Ripley Under Ground (11 page)

10

T
he next day was overcast, and it began to rain around nine o’clock. Mme. Annette went out to fasten a shutter that was banging somewhere. She had listened to her radio, and there were dire pronouncements of an
orage
, she warned Tom.

Wind made Tom jumpy. Tourism, that morning, was out for him and Chris. By midday, the storm was worse, and the wind bent the tops of the tall poplars like whips or sword-tips. Now and then a branch—small and dead, probably—was blown from a tree near the house and rattled as it hit the roof and rolled down.

“I really never saw anything like it—here,” Tom said at lunch.

But Chris, with the coolness of Dickie, or maybe of his whole family, smiled and enjoyed the disturbance.

The lights went out for half an hour, which Tom said happened all the time in the French countryside, even if the storm was a mild one.

After lunch, Tom went up to the room where he painted. Sometimes painting helped when he was nervous. He painted standing up at his worktable, with the canvas propped against a heavy vice and a few thick art books and books on horticulture. The bottom of the canvas rested on some newspapers plus a large paint rag which had been part of an old bedsheet. Tom bent zealously over his work, stepping back frequently to look at it. This was a portrait of Mme. Annette done in—perhaps—rather a de Kooning style, which meant Mme. Annette would never possibly recognize it as an attempted likeness. Tom was not consciously imitating de Kooning, and had not consciously thought of him when he began this opus, but there was no doubt the picture looked like a portrait in de Kooning’s style. Mme. Annette’s pale lips were parted in a smile of slashing pink, her teeth decidedly off-white and irregular. She was in a pale purple dress with a white ruffle round the neck. All this was done with rather wide brushes and in long strokes. Tom’s preliminary work for this had been several hasty cartoons of Mme. Annette done on a pad on his knee in the living room, when Mme. Annette was unaware.

Now there was lightning. Tom straightened up and breathed, his chest aching from tension. On his transistor,
France Culture
was interviewing another uncomfortable-sounding author: “Your book, M. Hublot (Heublein?) seems to me (crackle) . . . which is a departure from—as several critics have said—your up-to-now
challenge
to the concepts of anti-Sartrisme. But rather now it seems to be reversing . . .” Tom cut it off abruptly.

There was an ominous
crack
close by in the woods direction, and Tom looked out his window. The tops of pines and poplars still flexed, but if any tree had fallen in the woods, he could not see it from here in the gray-green murk of the forest. A tree might just fall, even a smallish tree, and cover the damned grave, Tom thought. He hoped so. Tom was mixing a reddish brown for Mme. Annette’s hair—he wanted to finish the painting today—when he heard voices, or thought he did, from downstairs. Men’s voices.

Tom went into the hall.

The voices were speaking English, but he could not hear what they were saying. Chris and someone else.
Bernard
, Tom thought. An English accent. Yes, my God!

Tom laid his palette knife carefully across the turpentine cup. He closed the door behind him and trotted downstairs.

It was Bernard, standing bedraggled and wet on the mat just inside the front door. Tom was struck by his dark eyes, which seemed deeper sunken under the straight black brows. Bernard looked terrified, Tom thought. Then in the next instant, Tom thought Bernard looked like death itself.

“Bernard!” Tom said. “Welcome!”

“Hello,” Bernard said. He had a duffelbag at his feet.

“This is Christopher Greenleaf,” Tom said. “Bernard Tufts. Maybe you’ve introduced yourselves.”

“Yes, we have,” said Chris, smiling, pleased to have company it seemed.

“I hope it’s all right if I just arrived—like this,” Bernard said.

Tom assured him it was. Now Mme. Annette came in, and Tom introduced them.

Mme. Annette asked to take Bernard’s coat.

Tom said to her in French, “You might prepare the little room for M. Bernard.” This was a second guest room, seldom used, with a single bed, which he and Heloise called “the little bedroom.” “And M. Bernard will dine with us tonight.” Then Tom said to Bernard, “What did you do? Take a taxi from Melun? Or Moret?”

“Yes. Melun. I looked up the town on a map in London.” Thin and angular, like his writing, Bernard stood chafing his hands. Even his jacket looked wet.

“Want a sweater, Bernard? How about a brandy to warm you up?”

“Oh, no, no, thank you.”

“Come in the living room! Some tea? I’ll ask Madame to make some when she comes down. Sit down, Bernard.”

Bernard looked anxiously at Chris, as if expecting him to sit down first or something. But in the next minutes, Tom realized that Bernard looked anxiously at everything, even at an ashtray on the coffee table. The exchange of words, such as it was, was extremely sticky, and Bernard plainly wished that Christopher were not here. But Chris did not seem to grasp this, Tom could see, and on the contrary thought his presence might be useful, because Bernard, obviously, was in a state. Bernard stuttered, and his hands shook.

“I really won’t disturb you for long,” Bernard said.

Tom laughed. “But you’re not going back today! We’re being treated to the worst weather I’ve seen in the three years I’ve been here. Did the plane have a hard time landing?”

Bernard didn’t remember. His eyes drifted to the—his own—“Man in Chair” over the fireplace, and away again.

Tom thought of the cobalt violet in that picture. Now it was like a chemical poison to Tom. To Bernard, too, Tom supposed. “You haven’t seen ‘The Red Chairs’ in a long time,” Tom said, getting up. The picture was behind Bernard.

Bernard got to his feet and twisted around, legs still pressed against the sofa.

Tom’s effort was rewarded by a faint but genuine smile on Bernard’s face. “Yes. It’s beautiful,” Bernard said in his quiet voice.

“Are you a painter?” asked Chris.

“Yes.” Bernard sat down again. “But not as good as—as Derwatt.”

“Mme. Annette, could you put on some water for tea?” Tom asked.

Mme. Annette had come down from upstairs, carrying towels or something. “At once, M. Tome.”

“Can you tell me,” Christopher began to Bernard, “what makes a painter good—or not? For instance, it seems to me several painters are painting like Derwatt now. I can’t remember their names offhand, because they’re not as famous. Oh, yes, Parker Nunnally, for one. Do you know his work? What is it that makes Derwatt so good?”

Tom also tried for a correct answer, perhaps “originality.” But the word “publicity” flashed into his mind, too. He was waiting for Bernard to speak.

“It is personality,” Bernard said carefully. “It is Derwatt.”

“You know him?” Chris asked.

A slight pang went through Tom, a twinge of sympathy for Bernard.

Bernard nodded. “Oh, yes.” Now his bony hands were clasped around one knee.

“Do you feel this personality when you meet him? See him, I mean?”

“Yes,” Bernard said more firmly. But he writhed, perhaps in agony, at the conversation. At the same time his dark eyes seemed to be searching for something else he might say on the subject.

“That probably wasn’t a fair question,” Chris said. “Most good artists don’t show their personalities or waste their fire in their personal life, I think. They seem perfectly ordinary on the surface.”

Tea was served.

“You have no suitcase, Bernard?” Tom asked. Tom knew he had no suitcase, and was worried about Bernard’s general comfort.

“No, I just came over on a hop,” Bernard said.

“Don’t worry. I’ve got everything you might want.” Tom felt Chris’s eyes on him and Bernard, speculating probably as to how and how well they knew each other. “Hungry?” Tom asked Bernard. “My housekeeper loves to make sandwiches.” There were only petits fours with the tea. “Her name’s Mme. Annette. Ask her for anything you want.”

“No, thank you.” Bernard’s cup made three distinct clicks against the saucer as he set it down.

Tom wondered if Jeff and Ed had so sedated Bernard that he was in need of something now? Bernard had finished his tea, and Tom took him upstairs to show him his room.

“You’ll have to share the bath with Chris,” Tom said. “You go across the hall here and through my wife’s room.” Tom left the doors open. “Heloise isn’t here, she’s in Greece. I hope you can rest a bit here, Bernard. What’s the matter, really? What’s worrying you?”

They were back in Bernard’s “little bedroom,” and the door was shut.

Bernard shook his head. “I feel as if I’m at the end. That’s all. The show was the end. It’s the last show I can paint. The last picture. ‘The Tub.’ And now they’re trying to bring—you know—bring him back to life.”

And I succeeded
, Tom might have said, but his face remained as serious as Bernard’s. “Well—he’s presumably
been
alive for the past five years. I’m sure they’re not going to force you to go on painting if you don’t want to, Bernard.”

“Oh, they’re going to try, Jeff and Ed. But I’ve had enough, you see. Quite enough.”

“I think they know that. Don’t worry about that. We can—Look, Derwatt can go into seclusion
again
. In Mexico. Let’s say he’s painting for the next many years, and refuses to show anything.” Tom walked up and down as he spoke. “Years can pass. When Derwatt dies—we’ll have him burn all his last paintings, something like that, so no one will ever see them!” Tom smiled.

Bernard’s somber eyes, staring at the floor, made Tom feel as if he had told a joke that his audience didn’t get. Or worse, committed a sacrilege, cracked a bad joke in a cathedral.

“You need a rest, Bernard. Would you like a phenobarb? I have some mild ones, quarter grains.”

“No, thanks.”

“Want to wash up? Don’t worry about Chris and me. We’ll leave you in peace. Dinner at eight if you want to join us. Come down earlier if you want a drink.”

The wind just then made a “
Whoo-oo-oo
” and a huge tree bent—they both glanced at the window and saw it, it was in Tom’s back garden—and it seemed to Tom as if the house bent, too, and he instinctively braced his feet. How could anyone be calm in this weather?

“Want me to close these curtains?” Tom asked.

“It doesn’t matter.” Bernard looked at Tom. “What did Murchison say when he saw ‘Man in Chair’?”

“He said he thought it was a forgery—at first. But I persuaded him it wasn’t.”

“How could you? Murchison told me what he thought about—the lavenders. He’s right. I made three mistakes, ‘Man in Chair,’ ‘The Clock,’ and now ‘The Tub.’ I don’t know how it happened. I don’t know why. I wasn’t thinking. Murchison is right.”

Tom was silent. Then he said, “Naturally it was a scare for all of us. Derwatt alive might have lived it down. It was the danger—the danger of his nonexistence being exposed. But we’re over that hump, Bernard.”

Bernard might not have followed this at all. He said, “Did you offer to buy ‘The Clock’ or something like that?”

“No. I persuaded him that Derwatt must’ve gone back—for a painting or two or maybe three—to a lavender he’d used before.”

“Murchison was even talking to me about the quality of the painting. Oh, Christ!” Bernard sat down on the bed and slumped back. “What’s Murchison doing now in London?”

“I don’t know. But I know he’s not going to see an expert, not going to do anything, Bernard—because I persuaded him our way,” Tom said soothingly.

“I can think of only one way you persuaded him, one wild way.”

“What do you mean?” Tom asked, smiling, a little frightened.

“You persuaded him to let me alone. As a thing of pity, a thing to be pitied. I don’t wish to be pitied.”

“There was no mention of you—naturally.”
You’re mad
, Tom felt like saying. Bernard was mad, or at least temporarily deranged. Yet what Bernard had said was exactly what Tom had tried to do in the cellar before he killed Murchison: persuade him to let Bernard alone, because Bernard would never paint any more “Derwatts.” Tom had even tried to make Murchison understand Bernard’s worship of Derwatt, his dead idol.

“I don’t think Murchison could be persuaded,” Bernard said. “You’re not trying to make me feel better by lying to me, are you, Tom? Because I’ve had just about enough of
lies
.”

“No.” But Tom felt uncomfortable because he was lying, to Bernard. It was seldom Tom felt uncomfortable, lying. Tom foresaw that he would have to tell Bernard at some time that Murchison was dead. It was the only way to reassure Bernard—reassure him partially, on the forgery score at least. But Tom couldn’t tell him now, not in this nerve-racking storm, not in the state Bernard was in now, or Bernard would really go berserk. “I’ll be back in a minute,” Tom said.

Bernard got up from the bed at once and walked toward the window, just as the wind threw a hard spray of rain against the panes.

Tom winced at it, but Bernard did not. Tom went into his room, got some pajamas and a Madras dressing gown for Bernard, also house slippers, and a new toothbrush still in its plastic box. He put the toothbrush in the bathroom in case Bernard had none, and brought the other things into Bernard’s room. He told Bernard he would be downstairs if he wanted anything, and that he would leave him to rest for a while.

Chris had gone into his room, Tom saw from his light. The storm had made the house unnaturally dark. Tom went into his own room and got the Count’s toothpaste from his top drawer. By rolling the bottom up, the tube was usable, and it was better that he use it than throw it away and run the risk of Mme. Annette’s seeing it in the garbage: inexplicable and wanton waste. Tom took his own toothpaste from the basin and put it in the bathroom used by Chris and Bernard.

What the hell would he do with Bernard, Tom wondered? And what if the police came back and Bernard was present, as Chris had been present? Bernard understood French pretty well, Tom thought.

Tom sat down and wrote a letter to Heloise. Writing to her always had a calming effect on him. When he was dubious about his French, he usually didn’t bother running to the dictionary, because his errors amused Heloise.