There is always something a little odd, a little uncomfortable, about meeting another person’s eyes in a glass: it is as if the watchers had simultaneously caught each other out in a furtive exercise. In this case the sensation was much exaggerated. For a moment Ricky and Syd stared at each other’s image with something like horror and then Ricky scrambled to his feet, paid his bill, and left in a hurry.
As he walked up the street with his rucksack on his back, he wondered if Syd was going to ruin his visit to Saint Pierre-des-Roches by cropping up like a malignant being in a Hans Christian Andersen tale. Since Dulcie Harkness’s death he hadn’t thought much about Syd’s peculiar behavior, being preoccupied with misgivings of another kind concerning freshly cut wire scars on wooden posts and a gash on a sorrel mare’s leg. He thought how boring it was of Syd to be like that. If they were on friendly terms he could have asked him about the wire. And then he thought, with a nasty jolt, that perhaps it mightn’t be a good idea to ask Syd about the wire.
He passed several shops and an estaminet and arrived at a square with an hôtel-de-ville, central gardens, a frock-coated statue of a portentous gentleman with whiskers, a public lavatory, a cylindrical billboard, and a newsagent. There were also several blocks of offices, a consequential house or two, and L’Hôtel des Roches, which Ricky liked the look of.
The morning was now well established, the sun shone prettily on the Place Centrale, as the little square was called, and Ricky thought it would be fun to stay overnight in Saint Pierre and perhaps not too extravagant to put up at L’Hôtel des Roches. He went in and found it to be a decorous hostelry, very provincial in tone and smelling of beeswax. In a parlor opening off the entrance hall, a bourgeois family sat like caricatures of themselves and read their morning papers. A dim clerk said they could accommodate Monsieur and an elderly porter escorted him by way of a cautious old lift to a room with a double bed, a wash-hand-stand, an armchair, a huge wardrobe, and not much else. Left alone he took the opportunity to wash the legacy of the fish crate from his hands and then looked down from his lattice window at a scene that might have been painted by a French Grandmère Moses. Figures, dressed mostly in black, walked briskly about the Place Centrale, gentlemen removed hats, ladies inclined their heads, children in smocks, bow ties, and berets skittered in the central gardens, housewives in shawls marched steadfastly to market. And behind all this activity was the harbor with the Island Belle at her moorings.
This didn’t look like Syd Jones’s scene, Ricky thought, still less like Mr. Ferrant’s, with his camel’s hair coat and porkpie hat. Days rather than hours might have passed since he sailed away from the Cove: it was a new world.
He changed into jeans and a T-shirt, left his rucksack in his room, and went out to explore. First, he would go uphill. The little town soon petered out. Some precipitous gardens, a flight of steps and a road to a cemetery led to the church, not surprisingly dedicated to Saint Pierre-des-Roches. It turned out to be rather commonplace except perhaps for a statue of the saint himself in pastel colors, wearing his custodial keys and stationed precariously on an unconvincing rock. “Tu es Pierre,” said a legend, “et sur cette pierre Je bâtirai Mon église.”
One could, for a small sum, climb the tower. Ricky did so and was rewarded by a panorama of the town, its environs, the sparkling sea, and a fragile shadow that was his own island out there in the Channel.
And, quite near at hand, were the premises of Jerome et Cie with their own legend in electric lights garnished with the image of a tube from which erupted a sausage of paint. At night, by a quaint device this would seem to gush busily. It reminded Ricky of the morning when he trod on Syd’s vermillion. Perhaps Syd had come over to Saint Pierre to renew his stock of samples and to this end would be calling on Messrs. Jerome et Cie. Ricky rested his arms on the balustrade and watched the humanoids moving about in the street below: all heads and shoulders. A funeral crawled up the road. He looked down into a wreath of lilies on top of the hearse. The cortège turned into the cemetery and presently there was a procession with a priest, a boy swinging a censer, and a following of black midgets. He imagined he could catch a whiff of incense. The cortège disappeared behind a large monument.
Ricky, caught in a kind of indolence, couldn’t make up his mind to leave the balcony. He still lounged on the balustrade and stared down at the scene below. Into a straggle of pedestrians there emerged from beneath him someone who seemed to have come out of the church itself, a figure with a purplish-red cap. It wore a belted coat and something square hung from its shoulder.
Ricky was not really at all surprised.
A frightful rumpus outraged his eardrums and upheaved his diaphragm. The church clock, under his feet, was striking ten.
5: Intermezzo with Storm
i
The last stroke of ten still rumbled on the air as Ricky watched the midget that was Syd walk up the street and, sure enough, turn in at the gateway to Jerome et Cie’s factory. Had he come out of the church? Had he already been lurking in some dark corner when Ricky came in? Or had he followed Ricky? Why had he gone there? To say his prayers? To look for something to paint? To rest his legs? The box, loaded as it always seemed to be with large tubes of paint, must be extremely heavy. And yet he had shifted it casually from one shoulder to the other and there was nothing in the movement to suggest weight. Perhaps it was empty and he was going to get a load of free paints from Jerome et Cie.
Ricky was visited by a sequence of disturbing notions. Did Sydney Jones really think that he, Ricky, was following him around, spying on him or — unspeakable thought — lustfully pursuing him? Or was the boot on the other foot? Was Syd, in fact, keeping Ricky under observation? Had Syd, for some unguessable reason, followed him on board the Island Belle? Into the bistro? Up the hill to the church? When cornered, were the abuse and insults a shambling attempt to throw him off the scent? Which was the hunter and which the hunted?
It had been after Syd’s return from London and after Dulcie’s death that he had, definitively, turned hostile. Why? Had anything happened when he lunched with Ricky’s parents to make him so peculiar? Was it because Troy had not thought well of his paintings? Or had asked if he was messing about with drugs?
And here Ricky suddenly remembered Syd’s face, six inches from his own when they were vis-à-vis across the fish crate and Syd’s dark glasses had slid down his nose. Were his eyes not pin-pupilled? And did he not habitually snuffle and sweat? And what about the night at Syd’s Pad when he asked if Ricky had ever taken a trip? And behaved very much as if he’d taken something or another himself? Could drugs in fact be the explanation? Of everything? The scene he made when vermillion paint burst out of the wrong end of the tube? The sulks? The silly violence? Everything?
A squalid, boring explanation, he thought, and one that didn’t really satisfy him. There was something else. It came to him that he would very much like to rake the whole thing over with his father.
He descended the church tower and went out to the street. Which way? On up the hill to Jerome et Cie or back to the town? Without consciously coming to a decision he found he had turned to the right and was approaching the entrance to the factory.
Opposite it was a café with chairs and tables set out under an awning. The day was beginning to be hot. He had walked quite a long way and climbed a tower. He chose a table beside a potted rubber plant whose leaves shielded him from the factory entrance but were not dense enough to prevent him watching it. He ordered beer and a roll and began to feel like a character in a roman policier. He supposed his father had often done this sort of thing and tried to imagine him, with his air of casual elegance, “keeping observation” hour after hour with a pile of saucers mounting on the table. “At a certain little café in the suburbs of Saint Pierre-des-Roches…,” thought Ricky. That was how they began roman policiers in the salad days of the genre.