Last Ditch. Ngaio Marsh

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      ‘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 СКАЧАТЬ