Patricia Highsmith - The Tremor of Forgery

by Patricia Highsmith

  Adams wasn’t in, and Ingham supposed he was on the beach. He found Adams lying on a straw mat on his stomach, writing something. Adams, oblivious of Ingham’s approach until he was quite close, finished off his sentence or whatever with a satisfied flourish, lifting his pen in the air.

  ‘Hello-o, Howard!’ Adams said. ‘Got your bungalow?’ ‘Yes, just now.’

  Adams was pleased to be invited, as Ingham had known he would be. He agreed to come to number three at six o’clock.

  Ingham went back and did some more unpacking. It was good to have a sort of ‘house’ instead of a hotel room. He thought of his desk in his apartment on West Fourth Street, near Washington Square. He’d had the apartment only three months. It was air-conditioned and more expensive than any place he’d ever had, and he had taken it only after the film sale of The Game of ‘If’ had become definite. Ina had a set of keys. He hoped she was looking in now and then, but she had taken his few plants to her Brooklyn house, and there weren’t any chores for her to do except forward letters that looked important Ina was brilliant at telling what was important and what wasn’t. Ingham had of course told his agent and his publishers that he would be in Tunisia, and by now they knew he was at the Reine.

  ‘Well’ Adams stood at the door with a bottle of wine. ‘Looks very nice!—Here, I brought you this. For the house-warming. Or for your first meal, you know.’

  ‘Oh, thanks, Francis! That’s very nice of you. What’ll you have?’

  They had their usual Scotch, Adams’s with soda.

  ‘Any news from your friend?’ Adams asked.

  ‘No, I’m sorry to say.’

  ‘Can’t you send a telegram to someone who knows him?’

  ‘I’ve done that.’ Ingham meant Ina.

  The boy called Mokta, a waiter at the bungalows’ bar-café, knocked on the open door, smiling his wide, friendly smile. ‘Good evening, messieurs,’ he said in French. Is there anything you have need of?’

  ‘I think nothing, thanks,’ Ingham said.

  ‘You would like breakfast at what time, sir?’

  ‘Oh, you serve breakfast?’

  It is not necessary to take it.’ Mokta said with a quick gesture, ‘but many of the people in the bungalows take it.’ ‘All right, at nine o’clock, then,’ Ingham said. ‘No, eight-thirty.’ The breakfast would probably be late.

  ‘Nice boy, Mokta,’ Adams said when Mokta had left. ‘And they really work them here. Have you seen the kitchen in that place?’ He gestured towards the low, square building that was the bungalows’ café—with-terrace. ‘And the room where they sleep there?’

  Ingham smiled. ‘Yes.’ He had had a glimpse today. The boys slept in a room that was a field often or twelve jammed-together beds. The sink in the kitchen had been full of dirty water and dishes.

  ‘The drains are always stopped up, you know. I make my own breakfast I imagine it’s a little more sanitary. Mokta’s nice. But that sour-puss directrice works him to death. She’s a German, probably only hired because she can speak Arabic and French. If they’re out of towels, it’s Mokta who has to go to the main building and get them.—How’re you doing on your book?’

  ‘I’ve done twenty pages. Not as fast as my usual rate, but I can’t complain.’ Ingham was grateful for Adams’s interest He had found out that Adams wasn’t a writer or a journalist, but he still didn’t know what Adams did, except study Russian in a casual way. Maybe Adams didn’t do anything. That was possible, of course.

  ‘It must be hard, writing when you think each day you’ll have to drop it,’ Adams said.

  ‘That doesn’t bother me too much.’ Ingham replenished Adams’s drink. He served Adams crackers and cheese. The bungalow began to seem more attractive. The waning sunlight shone through half-open, pale-blue shutters on to the white walls. Ingham thought that he and John might spend no more than ten days on the script John knew someone in Tunis who could help him in finding the small cast John wanted amateurs.

  He and Adams were in good spirits when they went off in Ingham’s car to have dinner at Melik’s. The terrace was half full, not noisy as yet. Someone was strumming a guitar, someone else tootling a flute hesitantly at a back table-Adams talked about his daughter Caroline in Tulsa, Her husband, the engineer, was about to be sent off to Vietnam, as he was in some kind of civilian army reserve. Caroline was due to have a baby within five months, and Adams was pleased and hopeful, because her first child had miscarried. Adams was pro-Vietnam War, Ingham had discovered early on. Ingham was sick of it, sick of discussing it with people like Adams, and he was glad Adams did not say anything else about the war that evening. Democracy and God, those were the things Adams believed in. It wasn’t Christian Science or Rosicrucianism with Adams—at least not so far—but a sort of Billy Graham, all-round God with an old-fashioned moral code thrown in. What the Vietnamese needed, Adams said in appallingly plain words, was the American kind of democracy. Besides the American kind of democracy, Ingham thought, the Americans were introducing the Vietnamese to the capitalist system in the form of a brothel industry, and to the American class system by making the Negroes pay higher for their lays. Ingham listened, nodding, bored, mildly irritated.

  ‘You’ve never been married?’ Adams asked.

  ‘Yes. Once. Divorced.—No children.’

  They were having a smoke after the couscous. Not much edible meat tonight, but the couscous and the spicy sauce had been delicious. Couscous was the name of the African millet flour, Adams had explained, granulated flour that was cooked by steaming it over a broth. It could be made also from wheat. It was tan in colour, bland in flavour, and over it was spooned hot or medium hot red sauce, turnips, and pieces of stewed lamb. It was a speciality at Melik’s.

  ‘Was your wife a writer, too?’ Adams asked.

  ‘No, she didn’t do anything,’ Ingham said, smiling a little.

  ‘A woman of leisure. Well, it’s past, and it was a long time ago.’ He was ready to tell Adams it was longer than a year and a half ago, in case Adams asked. ‘Do you think you’ll marry again?’ ‘I don’t know.—Why? Do you think it’s the ideal life?’ ‘Oh, I think that depends. It’s not the same for every man.’ Adams was smoking a small cigar. When his cheeks flattened out, his face looked longer, more like an ordinary face, and when he removed the cigar, the little pouches came back, like a cartoon of himself. Between the cheeks, the thin, pink mouth smiled good-naturedly. ‘I was certainly happy. My wife was the kind who really knew how to run a home. Put up preserves, took care of the garden, a good hostess, remembered people’s birthdays, all that. Never annoyed when I got delayed at the plant.—I thought of marrying again. There was even one woman—a lot like my wife—I might’ve married. But it’s not the same when you’re not young any more.’

  Ingham had nothing to say. He thought of Ina and wished she were here, sitting with them now, wished he could take a walk with her on the beach tonight, after they had said good night to Adams, wished they could go back to his bungalow and go to bed together.

  ‘Any girl in your life now?’ Adams asked.

  Ingham woke up. ‘In a way, yes.’

  Adams smiled. ‘So you’re in love?’

  Ingham didn’t like to talk to anyone about Ina, but did it matter if he talked to someone like Adams? ‘Yes, I suppose so. I’ve known her about a year. She works for CBS-TV in New York. She’s written some television plays and also some short stories. Several published,’ he added.

  The flautist was gaining strength. An Arab song began shakily, reinforced by a wailing male voice.

  ‘How old is she?’

  ‘Twenty-eight.’

  ‘Old enough to know her own mind.’

  ‘Um-m. She had a marriage that went wrong—when she was twenty-one or—two. So Fm sure she’s in no hurry to make a mistake again. Neither am I.’

  ‘But you expect to marry?’

  The music grew ever louder.

  ‘Vaguely.—I can’t see that it matters very much, unless peop
le want children.’

  ‘Is she going to join you here in Tunisia?’

  ‘No. I wish she were. She knows John Castlewood very well. In fact she introduced us. But she has her job in New York.’

  ‘And she hasn’t written you either? About John?’

  ‘No.’ Ingham warmed a little to Adams. ‘It’s funny, isn’t it? How slow can mail get here?’

  Their dessert of yoghurt had arrived. There was also a platter of fruit.

  ‘Tell me more about your girl. What’s her name?’

  Ina Pallant.—She lives with her family in a big house in Brooklyn Heights. She has a crippled brother she’s very fond of—Joey. He has multiple sclerosis, practically confined to his wheelchair, but Ina’s a great help to him. He paints—rather surrealistically. Ina arranged a show for him last year. But of course he couldn’t have got the show unless he was good. He sold—oh, seven or eight out of thirty canvases.’ Ingham disliked saying it, but he thought Adams would be interested in figures. ‘One picture, for instance, was of a man sitting casually on a rock in a forest, smoking a cigarette. In the foreground, a little girl is running forward, terrified, and a tree is growing out of the top of her head.’

  Adams leaned forward with interest. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘The terror of growing up. The man represents life and evil. He’s entirely green. He just sits watching—or not even watching—with an air of having the whole situation in his power.’

  Melik’s plump son, aged about thirteen, came and leaned on chubby hands on the table, exchanging something in Arabic with Adams. Adams was grinning. Then the boy totted up their bill. Ingham insisted on paying, because it was part of his bungalow-warming.

  Downstairs, on the dusty street, Ingham noticed an old Arab whom he had seen a few times before, loitering around his car. The Arab had a short grey beard and wore a turban and classic baggy red pants held up somehow under the knees. He walked with a stick. Ingham knew he must try the car doors when he—Ingham—wasn’t in sight, hoping with indefatigable patience for the day or the hour when Ingham would forget to lock a door. Now as the Arab drifted away from the big Peugeot station wagon, Ingham barely glanced at him. The Arab was becoming a fixture, like the tan fortress or the Café de la Plage near Melik’s. Ingham and Adams walked a little way up the main street, but since this became dark, they turned back. The interesting corner, the only alive part of the town at this time of night, was the broad sandy area in front of the Plage, where a few men sat at tables with their coffees or glasses of wine. The yellow light from the Plage’s big front windows flowed out on to the first table-legs and a few sandalled feet under them.

  As Ingham looked at the front door, a man was rudely pushed out and nearly fell. Ingham and Adams stopped to watch. The man seemed a little drunk. He went directly back into the Plage, and was again shoved out. Another man came out and put an arm around him, talking to him. The drunk had a stubborn air, but let himself be sent off in the direction of the white houses behind the fortress. Ingham continued to watch the unsteady man, fascinated by whatever passion filled him. Just beyond the glow of the café’s lights, the man stopped and half turned, staring defiantly at the café door. In the doorway of the Plage now, a tall man and the man who had put his arm around the drunken man were talking together and keeping an eye on the motionless, determined figure two hundred yards away.

  Ingham was rapt. He wondered if they were carrying knives. Perhaps, if it was a long-standing grudge.

  ‘Probably a quarrel about a woman,’ Adams said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Very jealous when it comes to women, you know.’

  ‘Yes, Fm sure.’ Ingham said.

  They walked a little on the beach, though Ingham did not like the fine sand getting into his shoes By the light of the moon, small children were gathering bits off the beach—the second or third wave of scavengers after their parents and elder siblings—and putting their findings away in bags that hung from their necks Ingham had never seen such a clean beach as this one. Nothing was ever left by all the picker-uppers, not even a four-inch-long splinter of wood, because they used the wood for fires, and not even a shell, because they sold all the shells they could to tourists.

  Ingham and Adams had a final coffee at the Plage. A smelly, arched doorway to their right revealed a huge ‘W.C.’ and an arrow, in black paint, on a blue wall three feet beyond. The ceiling was groined, if such a word could be used, by projecting supports ornamented with big yellow knobs that suggested stage footlights. Ingham realized that he had nothing to talk to Adams about. Adams, silent himself, must have realized the same thing in regard to Ingham. Ingham smiled a little as he drank the last of his sweet black coffee. Funny to think of someone like himself and Adams, hanging around together just because they were Americans. But their goodnight twenty minutes later, on the hotel grounds, was warm. Adams wished him a happy stay, as if he had moved in permanently, or as if, Ingham thought, he were a newcomer to an expedition, doomed to a different and rather lonely life for months to come. But Ingham had no duties at all except those he assigned himself, and he was free to go hundreds of miles anywhere in his car.

  Before he went to bed that night, Ingham looked through his personal and his business address books, and found two people to whom he might write in regard to John. (He hadn’t Miles Gallust’s address, or he had left it in New York, and reproached himself for this oversight.) The two people were William McHhenny, an editor in the New York office of Paramount, and Peter Langland, a free-lance photographer whom John knew pretty well, Ingham remembered. Ingham thought of cabling, but decided a cable would look too dramatic, so he wrote Peter Langland a short, friendly note (they had met at a party with John, and Ingham remembered him more clearly now, a chunky blond fellow with glasses), asking him to prod John and ask John to cable, in case he had not yet written. The probably four or five days until the letter reached New York seemed an aeon to wait, but Ingham tried to make himself be patient. This was Africa, not Paris or London. The letter had to get to Tunis before it could be put on a plane.

  Ingham posted the letter the next morning.

  4

  Two or three days went by. Ingham worked.

  In the mornings, Mokta brought his continental breakfast around nine-fifteen or nine-thirty. Mokta always had a question:

  ‘The refrigerator works well?’ Or ‘Hassim has brought you enough towels?’ Always Mokta asked these things with a disarming smile. He was more blond than brunette, and he had grey-blue eyes with long lashes.

  Ingham supposed Mokta was popular with both women and men, and though he was only seventeen or so, he had probably had experience with both. At any rate, with his good looks and his manner, he was not going to spend the rest of his life carrying breakfast-trays and stacks of towels across the sand. ‘Only one thing I’d like, my friend.’ Ingham said. ‘If you see a letter for me in that madhouse, would you bring it immediately?’

  Mokta laughed. ‘Bien sûr, m’sieur! Je regarde tout le temps—tout le temps pour vous!’

  Ingham waved a casual good-bye and poured himself some coffee, which was strong enough but not hot. Sometimes it was the other way around. He pulled on his pyjama top. He slept only in the pants. The nights were warm, too. He thought of the desk in the bungalow manager’s office. Dare he hope for a letter today by ten-thirty—eleven? Ingham had been told by the hotel’s main office that mail came twice a day to the bungalow headquarters and was delivered as soon as it arrived, but this was patently not so, because Ingham had seen people going to the office in the bungalow headquarters and looking through the post there, post that sometimes sorted and sometimes not. How could he expect Arab boys, or even the harassed, ill-tempered German directrice to care very much about people’s mail? There was never anyone at the desk. Stacks of towels filled one comer of the office—although when Ingham had asked for a clean towel, having used his for more than a week, the boy had told him he hadn’t changed it because it didn’t
look dirty. Mysterious grey metal files stood against the walls. The absurdity of the contents of this office had given it a Kafka-like futility to Ingham. He felt that he never would, never could receive any letter of significance there. And it was maddening to Ingham to find the door sometimes locked for no apparent reason, no one around to open it, or no one with the key. This would send him forging across the sand to the main building on the off-chance that post had arrived and not yet been brought to the bungalows.

  Ingham was working when Mokta came in just before eleven o’clock with a letter. Ingham seized it, automatically fishing in his pocket for some coins for Mokta.

  ‘Hallelujah!’ Ingham said. The envelope was a long business airmail, and it was postmarked New York.

  ‘Succès!’ said Mokta. ‘Merci, m’sieur!’ He bowed and left.

  The letter was from Peter Langland, strangely enough. Their letters had crossed.

  June 19, 19—

  Dear Mr Ingham—or Howard

  By now you no doubt know of the sad events of over last weekend, as Ina said she would write you. John spoke to me just two days before. He was in a crise, as you probably know, or maybe you didn’t know. But none of us expected anything like this. He was afraid he couldn’t go through with ‘Trio’ under the circumstances, which made him feel doubly guilty, I think, because you were already in Tunisia. Then he had his personal problems, as you probably know from Ina. But I know he would want me to write a line to you and say he is sorry, so herewith I do it. He simply couldn’t stand up to everything that was on his shoulders. I liked John very much and thought very highly of him, as I think everyone did who knew him. We all believed he had a great career coming. It is a shock to all of us, but especially to those who knew him well. I suppose you’ll be coming home now, and maybe you’ve already left, but I trust this can be forwarded to you.