Free Ripley Under Water by Patricia Highsmith Page B

happen with the mazout—the heating-fuel—people, he supposed. Such people thought the world turned around their metiers, and nothing else. “What does your husband really do?” Tom asked, taking a wild chance. “That is—I can hardly believe he’s studying marketing. He probably knows everything about marketing! So I felt he was kidding.” Tom wasn’t going to tell Janice he’d checked at INSEAD.
    “Oh—one minute—yes, I thought I heard the car. David’s back. Got to sign off, Mr. Ripley. Bye!” She hung up.
    Well! Had to ring him on the sly! Tom smiled. And her objective? To apologize! Was apologizing further humiliation for Janice Pritchard? Had David really been coming in the door?
    Tom laughed aloud. Games, games! Secret games and open games. Open-looking games that were really sly and secret. But of course beginning-and-end secret games went on behind closed doors, as a rule. And the people concerned merely players, playing out something not in their control. Oh, sure.
    He turned and stared at the harpsichord, which he was not going back to now, then went out and trotted to his nearest circle of dahlias. He cut with his pocketknife just one of the type he called frizzy orange, his favorite, because its petals reminded him of van Gogh sketches, of fields near Aries, of leaves and petals depicted with loving, wriggling care, be it with crayon or brush.
    Tom walked back to the house. He was thinking of the Scarlatti Opus 38, or Sonate en Re Mineur, as M. Lepetit called it, which Tom was working on and had hopes of improving. He loved the (to him) main theme which sounded like a striving, an attack upon a difficulty—and yet was beautiful. But he did not want to practice it so much that it became stale.
    He was also thinking of the telephone call to come from Jeff or Ed about Cynthia Gradnor. Depressing to know that it probably wouldn’t come for twenty-four hours, even if Jeff was successful in having some kind of conversation with Cynthia.
    When the telephone rang around five that afternoon, Tom had a small hope, very small, that it might be Jeff, but it was not. Agnes Grais’ pleasant voice announced itself, and asked Tom if he and Heloise could come for an aperitif that evening around seven. “Antoine had a prolonged weekend, and he wants to leave so early tomorrow morning, and you both so soon go away.”
    “Thank you, Agnes. Can you wait a moment while I speak with Heloise?”
    Heloise agreed, and Tom came back and so informed Agnes.
    Tom and Heloise left Belle Ombre almost at seven. The newly rented Pritchard house lay on the same road and beyond, Tom was thinking as he drove. What had the Grais noticed about the “renters”? Maybe nothing. The inevitable wild trees—Tom liked them—grew in the fields between houses in this area, sometimes blocking the points of distant house lights.
    As was usual, Tom found himself standing and talking with Antoine, though he had vowed in a mild way not to be so entrapped this time. He had little to talk about to Antoine, the hardworking right-wing architect, whereas Heloise and Agnes had that feminine talent for bursting into conversation on sight, and keeping it up—with pleasant expressions on their faces too—for a whole evening, if need be.
    This time, however, Antoine talked about Morocco instead of the influx of non-French in Paris demanding housing. “Ah oui, my father took me there when I was about six. I never forgot it. Of course I went a few times since then. It has a charm, a magic. To think that once the French had a protectorate over it, the days when the postal service was functioning, the telephone service, the streets …”
    Tom listened. Antoine waxed almost poetic as he described his father’s love of Tangier and Casablanca.
    “It is the people, of course it is,” said Antoine, “who make the country. They rightly possess their country—and yet they make such a mess from a French point of view.”
    Ah, yes. What to say about