Last Ditch. Ngaio Marsh

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 Côte 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 Ricky.

      ‘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 СКАЧАТЬ