Ripley Under Water (8 page)

Heloise was out of her bath, Tom was sure, and in her own room upstairs, but still Tom preferred to venture this call from his room with the door closed. He nipped up the stairs two at a time. Tom looked up the St. John’s Wood number and dialed, expecting an answering service.

A strange voice, male, answered, saying that Mr. Constant was busy just now, and could he take a message? Mr. Constant was photographing someone at an appointed sitting.

“Can you tell Mr. Constant that Tom is on the line and wants to speak just a moment?”

In less than half a minute, Jeff was on the line. Tom said, “Jeff. Sorry, but this is a bit urgent. Can you and Ed make another effort to find out how this David Pritchard got hold of Cynthia’s name? It’s very important. And—did Cynthia ever meet him? Pritchard’s a sick liar, if I ever saw one. I spoke with Ed the night before last. Did he ring you?”

“Yes, this morning before nine.”

“Good. My news—Pritchard was standing on the road outside, photographing my house yesterday morning. How do you like that?”

“Photographing! Is he a cop?”

“I’m trying to find out. I’ve got to find out. I’m leaving in a few days for a holiday with my wife. I hope you’ll understand why I’m thinking about the safety of my house. It might be a good idea to invite Cynthia for a drink or lunch, or whatever—to get the information we want.”

“That won’t—”

“I know it won’t be easy,” Tom said, “but it’s worth a try. It’s worth as much as a good bit of your income, Jeff, and Ed’s too.” Tom didn’t want to add, on the telephone, that it might also prevent a charge of fraud against Jeff and Ed, and a charge of first-degree murder against himself.

“I’ll try,” said Jeff.

“And Pritchard again: American about thirty-five, dark straight hair, about six feet, sturdy build, wears black-rimmed glasses, has a receding hairline that’s going to leave him with a widow’s peak.”

“I’ll remember.”

“If for some reason Ed might be better at the job—” But between the two, Tom couldn’t have told which might be better. “I know Cynthia’s difficult,” Tom went on, more gently, “but Pritchard’s on to Murchison—or at least mentioning his name.”

“I know,” said Jeff.

“Right, Jeff, you and Ed do your best and keep me posted. I’m here till Friday morning early.”

They hung up.

Tom seized a half-hour to practice with unusual concentration, he thought, at the harpsichord. He did better with definite short periods of time in view, twenty minutes, one half-hour, made more progress, if he dared use the word. Tom was not aiming at perfection, or even adequacy. Ha! What was that? He didn’t, wouldn’t, ever play for other people, so what did his mediocre level matter to anyone but himself? To Tom his practice, and the weekly visits and sessions with the Schubertly Roger Lepetit, were a form of discipline which he had come to love.

The half-hour in Tom’s mind and on his wristwatch was two minutes short of being up, when the telephone rang. Tom went to take it in the hall.

“Hello, Mr. Ripley, please—”

Tom at once recognized Janice Pritchard’s voice. Heloise had picked up her telephone, and Tom said, “It’s all right, my dear, I think it’s for me.” He heard Heloise hang up.

“This is Janice Pritchard,” the voice went on, tense and nervous. “I want to apologize for yesterday morning. My husband has such absurd, sometimes rude ideas—such as photographing your house! I’m sure you saw him or your wife did.”

As she spoke, Tom recalled her face, apparently smiling approval as she gazed at her husband in the car. “I think my wife did,” said Tom. “No serious matter, Janice. But why does he want pictures of my house?”

“He doesn’t,” she said on a high note. “He just wants to annoy you—and everybody else.”

Tom gave a laugh, a puzzled laugh, and repressed a statement that he longed to make. “Finds it fun, does he?”

“Yes. I can’t understand him. I’ve told him—”

Tom interrupted the phony-sounding defense of husband with, “May I ask you, Janice, where you got my telephone number, or your husband did?”

“Oh, that was easy. David asked our plumber. He’s the local plumber and he gave it to us right away. The plumber was here because we had a small problem.”

Victor Jarot, of course, the indefatigable voider of rebellious cisterns, the rammer of clogged pipes. Could such a man have any idea of privacy? “I see,” said Tom, at once livid, but at a loss what to do about Jarot, except to tell him please not to give his number out to anyone, under any circumstances. The same thing could happen with the mazout—the heating-fuel—people, he supposed. Such people thought the world turned around their metiers, and nothing else. “What does your husband really do?” Tom asked, taking a wild chance. “That is—I can hardly believe he’s studying marketing. He probably knows everything about marketing! So I felt he was kidding.” Tom wasn’t going to tell Janice he’d checked at INSEAD.

“Oh—one minute—yes, I thought I heard the car. David’s back. Got to sign off, Mr. Ripley. Bye!” She hung up.

Well! Had to ring him on the sly! Tom smiled. And her objective? To apologize! Was apologizing further humiliation for Janice Pritchard? Had David really been coming in the door?

Tom laughed aloud. Games, games! Secret games and open games. Open-looking games that were really sly and secret. But of course beginning-and-end secret games went on behind closed doors, as a rule. And the people concerned merely players, playing out something not in their control. Oh, sure.

He turned and stared at the harpsichord, which he was not going back to now, then went out and trotted to his nearest circle of dahlias. He cut with his pocketknife just one of the type he called frizzy orange, his favorite, because its petals reminded him of van Gogh sketches, of fields near Aries, of leaves and petals depicted with loving, wriggling care, be it with crayon or brush.

Tom walked back to the house. He was thinking of the Scarlatti Opus 38, or Sonate en Re Mineur, as M. Lepetit called it, which Tom was working on and had hopes of improving. He loved the (to him) main theme which sounded like a striving, an attack upon a difficulty—and yet was beautiful. But he did not want to practice it so much that it became stale.

He was also thinking of the telephone call to come from Jeff or Ed about Cynthia Gradnor. Depressing to know that it probably wouldn’t come for twenty-four hours, even if Jeff was successful in having some kind of conversation with Cynthia.

When the telephone rang around five that afternoon, Tom had a small hope, very small, that it might be Jeff, but it was not. Agnes Grais’ pleasant voice announced itself, and asked Tom if he and Heloise could come for an aperitif that evening around seven. “Antoine had a prolonged weekend, and he wants to leave so early tomorrow morning, and you both so soon go away.”

“Thank you, Agnes. Can you wait a moment while I speak with Heloise?”

Heloise agreed, and Tom came back and so informed Agnes.

Tom and Heloise left Belle Ombre almost at seven. The newly rented Pritchard house lay on the same road and beyond, Tom was thinking as he drove. What had the Grais noticed about the “renters”? Maybe nothing. The inevitable wild trees—Tom liked them—grew in the fields between houses in this area, sometimes blocking the points of distant house lights.

As was usual, Tom found himself standing and talking with Antoine, though he had vowed in a mild way not to be so entrapped this time. He had little to talk about to Antoine, the hardworking right-wing architect, whereas Heloise and Agnes had that feminine talent for bursting into conversation on sight, and keeping it up—with pleasant expressions on their faces too—for a whole evening, if need be.

This time, however, Antoine talked about Morocco instead of the influx of non-French in Paris demanding housing. “Ah oui, my father took me there when I was about six. I never forgot it. Of course I went a few times since then. It has a charm, a magic. To think that once the French had a protectorate over it, the days when the postal service was functioning, the telephone service, the streets …”

Tom listened. Antoine waxed almost poetic as he described his father’s love of Tangier and Casablanca.

“It is the people, of course it is,” said Antoine, “who make the country. They rightly possess their country—and yet they make such a mess from a French point of view.”

Ah, yes. What to say about that? Only sigh. Tom ventured: “To change the subject”—he swirled his tall gin and tonic and the ice rattled—“are your neighbors here quiet?” He nodded toward the Pritchard estate.

“Quiet?” Antoine’s lower lip came out. “Since you ask,” he said with a chuckle, “they were twice playing loud music. Late, around midnight. After! Pop music.” He said pop music as if it was amazing that anyone over twelve would play pop music. “But not for long. One half-hour.”

Suspicious length of time, Tom thought, and Antoine Grais was just the man to time such a phenomenon by his watch. “You can hear it here, you mean?”

“Oh, yes. And we’re nearly half a kilometer away! They had it really loud!”

Tom smiled. “Other complaints? They are not borrowing your lawnmower yet?”

“Non-n,” Antoine growled, and drank his Campari.

Tom was not going to say a word about Pritchard photographing Belle Ombre. Antoine’s vague suspicion of Tom would congeal a bit, the last thing Tom wanted. The whole village had finally known that the police, both French and English, had come to speak with Tom at Belle Ombre just after Murchison’s disappearance. The police had not made a noise about it, no cars with sirens, but in a small town everyone knew everything, and Tom could not afford more. He had warned Heloise before coming to the Grais that she was not to mention seeing Pritchard taking pictures.

The boy and girl came in, back from swimming somewhere, smiling, damp-haired and barefoot, but still not obstreperous: the Grais wouldn’t have permitted that. Edouard and his sister said their “Bon soir” and departed for the kitchen, Agnes following.

“A friend in Moret has a pool,” Antoine explained to Tom. “Very nice for us. He has kids too. And he brings ours back. I take them.” Antoine gave another rare smile that creased his well-fed face.

“When are you back?” asked Agnes, pushing her fingers through her hair. The question was for Heloise and Tom. Antoine had gone off somewhere.

Heloise said, “Perhaps in three weeks? It is not fixed.”

“Back again,” said Antoine, coming down the curving staircase with something in each hand. “Agnes cherie, some small glasses? Here is a fine map, Tom. Old but—you know!” His tone implied that old was best.

It was a much used roadmap of Morocco, Tom saw, folded many a time and repaired with transparent tape.

“I’ll be most careful with it,” Tom said.

“You should rent a car. No doubt about it. Get around to the little places.” Then Antoine attended to his specialty, Holland gin from a cold crock bottle.

Tom recalled that Antoine had a small fridge up in his atelier here.

Antoine poured and then passed the tray of four small glasses first to the ladies.

“Oooh!” Heloise exclaimed politely, though she was not fond of gin.

“Sante!” said Antoine as they all raised their glasses. “A happy trip and safe return!”

Bottoms up.

The Holland gin was particularly smooth, Tom had to admit, but Antoine acted as if he had made the stuff, and Tom had never known him to offer a second nip. Tom realized that the Pritchards had not yet tried to make acquaintance with the Grais, perhaps because Pritchard didn’t know that the Ripleys were old friends of the Grais. And that house between the Grais and the Pritchards? Empty for years, as far as Tom knew, maybe for sale; of no matter, no importance, Tom thought.

Tom and Heloise took their leave, promising a postcard, which prompted Antoine to warn that the post in Maroc was abominable. Tom thought of Reeves’s tape.

They had just got home when the telephone rang.

“I’m expecting a call, dear, so—” Tom picked up the telephone on the hall table, prepared to have to go up to his own room, in case it was Jeff and the conversation became complex.

“Cheri, I want some yogurt, I don’t like that gin,” Heloise said, and went off in the direction of the kitchen.

“Tom, this is Ed,” said Ed Banbury’s voice. “I got through to Cynthia. Jeff and I were sharing—efforts. I couldn’t make a date, but I learned a few things.”

“Yes?”

“It seems Cynthia was at a party some time ago for journalists, a big stand-up thing where nearly anybody could get in and—it seems this Pritchard was there.”

“One minute, Ed, I think I’ll take this on another phone. Hang on.” Tom leapt up the stairs to his room, took the telephone off the hook, and ran down again to hang up the hall telephone. Heloise, paying no attention, was turning on the TV in the living room. But Tom did not want to say the name Cynthia within her hearing, lest she remember that Cynthia had been the fiancee of Bernard Tufts, le you, as Heloise called him. Bernard had frightened Heloise when she had met him here at Belle Ombre. “Back again,” said Tom. “You talked with Cynthia.”

“By telephone. This afternoon. A man at the party whom Cynthia knew came over and told her there was an American there, asking if he knew Tom Ripley. Just out of the blue, it seems. So this man—”

“American also?”

“I don’t know. Anyway, Cynthia told her friend—this man—to tell the American to look into Ripley’s connection with Murchison. That’s how it all came about, Tom.”

Tom found it extremely fuzzy. “You don’t know the go-between’s name? Cynthia’s friend who spoke with Pritchard?”

“Cynthia didn’t drop it and I didn’t want to—to press it too much. What was my excuse for ringing her in the first place? That a rather gauche type of American knows her name? I didn’t say that you’d told me that. Talk about out of the blue! I had to play it that way. I think we learned at least something, Tom.”

True, Tom thought. “But Cynthia never met Pritchard? That night?”

“I gather not.”

“The go-between must’ve said to Pritchard, ‘Let me ask my friend Cynthia Gradnor about Ripley.’ Pritchard had her name right and it’s not an everyday name.” Maybe Cynthia had taken the trouble, via her go-between, Tom thought, to give her name like a calling card, thinking it might strike the fear of God into Tom Ripley, if it ever got to him.