Last Ditch

‘Lend, not give, and only something for the night,’ Julia urged. ‘Tomorrow there will be other arrangements.’

Children’s voices sounded in the hall. Bruno opened the door and two little girls rushed noisily in. They were aged about five and seven and wore nothing but denim trousers with crossover straps. They flung themselves upon their mother who greeted them in a voice fraught with emotion.

‘Dar – lings!’ cried Julia, tenderly embracing them.

Then came Miss Harkness.

She was a well-developed girl with a weather-beaten complexion and hands of such a horny nature that Ricky was reminded of hooves. A marked puffiness round the eyes bore evidence to her recent emotional contretemps. She wore jodhpurs and a checked shirt.

Julia introduced her all round. She changed her weight from foot to foot, nodded and sometimes said ‘Uh.’ The Pharamonds all set up a conversational breeze while Jasper produced a drinks-tray. Ricky and Bruno drank beer and the family either sherry or white wine. Miss Harkness in a hoarse voice asked for scotch and downed it in three noisy gulps. Louis Pharamond began to talk to her about horses and Ricky heard him say he had played polo badly in Peru.

How pale they all were, Ricky thought. Really, they looked as if they had been forced, like vegetables, under covers, and had come out severely bleached. Even Julia, a Pharamond only by marriage, was without colour. Hers was a lovely pallor, a dramatic setting for her impertinent eyes and mouth. She was rather like an Aubrey Beardsley lady.

At luncheon, Ricky sat on her right and had Carlotta for his other neighbour. Diagonally opposite, by Jasper and with Louis on her right, sat Miss Harkness with another whisky-and-soda, and opposite her on their father’s left, the little girls, who were called Selina and Julietta. Louis was the darkest and much the most mondain of all the Pharamonds. He wore a thread-like black moustache and a silken jumper and was smoothly groomed. He continued to make one-sided conversation with Miss Harkness, bending his head towards her and laughing in a flirtatious manner into her baleful face. Ricky noticed that Carlotta, who, he gathered, was Louis’s cousin as well as his wife, glanced at him from time to time with amusement.

‘Have you spotted our “Troy”?’ Julia asked Ricky, and pointed to a picture above Jasper’s head. He had, but had been too shy to say so. It was a conversation piece – a man and a woman, seated in the foreground, and behind them a row of wind-blown promenaders, dashingly indicated against a lively sky.

‘Jasper and me,’ Julia said, ‘on board the Oriana. We adore it. Do you paint?’

‘Luckily, I don’t even try.’

‘A policeman, perhaps?’

‘Not even that, I’m afraid. An unnatural son.’

‘Jasper,’ said his wife, ‘is a mathematician and is writing a book about the binomial theorem, but you musn’t say I said so because he doesn’t care to have it known. Selina, darling, one more face like that and out you go before the pudding, which is strawberries and cream.’

Selina, with the aid of her fingers, had dragged down the corners of her mouth, slitted her eyes and leered across the table at Miss Harkness. She let her face snap back into normality, and then lounged in her chair sinking her chin on her chest and rolling her eyes. Her sister, Julietta, was consumed with laughter.

‘Aren’t children awful,’ Julia asked, ‘when they set out to be witty? Yesterday at luncheon Julietta said: “My pud’s made of mud,” and they both laughed themselves sick. Jasper and I were made quite miserable by it.’

‘It won’t last,’ Ricky assured her.

‘It had better not.’ She leant towards him. He caught a whiff of her scent, became startlingly aware of her thick immaculate skin and felt an extraordinary stillness come over him.

‘So far, so good, wouldn’t you say?’ she breathed. ‘I mean – at least she’s not cutting up rough.’

‘She’s eating quite well,’ Ricky muttered.

Julia gave him a look of radiant approval. He was uplifted. ‘Gosh!’ he thought. ‘Oh, gosh, what is all this?’

It was with a sensation of having been launched upon unchartered seas that he took his leave of the Pharamonds and returned to his lodging in the village.

‘That’s an upsetting lady,’ thought Ricky. ‘A very lovely and upsetting lady.’

II

The fishing village of Deep Cove was on the north coast of the island: a knot of cottages clustered round an unremarkable bay. There was a general store and post office, a church and a pub: the Cod-and-Bottle. A van drove over to Montjoy on the south coast with the catch of fish when there was one. Montjoy, the only town on the island, was a tourist resort with three smart hotels. The Cove was eight miles away, but not many Montjoy tourists came to see it because there were no ‘attractions’, and it lay off the main road. Tourists did, however, patronize Leathers, the riding school and horse-hiring establishment run by the Harknesses. This was situated a mile out of Deep Cove and lay between it and the Pharamonds’ house which was called L’Esperance, and had been in the possession of the family, Jasper had told Ricky, since the mid-eighteenth century. It stood high above the cliffs and could be seen for miles around on a clear day.

Ricky had hired a push-bicycle and had left it inside the drive gates. He jolted back down the lane, spun along the main road in grand style with salt air tingling up his nose and turned into the steep descent to the Cove.

Mr and Mrs Ferrant’s stone cottage was on the waterfront; Ricky had an upstairs front bedroom and the use of a suffocating parlour. He preferred to work in his bedroom. He sat at a table in the window, which commanded a view of the harbour, a strip of sand, a jetty and the little fishing fleet when it was at anchor. Seagulls mewed with the devoted persistence of their species in marine radio-drama.

When he came into the passage he heard the thump of Mrs Ferrant’s iron in the kitchen and caught the smell of hot cloth. She came out, a handsome dark woman of about thirty-five with black hair drawn into a knot, black eyes and a full figure. In common with most of the islanders, she showed her Gallic heritage.

‘You’re back, then,’ she said. ‘Do you fancy a cup of tea?’

‘No, thank you very much, Mrs Ferrant. I had an awfully late luncheon.’

‘Up above at L’Esperance?’

‘That’s right.’

‘That would be a great spread, and grandly served?’

There was no defining her style of speech. The choice of words had the positive character almost of the West Country but her accent carried the swallowed r’s of France. ‘They live well up there,’ she said.

‘It was all very nice,’ Ricky murmured. She passed her working-woman’s hand across her mouth. ‘And they would all be there. All the family?’

‘Well, I think so, but I’m not really sure what the whole family consists of.’

‘Mr and Mrs Jasper and the children. Young Bruno, when he’s not at his schooling.’

‘That’s right,’ he agreed. ‘He was there.’

‘Would that be all the company?’

‘No,’ Ricky said, feeling cornered, ‘there were Mr and Mrs Louis Pharamond, too.’

‘Ah,’ she said, after a pause. ‘Them.’

Ricky started to move away but she said: ‘That would be all, then?’

He found her insistence unpleasing.

‘Oh no,’ he said, over his shoulder, ‘there was another visitor,’ and he began to walk down the passage.

‘Who might that have been, then?’ she persisted.

‘A Miss Harkness,’ he said shortly.

‘What was she doing there?’ demanded Mrs Ferrant.

‘She was lunching,’ Ricky said very coldly, and ran upstairs two steps at a time. He heard her slam the kitchen door.

He tried to settle down to work but was unable to do so. The afternoon was a bad time in any case and he’d had two glasses of beer. Julia Pharamond’s magnolia face stooped out of his thoughts and came close to him, talking about a pregnant young woman who might as well have been a horse. Louis Pharamond was making a pass at her and the little half-naked Selina pulled faces at all of them. And there, suddenly, like some bucolic fury was Mrs Ferrant: ‘You’re back, then,’ she mouthed. She’s going to scream, he thought, and before she could do it, woke up.

He rose, shook himself and looked out of the window. The afternoon sun made sequined patterns on the harbour and enriched the colours of boats and the garments of such people as were abroad in the village. Among them, in a group near the jetty, he recognized his landlord, Mr Ferrant.