“But that is terrible—to kill oneself at sixteen! More and more young people are killing themselves, you know? I am always reading about it in the newspapers.— Would you like some? Or anything?” Heloise extended the wineglass full of Perrier which she had just poured for herself, Tom knew.
Tom shook his head. “I want to wash up.” He went toward the downstairs WC and basin, and en route glanced at the little stack of four letters on the telephone table, yesterday’s and today’s post. That could wait.
During lunch, Tom told Heloise about the Kennebunkport house of the Piersons, about the odd old servant called Susie Schuhmacher, who had been housekeeper and in a way governess of the boys years ago, and who was now laid low with a heart attack. He succeeded in making the house a mixture of luxury and gloom, which was the truth, Tom thought, or anyway the way he had felt about it. From Heloise’s slight frown, Tom knew that she knew he was not telling the whole truth.
“And you went away the same evening—just after the boy died?” she asked.
“Yes. I didn’t see what good I could do by staying longer. The funeral—it might have been two days away.” Might be today, Tuesday, Tom thought.
“I don’t think you could face the funeral,” Heloise said. “You were very fond of the boy—weren’t you? I know.”
“Yes,” said Tom. He could look at Heloise steadily now. It had been strange to try to steer a young life like that, as he had tried—and to have failed. Maybe one day he could admit that to Heloise. But on the other hand, he couldn’t, because he was never going to tell her that the boy pushed his father over the cliff, and that was the whole explanation of the boy’s suicide, or at least it was more important than Teresa, Tom felt.
“Did you meet Teresa?” Heloise asked. She had already asked for a full description of Lily Pierson, the former actress who had married such wealth and Tom had done his best there, including a description of the attentive Tal Stevens, whom Tom suspected she would marry.
“No, no, I didn’t meet Teresa. I think she was in New York.” And Tom doubted that Teresa would even come to Frank’s funeral, and did that matter, either? Teresa to Frank had been an idea, intangible almost, and so she would remain, as Frank had written, “forever.”
Tom went upstairs after lunch to look at his post, and to unpack. Another letter from Jeff Constant of the Buckmaster Gallery, London, and at a glance Tom saw that all was well. The news was that the Derwatt Accademia in Perugia had had a change of managership to two artistically inclined young men from London (Jeff supplied their names), and they had the idea of acquiring a nearby palazzo which could be converted into a hotel for the art students. Did Tom like the idea? Did he possibly know the palazzo to southwest of the art school? The new London boys were going to send a photo next post. Jeff wrote:
This means expansion, which sounds all to the good, don’t you think, Tom? Unless you have some inside information about Italian internal conditions that might make the purchase inadvisable just now.
Tom had no inside information. Did Jeff think him a genius? Yes. Tom knew he would agree to the purchase idea. Expansion, yes, as to hotels. The art school made most of its money from the hotel. The real Derwatt would cringe with shame.
He pulled off his sweater, strolled into his blue and white bathroom, and threw the sweater behind him onto a chair. He fancied he heard the carpenter ants shut up at his step, or had he heard the ants in the first place? He put his ear to the wooden shelf side. No! He had heard them, and they hadn’t shut up. There was the faintest whir, which augmented even as he listened. At it still, the little zealots! On a folded pajama top on one shelf, Tom saw a miniature pyramid of fine reddish-tan dust which had fallen from excavations above. What were they building in there? Beds for themselves, egg repositories? Had these little carpenters put their wits together and constructed maybe a tiny bookcase in there, composed of spit and sawdust, a little monument to their know-how, their will to live? Tom had to laugh out loud. Was he going mad himself?
From the corner of his suitcase, Tom took the Berlin bear, fluffed its fur out gently, and set it at the back of his desk against a couple of dictionaries. The little bear was made to sit, its legs didn’t bend for it to stand up. Its bright eyes looked at Tom with the same innocent gaiety as in Berlin, and Tom smiled back at it, thinking of the “3 Würfe 1 Mark” which had won it. “You will have a good home for the rest of your life,” Tom said to the bear.
He would take a shower, flop on the bed, and look at the rest of his letters, he thought. Try to get back to normal in time, twenty to three now, French time. Frank would be lowered into a grave today, Tom felt sure, and he didn’t care to figure out just when it might be, because for Frank time had ceased to matter.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, Patricia Highsmith spent much of her adult life in Switzerland and France. She was educated at Barnard College, where she studied English, Latin, and Greek. Her first novel, Strangers on a Train, published initially in 1950, proved to be a major commercial success, and was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock. Despite this early recognition, Highsmith was unappreciated in the United States for the entire length of her career.
Writing under the pseudonym of Claire Morgan, she then published The Price of Salt in 1952, which had been turned down by her previous American publisher because of its frank exploration of homosexual themes. Her most popular literary creation was Tom Ripley, the dapper sociopath who first debuted in her 1955 novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley. She followed with four other Ripley novels. Posthumously made into a major motion picture, The Talented Mr. Ripley has helped bring about a renewed appreciation of Highsmith’s work in the United States, as has the posthumous publication of The Selected Stories and Nothing That Meets the Eye: The Uncollected Stories, both of which received widespread acclaim when they were published by W. W. Norton & Company.
The author of more than twenty books, Highsmith has won the O. Henry Memorial Award, the Edgar Allan Poe Award, Le Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, and the Award of the Crime Writers’ Association of Great Britain. She died in Switzerland on February 4, 1995, and her literary archives are maintained in Berne.
Praise for Patricia Highsmith
and the Ripley novels
“Tom Ripley is one of the most interesting characters of world literature.”
—Anthony Minghella
“Mesmerizing . . . a Ripley novel is not to be safely recommended to the weak-minded or impressionable.”
—Washington Post Book World
“The brilliance of Highsmith’s conception of Tom Ripley was her ability to keep the heroic and demonic American dreamer in balance in the same protagonist—thus keeping us on his side well after his behavior becomes far more sociopathic than that of a con man like Gatsby.”
—Frank Rich, New York Times Magazine
“The most sinister and strangely alluring quintet the crime-fiction genre has ever produced. . . . This young, charismatic American protagonist is, it turns out, a murderer, a gentleman of calm amorality. It’s an unnerving characterization, and time and again Highsmith pulls it off, using all the singular tools of her trade.”
—Mark Harris, Entertainment Weekly
“Highsmith’s subversive touch is in making the reader complicit with Ripley’s cold logic.”
—Daily Telegraph (UK)
“[Highsmith] forces us to re-evaluate the lines between reason and madness, normal and abnormal, while goading us into sharing her treacherous hero’s point of view.”
—Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
“[Tom Ripley] is as appalling a protagonist as any mystery writer has ever created.”
—Newsday
“Savage in the way of Rabelais or Swift.”
—Joyce Carol Oates, New York Review of Books
“For eliciting the menace that lurks in familiar surroundings, there’s no one like Patricia Highsmith.”
—Time
“Murder, in Patricia Hi
ghsmith’s hands, is made to occur almost as casually as the bumping of a fender or a bout of food poisoning. This downplaying of the dramatic . . . has been much praised, as has the ordinariness of the details with which she depicts the daily lives and mental processes of her psychopaths. Both undoubtedly contribute to the domestication of crime in her fiction, thereby implicating the reader further in the sordid fantasy that is being worked out.”
—Robert Towers, New York Review of Books
If you enjoyed this novel, you’ll enjoy the other Ripley novels. To entice you, here is the first chapter of Ripley Under Water.
1
Tom stood in Georges and Marie’s bar-tabac with a nearly full cup of café express in his hand. He had paid, and Heloise’s two packs of Marlboros bulged his jacket pocket. Tom was watching a slot-machine game that someone else was playing.
The screen showed a cartoon motorcyclist hurtling into the background, the illusion of speed given by a forward-moving picket fence on either side of the road. The player manipulated a half-wheel, making the cyclist swerve to pass a slower car, or leap like a horse to hurdle a fence that had suddenly appeared across the road. If the motorcyclist (game-player) didn’t hurdle in time, there was a silent impact, a black and gold star appeared to indicate a crash, the motorcyclist was finished and so was the game.
Tom had watched the game many a time (it was the most popular he had ever known Georges and Marie to acquire), but he had never played it. He somehow didn’t want to.
“Non-non!” From behind the bar Marie’s voice sang out over the usual din as she contested some customer’s opinion, probably political. She and her husband were left-wing no matter what. “Ecoutez, “Non-Mitterrand . . .”
It crossed Tom’s mind that Georges and Marie didn’t like the influx of people from North Africa, however.
“Eh, Marie! Deux pastis!” That was fat Georges with a somewhat soiled white apron over shirt and trousers, serving the few tables, where people drank and occasionally ate potato chips and hard-boiled eggs.
The jukebox played an old cha-cha-cha.
A silent black and gold star! Spectators groaned sympathetically. Dead. All was over. The screen flashed its silent, obsessed message, INSERT COINS INSERT COINS INSERT COINS, and the workman in blue jeans groped obediently in a pocket, inserted more coins, and the game began again, motorcyclist in tip-top shape, zooming into the background, ready for anything, neatly dodging a barrel that appeared in his lane, smoothly jumping the first barrier. The man at the controls was intent, determined to make his man come through.
Tom was thinking now about Heloise, about her trip to Morocco. She wanted to see Tangier, Casablanca, maybe Marrakesh. And Tom had agreed to go with her. After all, it wasn’t one of her adventure cruises requiring hospital visits for vaccines before departure, and it behooved him as her husband to accompany her on some of her jaunts. Heloise had two or three inspirations a year, not all of which she acted on. Tom wasn’t in the mood for a holiday now. It was early August, Morocco would be at its hottest, and Tom loved his own peonies and dahlias at this time of year, loved cutting a fresh two or three for the living room almost daily. Tom was fond of his garden, and he rather liked Henri, the handyman who helped him with big jobs, a giant when it came to strength, though not the man for some tasks.
Then there was the Odd Pair, as Tom had begun calling them to himself. He wasn’t sure they were married, and of course that didn’t matter. He felt they were lurking in the area and had their eye on him. Maybe they were harmless, but who knew? Tom had first noticed them a month or so ago in Fontainebleau, when he and Heloise had been shopping one afternoon: a man and woman who looked American and in their mid-thirties, walking toward them, eyeing them with that look Tom knew well, as if they knew who he was, perhaps knew his name, Tom Ripley. Tom had seen the same look a few times at airports, though rarely, and not lately. It could come after one’s picture had been in the newspapers, he supposed, but Tom’s hadn’t been in any newspapers for years, he was sure of that. Not since the Murchison business, and that had been about five years ago—Murchison, whose blood still stained Tom’s cellar floor, and which Tom said was a wine stain, if anyone remarked on it.
In truth, it was a mixture of wine and blood, Tom reminded himself, because Murchison had been hit over the head with a wine bottle. A bottle of Margaux wielded by Tom.
Well, the Odd Pair. Crash went the motorcyclist. Tom made himself turn away and took his empty cup over to the bar counter.
The male of the Odd Pair had dark straight hair, black round-rimmed glasses, and the woman light brown hair, a slender face and gray or hazel eyes. It was the man who stared, with a vague and empty smile. Tom felt that he might have seen the man before, at Heathrow or Charles de Gaulle Airport, giving him that I-know-your-face look. Nothing hostile, but Tom didn’t like it.
And then Tom had seen them once cruising slowly in their car down the main street of Villeperce at midday when he was coming out of the bakery with a flûte (must have been Mme. Annette’s day off or she’d been busy with a lunch), and again Tom had seen them looking at him. Villeperce was a tiny town, several kilometers from Fontainebleau. Why should the Odd Pair have come here?
Both Marie with her big red smile and balding Georges happened to be behind the bar just as Tom pushed his cup and saucer away. “Merci et bonne nuit, Marie—Georges!” Tom called and gave a smile.
“Bon soir, M’sieur Reepley!” cried Georges, one hand waving, the other pouring Calvados.
“Merci, m’sieur, à bientôt!” Marie threw at him.
Tom was almost at the door when the male of the Odd Pair walked in, round glasses and all, and seemingly alone.
“Mr. Ripley?” His pinkish lips again wore a smile. “Good evening.”
“Evening,” said Tom, still on his way out.
“We’ve—my wife and I—may I invite you for a drink?”
“Thanks, I’m just leaving.”
“Another time, maybe. We’ve rented a house in Villeperce. This direction.” He gestured vaguely north, and his smile widened to reveal squarish teeth. “Looks like we’ll be neighbors.”
Tom was confronted by two people entering, and had to step back into the bar.
“My name’s Pritchard. David. I’m taking courses at the Fontainebleau business school—INSEAD. I’m sure you know of it. Anyway, my house here is a two-story white one with garden and a little pool. We fell in love with it because of the pool, reflections on the ceiling—the water.” He chuckled.
“I see,” Tom said, trying to sound reasonably pleasant. He was now out of the door.
“I’ll telephone you. My wife’s name is Janice.”
Tom managed a nod and forced a smile. “Yes—fine. Do that. Good night.”
“Not too many Americans around here!” the determined David Pritchard called after him.
Mr. Pritchard would have a hard time finding his number, Tom was thinking, because he and Heloise had managed to keep it out of the telephone book. The outwardly dull David Pritchard—nearly as tall as Tom and a bit heavier—looked like trouble, Tom was thinking as he walked homeward. A police officer of some kind? Digging up old records? Private detective for—for whom, really? Tom couldn’t think of any active enemies. “Phony” was the word Tom thought of in regard to David Pritchard: phony smile, phony goodwill, maybe phony story about studying at INSEAD. That educational institution at Fontainebleau could be a cover, in fact such an obvious one that Tom thought it might be true that Pritchard was studying something there. Or maybe they weren’t man and wife but a CIA pair. What would the USA be after him for, Tom wondered. Not income tax, that was in order. Murchison? No, that was settled. Or case abandoned. Murchison and his corpse had disappeared. Dickie Greenleaf? Hardly. Even Christopher Greenleaf, Dickie’s cousin, wrote Tom a friendly postcard now and then, from Alice Springs last year, for instance. Christopher was now a civil engineer, married, working in Rochester, New York, as Tom recalled. Tom was even on good terms with
Dickie’s father, Herbert. At least, they exchanged Christmas cards.
As Tom approached the big tree opposite Belle Ombre, a tree whose branches leaned a little over the road, his spirits rose. What was there to worry about? Tom pushed open one big gate just enough to slip through, then closed it with as gentle a clang as he could manage and slid the padlock home, then the long bolt.
Reeves Minot. Tom stopped short and his shoes slid on the gravel of the forecourt. Another fence job for Reeves was in the offing. Reeves had telephoned a few days ago. Tom often vowed he would not do another, then found himself accepting. Was it because he enjoyed meeting new people? Tom gave a laugh, short and barely audible, then continued walking toward his front door with his usual light tread that hardly disturbed the gravel.
The light was on in the living room, and the front door was unlocked, as Tom had left it forty-five minutes ago. Tom went in, then locked the front door behind him. Heloise sat on the sofa, poring over a magazine—probably an article on North Africa, Tom thought.
“’Ello, chéri—Reeves telephoned,” Heloise said, looking up, tossing her blonde hair back with a swing of her head. “Tome, did you—”
“Yes. Catch!” Smiling, Tom tossed the first red and white packet to her, then the second. She caught the first, the second hit her blue shirtfront. “Anything pressing concerning Reeves? Repassant—ironing—bügelnd?”
“Oh, Tome, stop it!” said Heloise, and used her lighter. She inwardly enjoyed his puns, Tom thought, though she would never say so, would hardly permit herself to smile. “He will telephone back but maybe not tonight.”
The Boy Who Followed Ripley Page 34