Ripley Under Ground Read online

  Chris sounded naïve, but perhaps he had some of the Greenleaf good manners and would not outstay a welcome. Tom winced as this crossed his mind, because he had certainly outstayed his welcome at Dickie’s in Mongibello in his callow youth, when he’d been twenty-five, not twenty. Tom had come from America, or rather had been sent by Dickie’s father, Herbert Greenleaf, to bring Dickie back home. It had been a classic situation. Dickie hadn’t wanted to go back to the United States. And Tom’s naïveté at that time, was something that now made him cringe. The things he had had to learn! And then—well, Tom Ripley had stayed in Europe. He had learned a bit. After all he had some money—Dickie’s—the girls had liked him well enough, and in fact Tom had felt a bit pursued. Heloise Plisson had been one of the ones who had liked him. And from Tom’s point of view, she wasn’t a piece of cement, orthodox, or far out, or another bore. Tom had not proposed marriage, nor had Heloise. It was a dark chapter in his life, a brief one. Heloise had said, in their rented bungalow in Cannes, “Since we’re living together, why not get married? . . . Apropos, I am not sure Papa will countenance [how had she said ‘countenance’ in French? look that up] our living together much longer, whereas if we were really married—ça serait un ƒait accompli.” Tom had turned green at the wedding, even though it had been a civil wedding with no audience in a courtroom of some kind. Heloise had said later, laughing, “You were green.” True. But Tom had at least gone through with it. He had hoped for a word of praise from Heloise, though he knew this was absurd on his part. It was for the bridegroom to say, “Darling, you were gorgeous!” or “Your cheeks were glowing with beauty and happiness!” or some such rot. Well, Tom’s had been pale green. At least he hadn’t collapsed going up the aisle—which had been a dingy passage between a few straight empty chairs in a magistrate’s office in the south of France. Marriages ought to be secret, Tom thought, as private as the wedding night—which wasn’t saying much. Since everybody’s mind was frankly on the wedding night anyway at weddings, why was the affair itself so blatantly public? There was something rather vulgar about it. Why couldn’t people surprise their friends by saying, “Oh, but we’ve been married for three months now!” It was easy to see the reason for public weddings in the past—she’s off our hands and you can’t wriggle out of this one, old cock, or fifty relatives of the bride will boil you in oil—but why these days?

  Tom went to bed.

  On Sunday morning, again around 5 a.m., Tom donned his Levi’s and went quietly down the stairs.

  This time, he ran into Mme. Annette, who opened the door from the kitchen into the hall, just as Tom was about to open the front door to go out. Mme. Annette had a white cloth pressed to her cheek—no doubt the cloth contained hot salt of the coarse cooking type—and there was a dolorous expression on her face.

  “Mme. Annette—it’s the tooth,” Tom said sympathetically.

  “I could not sleep all night,” said Mme. Annette. “You are up early, M. Tome.”

  “Damn that dentist,” Tom said in English. He continued in French, “The idea of a nerve falling out! He doesn’t know what he’s doing. Now listen, Mme. Annette, I have some yellow pills upstairs, I just remembered them. From Paris. Especially for toothache. Wait a second.” Tom ran back up the stairs.

  She took one of the capsules. Mme. Annette blinked as she swallowed. She had pale blue eyes. Her thin upper lids, drawn downward at the outer corners, looked Nordic. She was a Breton on her father’s side.

  “If you like, I can drive you to Fontainebleau today,” Tom said. Tom and Heloise had a dentist in Fontainebleau, and Tom thought he would see Mme. Annette on a Sunday.

  “Why are you up so early?” Mme. Annette’s curiosity was greater than her pain, it seemed.

  “I’m going to work a little in the garden and go back to sleep for an hour or so. I also had a difficult time sleeping.”

  Tom persuaded her gently back to her room, and left the bottle of capsules with her. Four in twenty-four hours were all right to take, he told her. “Don’t bother with breakfast or lunch for me, dear Madame. Repose yourself today.”

  Then Tom went out to his task. He took it at a reasonable rate, or what he thought was reasonable. The trench ought to be five feet deep, and no nonsense about it. He had taken a rather rusty but still effective bucksaw from the toolshed, and with this he attacked the crisscrossing roots, heedless of the damp soil that stuck in the saw’s teeth. He made progress. It was fairly light, though the sun was by no means up, when he finished the trench and hauled himself out, muddying the whole front of his sweater, unfortunately a beige cashmere. He looked around, but saw no one on the little lane that ran through the woods. A good thing, he thought, that the French tied up their dogs in the country, because a dog during last night might have snuffed up the branches that covered Murchison’s corpse and barked an announcement that would have carried a kilometer. Again Tom tugged on the ropes that bound Murchison’s tarpaulin. The body fell in with a thud positively delicious to Tom’s ears. The shoveling in of earth was also a pleasure. There was soil to spare, and after stamping down the grave, Tom scattered the rest of the soil about in all directions. Then he walked slowly, but with a sense of achievement, back across his lawn and around to the front door.

  He washed his sweater in some kind of delicate suds from Heloise’s bathroom. Then he slept excellently till after 10 a.m.

  Tom made some coffee in the kitchen, then went out to pick up his Observer and Sunday Times at the newspaper shop. Usually he stopped for a coffee somewhere while he glanced at the two newspapers—always a treasure to him—but today he wanted to be alone when he looked at the Derwatt write-ups. Tom almost forgot to buy Mme. Annette’s daily, the local edition of Le Parisien, whose headline was always in red. Today, something about a strangled twelve-year-old. The placards outside the shop touting various newspapers were equally bizarre but in a different way:

  JEANNE AND PIERRE KISS AGAIN!

  Who were they?

  MARIE FURIOUS WITH CLAUDE!

  The French were never merely annoyed, they were ƒurieux.

  ONASSIS FEARS THEY WILL STEAL JACKIE FROM HIM!

  Were the French lying awake worrying about that?

  A BABY FOR NICOLE!

  Nicole who, for Christ’s sake? Tom never knew who most of these people were—film stars, pop singers, perhaps—but they evidently sold newspapers. The activities of the English Royal Family were unbelievable, Elizabeth and Philip on the brink of divorce three times a year, and Margaret and Tony spitting in each other’s faces.

  Tom put Mme. Annette’s paper on the kitchen table, then went up to his room. Both the Observer and the Sunday Times had a picture of him as Philip Derwatt on their arts review pages. In one, his mouth was open in the act of replying to questions, open in the disgusting beard. Tom looked quickly at the write-ups, not really wanting to read every word.

  The Observer said: “. . . breaking his long retreat with a surprise appearance Wednesday afternoon at the Buckmaster Gallery, Philip Derwatt, who prefers to be called simply Derwatt, was reticent about his Mexican whereabouts but voluble enough when questioned about his work and that of his contemporaries. On Picasso: ‘Picasso has periods. I have no periods.’” In the Sunday Times photograph, he stood behind Jeff’s desk gesticulating with his left fist raised, an action Tom did not remember having made, but here it was “. . . wearing clothes that had obviously been in a cupboard for years . . . held his own against a battery of twelve reporters, which must have been a trial after six years of seclusion, we assume.” Was that “we assume” a dig? Tom thought not, really, because the rest of the comment was favorable. “Derwatt’s current canvases maintain his high standards—idiosyncratic, bizarre, even sick, perhaps? . . . None of Derwatt’s paintings is dashed off or unresolved. They are labors of love, though his technique appears quick, fresh, and easy for him. This is not to be confused with facility or the look of it. Derwatt says he has never painted a picture in less than two weeks . . .” Had he
said that? “. . . and he works daily, often for more than seven hours per day. . . . Men, little girls, chairs, tables, strange things on fire, these still predominate. . . . The show is going to be another sellout.” No mention was made of Derwatt’s disappearance after the interview.

  A pity, Tom thought, that some of these compliments couldn’t be engraved upon Bernard Tufts’s own tomb, wherever that might be finally. Tom was reminded of “Here lies one whose name was writ in water,” a line that had made Tom’s eyes fill with tears on the three occasions he had seen it in the English Protestant Cemetery in Rome, and could sometimes make his eyes water when he merely thought of it. Perhaps Bernard, the plodder, the artist, would compose his own lines before he died. Or would he be anonymously famous because of one “Derwatt,” one splendid picture which he had yet to paint?

  Or would Bernard ever paint another Derwatt? Good God, he didn’t even know, Tom realized. And was Bernard painting any more of his own paintings, that might be called Tufts?

  Mme. Annette was feeling better before noon. And as Tom had foreseen, because of the anodynal pills, she did not want to be taken to the better dentist at Fontainebleau.

  “Madame—I am inundated with invités just now, it seems. A pity Mme. Heloise is not here. But tonight there is another for dinner, a young man called M. Christophe, an American. I can do all the shopping necessary in the village. . . . Non-non, you repose yourself.”

  And Tom did the shopping straightaway and was back home before two. Mme. Annette said an American had rung, but they could not understand each other, and the American would ring back.

  Chris did, and Tom was to pick him up at 6:30 at Moret.

  Tom put on old flannels, a turtleneck sweater, and desert boots, and left in the Alfa Romeo. The menu tonight was viande hâchée—the French hamburger which was so red and delicious one could eat it raw. Tom had seen Americans swoon over hamburgers with onion and ketchup in the Paris drugstores, when they had been away from America only twenty-four hours.

  Tom recognized Chris Greenleaf at his first glimpse, as he had thought he might. Though Tom’s view was obscured by several people, Christopher’s blond head stuck a bit above them. His eyes and his brows had the same slight frown that Dickie’s had had. Tom raised an arm in greeting, but Christopher was hesitant until their eyes actually met, and Tom smiled. The boy’s smile was like Dickie’s, but if there was a difference, it was in the lips, Tom thought. Christopher’s lips were fuller, with a fullness unrelated to Dickie and no doubt from Christopher’s mother’s side.

  They gripped hands.

  “It’s really like the country out here.”

  “How do you like Paris?”

  “Oh, I like it. It’s bigger than I thought.”

  Christopher took in everything, craning his neck at the most ordinary bar-cafés, plane trees, private houses along the way. His friend Gerald might go for two or three days to Strassburg, Christopher told Tom. “This is the first French village I’ve seen. It’s real, isn’t it?” he asked, as if it might be a stage set.

  Tom found it amusing, strangely nervous-making, Chris’s enthusiasm. Tom remembered his own mad joy—though there’d been no one for him to speak to—at his first glimpse of the Leaning Tower of Pisa from a moving train, his first view of the curving lights of Cannes’ shore.

  Belle Ombre was not fully visible in the dark now, but Mme. Annette had put the light on at the front door, and its proportions could be guessed from a light in the front left corner, where the kitchen was. Tom smiled to himself at Chris’s ecstatic comments, but they pleased Tom nevertheless. Sometimes Tom felt like kicking Belle Ombre and the Plisson family, too, to pieces, as if they were a conglomerate sand castle that he could destroy with a foot. These times came when he was maddened by some incident of French bloodymindedness, greed, a lie that was not exactly a lie but a deliberate concealment of fact. When other people praised Belle Ombre, Tom liked it, too. Tom drove into the garage, and carried one of Chris’s two suitcases. Chris said he had everything with him.

  Mme. Annette opened the front door.

  “My housekeeper, faithful retainer, without whom I couldn’t live,” Tom said, “Mme. Annette. M. Christophe.”

  “How do you do? Bonsoir,” Chris said.

  “Bonsoir, m’sieur. The room of m’sieur is ready.”

  Tom took Chris upstairs.

  “This is marvelous,” Chris said. “It’s like a museum!”

  There was, Tom supposed, a considerable amount of satin and ormolu. “It’s my wife, I think—the decorating. She’s not here just now.”

  “I saw a picture of her with you. Uncle Herbert showed it to me in New York just the other day. She’s blonde. Her name’s Heloise.”

  Tom left Christopher to wash up, and said he would be downstairs.

  Tom’s thoughts drifted to Murchison again: Murchison would be missing from his plane’s passenger list. The police would check Paris hotels and find that Murchison had not been at any. An immigration check would show that Murchison had been at the Hotel Mandeville October 14th and 15th, and had said he would be back on the 17th. Tom’s own name and address was on the Hotel Mandeville register for the night of 15 October. But he would not be the only resident of France in the Mandeville that night, surely. Would the police come to question him or would they not?

  Christopher came downstairs. He had combed his wavy blond hair, and still wore his corduroy trousers and army boots. “Hope you’re not having guests for dinner. If you are, I’ll change.”

  “We’re alone. It’s the country, so wear what you like.”

  Christopher looked at Tom’s paintings, and paid more attention to a pinkish Pascin nude, a drawing, than to the paintings. “You live here all year round? It must be a pleasure.”

  He accepted a scotch. Tom had to account for his time again, and mentioned his gardening and his informal study of languages, though in fact Tom’s routine of study was stricter then he admitted. Tom loved his leisure, however, as only an American could, he thought—once an American got the hang of it, and so few did. It was not a thing he cared to put into words to anyone. He had longed for leisure and a bit of luxury when he had met Dickie Greenleaf, and now that he had attained it, the charm had not palled.

  At the table, Christopher began to talk of Dickie. He said he had photographs of Dickie that someone had taken in Mongibello, and that Tom was in one of the photographs. Christopher spoke with a little difficulty of Dickie’s death—his suicide, as everyone thought. Chris had something better than manners, Tom saw, which was sensitivity. Tom was fascinated by the candlelight through the irises of his blue eyes, because so often Dickie’s eyes had looked the same late at night in Mongibello, or in some candlelit restaurant in Naples.

  Christopher said, standing tall and looking at the French windows, and up at the cream-colored coffered ceiling, “It’s fabulous to live in a house like this. And you have music besides—and paintings!”

  Tom was reminded painfully of himself at twenty. Chris’s family wasn’t poor, Tom was sure, but their house wouldn’t be quite like this one. While they drank coffee, Tom played A Midsummer Night’s Dream music.

  Then the telephone rang. It was about 10 p.m.

  The French telephone operator asked him if his number was so-and-so, then told him not to quit for a call from London.

  “Hello. This is Bernard Tufts,” said the tense voice, and there followed crackles.

  “Hello? Yes. Tom here. Can you hear me?”

  “Can you speak louder? I’m ringing to say . . .” Bernard’s voice faded out as if drowned in a deep sea.

  Tom glanced at Chris, who was reading the sleeve of a record. “Is this better?” Tom roared into the telephone, and as if to spite him, the telephone gave a fart, then a crack like a mountain splitting beneath a stroke of lightning. Tom’s left ear rang from the impact, and he switched to the right ear. He could hear Bernard struggling on slowly, loudly, but alas the words were quite unintelligible. Tom heard only �
��Murchison.” “He’s in London!” Tom shouted, glad to have something definite to convey. Now it was something about the Mandeville. Had the man from the Tate Gallery tried to reach Murchison at the Mandeville, then spoken to the Buckmaster Gallery, Tom wondered? “Bernard, it is hopeless!” Tom yelled desperately. “Can you write me?” Tom didn’t know whether Bernard hung up or not, but a buzzing silence followed, and Tom assumed Bernard had given up, so he put the telephone down. “To think one pays a hundred and twenty bucks just to get a telephone in this country,” Tom said. “I’m sorry for all the shouting.”

  “Oh, I’ve always heard French telephones are lousy,” Chris said. “Was it important? Heloise?”

  “No, no.”

  Chris stood up. “I’d like to show you my guide books. Can I?” He ran upstairs.

  A matter of time, Tom thought, till the French police or the English—maybe even the American—questioned him about Murchison. Tom hoped Chris would not be here when it happened.

  Chris came down with three books. He had the Guide Bleu for France, an art book on French châteaux, and a big book on the Rheinland, where he intended to go with Gerald Hayman when Gerald came back from Strassburg.

  Christopher sipped with pleasure at a single brandy, prolonging it. “I have serious doubts about the value of democracy. That’s a terrible thing for an American to say, isn’t it? Democracy depends on a certain minimal level of education for everybody, and America tries to give it to everybody—but we really haven’t got it. And it isn’t even true that everybody wants it. . . .”

  Tom half listened. But his occasional comments seemed to satisfy Chris, at least this evening.

  The telephone rang again. Tom noticed that it was five to eleven by the little silver clock on the telephone table.

  A man’s voice said in French that he was an agent of police, and apologized for ringing at this hour, but was M. Ripley there? “Good evening, m’sieur. Do you by any chance know an American named Thomas Murchison?”