Felix in the Underworld by John Mortimer Read Free Book Online

him. Anyway, I can’t stand the stuff he writes. Friend of yours, is he?’
    â€˜No, he’s come to me for a bit of advice.’
    â€˜I should think he needs it. Writing like that. Virginia Woolf and piss.’
    â€˜Read him then?’
    â€˜Read him? Of course I don’t read him! Life’s too short to read Morsom. Why on earth are you having him to lunch?’
    â€˜I told you,’ Septimus Roache shouted gleefully, ‘he’s in a spot of trouble!’
    Members were struggling up to the bar for drinks. Other members came clattering down on their way to lunch while others stood in the entrance hall, warming themselves in front of the fire, reading the evening paper or the news on the tickertape, and waiting for their guests. Some of them may not have known who Felix Morsom was but now they all knew he was in a spot of trouble.
    â€˜Don’t step on this bit of carpet.’ Septimus Roache’s voice was deep and somehow disembodied, so it was difficult to associate his warning rumble with his rare smile of welcome. ‘Members only!’ Felix, who had advanced with an outstretched hand and a polite ‘Mr Roache, isn’t it?’, skipped back from the minefield the members’ carpet no doubt represented.
    â€˜Yes, I’m Seppy Roache.’ The rumble was more gentle now, as though the explosive device had been temporarily defused.
    Felix said, ‘Simon Tubal-Smith at Llama told me you specialize in authors’ troubles?’
    Septimus Roache’s grandfather had been articled to the firm of C.O. Humphries, Son & Kershaw, which acted for Oscar Wilde when he took his disastrous journey through three trials to Reading Gaol. Young Artemus Roache had been no more than a silent spectator at these proceedings, having been sent out of the office to fetch hock and seltzer to quench the thirst of the nervous literary martyr. However, it gave him the idea that artists, particularly literary artists, were vulnerable creatures, usually with secrets to hide, who might
    be lured into costly and unwise litigation. He started his own firm, Roache, Pertwee & Musselbaum, in which he was succeeded by his son and grandson. Writers as diverse as Somerset Maugham, Mrs Radcliffe-Hall, Agatha Christie, Henry Miller and Edgar Wallace would wander casually, and as though they never quite meant to, into the old house in Bedford Square and discuss everything from infringement of copyright and wills to blackmail, gross indecency contrary to the Criminal Law Amendment Act and, on one or two surprising occasions, murder.
    So Septimus (he was so called not because he was the seventh son but because he was seventh in a long line of frustrated hopes, imaginary pregnancies, miscarriages and other disappointments – and the only child to fight, argue and cheat his way into existence with an aggression to which he owed his success in the law) carried on the family tradition and managed to grab from his partners (the descendants of Pertwee and Musselbaum) all the exotic cases arising from the aberrant behaviour of poets, novelists, playwrights and the occasional painter or composer. He was already an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was shortly to be knighted for services to the arts. He was a short-legged, square man with wide shoulders, the face of a discontented Pekinese and wiry grey hair which sprouted, not only around his bald patch, but from his nostrils, his ears and on the backs of his fingers. He wore a bow-tie, a black suit with a wide chalk line, and a monocle dangled round his neck like a foreign order.
    â€˜Well, young fellow,’ he said to his prospective client as they sat together at a table by the high window, ‘what’ve you been up to exactly?’
    â€˜As a matter of fact I’ve just got a new book out, Out of Season. ’
    â€˜You’ll have the brains?’
    â€˜Well, I’m not sure that writing a novel requires