still dark and passing-fair, by the way?’
Nobody answered.
Louis said very loudly: ‘Any progeny? Oh, but of course. I forgot.’
‘Shut up,’ Jasper said, in a tone of voice that Ricky hadn’t heard from him before.
He and Julia and Carlotta together said good night to Ricky, who by this time was outside the car. He shut the door as quietly as he could and stood back. Louis reversed noisily and much too fast. He called out something that sounded like: ‘Give her my love.’ The car shot away in low gear and roared up the lane.
Upstairs on the dark landing Ricky could hear Ferrant snoring prodigiously and pictured him with his red hair and high colour and his mouth wide open. Evidently he had not gone fishing that night.
IV
In her studio in Chelsea, Troy shoved her son’s letter into the pocket of her painting smock and said:
‘He’s fallen for Julia Pharamond.’
‘Has he, now?’ said Alleyn. ‘Does he announce it in so many words?’
‘No, but he manages to drag her into every other sentence of his letter. Take a look.’
Alleyn read his son’s letter with a lifted eyebrow. ‘I see what you mean,’ he said presently.
‘Oh well,’ Troy muttered. ‘It’ll be one girl and then another, I suppose, and then, with any luck, just one and that a nice one. In the meantime, she’s very attractive. Isn’t she?’
‘A change from dirty feet, jeans, and beads in the soup, at least.’
‘She’s beautiful,’ said Troy.
‘He may tire of her heavenly inconsequence.’
‘You think so?’
‘Well, I would. They seem to be taking quite a lot of trouble over him. Kind of them.’
‘He’s a jolly nice young man,’ Troy said firmly.
Alleyn chuckled and read on in silence.
‘Why,’ Troy asked presently, ‘do you suppose they live on that island?’
‘Dodging taxation. They’re clearly a very clannish lot. The other two are there.’
‘The cousins that came on board at Acapulco?’
‘Yes,’ Alleyn said. ‘It was a sort of enclave of cousins.’
‘The Louis’s seem to live with the Jaspers, don’t they?’
‘Looks like it.’ Alleyn turned a page of the letter. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘besotted or not, he seems to be writing quite steadily.’
‘I wonder if his stuff’s any good, Rory? Do you wonder?’
‘Of course I do,’ he said, and went to her.
‘It can be tough going, though, can’t it?’
‘Didn’t you swan through a similar stage?’
‘Now I come to think of it,’ Troy said, squeezing a dollop of flake white on her palette, ‘I did. I wouldn’t tell my parents anything about my young men and I wouldn’t show them anything I painted. I can’t imagine why.’
‘You gave me the full treatment when I first saw you, didn’t you? About your painting?’
‘Did I? No, I didn’t. Shut up,’ said Troy, laughing. She began to paint.
‘That’s the new brand of colour, isn’t it? Jerome et Cie?’ said Alleyn, and picked up a tube.
‘They sent it for free. Hoping I’d talk about it, I suppose. The white and the earth colours are all right but the primaries aren’t too hot. Rather odd, isn’t it, that Rick should mention them?’
‘Rick? Where?’
‘You haven’t got to the bit about his new painting chum and the pregnant equestrienne.’
‘For the love of Mike!’ Alleyn grunted and read on. ‘I must say,’ he said, when he’d finished, ‘he can write, you know, darling. He can indeed.’
Troy put down her palette, flung her arm round him and pushed her head into his shoulder. ‘He’ll do us nicely,’ she said, ‘won’t he? But it was quite a coincidence, wasn’t it? About Jerome et Cie and their paint?’
‘In a way,’ said Alleyn, ‘I suppose it was.’
V
On the morning after the party, Ricky apologized to Mrs Ferrant for the noisy return in the small hours, and although Mr Ferrant’s snores were loud in his memory, said he was afraid he had been disturbed.
‘It’d take more than that to rouse him,’ she said. She never referred to her husband by name. ‘I heard you. Not you but him. Pharamond. The older one.’
She gave Ricky a sideways look that he couldn’t fathom. Derisive? Defiant? Sly? Whatever lay behind her manner, it was certainly not that of an ex-domestic cook, however emancipated. She left him with the feeling that the corner of a curtain had been lifted and dropped before he could see what lay beyond it.
During the week he saw nothing of the Pharamonds except in one rather curious incident on the Thursday evening. Feeling the need of a change of scene, he had wheeled his bicycle up the steep lane, pedalled along the road to Montjoy and at a point not far from L’Esperance had left his machine by the wayside and walked towards the cliff-edge.
The evening was brilliant and the Channel, for once, blue with patches of bedazzlement. He sat down with his back to a warm rock at a place where the cliff opened into a ravine through which a rough path led between clumps of wild broom, down to the sea. The air was heady and a salt breeze felt for his lips. A lark sang and Ricky would have liked a girl – any girl – to come up through the broom from the sea with a reckless face and the sun in her eyes.
Instead, Louis Pharamond came up the path. He was below Ricky, who looked at the top of his head. He leant forward, climbing, swinging his arms, his chin down.
Ricky didn’t want to encounter Louis. He shuffled quickly round the rock and lay on his face. He heard Louis pass by on the other side. Ricky waited until the footsteps died away, wondering at his own behaviour.
He was about to get up when he heard a displaced stone roll down the path. The crown of a head and the top of a pair of shoulders appeared below him. Grossly foreshortened though they were, there was no mistaking who they belonged to. Ricky sank down behind his rock and let Miss Harkness, in her turn, pass him by.
He rode back to the cottage.
He was gradually becoming persona grata at the pub. He was given a ‘good evening’ when he came in and warmed up to when, his work having prospered that day, he celebrated by standing drinks all round. Bill Prentice, the fish-truck driver, offered to give him a lift into Montjoy if ever he fancied it. They settled for the coming morning. It was then that Miss Harkness came into the bar alone.
Her entrance was followed by a shuffling of feet and by the exchange of furtive smiles. She ordered a glass of port. Ferrant, leaning back against the bar in his favourite pose, looked her over. He said something that Ricky couldn’t hear and raised a guffaw. She smiled slightly. Ricky realized that with her entrance the atmosphere in the Cod-and-Bottle had become that of the stud. And that not a man there was unaware of it. So this, he thought, is what Miss Harkness is about.
The next morning, very early, Ricky tied his bicycle to the roof of the fish-truck and himself climbed into the front seat.
He was taken aback to find that Syd Jones was to be a fellow-passenger. Here he came, hunched up in a dismal mackintosh, with his paintbox slung over his shoulder, a plastic carrier-bag and a large and superior suitcase which seemed to be unconscionably