Ripley Under Ground

by Patricia Highsmith

  No answer.

  Tom opened the door. The bed was made as it had been made that morning when Bernard sat on it, and now Tom saw the faint depression in the bedspread where Bernard had sat. But everything of Bernard’s was gone, his duffelbag, his unpressed suit which Tom had put in the closet. Tom took a quick look in his own room. Bernard was not there. And there was no note anywhere. Mme. Clusot was vacuuming in his room, and Tom said, “Bonjour, madame,” to her.

  Tom went downstairs. “Mme. Annette!”

  Mme. Annette was not in the kitchen, she was in her bedroom. Tom knocked and, hearing a word from her, opened the door. Mme. Annette was reclining on her bed under a mauve knitted coverlet, reading Marie-Claire.

  “Don’t disturb yourself, madame!” Tom said. “I only wanted to ask where is M. Bernard?”

  “Is he not in his room? Perhaps he has gone out for a walk.”

  Tom did not want to tell her that he appeared to have taken his things and left. “He didn’t say anything to you?”

  “No, m’sieur.”

  “Well—” Tom managed a smile. “Let’s not worry about it. Were there any telephone calls?”

  “No, m’sieur. And how many will there be for dinner this evening?”

  “Two, I think, thank you, Mme. Annette,” Tom said, thinking that Bernard might be back. He went out and closed the door.

  My God, Tom thought, plunge into a couple of soothing Goethe poems. Der Abschied or some such. A little German solidity, Goethian conviction of superiority and—maybe genius. That was what he needed. Tom pulled the book down—Goethes Gedichte—from a shelf, and as fate or the unconscious would have it, he opened the book at Der Abschied. Tom knew it by heart almost, though he would never have dared recite it to anyone, being afraid his accent was not perfect. Now the first lines upset him:

  Lass mein Aug’ den Abschied sagen,

  Den mein Mund nicht nehmen kann!

  Let my eyes say the adieu that my mouth cannot.

  Schwer, wie schwer ist er zu tragen!

  Und ich bin—

  Tom was startled by the closing of a car door. Someone was arriving. Bernard had taken a taxi back, Tom thought.

  But no, it was Heloise.

  She stood bareheaded, her long blonde hair blowing in the breeze, fumbling with her purse.

  Tom bolted for the door and flung it open. “Heloise!”

  “Ah, Tome!”

  They embraced. Ah, Tome, ah, Tome! Tom had grown used to this bookish name, and from Heloise, he liked it.

  “You’re all sunburnt!” Tom said in English, but he meant suntanned. “Let me get rid of this guy. How much is it?”

  “One hundred forty francs.”

  “Bastard. From Orly he’s—” Tom repressed, even in English, the words he had been going to use. Tom paid the bill. The driver did not assist with the luggage.

  Tom took everything into the house.

  “Ah, how good to be home!” Heloise said, stretching her arms. She flung a big tapestry-like bag—a Greek product—onto the yellow sofa. She was wearing brown leather sandals, pink, bell-bottomed trousers, an American Navy pea jacket. Tom wondered where and how she had acquired the pea jacket?

  “All is well. Mme. Annette is at ease in her bedroom,” Tom said, switching to French.

  “What a terrible vacation I had!” Heloise plopped on the sofa and lit a cigarette. She would take several minutes to calm down, so he started to carry her suitcases upstairs. She screamed at one of them, because there was something in it which belonged downstairs, so Tom left that and took something else. “Must you be so American and so efficient?”

  What was the alternative? Standing and waiting for her to unwind? “Yes.” He took the other things to her room.

  When he came down, Mme. Annette was in the living room, and she and Heloise were talking about Greece, the yacht, the house there (evidently in a small fishing village), but not, Tom noticed, about Murchison as yet. Mme. Annette was fond of Heloise, because Mme. Annette liked to be of service to people, and Heloise liked to be served. Heloise did not want anything now, though at Mme. Annette’s insistence, she agreed to a cup of tea.

  Then Heloise told him about her vacation on the Princesse de Grèce, the yacht of the oaf called Zeppo, a name which recalled the Marx Brothers to Tom. Tom had seen pictures of this hairy beast, whose self-esteem matched that of any of the Greek shipping tycoons, from what Tom could gather, and Zeppo was only the son of a minor real estate shark, small potatoes. A businessman screwing his own people, himself already screwed by the fascist colonels there, according to Zeppo and Heloise, yet still making so much money that his son could cruise around on a yacht throwing caviar to the fish and filling the yacht’s swimming pool with champagne, which they later heated so they could swim in it. “Zeppo had to hide the champagne, so he put it in the pool,” Heloise explained.

  “And who was in bed with Zeppo? Not the wife of the president of the United States, I trust?”

  “Anybody,” Heloise said in English, with disgust, and blew her smoke out.

  Not Heloise, Tom was sure. Heloise was sometimes—not even too often—a tease, but Tom was sure she had not jumped into bed with anyone but him since they were married. Thank God, not Zeppo, who was a gorilla. Heloise would never go for that. Zeppo’s treatment of women sounded repellent, but Tom’s attitude to that—which he had never dared express to a woman—was that if women put up with it from the start, in order to get a diamond bracelet or a villa in the south of France, why should they complain about it later? Heloise’s main irritation seemed to be due to the jealousy of one woman named Norita, because a certain man on the yacht had been paying attention to Heloise. Tom scarcely listened to this gossip column drivel, because he was wondering how to tell Heloise some of his news in a manner that wouldn’t upset her.

  Tom was also half-expecting Bernard’s gaunt figure to appear at the front door at any moment. He walked up and down the floor slowly, glancing at the front door at each turn. “I went to London.”

  “Yes? How was it?”

  “I brought you something.” Tom ran up the stairs—his ankle was much better—and returned with the Carnaby Street trousers. Heloise put them on in the dining room. They fitted well.

  “I love them!” Heloise said, and gave Tom a hug and a kiss on his cheek.

  “I came back with a man called Thomas Murchison,” Tom said, and proceeded to tell her what had happened.

  Heloise had not heard of his disappearance. Tom explained Murchison’s suspicion of his “Clock” as a forgery, and Tom said he was convinced there was no forgery being done of Derwatt’s paintings, and so, like the police, he could not account for Murchison’s disappearance. Just as Heloise did not know about the forging, she did not know how much of an income Tom derived from Derwatt Ltd., about $12,000 per year, about the same as the income from the stocks he had acquired from Dickie Greenleaf. Heloise was interested in money, but not particularly in where it came from. She knew her family’s money contributed as much to their household as Tom’s, but she had never thrown this up to Tom, and Tom knew she couldn’t have cared less, which was another thing he appreciated in Heloise. Tom had told her that Derwatt Ltd. insisted on giving him a small percentage of their profits, because he had helped them organize their business years ago, before he and Heloise met. Tom’s Derwatt Ltd. income was sent to him, or handled by the New York company which was a distributor of the Derwatt-labeled art supplies. Some of this Tom invested in New York, and some he had sent to France to be turned into francs. The head of the Derwatt art supply company (who also happened to be a Greek) was aware that Derwatt did not exist and was being falsified.

  Tom continued: “Another matter. Bernard Tufts—I don’t think you ever met him—was visiting for a couple of days, and just this afternoon he appears to have taken a walk—with his things. I don’t know if he’s coming back or not.”

  “Bernard Toofts? Un Anglais?”

  “Yes. I don’t know him well. He’s
a friend of friends. He’s a painter, a little upset now because of his girlfriend. He’s probably gone off to Paris. I thought I should tell you about him in case he comes back.” Tom laughed. He felt more and more convinced that Bernard would not come back. Had he taken a taxi perhaps, to Orly to hop the first plane he could back to London? “And—my other news is we’re invited tomorrow night to the Berthelins for dinner. They’ll be enchanted that you’re back! Oh, I almost forgot. I had still another guest—Christopher Greenleaf, a cousin of Dickie’s. He was here two nights. Didn’t you get my letter about him?” But she hadn’t, because he had sent it only Tuesday.

  “Mon dieu, you have been busy!” Heloise said in English, with a funny edge of jealousy in it. “Did you miss me, Tome?”

  He put his arms around her. “I missed you—really I did.”

  The item Heloise had for the downstairs was a vase, short and sturdy with two handles, and two black bulls on it lowering their heads at each other. It was attractive, and Tom did not ask if it was valuable, very old, or anything else, because at that moment he did not care. He put on Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Heloise was upstairs unpacking, and she said she wanted to take a bath.

  By 6:30 p.m. Bernard had not arrived. Tom had a feeling Bernard was in Paris, not London, but it was only a feeling, something he shouldn’t count on. During dinner, which he and Heloise took at home, Mme. Annette chatted with Heloise about the English gentleman who had come that morning to ask about M. Murchison. Heloise was interested but only slightly, and certainly she wasn’t worried, Tom saw. She was more interested in Bernard.

  “You expect him back? Tonight?”

  “In fact—now I don’t,” Tom said.

  Thursday morning came and went tranquilly, without even a telephone call, though Heloise rang up three or four people in Paris, including her father at his Paris office. Now Heloise wore faded Levi’s and she went barefoot in the house. There was nothing in Mme. Annette’s Parisien today about Murchison. When Mme. Annette went out in the afternoon—ostensibly to shop, but probably to call on her friend Mme. Yvonne and inform her of Heloise’s arrival and of the visit of an agent of the London police—Tom lay with Heloise on the yellow sofa, drowsily, his head against her breast. They had made love that morning. Amazing. It was supposed to be a dramatic fact. It was not so important to Tom as having fallen asleep with Heloise the night before, with Heloise in his arms. Heloise often said, “You are nice to sleep with, because when you turn over it is not like an earthquake shaking the bed. Really, I don’t know when you turn over.” That pleased Tom. He had never even asked who the earthquakes had been. Heloise existed. It was odd for Tom. He could not make out her objectives in life. She was like a picture on the wall. She might want children, some time, she said. Meanwhile, she existed. Not that Tom could boast of having any objectives himself, now that he had attained the life he had now, but Tom had a certain zest in seizing the pleasures he was now able to seize, and this zest seemed lacking in Heloise, maybe because she had had everything she wished since birth. Tom felt odd sometimes making love with her, because he felt detached half the time, and as if he derived pleasure from something inanimate, unreal, from a body without an identity. Or was this some shyness or Puritanism on his part? Or some fear of (mentally) giving himself completely, which would be to say to himself, “If I should not have, if I should lose Heloise, I couldn’t exist any longer.” Tom knew he was capable of believing that, even in regard to Heloise, but he did not like to admit it to himself, did not permit it, and had certainly never said it to Heloise, because it would (as things were now) be a lie. The condition of utter dependence on her he sensed merely as a possibility. It had little to do with sex, Tom thought, with any dependence on that. Usually Heloise was disrespectful of the same things he was. She was a partner, in a way, though a passive one. With a boy or a man, Tom would have laughed more—maybe that was the main difference. Yet Tom remembered one occasion with her parents, when he’d said, “I’m sure every member of the Mafia is baptized, and what good does it do them?” and Heloise had laughed. Her parents hadn’t. They (the parents) had somehow ferreted out of Tom the fact that he hadn’t been baptized in the United States—a point Tom actually was vague about, but certainly his Aunt Dottie had never mentioned it. Tom’s parents had been drowned when he was very small, so he’d never heard anything on the subject from them. Impossible to explain to the Plissons, who were Catholics, that in the United States baptism and mass and confession and pierced ears and Hell and the Mafia were sort of, somehow, Catholic and not Protestant, not that Tom was anything, but if he was sure of anything, he was sure he wasn’t Catholic.

  The times that Heloise came most alive to Tom were when she flew into a temper. She had tempers and tempers. Tom did not count the tempers over a delayed delivery of something from Paris, when Heloise swore (untruthfully) that she would never patronize such-and-such a shop again. The more serious tempers were caused by boredom or a minor assault upon her ego, and could occur if a guest had bested or contradicted her in a discussion at the table. Heloise would control herself until the guest or guests had departed—which was something—but once the people had gone, she would walk up and down the floor ranting, throwing pillows at the walls, shouting, “Fous-moi la paix!—Salauds!” (“Get the hell out of here!— Slobs!”) with Tom as her only audience. Tom would say something soothing and irrelevant, Heloise would go limp, a tear would roll out of each eye, and she could be laughing a moment later. Tom supposed that was Latin. It certainly wasn’t English.

  Tom worked for an hour or so in the garden, then read a bit in Les Armes Secrètes by Julio Cortazar. Then he went up and did the last work on his portrait of Mme. Annette—this was her day off, Thursday. At 6 p.m. Tom asked Heloise to come in and look at it.

  “It’s not bad, you know? You have not worked too much on it. I like that.”

  Tom was pleased by this. “Don’t mention it to Madame.” He put it in a corner to dry, face to the wall.

  Then they got ready to go to the Berthelins. Dress was informal. Levi’s would do. Vincent was another husband who worked in Paris and came to his country house at weekends.

  “What has Papa to say?” Tom asked.

  “He is glad I am back in France.”

  Papa didn’t like him much, Tom knew, but Papa had a vague feeling that Heloise neglected him. Bourgeois virtue was at war with a nose for character, Tom supposed. “And Noëlle?” Noëlle was a favorite friend of Heloise who lived in Paris.

  “Oh, the same. Bored, she says. She never likes the autumn.”

  The Berthelins, though quite well off, deliberately roughed it in the country, with an outside john, and no hot water in the kitchen sink. Hot water was made in a kettle on the stove which burnt wood. Their guests, the Cleggs, the English couple, were about fifty, the same age as the Berthelins. Vincent Berthelin’s son, whom Tom had not met before, was a dark-haired young man of twenty-two (Vincent told Tom his age in the kitchen, when he and Tom were drinking Ricards, and Vincent was doing the cooking), living with a girlfriend now in Paris, and on the brink of abandoning his architectural studies at the Beaux Arts, which had Vincent in a tizzy. “The girl is not worth it!” Vincent stormed at Tom. “It is the English influence, you know?” Vincent was a Gaullist.

  The dinner was excellent, chicken, rice, salad, cheese, and apple tart made by Jacqueline. Tom’s mind was on other things. But he was pleased, pleased to the point of smiling, because Heloise was in good spirits, talking about her Greek adventures, and at the last they all sampled the ouzo Heloise had brought.

  “Disgusting taste, that ouzo! Worse than Pernod!” said Heloise at home, brushing her teeth at the basin in her bathroom. She was already in her nightdress, a short blue thing.

  In his bedroom, Tom was putting on his new pajamas from London.

  “I’m going down to get some champagne!” Heloise called.

  “I’ll get it,” Tom hurried into his slippers.

  “I have to get this taste o
ut. Besides I want some champagne. You would think the Berthelins were paupers, the things they serve to drink. Vin ordinaire!” She was going down the stairs.

  Tom intercepted her.

  “I shall get it,” Heloise said. “Get some ice.”

  Tom somehow didn’t want her to go into the cellar. He went on to the kitchen. He had just pulled an ice tray out, when he heard a scream—a muffled scream because of the distance, but Heloise’s scream, and a terrible one. Tom dashed across the front hall.

  There was a second scream, and he collided with her in the spare loo.

  “Mon dieu! Someone has hanged himself down there!”

  “Oh, Christ!” Tom half-supported Heloise and guided her up the stairs.

  “Don’t go down, Tome! It is horrible!”

  It was Bernard, of course. Tom was trembling as he walked up the stairs with her, she talking in French and he in English.

  “Promise me you won’t go down! Call the police, Tome!”

  “All right, I’ll call the police.”

  “Who is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  They went into Heloise’s bedroom.

  “Stay here!” Tom said.

  “No, don’t leave me!”

  “I insist!” Tom said in French, and ran out and down the stairs. A straight scotch was the best thing, he thought. Heloise hardly drank spirits, so it ought to help her at once. Then a sedative. Tom ran back upstairs with the bottle and a glass from the bar cart. He poured half a glassful, and when Heloise hesitated, drank some himself, then put the glass between her lips. Her teeth were chattering.