“I’m going to see what they did out there,” Tom said, and walked across the lawn toward the woods. What a relief to have the men of the law out of the house!
They had filled in the hole. It stood a bit high, reddish-brown earth, but they had been quite tidy about it. Tom walked back to the house. Good God, he thought, how many more discussions, repetitions, could he bear? One thing, perhaps, he should be grateful for, Bernard was not self-pitying. Bernard accused him. That was at least active and positive and definite.
“Well,” Tom said, entering the living room, “a tidy job they did. And twenty centimes for their trouble. Why don’t we leave before—”
Just then, Mme. Annette opened the door from the kitchen—Tom heard it without seeing it—and Tom advanced to speak with her.
“Well, Mme. Annette, the agents have departed. No clues for them, I’m afraid.” He was not going to mention the grave in the woods.
“It is very strange, is it not?” she said quickly, often a protocol in French for something else more important. “It is a mystery here, is it not?”
“It is a mystery at Orly or Paris,” Tom replied. “Not here.”
“Will you and M. Bernard be here for lunch?”
“Not today,” Tom said. “We shall go out somewhere. And as for this evening, don’t trouble yourself. If Mme. Heloise telephones, would you tell her I shall ring back tonight? In fact—” Tom hesitated. “I’ll definitely ring back by five this afternoon. In any case, why don’t you take the rest of the day off?”
“I bought some cutlets just in case. Yes, I have a rendezvous with Mme. Yvonne at—”
“That’s the spirit!” Tom interrupted. He turned to Bernard. “Shall we take off somewhere?”
But they could not leave at once. Bernard wanted to do something in his room, he said. Mme. Annette (Tom thought) left the house, possibly to have lunch with a friend in Villeperce. Tom at last knocked on Bernard’s closed door.
Bernard was writing at the table in his room.
“If you want to be left alone—”
“In fact, I don’t,” Bernard said, getting up readily enough.
Tom was mystified. What do you want to talk about? Tom wanted to ask. Why are you here? Tom could not bring himself to ask these questions. “Let’s go downstairs.”
Bernard came with him.
Tom wanted to ring Heloise. It was now 12:30 p.m. Tom could catch her before lunch. At home, the family ate on the hour, at 1 p.m. The telephone rang as Tom and Bernard entered the living room. “Maybe Heloise,” Tom said, and picked the telephone up.
“Vous êtes . . . blur-r-p . . . Ne quittez pas. Londres vous appelle . . .”
Then Jeff came on. “Hello, Tom. I’m ringing from a post office. Can you come over again—possibly?”
Tom knew he meant come over as Derwatt. “Bernard is here.”
“We thought so. How is he?”
“He’s—taking it easy,” Tom said. Tom did not think Bernard—gazing out the French windows—even cared to listen, but Tom was not sure. “I can’t just now,” Tom said. Didn’t they realize, after all, that he had killed Murchison?
“Can’t you think it over—please?”
“But I have a few obligations here, too, you know. What’s happening?”
“That inspector was here. He wanted to know where Derwatt was. He wanted to look at our books.” Jeff gulped, his voice had become perhaps unconsciously lower for reasons of secrecy, but at the same time he sounded so desperate that he might not have cared who heard or understood him. “Ed and I—we made a few lists, recent ones. We said we’d always had an informal arrangement, that no pictures had ever been lost. I think that went down all right. But they are curious about Derwatt himself, and if you could carry it off again—”
“I don’t think it’s wise,” Tom said, interrupting.
“If you could confirm our books—”
Damn their books, Tom thought. Damn their income. What about Murchison’s murder, was that his responsibility only? And what about Bernard and Bernard’s life? In one strange instant, while he was not even thinking, Tom realized that Bernard was going to kill himself, was going to be a suicide somewhere. And Jeff and Ed were worried about their income, their reputation, and about going to prison! “I have certain responsibilities here. It’s impossible for me to go to London.” In Jeff’s disappointed silence, Tom asked, “Is Mrs. Murchison coming over, do you know?”
“We haven’t heard anything about that.”
“Let Derwatt stay where he is, wherever that is. Maybe he’s got a friend with a private plane, who knows?” Tom laughed.
“By the way,” Jeff said, slightly more cheerful, “what happened to ‘The Clock’? Was it really stolen?”
“Yes. Amazing, isn’t it? I wonder who’s enjoying that treasure.”
The note on which Jeff hung up was still a disappointed one: Tom was not coming over.
“Let’s take a walk,” Bernard said.
So much for ringing Heloise, Tom thought. Tom started to ask if he might take ten minutes up in his room to ring her, then thought it better to humor Bernard. “I’ll get a jacket.”
They walked around the village. Bernard did not want a coffee, or a glass of wine, or lunch. They walked nearly a kilometer on two of the roads that led out of Villeperce, then turned back, stepping aside sometimes for wide farm trucks, for wagons pulled by Percheron horses. Bernard talked of Van Gogh and Arles, where Bernard had been twice.
“. . . Vincent like all the others had a certain span of life and no more. Can anybody imagine Mozart living to be eighty? I’d like to see Salzburg again. There’s a café there, the Tomaselli. Marvelous coffee. . . . Can you imagine Bach dying at twenty-six, for example? Which proves a man is his work, nothing more or less. It’s never a man we’re talking about, but his work . . .”
It was threatening to rain. Tom had long ago turned his jacket collar up.
“. . . Derwatt had a certain decent span, you see. It was absurd that I prolonged it. But of course I didn’t. All that can be rectified,” Bernard said like a judge pronouncing sentence, a wise sentence—in the opinion of the judge.
Tom took his hands from his pockets and blew on them, and stuffed them back in his pockets.
Back at the house, Tom made tea and brought out the whiskey and the brandy. The drink would either calm Bernard or bring matters to a crisis by making Bernard angry, and something would happen.
“I must ring my wife,” Tom said. “Help yourself to anything.” Tom fled up the stairs. Heloise, even if angry still, would be a voice of sanity.
Tom said the Chantilly number to the operator. The rain began to fall. It was gentle against the windowpanes. There was no wind just now. Tom sighed.
“Hello, Heloise!” She had answered. “Yes, I am all right. I wanted to ring you last evening, but it became too late. . . . I was just out walking.” (She had tried to ring him.) “With Bernard. . . . Yes, he is still here but I think he’s leaving this afternoon, maybe tonight. When will you come home?”
“When you get rid of that fou!”
“Heloise, je t’aime. I may come to Paris. With Bernard, because I think it will help him to leave.”
“Why are you so nervous? What is happening?”
“Nothing!”
“Will you tell me when you are in Paris?”
Tom went back downstairs, and put on some music. He chose jazz. It was not good, not bad jazz, and, as he had noticed in other crucial moments in his life, the jazz did nothing for him. Only classical music did something—it soothed or it bored, gave confidence or took confidence quite away, because it had order, and one either accepted that order or rejected it. Tom dumped a lot of sugar into his tea, now cold, and drank it off. Bernard had not shaved in two days, it seemed. Was he going to affect a Derwatt beard?
A few minutes later, they were strolling over the back lawn. One of Bernard’s shoelaces was untied. Bernard wore desert boots, rather flattened with wear, their soles agai
nst the uppers like the beaks of newborn birds, which had a curious way of looking ancient. Was Bernard going to tie his shoelace or not?
“The other night,” Tom said, “I tried to compose a limerick.
“There once was a match by computer.
A nought was wed to a neuter.
Said the neuter to nought,
‘I’m not what I ought,
But our offspring will be even mooter.’
“The trouble is, it’s clean. But maybe you can think of a better last line.” Tom had two versions of middle part and last line, but was Bernard even listening?
They were going into the lane now, into the woods. The rain had stopped, and now it was merely drippy.
“Look at the little frog!” Tom said, bending to scoop it up, because he had almost trod on it, a little thing no bigger than a thumbnail.
The blow hit Tom on the back of the head, and might have been Bernard’s fist. Tom heard Bernard’s voice saying something, was aware of wet grass, a stone against his face, then he passed out—for all practical purposes, though he felt a second blow on the side of his head. This is too much, Tom thought. He imagined his empty hands groping stupidly over the ground, but he knew he was not moving.
Then he was being rolled over and over. Everything was silent, except for a ringing in his ears. Tom tried to move and could not. Was he face down or face up? He was thinking, in a way, without being able to see. He blinked his eyes, and they were gritty. He began to realize, to believe, that weights or a weight was descending on his spine, his legs. Through the ringing in his ears came the whispering sound of a shovel driving into soil. Bernard was burying him. Tom was sure now that his eyes were open. How deep was the hole? It was Murchison’s grave, Tom was sure. How much time had passed?
Good God, Tom thought, he couldn’t allow Bernard to bury him several feet under, or he’d never get out. Dimly, even with dim humor, Tom thought that there could be a limit to placating Bernard, and the limit was his own life. Listen! Okay! Tom imagined, believed that he had yelled this, but he hadn’t.
“. . . not the first,” Bernard’s voice said, thick and muffled by the earth that surrounded Tom.
What did that mean? Had he even heard it? Tom was able to turn his head a little, and he realized he was face down. He could turn his head to a very small degree.
And the weight had stopped falling. Tom concentrated on breathing, partly through his mouth. His mouth was dry and he spat out gritty soil. If he didn’t move, Bernard would leave. Now Tom was awake enough to realize that Bernard must have got the shovel from the toolshed, while he was knocked out. Tom felt a warm tickle on the back of his neck. That was blood, probably.
Maybe two, maybe five minutes passed, and Tom wanted to bestir himself, or at least try to, but was Bernard standing there watching him?
Impossible to hear anything, such as footfalls. Maybe Bernard had departed minutes ago. And anyway, would Bernard attack again if he saw him struggling out of the grave? It was a bit amusing. Later, if there was any later, Tom would laugh, he thought.
Tom risked it. He worked his knees. He got his hands in a position to push himself upward, and then found he had no strength. So he began to dig upward with his fingers like a mole. He cleared a space for his face, and tunneled upward for air, without reaching any air. The earth was wet and loose but very clinging. The weight on his spine was formidable. He began to push with his feet and to work upward with his hands and arms, like someone trying to swim in unhardened cement. It couldn’t be more than three feet of earth on top of him. Tom thought optimistically, maybe not even that. It took a long time to excavate three feet of earth, even soft earth like this, and Bernard surely hadn’t been at work very long. Tom felt sure he was now stirring the top of his prison, and if Bernard were standing there not reacting, not tossing more earth on or digging him up to hit him on the head again, he could afford to give a big heave and relax for a few seconds. Tom gave a big heave. It gained him more breathing space. He took some twenty inhalations of tomblike wet air, then went at it again.
Two minutes later, he was standing reeling like a drunk, beside Murchison’s—now his own—grave, covered from head to foot with mud and clods.
It was growing dark. There was no light on in the house, Tom saw when he staggered into the lane. Automatically, Tom thought of the appearance of the grave, thought of covering it back, wondered where the shovel was that Bernard had used, and then thought the hell with it all. He was still wiping dirt out of his eyes and ears.
Maybe he would find Bernard sitting in the more or less dark of the living room, in which case Tom would say, “Boo!” Bernard’s had been a rather ponderous practical joke. Tom took his shoes off on the terrace and left them. The French windows were ajar. “Bernard!” Tom called. He was really in no state to withstand another attack.
No answer.
Tom walked into his living room, then turned and walked dazedly out again and dropped his muddy jacket on the terrace, also his trousers. In his shorts now, he put on lights and went upstairs to his bathroom. A bath refreshed him. He put a towel around his neck. The cut on his head was bleeding. Tom had touched it only once with his washcloth to get the mud out, and then tried to forget it, because there was nothing he could do about it alone. He put on his dressing gown and went down to the kitchen, made a sandwich of sliced ham and poured a big glass of milk, and had this snack at the kitchen table. Then he hung his jacket and trousers in his bathroom. Brush them and send them to the cleaners, the redoubtable Mme. Annette would say, and what a blessing she was not here now, but she’d be back by 10 p.m., Tom thought, maybe 11:30 p.m. if she’d gone to the cinema in Fontainebleau or Melun, but he shouldn’t count on that. It was now ten minutes to eight.
What would Bernard do now, Tom wondered? Drift to Paris? Somehow Tom could not see Bernard going back to London, so he ruled that idea out. But Bernard was so deranged at the moment as to be really unpredictable by any standards. Would Bernard, for instance, inform Jeff and Ed that he had killed Tom Ripley? Bernard might as well shout anything from the housetops now. In fact, Bernard was going to kill himself, and Tom sensed this the way he might have sensed a murder, because suicide was after all a form of murder. And in order for Bernard to go through, or carry out, whatever it was he intended, Tom knew that he himself had to continue to be dead.
And what a bore that was, in view of Mme. Annette, Heloise, his neighbors, the police. How could he make all of them believe he was dead?
Tom put on Levi’s and went back to the lane with the lantern from the spare loo. Sure enough, the shovel lay on the ground between the much-used grave and the lane. Tom used it to fill in the grave. A beautiful tree ought to grow there at some time, Tom thought, because the ground was so well loosened. Tom even dragged back some of the old branches and leaves with which he had originally covered Murchison.
R.I.P. Tom Ripley, he thought.
Another passport might be useful, and who but Reeves Minot should he call on for it? It was high time he asked Reeves for a small favor.
Tom wrote a note to Reeves on his typewriter, and enclosed two, for safety, of his current passport photographs. He should ring Reeves tonight from Paris. Tom had decided to go to Paris, where he could hide out for a few hours and think. So Tom now took his muddy shoes and clothes up to the attic, where Mme. Annette would probably not go. Tom changed clothes again, and took the estate wagon to the Melun railway station.
He was in Paris by 10:45 p.m., and he dropped the note to Reeves in a Gare de Lyon postbox. Then he went to the Hotel Ritz, where he took a room under the name Daniel Stevens, wrote a made-up American passport number, saying he did not have his passport with him. Address: 14 rue du Docteur Cavet, Rouen, a street which as far as Tom knew did not exist.
17
Tom telephoned Heloise from his room. She was not in. The maid said she had gone out to dinner with her parents. Tom put in a call to Reeves in Hamburg. This came through in twenty minutes, and Reeves was in
.
“Greetings, Reeves. Tom here. I’m in Paris. How goes everything? . . . Can you pop me a passport tout de suite? I’ve already sent you photographs.”
Reeves sounded flustered. Good heavens, was this a real request at last? A passport? Yes, those essential little things that were pinched all the time, everywhere. How much would Reeves want for it, Tom was polite enough to ask.
Reeves couldn’t say just now.
“Put it on the bill,” Tom said with confidence. “The point is to get it to me at once. If you get my pictures Monday morning, can you finish by Monday night? . . . Yes, it is urgent. Have you got a friend flying to Paris late Monday night, for example?” If not, find one, Tom thought.
Yes, Reeves said, a friend could fly to Paris. Not another carrier (or host), Tom insisted, because he would not be in any position to pick someone’s pockets or suitcase.
“Any American name,” Tom said. “American passport preferred, English will do. Meanwhile, I’m at the Ritz, Place Vendôme . . . Daniel Stevens.” Tom gave the Ritz’s telephone number for Reeves’s convenience, and said he would meet Reeves’s messenger personally, once he knew the time the man could get to Orly.
By this time, Heloise was back in Chantilly, and Tom spoke with her. “Yes, I am in Paris. Do you want to come in tonight?”
Heloise did. Tom was delighted. He had a vision of sitting across a table from Heloise, drinking champagne, in another hour or so, if Heloise wanted champagne, and she usually did.
Tom stood on the gray pavement, looking out at the round Place Vendôme. Circles annoyed him. Which direction should he take? Left toward l’Opéra, or right toward the rue de Rivoli? Tom preferred to think in squares or rectangles. Where was Bernard? Why do you want a passport, he asked himself? As an ace in the hole? An added measure of potential freedom? I can’t draw like Derwatt, Bernard had said this afternoon. I simply don’t draw anymore—seldom for myself even. Was Bernard at this moment in some Paris hotel, cutting his wrists in a basin? Leaning over the Seine on one of the bridges about to jump over—gently—when no one was looking?