Last Ditch

‘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.’

‘Where is she?’

‘Down below, in the car. Come and see her, do.’

Ricky couldn’t resist the thought of Julia so near at hand. He followed Jasper down the stairs, his heart thumping as violently as if he had run up them.

It was a dashing sports car and Julia looked dashing and expensive to match it. She was in the driver’s seat, her gloved hands drooping on the wheel with their gauntlets turned back so that her wrists shone delicately. Jasper at once began to tell about Miss Harkness, inviting Ricky to join in. Ricky thought how brilliantly she seemed to listen and how this air of being tuned-in invested all the Pharamonds. He wondered if they lost interest as suddenly as they acquired it.

When he had answered her questions she said briskly: ‘A case, no doubt, of like calling to like. Both of them naturally speechless. No doubt she’s gone into residence at the pad.’

‘I’m not so sure,’ Ricky said. ‘Her horse was there, don’t forget. It seemed to be floundering about in the dark.’

Jasper said, ‘She would hardly leave it like that all night. Perhaps it was only a social call after all.’

‘How very odd,’ Julia said, ‘to think of Miss Harkness in the small hours of the morning, riding through the Cove. I wonder she didn’t wake you up.’

‘She may not have passed by my window.’

‘Well,’ Julia said, ‘I’m beginning all of a sudden to weary of Miss Harkness. It was very boring of her to be so rude, walking out on us like that.’

‘It’d have been a sight more boring if she’d stayed, however,’ Jasper pointed out.

There was a clatter of shoes on the cobblestones and the Ferrant son, Louis, came running by on his way home from school. He slowed up when he saw the car and dragged his feet, staring at it and walking backwards.

‘Hullo, young Louis,’ Ricky said.

He didn’t answer. His sloe eyes looked out of a pale face under a dark thatch of hair. He backed slowly away, turned and suddenly ran off down the street.

‘That’s Master Ferrant, that was,’ said Ricky.

Neither of the Pharamonds seemed to have heard him. For a second or two they looked after the little boy and then Jasper said lightly: ‘Dear me! It seems only the other day that his Mum was a bouncing tweeny or parlourmaid, or whatever it was she bounced at.’

‘Before my time,’ said Julia. ‘She’s a marvellous laundress and still operates for us. Darling, we’re keeping Ricky out here. Who can tell what golden phrase we may have aborted. Super that you can come on Saturday, Ricky.’

‘Pick you up at eightish,’ cried Jasper, bustling into the car. They were off, and Ricky went back to his room.

But not, at first, to work. He seemed to have taken the Pharamonds upstairs, and with them little Louis Ferrant, so that the room was quite crowded with white faces, black hair and brilliant pitch-ball eyes.

III

Montjoy might have been on another island from the Cove and in a different sea. Once a predominantly French fishing village, it was now a fashionable place with marinas, a yacht club, surfing, striped umbrellas and, above all, the celebrated Hotel Montjoy itself with its Stardust Ballroom, whose plateglass dome and multiple windows could be seen, airily glowing, from far out to sea. Here, one dined and danced expensively to a famous band, and here, on Saturday night at a window-table sat the Pharamonds, Ricky and a girl called Susie de Waite.

They ate lobster salad and drank champagne. Ricky talked to and danced with Susie de Waite as was expected of him and tried not to look too long and too often at Julia Pharamond.

Julia was in great form, every now and then letting off the spluttering firework of her laughter. He had noticed at luncheon that she had uninhibited table-manners and ate very quickly. Occasionally she sucked her fingers. Once when he had watched her doing this he found Jasper looking at him with amusement.

‘Julia’s eating habits,’ he remarked, ‘are those of a partially-trained marmoset.’

‘Darling,’ said Julia, waggling the sucked fingers at him, ‘I love you better than life itself.’

‘If only,’ Ricky thought, ‘she would look at me like that’ – and immediately she did, causing his unsophisticated heart to bang at his ribs and the blood mount to the roots of his hair.

Ricky considered himself pretty well adjusted to the contemporary scene. But, he thought, every adventure that he had experienced so far had been like a bit of fill-in dialogue leading to the entry of the star. And here, beyond all question, she was.

She waltzed now with her cousin Louis. He was an accomplished dancer and Julia followed him effortlessly. They didn’t talk to each other, Ricky noticed. They just floated together – beautifully.

Ricky decided that he didn’t perhaps quite like Louis pharamond. He was too smooth. And anyway, what had he been up to in the Cove at one o’clock in the morning?

The lights were dimmed to a black-out. From somewhere in the dome, balloons, treated to respond to ultraviolet ray, were released in hundreds and jostled uncannily together, filling the ballroom with luminous bubbles. The band reduced itself to the whispering shish-shish of waves on the beach below. The dancers, scarcely moving, resembled those shadows that seem to bob and pulse behind the screen of an inactive television set.

‘May we?’ Ricky asked Susie de Waite.

He had once heard his mother say that a great deal of his father’s success as an investigating officer stemmed from his gift for getting people to talk about themselves. ‘It’s surprising,’ she had said, ‘how few of them can resist him.’

‘Did you?’ her son asked.

‘Yes,’ Troy said, and after a pause, ‘but not for long.’

So Ricky asked Susie de Waite about herself and it was indeed surprising how readily she responded. It was also surprising how unstimulating he found her self-revelations.

And then, abruptly, the evening was set on fire. They came alongside Julia and Louis and Julia called to Ricky.

‘Ricky, if you don’t dance with me again at once I shall take umbrage.’ And then to Louis. ‘Goodbye, darling. I’m off.’

And she was in Ricky’s arms. The stars in the sky had come reeling down into the ballroom and the sea had got into his eardrums and bliss had taken up its abode in him for the duration of a waltz.

They left at two o’clock in the large car that belonged, it seemed, to the Louis Pharamonds. Louis drove with Susie de Waite next to him and Bruno on her far side. Ricky found himself at the back between Julia and Carlotta, and Jasper was on the tip-up seat facing them.

When they were clear of Montjoy on the straight road to the Cove, Louis asked Susie if she’d like to steer, and on her rapturously accepting, put his arm round her. She took the wheel.

‘Is this all right?’ Carlotta asked at large. ‘Is she safe?’

‘It’s fantastic,’ gabbled Susie. ‘Safe as houses. Promise! Ow! Sorry!

She really is rather an ass of a girl, Ricky thought.

Julia picked up Ricky’s hand and then Carlotta’s. ‘Was it a pleasant party?’ she asked, gently tapping their knuckles together. ‘Have you liked it?’

Ricky said he’d adored it. Julia’s hand was still in his. He wondered whether it would be all right to kiss it under, as it were, her husband’s nose, but felt he lacked the style. She gave his hand a little squeeze, dropped it, leant forward and kissed her husband.

‘Sweetie,’ Julia cried extravagantly, ‘you are such heaven! Do look, Ricky, that’s Leathers up there where Miss Harkness does her stuff. We really must all go riding with her before it’s too late.’

‘What do you mean,’ her husband asked, ‘by your “too late”?’

‘Too late for Miss Harkness, of course. Unless, of course, she does it on purpose, but that would be very silly of her. Too silly for words,’ said Julia severely.

Susie de Waite let out a scream that modulated into a giggle. The car shot across the road and back again.

Carlotta said sharply: ‘Louis, do keep your techniques for another setting.’

Louis gave what Ricky thought of as a bedroom laugh, cuddled Susie up and closed his hand over hers on the wheel.

‘Behave,’ he said. ‘Bad girl.’

They arrived at the lane that descended precipitously into the Cove. Louis took charge, drove pretty rapidly down it and pulled up in front of the Ferrant cottage.

‘Here we are,’ he said. ‘Abode of the dark yet passing-fair Marie. Is she still dark and passing-fair, by the way?’

Nobody answered.

Louis said very loudly: ‘Any progeny? Oh, but of course. I forgot.’

‘Shut up,’ Jasper said, in a tone of voice that Ricky hadn’t heard from him before.

He and Julia and Carlotta together said good night to Ricky, who by this time was outside the car. He shut the door as quietly as he could and stood back. Louis reversed noisily and much too fast. He called out something that sounded like: ‘Give her my love.’ The car shot away in low gear and roared up the lane.

Upstairs on the dark landing Ricky could hear Ferrant snoring prodigiously and pictured him with his red hair and high colour and his mouth wide open. Evidently he had not gone fishing that night.

IV

In her studio in Chelsea, Troy shoved her son’s letter into the pocket of her painting smock and said:

‘He’s fallen for Julia Pharamond.’

‘Has he, now?’ said Alleyn. ‘Does he announce it in so many words?’

‘No, but he manages to drag her into every other sentence of his letter. Take a look.’

Alleyn read his son’s letter with a lifted eyebrow. ‘I see what you mean,’ he said presently.

‘Oh well,’ Troy muttered. ‘It’ll be one girl and then another, I suppose, and then, with any luck, just one and that a nice one. In the meantime, she’s very attractive. Isn’t she?’

‘A change from dirty feet, jeans, and beads in the soup, at least.’

‘She’s beautiful,’ said Troy.

‘He may tire of her heavenly inconsequence.’

‘You think so?’

‘Well, I would. They seem to be taking quite a lot of trouble over him. Kind of them.’

‘He’s a jolly nice young man,’ Troy said firmly.

Alleyn chuckled and read on in silence.

‘Why,’ Troy asked presently, ‘do you suppose they live on that island?’

‘Dodging taxation. They’re clearly a very clannish lot. The other two are there.’

‘The cousins that came on board at Acapulco?’

‘Yes,’ Alleyn said. ‘It was a sort of enclave of cousins.’

‘The Louis’s seem to live with the Jaspers, don’t they?’

‘Looks like it.’ Alleyn turned a page of the letter. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘besotted or not, he seems to be writing quite steadily.’

‘I wonder if his stuff’s any good, Rory? Do you wonder?’

‘Of course I do,’ he said, and went to her.

‘It can be tough going, though, can’t it?’

‘Didn’t you swan through a similar stage?’

‘Now I come to think of it,’ Troy said, squeezing a dollop of flake white on her palette, ‘I did. I wouldn’t tell my parents anything about my young men and I wouldn’t show them anything I painted. I can’t imagine why.’

‘You gave me the full treatment when I first saw you, didn’t you? About your painting?’

‘Did I? No, I didn’t. Shut up,’ said Troy, laughing. She began to paint.

‘That’s the new brand of colour, isn’t it? Jerome et Cie?’ said Alleyn, and picked up a tube.

‘They sent it for free. Hoping I’d talk about it, I suppose. The white and the earth colours are all right but the primaries aren’t too hot. Rather odd, isn’t it, that Rick should mention them?’

‘Rick? Where?’

‘You haven’t got to the bit about his new painting chum and the pregnant equestrienne.’

‘For the love of Mike!’ Alleyn grunted and read on. ‘I must say,’ he said, when he’d finished, ‘he can write, you know, darling. He can indeed.’

Troy put down her palette, flung her arm round him and pushed her head into his shoulder. ‘He’ll do us nicely,’ she said, ‘won’t he? But it was quite a coincidence, wasn’t it? About Jerome et Cie and their paint?’

‘In a way,’ said Alleyn, ‘I suppose it was.’

V

On the morning after the party, Ricky apologized to Mrs Ferrant for the noisy return in the small hours, and although Mr Ferrant’s snores were loud in his memory, said he was afraid he had been disturbed.

‘It’d take more than that to rouse him,’ she said. She never referred to her husband by name. ‘I heard you. Not you but him. Pharamond. The older one.’

She gave Ricky a sideways look that he couldn’t fathom. Derisive? Defiant? Sly? Whatever lay behind her manner, it was certainly not that of an ex-domestic cook, however emancipated. She left him with the feeling that the corner of a curtain had been lifted and dropped before he could see what lay beyond it.

During the week he saw nothing of the Pharamonds except in one rather curious incident on the Thursday evening. Feeling the need of a change of scene, he had wheeled his bicycle up the steep lane, pedalled along the road to Montjoy and at a point not far from L’Esperance had left his machine by the wayside and walked towards the cliff-edge.

The evening was brilliant and the Channel, for once, blue with patches of bedazzlement. He sat down with his back to a warm rock at a place where the cliff opened into a ravine through which a rough path led between clumps of wild broom, down to the sea. The air was heady and a salt breeze felt for his lips. A lark sang and Ricky would have liked a girl – any girl – to come up through the broom from the sea with a reckless face and the sun in her eyes.

Instead, Louis Pharamond came up the path. He was below Ricky, who looked at the top of his head. He leant forward, climbing, swinging his arms, his chin down.

Ricky didn’t want to encounter Louis. He shuffled quickly round the rock and lay on his face. He heard Louis pass by on the other side. Ricky waited until the footsteps died away, wondering at his own behaviour.

He was about to get up when he heard a displaced stone roll down the path. The crown of a head and the top of a pair of shoulders appeared below him. Grossly foreshortened though they were, there was no mistaking who they belonged to. Ricky sank down behind his rock and let Miss Harkness, in her turn, pass him by.

He rode back to the cottage.

He was gradually becoming persona grata at the pub. He was given a ‘good evening’ when he came in and warmed up to when, his work having prospered that day, he celebrated by standing drinks all round. Bill Prentice, the fish-truck driver, offered to give him a lift into Montjoy if ever he fancied it. They settled for the coming morning. It was then that Miss Harkness came into the bar alone.

Her entrance was followed by a shuffling of feet and by the exchange of furtive smiles. She ordered a glass of port. Ferrant, leaning back against the bar in his favourite pose, looked her over. He said something that Ricky couldn’t hear and raised a guffaw. She smiled slightly. Ricky realized that with her entrance the atmosphere in the Cod-and-Bottle had become that of the stud. And that not a man there was unaware of it. So this, he thought, is what Miss Harkness is about.

The next morning, very early, Ricky tied his bicycle to the roof of the fish-truck and himself climbed into the front seat.

He was taken aback to find that Syd Jones was to be a fellow-passenger. Here he came, hunched up in a dismal mackintosh, with his paintbox slung over his shoulder, a plastic carrier-bag and a large and superior suitcase which seemed to be unconscionably heavy.

‘Hullo,’ Ricky said. ‘Are you moving into the Hotel Montjoy, with your grand suitcase?’

‘Why the hell would I do that?’

‘All right, all right, let it pass. Sorry.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t fall about at upper-middle-class humour.’

‘My mistake,’ said Ricky. ‘I do better in the evenings.’

‘I haven’t noticed it.’

‘You may be right. Here comes Bill. Where are you going to put your case? On the roof with my upper-middle-class bike?’

‘In front. Shift your feet. Watch it.’

He heaved the case up, obviously with an effort, pushed it along the floor under Ricky’s legs and climbed up. Bill Prentice, redolent of fish, mounted the driver’s seat, Syd nursed his paintbox and Ricky was crammed in between them.

It was a sparkling morning. The truck rattled up the steep lane, they came out into sunshine at the top and banged along the main road to Montjoy. Ricky was in good spirits.

They passed the entry into Leathers with its signboard: ‘Riding Stables. Hacks and Ponies for hire. Qualified Instructors.’ He wondered if Miss Harkness was up and about. He shouted above the engine to Syd: ‘You don’t go there every day, do you?’

‘Definitely bloody not,’ Syd shouted back. It was the first time Ricky had heard him raise his voice.

The road made a blind turn round a dense copse. Bill took it on the wrong side at forty miles an hour.

The windscreen was filled with Miss Harkness on a plunging bay horse, all teeth and eyes and flying hooves. An underbelly and straining girth reared into sight. The brakes shrieked, the truck skidded, the world turned sideways, and the passenger’s door flew open. Syd Jones, his paintbox and his suitcase shot out. The van rocked and sickeningly righted itself on the verge in a cloud of dust. The horse could be seen struggling on the ground and its rider on her feet with the reins still in her hands. The engine had stopped and the air was shattered by imprecations – a three-part disharmony from Bill, Syd and, predominantly, Miss Harkness.

Bill turned off the ignition, dragged his hand-brake on, got out and approached Miss Harkness, who told him with oaths to keep off. Without a pause in her stream of abuse she encouraged her mount to clamber to its feet, checked its impulse to bolt and began gently to examine it; her great horny hand passed with infinite delicacy down its trembling legs and heaving barrel. It was, Ricky saw, a wall-eyed horse.

‘Keep the hell out of it,’ she said softly. ‘You’ll hear about this.’

She led the horse along the far side of the road and past the truck. It snorted and plunged but she calmed it. When they had gone some distance, she mounted. The sound of its hooves, walking, diminished. Bill began to swear again.

Ricky slid out of the truck on the passenger’s side. The paintbox had burst open and its contents were scattered about the grass. The catches on the suitcase had been sprung and the lid had flown back. Ricky saw that it was full of unopened cartons of Jerome et Cie’s paints. Syd Jones squatted on the verge, collecting tubes and fitting them back into their compartments.

Ricky stooped to help him.

‘Cut that out!’ he snarled.

‘Very well, you dear little man,’ Ricky said, with a strong inclination to throw one at his head. He took a step backwards, felt something give under his heel and looked down. He had trodden on a large tube of vermilion and burst the end open. Paint had spurted over his shoe.

‘Oh damn, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m most awfully sorry.’

He reached for the depleted tube. It was snatched from under his hand. Syd, on his knees, the tube in his grasp and his fingers reddened, mouthed at him. What he said was short and unprintable.

‘Look,’ Ricky said. ‘I’ve said I’m sorry. I’ll pay for the paint and if you feel like a fight you’ve only to say so and we’ll shape up and make fools of ourselves here and now. How about it?’

Syd was crouched over his task. He mumbled something that might have been ‘Forget it.’ Ricky, feeling silly, walked round to the other side of the truck. It was being inspected by Bill Prentice with much the same intensity as Miss Harkness had displayed when she examined her horse. The smell of petrol now mingled with the smell of fish.

‘She’s OK,’ Bill said at last and climbed into the driver’s seat. ‘Silly bitch,’ he added, referring to Miss Harkness, and started up the engine.

Syd loomed up on the far side with his suitcase, round which he had buckled his belt. His jeans drooped from his hip-bones as if from a coat-hanger.

‘Hang on a sec,’ Bill shouted.

He engaged his gear and the truck lurched back on the road. Syd waited. Ricky walked round to the passenger’s side. To his astonishment, Syd observed on what sounded like a placatory note: ‘Bike’s OK, then?’

They climbed on board and the journey continued. Bill’s strictures upon Miss Harkness were severe and modified only, Ricky felt, out of consideration for Syd’s supposed feelings. The burden of his plaint was that horse-traffic should be forbidden on the roads.

‘What was she on about?’ he complained. ‘The horse was OK.’

‘It was Mungo,’ Syd offered. ‘She’s crazy about it. Savage brute of a thing.’

‘That so?’

‘Bit me. Kicked the old man. He wants to have it destroyed.’

‘Is it all right with her?’ asked Ricky.

‘So she reckons. It’s an outlaw with everyone else.’

They arrived at the only petrol station between the Cove and Montjoy. Bill pulled into it for fuel and oil and held the attendant rapt with an exhaustive coverage of the incident.

Syd complained in his dull voice: ‘I’ve got a bloody boat to catch, haven’t I?’

Ricky, who was determined not to make advances, looked at his watch and said that there was time in hand.

After an uncomfortable silence Syd said, ‘I’m funny about my painting gear. You know? I can’t do with anyone else handling it. You know? If anyone else scrounges my paint, you know, borrows some, I can’t use that tube again. It’s kind of contaminated. Get what I mean?’

Ricky thought that what he seemed to mean was a load of highfalutin’ balls, but he gave a tolerant grunt and after a moment or two Syd began to talk. Ricky could only suppose that he was trying to make amends. His discourse was obscure but it transpired that he had been given some kind of agency by Jerome et Cie. He was to leave free samples of their paints at certain shops and with a number of well-known painters, in return for which he was given his fare, as much of their products for his own use as he cared to ask for and a small commission on sales. He produced their business card with a note, ‘Introducing Mr Sydney Jones’, written on it. He showed Ricky the list of painters they had given him. Ricky was not altogether surprised to find his mother’s name at the top.

With as ill a grace as could be imagined, he said he supposed Ricky ‘wouldn’t come at putting the arm on her’, which Ricky interpreted as a suggestion that he should give Syd an introduction to his mother.