Last Ditch

2: Syd Jones’s Pad and Montjoy

i

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’Espérance.”

“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 stereo system where she made a choice and released a cacophony.

Mr. Jones returned. He dropped onto 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. Syd’s place was a “pad,” all right.

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 color television, and the stereo components. 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’Espérance? Was Mr. Jones the father of her child? How did Mr. Jones contrive to support an existence combining extremes of squalor with color television and highly sophisticated stereo equipment? 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 learned to look at pictures in the right way but he had never learned to talk easily about them, and in his experience the painters themselves, good or bad, were as a rule extremely inarticulate. Perhaps, in this respect, Mr. Jones’s formidable silences were merely occupational characteristics.

But what would Troy, Ricky’s mother, have said about the paintings? Mr. Jones had skipped through a tidy sequence of styles. As representation retired before abstraction and abstraction yielded to collage and collage to surrealism, Ricky fancied he could hear her crisp dismissal: “Not much cop, I’m afraid, poor chap.”

The exhibition and the pop music came to an end and Mr. Jones’s high spirits seemed to die with them. In the deafening silence that followed Ricky felt he had to speak. He said, “Thank you very much for letting me see them.”

“Don’t give me that,” said Mr. Jones yawning hideously. “Obviously you haven’t understood what I’m doing.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Stuff it. You smoke?”

“If you mean what I think you mean, no, I don’t.”

“I didn’t mean anything.”

“My mistake,” Ricky said.

“You ever take a trip?”

“No.”

“Bloody smug, aren’t we?”

“Think so?” Ricky said and not without difficulty struggled to his feet. Miss Harkness was fully extended on the divan bed and was possibly asleep.

Mr. Jones said, “I suppose you think you know what you like.”

“Why not? Anyway that’s a pretty crummy old crack, isn’t it?”

“Do you ever look at anything that’s not in the pretty peep department?”

“Such as?”

“Oh, you wouldn’t know,” Mr. Jones said. “Such as Troy. Does the name Troy mean anything to you, by the way?”

“Look,” Ricky said, “it really is bad luck for you and I can’t answer without making it sound like a payoff line. But, yes, the name Troy does mean quite a lot to me. She’s — I feel I ought to say ‘wait for it, wait for it’—she’s my mother.”

Mr. Jones’s jaw dropped. This much could be distinguished by a change of direction in his beard. There were, too, involuntary movements of the legs and arms. He picked up a large tube of paint, which he appeared to scrutinize closely. Presently he said in a voice pitched u

“Indeed, you couldn’t.”

“As a matter of fact, I’ve really gone through my Troy phase. You won’t agree, of course, but I’m afraid I feel she’s painted herself out.”

“Are you?”

Mr. Jones dropped the tube of paint on the floor.

Ricky picked it up.

“Jerome et Cie,” he said. “They’re a new firm, aren’t they? I think they sent my Mum some specimens to try. Do you get it direct from France?”

Jones took it from him.

“I generally use acrylic,” he said.

“Well,” Ricky said, “I think I’ll seek my virtuous couch. It was nice of you to ask me in.”

They faced each other as two divergent species in a menagerie might do.

“Anyway,” Ricky said, “we do both speak English, don’t we?”

“You reckon?” said Mr. Jones. And after a further silence: “Oh Christ, forget the lot and have a beer.”

“I’ll do that thing,” said Ricky.

ii

To say that after this exchange all went swimmingly at Mr. Jones’s Pad would not be an accurate account of that evening’s strange entertainment, but at least the tone became less acrimonious. Indeed, Mr. Jones developed high spirits of a sort and instructed Ricky to call him Syd. He was devoured by curiosity about Ricky’s mother, her approach to her work and — this was a tricky one — whether she took pupils. Ricky found this behavioral change both touching and painful.

Miss Harkness took no part in the conversation but moodily produced bottled beer of which she consumed rather a lot. It emerged that the horse Ricky had shrunk from in the dark was her mount. So, he supposed, she would not spend the night at Syd’s Pad, but would ride, darkling, to the stables or — was it possible? — all the way to L’Espérance and the protection (scarcely, it seemed, called for) of the Pharamonds.

By midnight Ricky knew that Syd was a New Zealander by birth, which accounted for certain habits of speech. He had left his native soil at the age of seventeen and had lived in his Pad for a year. He did some sort of casual labor at Leathers, the family riding stables to which Miss Harkness was attached but from which she seemed to have been evicted.

“He mucks out,” said Miss Harkness in a solitary burst of conversation and, for no reason that Ricky could divine, gave a hoarse laugh.

It transpired that Syd occasionally visited Saint Pierre-des-Roches, the nearest port on the Normandy coast to which there was a weekly ferry service.

At a quarter to one Ricky left the Pad, took six paces into the night, and fell flat on his face in the mud. He could hear Miss Harkness’s horse giving signs of equine consternation.

The village was fast asleep under a starry sky, the sound of the night tide rose and fell uninterrupted by Ricky’s rubber-shod steps on the cobbled front. Somewhere out on the harbor a solitary light bobbed and he wondered if Mr. Ferrant was engaged in his hobby of night fishing. He paused to watch it and realized that it was nearer inshore than he had imagined and coming closer. He could hear the rhythmic dip of oars.