandwich here and there, a selection of samosas, and a modest swig from a bottle of white wine. Felix wished them well and tried to hold the attention of his audience, and the staff of the bookshop, while they ate. By the time he had finished his speech, to a gentle shower of applause, the swarm had vanished and the plates, though depleted, looked undisturbed.
    When the queue formed for booksignings, however, an alarming smell approached him. That part of life which Felix feared most came first to him by way of his nose, which was now filled with a cocktail of stale urine, dirty feet, bad breath, fried food and, somewhere in the background, the dry, musty all-enveloping smell of shit. Standing in front of him, parcelled into a collection of wrappings fastened with binder twine, was a dumpy woman of unfathomable age.
    â€˜Put your name on there, Felix. Sorry I can’t afford a book.’ The woman was holding out a sheet, yellowing with age and brittle, of the Western Mail.
    â€˜What name is it?’ Felix was trying to speak whilst holding his breath so that he sounded like a ventriloquist’s doll.
    â€˜Evangeline. And you can put “With love from Felix” and I shan’t mind.’
    He put that and watched her go. What should he have given her? Money, a bottle of the Carafino, a free copy of Out of Season ? Whatever he should have done, he had missed his chance. She was on her way to the door and another book, opened at the flyleaf, was being pushed in front of him. He asked, as he always did, ‘What name shall I write?’
    â€˜Just your signature would be an honour, Mr Morsom. Dated, of course, if you’d care to oblige.’
    It was the voice he had come to recognize. The voice he was hearing for the third time. ‘You’re sure you don’t want me to write your name?’
    â€˜It’s your name that’s important, Mr Morsom. Your name and your book. I’m quite simply a member of the public. No more and no less.’
    Felix’s signing of the book produced a small flash of light. The member of the public had handed a camera to the next person in the queue, who had snapped author and fan chatting at a literary event. This member of the public looked younger than Felix. Perhaps he was not yet thirty but his hair was already receding. He had a pale face and a delicate turned-up nose. Although young he had the look, both anxious and resigned, of middle age. He wore a blue suit and a tie with a crest on it. Felix thought it might have been the tie of a Rotary club or the rowing club of a bank. Watching him recover his camera, Felix said, ‘You’re a member of the public who seems to have been in some terrible trouble. Didn’t you send me a tape?’
    â€˜A tape? You think I’d send you a tape?’ The member of the public looked at Felix with sympathetic concern.
    â€˜I’m sure you did. And you spoke to me on “Good Morning, Thames Estuary”.’
    â€˜Good morning,