Last Ditch (3 page)

‘Too rough for you?’ sneered – or seemed to sneer – Mr Jones.

‘Not a bit of it,’ Ricky jauntily replied.

‘Watch it. I’ll go first.’

They were on some kind of very wet and very rough path. Ricky could only just see his host, outlined against the dim glow of what seemed to be dirty windows.

He was startled by a prodigious snort followed by squelching footsteps close at hand.

‘What the hell’s that?’ Ricky exclaimed.

‘It’s a horse,’ Mr Jones tossed off.

The invisible horse blew down its nostrils.

They arrived at the windows and at a door. Mr Jones gave the door a kick and it ground noisily open. It had a dirty parody of a
portière
on the inside.

Without an invitation or, indeed, any kind of comment, he went in, leaving Ricky to follow.

He did so, and was astonished to find himself face to face with Miss Harkness.

Ricky heard a voice that might have been anybody’s but his saying:

‘Oh, hullo. Good evening. We meet again. Ha-ha.’

She looked at him with contempt. He said to Mr Jones:

‘We met at luncheon up at L’Esperance.’

‘Oh Christ!’ Mr Jones said in a tone of utter disgust. And to Miss Harkness, ‘What the hell were you doing up there?’

‘Nothing,’ she mumbled. ‘I came away.’

‘So I should bloody hope. Had they got some things of mine up there?’

‘Yes.’

He grunted and disappeared through a door at the far end of the room. Ricky attempted a conversation with Miss Harkness but got nowhere with it. She said something inaudible and retired upon a record-player where she made a choice and released a cacophony.

Mr Jones returned. He dropped on to a sort of divan bed covered with what looked like a horse-rug. He seemed to be inexplicably excited.

‘Take a chair,’ he yelled at Ricky.

Ricky took an armchair, misjudging the distance between his person and the seat, which, having lost its springs, thudded heavily on the floor. He landed in a ludicrous position, his knees level with his ears. Mr Jones and Miss Harkness burst into raucous laughter. Ricky painfully joined in – and they immediately stopped.

He stretched out his legs and began to look about him.

As far as he could make out in the restricted lighting provided by two naked and dirty bulbs, he was in the front of a dilapidated cottage whose rooms had been knocked together. The end where he found himself was occupied by a bench bearing a conglomeration of painter’s materials. Canvases were ranged along the walls including a work which seemed to have been inspired by Miss Harkness herself or at least by her breeches, which were represented with unexpected realism.

The rest of the room was occupied by the divan bed, chairs, a filthy sink, a colour television and a stereophonic record-player. A certain creeping smell as of defective drainage was overlaid by the familiar pungency of turpentine, oil and lead.

Ricky began to ask himself a series of unanswerable questions. Why had Miss Harkness decided against L’Esperance? Was Mr Jones the father of her child? How did Mr Jones contrive to support an existence combining extremes of squalor with colour television and a highly sophisticated record-player? How good or how bad was Mr Jones’s painting?

As if in answer to this last conundrum, Mr Jones got up and began to put a succession of canvases on the easel, presumably for Ricky to look at.

This was a familiar procedure for Ricky. For as long as he could remember, young painters fortified by an introduction or propelled by their own hardihood, would bring their works to his mother and prop them up for her astringent consideration. Ricky hoped he had learnt to look at pictures in the right way, but he had never learned to talk easily about them and in his experience the painters themselves, good or bad, were as a rule extremely inarticulate. Perhaps, in this respect, Mr Jones’s formidable silences were merely occupational characteristics.

But what would Troy, Ricky’s mother, have said about the paintings? Mr Jones had skipped through a tidy sequence of styles. As representation retired before abstraction and abstraction yielded to collage and collage to surrealism, Ricky fancied he could hear her crisp dismissal: ‘Not much cop, I’m afraid, poor chap.’

The exhibition and the pop music came to an end and Mr Jones’s high spirits seemed to die with them. In the deafening silence that
followed Ricky felt he had to speak. He said: ‘Thank you very much for letting me see them.’

‘Don’t give me that,’ said Mr Jones, yawning hideously. ‘Obviously you haven’t understood what I’m doing.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Stuff it. You smoke?’

‘If you mean what I think you mean, no, I don’t.’

‘I didn’t mean anything.’

‘My mistake,’ Ricky said.

‘You ever take a trip?’

‘No,’

‘Bloody smug, aren’t we?’

‘Think so?’ Ricky said, and not without difficulty struggled to his feet. Miss Harkness was fully extended on the divan bed and was possibly asleep.

Mr Jones said: ‘I suppose you think you know what you like.’

‘Why not? Anyway, that’s a pretty crummy old crack, isn’t it?’

‘Do you ever look at anything that’s not in the pretty peep department?’

‘Such as?’

‘Oh, you wouldn’t know,’ Mr Jones said. ‘Such as Troy.
Does
the name Troy mean anything to you, by the way?’

‘Look,’ Ricky said, ‘it really is bad luck for you and I can’t answer without making it sound like a pay-off line. But, yes, the name Troy does mean quite a lot to me. She’s – I feel I ought to say “wait for it, wait for it” – she’s my mother.’

Mr Jones’s jaw dropped. This much could be distinguished by a change of direction in his beard. There were, too, involuntary movements of the legs and arms. He picked up a large tube of paint which he appeared to scrutinize closely. Presently he said in a voice which was pitched unnaturally high:

‘I couldn’t be expected to know that, could I?’

‘Indeed, you couldn’t.’

‘As a matter of fact, I’ve really gone through my Troy phase. You won’t agree, of course, but I’m afraid I feel she’s painted herself out.’

‘Are you?’

Mr Jones dropped the tube of paint on the floor.

Ricky picked it up.

‘Jerome et Cie,’ he said. ‘They’re a new firm, aren’t they? I think they sent my Mum some specimens to try. Do you get it direct from France?’

Jones took it from him.

‘I generally use acrylic,’ he said.

‘Well,’ Ricky said, ‘I think I’ll seek my virtuous couch. It was nice of you to ask me in.’

They faced each other as two divergent species in a menagerie might do.

‘Anyway,’ Ricky said, ‘we do both speak English, don’t we?’

‘You reckon?’ said Mr Jones. And after a further silence: ‘Oh Christ, forget the lot and have a beer.’

‘I’ll do that thing,’ said Ricky.

To say that after this exchange all went swimmingly at Mr Jones’s pad would not be an accurate account of that evening’s strange entertainment but at least the tone became less acrimonious. Indeed, Mr Jones developed high spirits of a sort and instructed Ricky to call him Syd. He was devoured by curiosity about Ricky’s mother, her approach to her work and – this was a tricky one – whether she took pupils. Ricky found this behavioural change both touching and painful.

Miss Harkness took no part in the conversation but moodily produced bottled beer of which she consumed rather a lot. It emerged that the horse Ricky had shrunk from in the dark was her mount. So, he supposed, she would not spend the night at Syd’s pad, but would ride, darkling, to the stables or – was it possible? – all the way to L’Esperance and the protection, scarcely, it seemed, called for, of the Pharamonds.

By midnight Ricky knew that Syd was a New Zealander by birth, which accounted for certain habits of speech. He had left his native soil at the age of seventeen and had lived in his pad for a year. He did some sort of casual labour at Leathers, the family riding-stables to which Miss Harkness was attached but from which she seemed to have been evicted.

‘He mucks out,’ said Miss Harkness in a solitary burst of conversation and, for no reason that Ricky could divine, gave a hoarse laugh.

It transpired that Syd occasionally visited St Pierre-des-Roches, the nearest port on the Normandy coast to which there was a weekly ferry service.

At a quarter to one Ricky left the pad, took six paces into the night and fell flat on his face in the mud. He could hear Miss Harkness’s horse giving signs of equine consternation.

The village was fast asleep under a starry sky, the sound of the night tide rose and fell uninterrupted by Ricky’s rubber-shod steps on the cobbled front. Somewhere out on the harbour a solitary light bobbed, and he wondered if Mr Ferrant was engaged in his hobby of night fishing. He paused to watch it and realized that it was nearer inshore than he had imagined and coming closer. He could hear the rhythmic dip of oars.

There was an old bench facing the front. Ricky thought he would wait there and join Mr Ferrant, if indeed it was he, when he landed.

The light vanished round the far side of the jetty. Ricky heard the gentle thump of the boat against a pier followed by irregular sounds of oars being stowed and objects shifted. A man with a lantern rose into view and made fast the mooring lines. He carried a pack on his back and began to walk down the jetty. He was too far away to be identified.

Ricky was about to get up and go to meet him when, as if by some illusionist’s trick, there was suddenly a second figure beside the first. Ricky remained where he was, in shadow.

The man with the lantern raised it to the level of his face, and Ricky saw that he was indeed Ferrant, caught in a Rembrandt-like golden effulgence. Ricky kept very still, feeling that to approach them would be an intrusion. They came towards him. Ferrant said something indistinguishable and the other replied in a voice that was not that of the locals: ‘OK, but watch it. Good night.’ They separated. The newcomer walked rapidly away towards the turning that led up to the main road and Ferrant crossed the street to his own house.

Ricky ran lightly and soundlessly after him. He was fitting his key in the lock and had his back turned.

‘Good morning, Mr Ferrant,’ Ricky said.

He spun round with an oath.

‘I’m sorry,’ Ricky stammered, himself jolted by this violent reaction. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you.’

Ferrant said something in French, Ricky thought, and laughed, a little breathlessly.

‘Have you been making a night of it, then?’ he said, ‘Not much chance of that in the Cove.’

‘I’ve been up at Syd Jones’s.’

‘Have you now,’ said Ferrant. ‘Fancy that.’ He pushed the door open and stood back for Ricky to enter.

‘Good night then, Mr Alleyn,’ said Ferrant.

As Ricky entered he heard in the distance the sound of a car starting. It seemed to climb the steep lane out of Deep Cove, and at that moment he realized that the second man on the wharf had been Louis Pharamond.

The house was in darkness. Ricky crept upstairs making very little noise. Just before he shut his bedroom door he heard another door close quite near at hand.

For a time he lay awake listening to the sound of the tide and thinking what a long time it seemed since he arrived in Deep Cove. He drifted into a doze, and found the scarcely-formed persons of the book he hoped to write, taking upon themselves characteristics of the Pharamonds, of Sydney Jones, of Miss Harkness and the Ferrants, so that he scarcely knew which was which.

The next morning was cold and brilliant with a March wind blowing through a clear sky. Mrs Ferrant gave Ricky a grey mullet for his breakfast, the reward, it emerged, of her husband’s night excursion.

By ten o’clock he had settled down to a determined attack on his work.

He wrote in longhand, word after painful word. He wondered why on earth he couldn’t set about this job with something resembling a design. Once or twice he thought possibilities – the ghosts of promise – began to show themselves. There was one character, a woman, who had stepped forward and presented herself to be written about. An appreciable time went by before he realized he was dealing with Julia Pharamond.

It came as quite a surprise to find that he had been writing for two hours. He eased his fingers and filled his pipe. I’m feeling better, he thought.

Something spattered against the window-pane. He looked out and down, and there, with his face turned up, was Jasper Pharamond.

‘Good morning to you,’ Jasper called in his alto voice, ‘are you
incommunicado
? Is this a liberty?’

‘Of course not. Come up.’

‘Only for a moment.’

He heard Mrs Ferrant go down the passage, the door open and Jasper’s voice on the stairs: ‘It’s all right, thank you, Marie. I’ll find my way.’

Ricky went out to the landing and watched Jasper come upstairs. He pretended to make heavy weather of the ascent, rocking his shoulders from side to side and thumping his feet.

‘Really!’ he panted when he arrived. ‘This is the authentic setting. Attic stairs and the author embattled at the top. You must be sure to eat enough. May I come in?’

He came in, sat on Ricky’s bed with a pleasant air of familiarity, and waved his hand at the table and papers. ‘The signs are propitious,’ he said.

‘The place is propitious,’ Ricky said warmly. ‘And I’m very much obliged to you for finding it. Did you go tramping about the village and climbing interminable stairs?’

‘No, no. Julia plumped for Marie Ferrant.’

‘You knew her already?’

‘She was in service up at L’Esperance before she married. We’re old friends,’ said Jasper lightly.

Ricky thought that might explain Mrs Ferrant’s curiosity.

‘I’ve come with an invitation,’ Jasper said. ‘It’s just that we thought we’d go over to Montjoy to dine and trip a measure on Saturday and we wondered if it would amuse you to come.’

Ricky said: ‘I ought to say no, but I won’t. I’d love to.’

‘We must find somebody nice for you.’

‘It won’t by any chance be Miss Harkness?’

‘My dear!’ exclaimed Jasper excitedly. ‘Apropos the Harkness! Great drama! Well, great drama in a negative sense. She’s gone!’

‘When?’

‘Last night. Before dinner. She prowled down the drive, disappeared and never came back. Bruno wonders if she jumped over the cliff – too awful to contemplate.’

‘You may set your minds at rest,’ said Ricky. ‘She didn’t do that.’ And he told Jasper all about his evening with Syd Jones and Miss Harkness.

‘Well!’ said Jasper. ‘There you are. What a very
farouche
sort of girl. No doubt the painter is the partner of her shame and the father of her unborn babe. What’s he like? His work, for instance?’

‘You ought to be the best judge of that. You’ve got some of it pinned on your drawing-room walls.’

‘I might have known it!’ Jasper cried dramatically. ‘Another of Julia’s finds! She bought them in the street in Montjoy on Market Day. I can’t wait to tell her,’ Jasper said, rising energetically. ‘What fun! No. We must both tell her.’