Ngaio Marsh - Last Ditch

After the initial shock, Ricky’s reaction was one of hideous embarrassment joined to fury. He sat there with a flaming face knowing himself to look the last word in abysmal foolishness. How long, oh God, how long had Mr. Ferrant stood behind him and watched him squint with screwed up countenance through a hole in a newspaper at Syd Jones? Mr. Ferrant, togged out in skintight, modishly flared white trousers, a pink striped T-shirt, white buckskin sandals, and a medallion on a silver chain. Mr. Ferrant of the clustering curls and impertinent smile. Mr. Ferrant, incongruously enough, the plumber and odd-job man.

“You made me jump,” Ricky said. “Hullo. Mrs. Ferrant said you might be here.”

Mr. Ferrant snapped his fingers at the waiter.

“Mind if I join you?” he asked Ricky.

“No. Please. Do. What,” Ricky invited in a strange voice, “will you have?”

He would have beer. Ricky ordered two beers and felt that he himself would be awash with it.

Ferrant, whose every move seemed to Ricky to express a veiled insolence, slid into a chair and stretched himself. “When did you come over, then?” he asked.

“This morning.”

“Is that right?” he said easily. “So did he ,” and nodded across at Syd who now fidgeted and looked at his watch. At any moment, Ricky thought, he might turn round and see them and what could that not lead to?

The waiter brought their beer. Ferrant lit a cigarette. He blew out smoke and wafted it away with a workman’s hand. “And what brought you over, anyway?” he asked.

“Curiosity,” said Ricky and then, hurriedly, “To make a change from work.”

“Work? That’d be writing, wouldn’t it?” he said as if there was something suspect in the notion. “Where’re you staying?” Ricky told him.

“That’s a crummy little old place, that is,” he said. “I go to Le Beau Rivage myself.”

He took the copy of Le Monde out of Ricky’s nerveless grasp and stuck his blunt forefinger through the hole. “Quite fascinating what you was reading, seemingly. Couldn’t take your eyes off of it, could you, Mr. Alleyn?”

“Look here,” Ricky said. He put his hand up to his face and felt its heat. “I expect you think there was something a bit off about — about — my looking — about. But there wasn’t. I can’t explain but—”

“Me!” said Ferrant. “Think! I don’t think nothing.”

He drained his glass and clapped it down on the table. “We all get our little fancies, like,” he said. “Right? And why not? Nice drop of ale, that.” He was on his feet. “Reckon I’ll have a word with Syd,” he said. “Quite a coincidence. He come in the morning boat, too. Lovely weather, isn’t it? Might turn to thunder later on.”

He strolled across between the empty tables with slight but ineffable shifts of his vulgar little stern. Ricky could have kicked him but he could have kicked himself still harder.

It seemed an eternity before Ferrant reached Syd, who appeared to have dozed off. Ricky, held in a nightmarish inertia, could not take his eyes off them. Ferrant laid his hand on Syd’s head and rocked it, not very gently, to and fro.

Syd opened his eyes. Ferrant twisted the head towards Ricky. He said something that didn’t seem to register. Syd blinked and frowned as if unable to focus his eyes, but he made a feeble attempt to shake Ferrant off. Ferrant released him with a bully’s playful buffet. Ricky saw awareness dawn on Syd’s face and a mounting anger.

Ferrant shifted the paint box to the ground and sat down. He put his hand on Syd’s knee and leaned toward him. He might have been giving him some important advice. The waiter strolled toward Ricky, who paid and tipped him. He said something about “ un drôle de type, celui-là, ” meaning Ferrant.

Ricky left the café. On his way out Ferrant waved to him.

He walked back into the town, chastened.

Perhaps the circumstance that most mortified him was the certainty that Ferrant by this time had told Syd about the hole in the newspaper.

The day had turned into a scorcher and the soles of his feet were cobbled with red-hot marbles. He reached the front and sought the shade of a wooden pavillion facing the sea. He shuffled out of his espadrilles, lit his pipe, and began to feel a little better.

The Island Belle was still at her berth. After the upset with Syd Jones on the way over Ricky hadn’t thought of finding out when she sailed for Montjoy. He wondered whether he should call it a day, sail with her, and retire to his proper occupation of writing a book and perhaps licking the wounds in his self-esteem.

He was unable to make up his mind. French holiday-makers came and went; with the approach of noon the day grew hotter and the little pavillion less endurable. Ricky left it and walked painfully along the front to a group of three hotels, each of which had private access to a beach. He went into the first, Le Beau Rivage, hired bathing drawers and a towel, and swam about among the decorous bourgeoisie, hoping to become refreshed and in better heart.

What he did become was hungry. Unable to face the walk along scorching pavements, he took a taxi to his hotel, lunched there in a dark little salle à manger , and retired to his room where he fell into a very heavy sleep.

He woke, feeling awful, at three o’clock. The room had darkened. When he looked out his window it was to the ominous rumble of thunder and at steely clouds rolling in from the north. The harbor had turned gray and choppy and the Island Belle jaunced at her moorings. There were very few people about in the town and those that were to be seen walked quickly, seeking shelter.

Ricky was one of those beings who respond uncomfortably to electric storms. They produced a nervous tingling in his arms and legs and a sense of impending disaster. As a small boy they had aroused a febrile excitement so that at one moment he wanted to hide and at the next to stand at the window or even go out of doors for the sheer terror of doing so. Although he had learned to control these reactions and to give little outward sign of them, the restlessness they induced even now was almost unbearable.

The room flashed up and out. Ricky counted the seconds automatically, scarcely knowing that he did so. “One-a-b, two-a-b,” up to seven, when the thunder broke. That meant, or so he had always believed, that the core of the storm was seven miles away and might or might not come nearer.

The sky behaved in the manner of a Gustave Doré engraving. A crack opened and a shaft of vivid sunlight darted down like God’s vengeance upon the offending sea.

Ricky tingled from head to foot. The room had stealthily become much too small. He was invaded by an urge to prove himself to himself. “1 may have made a muck of my espionage,” he thought, “but, by gum, I’m not going to stay in my bedroom with pins-and-needles because a couple of clouds are having it off up there. To hell with them.”

He fished a light raincoat out of his rucksack and ran downstairs, pulling it on as he went. The elderly clerk was asleep behind his desk.

Outside there was a stifled feeling in the air, as if the town held its breath. Sounds — isolated footsteps, desultory voices, and the hiss of tires on the road — were all exaggerated. The sky was now so black that twilight seemed to have fallen on Saint Pierre-des-Roches.

Forked lightning wrote itself with a flourish across the heavens and almost simultaneously a gigantic tin tray banged overhead. A woman in the street crossed herself and broke into a shuffle. Ricky thought: “If I combed my hair it would crackle.”

A few big drops fell like bullets in the dust and then, tremendously, the rain came down.

It really was a ferocious storm. The streets were running streams; lightning whiplashed almost continuously, thunder mingled with the din made by rain on roofs, sea, and stone. Ricky’s espadrilles felt as if they had dissolved on his feet.