Last Ditch

Bruno strolled away. Julia called after him: “And bring the children, darling, for Ricky to meet.” She gave Ricky a brilliant smile: “You have come in for a tricky luncheon haven’t you?” she said.

“I expect I can manage,” he replied, and the Pharamonds looked approvingly at him. Julia turned to Carlotta. “Would you say you were about the same size?” she asked.

“As who?”

“Darling, as Miss Harkness. Her present size, I mean, of course. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”

“What is all this?” Carlotta demanded in a rising voice. “What’s Julia up to?”

“No good, you may depend upon it,” Jasper muttered. And to his wife: “Have you asked Miss Harkness to stay? Have you dared?”

“But where else is there for her to go? She can’t return to Mr. Harkness and be beaten up. In her condition. Face it.”

“They are coming,” said Louis, who was looking out the windows. “I don’t understand any of this. Is she lunching?”

“And staying, apparently,” said Carlotta. “And Julia wants me to give her my clothes.”

“Lend, not give, and only something for the night,” Julia urged. “Tomorrow there will be other arrangements.”

Children’s voices sounded in the hall. Bruno opened the door and two little girls rushed noisily in. They were aged about five and seven and wore nothing but denim trousers with crossover straps. They flung themselves upon their mother, who greeted them in a voice fraught with emotion.

“Dar-lings!” cried Julia, tenderly embracing them.

Then came Miss Harkness.

She was a well-developed girl with a weather-beaten complexion and hands so horny that Ricky was reminded of hooves. A marked puffiness around the eyes bore evidence to her recent emotional contretemps. She wore jodhpurs and a checked shirt.

Julia introduced her all around. Miss Harkness changed her weight from foot to foot, nodded and sometimes said “Uh.” The Pharamonds all set up a conversational breeze while Jasper produced a tray of drinks. Ricky and Bruno drank beer and the family either sherry or white wine. Miss Harkness in a hoarse voice asked for Scotch and soda and downed it in three noisy gulps. Louis Pharamond began to talk to her about horses, and Ricky heard him say he had played polo badly in Brazil.

How pale they all were, Ricky thought. Really, they looked as if they had been forced, like vegetables under covers, and had come out severely bleached. Even Julia, a Pharamond only by marriage, was without color. Hers was a lovely pallor, a dramatic setting for her impertinent eyes and mouth. She was rather like an Aubrey Beardsley lady.

At luncheon, Ricky sat on her right and had Carlotta for his other neighbor. Diagonally opposite, by Jasper, and with Louis on her right, sat Miss Harkness with another whiskey and soda, and opposite her, on their father’s left, the little girls who were called Selina and Julietta. Louis was the darkest and much the most mondain of all the Pharamonds. He wore a threadlike black moustache and a silken jumper and was smoothly groomed. He continued to make one-sided conversation with Miss Harkness, bending his head towards her and laughing in a flirtatious ma

“Have you spotted our ‘Troy’?” Julia asked Ricky, and pointed to a picture above Jasper’s head. He had, but had been too shy to say so. It was a conversation piece — a man and a woman seated in the foreground, and behind them a row of wind-blown promenaders, dashingly indicated against a lively sky.

“Jasper and me,” Julia said, “on board the Oriana. We adore it. Do you paint?”

“Luckily, I don’t even try.”

“A policeman, perhaps?”

“Not even that, I’m afraid. An u

“Jasper,” said his wife, “is a mathematician and is writing a book about the binomial theorem but you mustn’t say I said so because he doesn’t care to have it known. Selina, darling, one more face like that and out you go before the pudding which is strawberries and cream.”

Selina, with the aid of her fingers, had dragged down the corners of her mouth, slitted her eyes, and leered across the table at Miss Harkness. She let her face snap back into normality, and then lounged in her chair, sinking her chin on her chest and rolling her eyes. Her sister, Julietta, was consumed with laughter.

“Aren’t children awful,” Julia asked, “when they set out to be witty? Yesterday at luncheon Julietta said, ‘My pud’s made of mud,’ and they both laughed themselves sick. Jasper and I were made quite miserable by it.”

“It won’t last,” Ricky assured her.

“It had better not.” She leaned toward him. He caught a whiff of her scent, became startlingly aware of her thick immaculate skin, and felt an extraordinary stillness come over him.

“So far, so good, wouldn’t you say?” she breathed. “I mean — at least she’s not cutting up rough.”

“She’s eating quite well,” Ricky muttered.

Julia gave him a look of radiant approval. He was uplifted. “Gosh!” he thought. “Oh, gosh, what is all this?”

It was with a sensation of having been launched upon uncharted seas that he took his leave of the Pharamonds and returned to his lodging in the village.

“That’s an upsetting lady,” thought Ricky. “A very lovely and upsetting lady.”

ii

The fishing village of Deep Cove was on the north coast of the island: a knot of cottages clustered around an unremarkable bay. There was a general store and post office, a church and a pub — the Cod-and-Bottle. A van drove over to Montjoy on the south Coast with the catch of fish when there was one. Montjoy, the only town on the island, was a tourist resort with three smart hotels. The cove was eight miles away, but not many Montjoy tourists came to see it because there were no “attractions,” and it lay off the main road. Tourists did, however, patronize Leathers, the riding school and horse-hiring establishment run by the Harknesses. This was situated a mile out of Deep Cove and lay between it and the Pharamonds’ house, which was called L’Espérance and had been in the possession of the family, Jasper had told Ricky, since the mid-eighteenth century. It stood high above the cliffs and could be seen for miles around on a clear day.

Ricky had hired a bicycle and had left it inside the drive gates. He jolted back down the lane, spun along the main road in grand style with salt air tingling up his nose, and turned into the steep descent to the cove.

Mr. and Mrs. Ferrant’s stone cottage was on the waterfront; Ricky had an upstairs front bedroom and the use of a suffocating parlor. He preferred to work in his bedroom. He sat at a table at the window, which commanded a view of the harbor, a strip of sand, a jetty, and the little fishing fleet when it was at anchor. Seagulls mewed with the devoted persistence of their species in marine radio-drama.

When he came into the passage he heard the thump of Mrs. Ferrant’s iron in the kitchen and caught the smell of hot cloth. She came out, a handsome dark woman of about thirty-five with black hair drawn into a knot, black eyes, and a full figure. In common with most of the islanders, she showed her Gallic heritage.

“You’re back then,” she said. “Do you fancy a cup of tea?”

“No, thank you very much, Mrs. Ferrant. I had an awfully late luncheon.”

“Up above at L’Espérance?”

“That’s right.”

“That would be a great spread, and grandly served?”

There was no defining her style of speech. The choice of words had the positive character almost of the West Country, but her accent carried the swallowed r’s of France. “They live well, up there,” she said.

“It was all very nice,” Ricky murmured. She passed her working-woman’s hand across her mouth. “And they would all be there. All the family?”