Last Ditch

by Ngaio Marsh

  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.

  Mr Ferrant was the local plumber and general handyman. He possessed a good-looking car and a little sailing-boat with an auxiliary engine in which, Ricky gathered, he was wont to putter round the harbour and occasionally venture quite far out to sea, fishing. Altogether the Ferrants seemed to be very comfortably off. He was a big fellow with a lusty, rather sly look about him but handsome enough with his high colour and clustering curls. Ricky thought that he was probably younger than his wife and wondered if she had to keep an eye on him.

  He was telling some story to the other men in the group. They listened with half-smiles, looking at each other out of the corners of their eyes. When he reached his point they broke into laughter and stamped about, doubled in two, with their hands in their trouser pockets. The group broke up. Mr Ferrant turned towards the house, saw Ricky in the window and gave him the slight, sideways jerk of the head which served as a greeting in the Cove. Ricky lifted his hand in return. He watched his landlord approach the house, heard the front door bang and boots going down the passage.

  Ricky thought he would now give himself the pleasure of writing a bread-and-butter letter to Julia Pharamond. He made several shots at it but they all looked either affected or laboured. In the end he wrote:

  Dear Mrs Pharamond,

  It was so kind of you to have me and I did enjoy myself so very much.

  With many thanks,

  Ricky.

  PS. I do hope your other visitor has settled in nicely.

  He decided to go out and post it. He had arrived only last evening in the village and had yet to explore it properly.

  There wasn’t a great deal to explore. The main street ran along the front, and steep little cobbled lanes led off it through ranks of cottages, of which the one on the corner, next door to the Ferrants’, turned out to be the local police station. The one shop there was, Mercer’s Drapery and General Suppliers, combined the functions of post office, grocery, hardware, clothing, stationery and toy shops. Outside hung ranks of duffle coats, pea-jackets, oilskins and sweaters, all strung above secretive windows beyond which one could make out further offerings set out in a dark interior. Ricky was filled with an urge to buy. He turned in at the door and sustained a sharp jab below the ribs.

  He swung round to find himself face to face with a wild luxuriance of hair, dark spectacles, a floral shirt, beads and fringes.

  ‘Yow!’ said Ricky, and clapped a hand to his waist. ‘What’s that for?’

  A voice behind the hair said something indistinguishable. A gesture was made, indicating a box slung from the shoulder, a box of a kind very familiar to Ricky.

  ‘I was turning round, wasn’t I,’ the voice mumbled.

  ‘OK,’ said Ricky. ‘No bones broken. I hope.’

  ‘Hurr,’ said the voice, laughing dismally.

  Its owner lurched past Ricky and slouched off down the street, the paintbox swinging from his shoulder.

  ‘Very careless, that was,’ said Mr Mercer, the solitary shopman, emerging from the shadows. ‘I don’t care for that type of behaviour. Can I interest you in anything?’

  Ricky, though still in pain, could be interested in a dark-blue polo-necked sweater that carried a label ‘Hand-knitted locally. Very special offer’.

  ‘That looks a good kind of sweater,’ he said.

  ‘Beautiful piece of work, sir. Mrs Ferrant is in a class by herself.’

  ‘Mrs Ferrant?’

  ‘Quite so, sir. You are accommodated there, I believe. The pullover,’ Mr Mercer continued, ‘would be your size, I’m sure. Would you care to try?’

  Ricky did try and not only bought the sweater but also a short blue coat of a nautical cut that went very well with it. He decided to wear his purchases.

  He walked along the main street, which stopped abruptly at a flight of steps leading down to the strand. At the foot of these steps, with an easel set up before him, a palette on his arm and his paintbox open at his feet, stood the man he had encountered in the shop.

  He had his back towards Ricky and was laying swathes of colour across a large canvas. These did not appear to bear any relation to the prospect before him. As Ricky watched, the painter began to superimpose in heavy black outline, a female nude with minuscule legs, a vast rump and no head. Having done this he fell back a step or two, paused, and then made a dart at his canvas and slashed down a giant fowl taking a peck at the nude. Leda, Ricky decided, and, therefore, the swan.

  He was vividly reminded of the sketches pinned to the drawing-room wall at L’Esperance. He wondered what his mother, whose work was very far from being academic, would have had to say about this picture. He decided that it lacked integrity.

  The painter seemed to think it was completed. He scraped his palette and returned it and his brushes to the box. He then fished out a packet of cigarettes and a matchbox, turned his back to the sea-breeze and saw Ricky.

  For a second or two he seemed to lower menacingly, but the growth of facial hair was so luxuriant that it hid all expression. Dark glasses gave him a look of some dubious character on the Càte d’Azur.

  Ricky said: ‘Hullo, again. I hope you don’t mind my looking on for a moment.’

  There was movement in the beard and whiskers and a dull sound. The painter had opened his matchbox and found it empty.

  ‘Got a light?’ Ricky thought must have been said.

  He descended the steps and offered his lighter. The painter used it and returned to packing up his gear.

  ‘Do you find,’ Ricky asked, fishing for something to say that wouldn’t be utterly despised, ‘do you find this place stimulating? For painting, I mean.’

  ‘At least,’ the voice said, ‘it isn’t bloody picturesque. I get power from it. It works for me.’

  ‘Could I have seen some of your things up at L’Esperance – the Pharamonds’ house?’

  He seemed to take another long stare at Ricky and then said: ‘I sold a few things to some woman the other day. Street show in Montjoy. A white sort of woman with black hair. Talked a lot of balls, of course. They always do. But she wasn’t bad, figuratively speaking. Worth the odd grope.’

  Ricky suddenly felt inclined to kick him.

  ‘Oh, well,’ he said. ‘I’ll be moving on.’

  ‘You staying here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘For long?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, turning away.

  The painter seemed to be one of those people whose friendliness increases in inverse ratio to the warmth of its reception.

  ‘What’s your hurry?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve got some work to do,’ Ricky said.

  ‘Work?’

  ‘That’s right. Good evening to you.’

  ‘You write, don’t you?’

  ‘Try to,’ he said over his shoulder.

  The young man raised his voice. ‘That’s what Gil Ferrant makes out, anyway. He reckons you write.’

  Ricky walked on without further comment.

  On the way back he reflected that it was highly possible every person in the village knew by this time that he lodged with the Ferrants – and tried to write.

  So he returned to the cottage and tried.

  He had his group of characters. He knew how to involve them, one with the other, but so far he didn’t know where to put them: they hovered, they floated. He found himself moved to introduce among them a woman with a white magnolia face, black hair and eyes and a spluttering laugh.

  Mrs Ferrant gave him his evening meal on a tray in the parlour. He asked her about the painter and she replied in an off-hand, slighting manner that he was called Sydney Jones and had a ‘terrible old place up to back of Fisherman’s Steps’.

  ‘He lives here, then?’ said Ric
ky.

  ‘He’s a foreigner,’ she said, dismissing him, ‘but he’s been in the Cove a while.’

  ‘Do you like his painting?’

  ‘My Louis can do better.’ Her Louis was a threatening child of about ten.

  As she walked out with his tray she said: ‘That’s a queer old sweater you’re wearing.’

  ‘I think it’s a jolly good one,’ he called after her. He heard her give a little grunt and thought she added something in French.

  Visited by a sense of well-being, he lit his pipe and strolled down to the Cod-and-Bottle.

  Nobody had ever tried to tart up the Cod-and-Bottle. It was unadulterated pub. In the bar the only decor was a series of faded photographs of local worthies and a map of the island. A heavily-pocked dartboard hung on the wall and there was a shove-ha’penny at the far end of the bar. In an enormous fireplace, a pile of driftwood blazed a good-smelling welcome.

  The bar was full of men, tobacco smoke and the fumes of beer. A conglomerate of male voices, with their overtones of local dialect, engulfed Ricky as he walked in. Ferrant was there, his back propped against the bar, one elbow resting on it, his body curved in a classic pose that was sexually explicit, and, Ricky felt, deliberately contrived. When he saw Ricky he raised his pint-pot and gave him that sidelong wag of his head. He had a coterie of friends about him.

  The barman who, as Ricky was to learn, was called Bob Maistre, was the landlord of the Cod-and-Bottle. He served Ricky’s pint of bitter with a flourish.

  There was an empty chair in the corner and Ricky made his way to it. From here he was able to maintain the sensation of being an onlooker.

  A group of dart players finished their game and moved over to the bar, revealing, to Ricky’s unenthusiastic gaze, Sydney Jones, the painter, slumped at a table in a far corner of the room with his drink before him. Ricky looked away quickly, hoping that he had not been spotted.

  A group of fresh arrivals came between them: fishermen, by their conversation. Ferrant detached himself from the bar and lounged over to them. There followed a jumble of conversation, most of it incomprehensible. Ricky was to learn that the remnants of a patois that had grown out of a Norman dialect, itself long vanished, could still be heard among the older islanders.

  Ferrant left the group and strolled over to Ricky.

  ‘Evening, Mr Alleyn,’ he said. ‘Getting to know us?’

  ‘Hoping to, Mr Ferrant,’ Ricky said.

  ‘Quiet enough for you?’

  ‘That’s what I like.’

  ‘Fancy that now, what you like, eh?’

  His manner was half bantering, half indifferent. He stayed a minute or so longer, took one or two showy pulls at his beer, said: ‘Enjoy yourself, then,’ turned and came face to face with Mr Sydney Jones.

  ‘Look what’s come up in my catch,’ he said. He fetched Mr Jones a shattering clap on the back and returned to his friends.

  Mr Jones evidently eschewed all conventional civilities. He sat down at the table, extended his legs and seemed to gaze at nothing in particular. A shout of laughter greeted Ferrant’s return to the bar and drowned any observation that, by a movement of his head, Mr Jones would seem to have offered.

  ‘Sorry,’ Ricky said. ‘I can’t hear you.’

  He slouched across the table and the voice came through.

  ‘Care to come up to my pad?’ it invited.

  There was nothing, at the moment, that Ricky fancied less.

  ‘That’s very kind of you,’ he said. ‘One of these days I’d like to see some of your work, if I may.’

  The voice said, with what seemed to be an imitation of Ricky’s accent, ‘Not “one of these days”. Now.’

  ‘Oh,’ Ricky said, temporizing, ‘now? Well – ‘

  ‘You won’t catch anything,’ Mr Jones sneered loudly. ‘If that’s what you’re afraid of.’

  ‘Oh God!’ Ricky thought. ‘Now he’s insulted. What a bloody bore.’

  He said: ‘My dear man, I don’t for a moment suppose anything of the sort.’

  Jones emptied his pint-pot and got to his feet.

  ‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘We’ll push off, then.’

  And without another glance at Ricky he walked out of the bar.

  It was dark outside and chilly, with a sea-nip in the air and misty haloes round the few street lamps along the front. The high tide slapped against the sea-wall.

  They walked in silence as far as the place where Ricky had seen Mr Jones painting in the afternoon. Here they turned left into deep shadow and began to climb what seemed to be an interminable flight of wet, broken-down steps, between cottages that grew farther apart and finally petered out altogether.

  Ricky’s right foot slid under him, he lurched forward and snatched at wet grass on a muddy bank.

  ‘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.

  CHAPTER 2

  Syd Jones’s Pad and Montjoy

  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.’