The Talented Mr Ripley - PDF

The Talented Mr Ripley sail began to climb. Behind them, to the left, the orange sun was sinking into the water. Tom could hear Marge's laugh, and a shout from Dickie in Italian toward the pier. Tom realised he was seeing them on a typical day--a siesta after the late l...

The Talented Mr Ripley sail began to climb. Behind them, to the left, the orange sun was sinking into the water. Tom could hear Marge's laugh, and a shout from Dickie in Italian toward the pier. Tom realised he was seeing them on a typical day--a siesta after the late lunch, probably, then the sail in Dickie's boat at sundown. Then apéritifs at one of the cafes on the beach. They were enjoying a perfectly ordinary day, as if he did not exist. Why should Dickie want to come back to subways and taxis and starched collars and a nine-to- five job? Or even a chauffeured car and vacations in Florida and Maine? It wasn't as much fun as sailing a boat in old clothes and being answerable to nobody for the way he spent his time, and having his own house with a good-natured maid who probably took care of everything for him. And money besides, to take trips if he wanted to. Tom envied him with a heartbreaking surge of envy and self-pity. Dickie's father had probably said in his letter the very things that would set Dickie against him, Tom thought. How much better it would have been if he had just sat down in one of the cafes down at the beach and struck up an acquaintance with Dickie out of the blue! He probably could have persuaded Dickie to come home eventually, if he had begun like that, but this way it was useless. Tom cursed himself for having been so heavy-handed and so humourless today. Nothing he took desperately seriously ever worked out. He'd found that out years ago. He'd let a few days go by, he thought. The first step, anyway, was to make Dickie like him. That he wanted more than anything else in the world. 9 Tom let three days go by. Then he went down to the beach on the fourth morning around noon, and found Dickie alone, in the same spot Tom had seen him first, in front of the grey rocks that extended across the beach from the land. 'Morning!' Tom called. 'Where's Marge?' 40  The Talented Mr Ripley 'Good morning. She's probably working a little late. She'll be down.' 'Working?' 'She's a writer.' 'Oh.' Dickie puffed on the Italian cigarette in the corner of his mouth. 'Where've you been keeping yourself? I thought you'd gone.' 'Sick,' Tom said casually, tossing his rolled towel down on the sand, but not too near Dickie's towel. 'Oh, the usual upset stomach?' 'Hovering between life and the bathroom,' Tom said, smiling. 'But I'm all right now.' He actually had been too weak even to leave the hotel, but he had crawled around on the floor of his room, following the patches of sunlight that came through his windows, so that he wouldn't look so white the next time he came down to the beach. And he had spent the remainder of his feeble strength studying an Italian conversation book that he had bought in the hotel lobby. Tom went down to the water, went confidently up to his waist and stopped there, splashing the water over his shoulders. He lowered himself until the water reached his chin, floated around a little, then came slowly in. 'Can I invite you for a drink at the hotel before you go up to your house?' Tom asked Dickie. 'And Marge, too, if she comes. I wanted to give you your bathrobe and socks, you know.' 'Oh yes. Thanks very much. I'd like to have a drink.' He went back to his Italian newspaper. Tom stretched out on his towel. He heard the village clock strike one. 'Doesn't look as if Marge is coming down,' Dickie said. 'I think I'll be going along.' Tom got up. They walked up to the Miramare, saying practically nothing to each other, except that Tom invited Dickie to lunch with him, and Dickie declined because the maid had his lunch ready at the house, he said. They went up to Tom's room, and Dickie tried the bathrobe on and held the socks up to his bare feet. Both the bathrobe and the socks were the right size, and, as Tom had anticipated, Dickie was extremely pleased with the bathrobe. 'And this,' Tom said, taking a square package wrapped in drugstore paper from a bureau drawer. 'Your mother sent you some 41  The Talented Mr Ripley nose-drops, too.' Dickie smiled. 'I don't need them any more. That was sinus. But I'll take them off your hands.' Now Dickie had everything, Tom thought, everything he had to offer. He was going to refuse the invitation for a drink, too, Tom knew. Tom followed him toward the door. 'You know, your father's very concerned about your coming home. He asked me to give you a good talking to, which of course I won't, but I'll still have to tell him something. I promised to write him.' Dickie turned with his hand on the doorknob. 'I don't know what my father thinks I'm doing over here--drinking myself to death or what. I'll probably fly home this winter for a few days, but I don't intend to stay over there. I'm happier here. If I went back there to live, my father would be after me to work in Burke-Greenleaf. I couldn't possibly paint. I happen to like painting, and I think it's my business how I spend my life.' 'I understand. But he said he wouldn't try to make you work in his firm if you come back, unless you wanted to work in the designing department, and he said you liked that.' 'Well--my father and I have been over that. Thanks, anyway, Tom, for delivering the message and the clothes. It was very nice of you.' Dickie held out his hand. Tom couldn't have made himself take the hand. This was the very edge of failure, failure as far as Mr Greenleaf was concerned, and failure with Dickie. 'I think I ought to tell you something else,' Tom said with a smile. 'Your father sent me over here especially to ask you to come home.' 'What do you mean?' Dickie frowned. 'Paid your way?' 'Yes.' It was his one last chance to amuse Dickie or to repel him, to make Dickie burst out laughing or go out and slam the door in disgust. But the smile was coming, the long corners of his mouth going up, the way Tom remembered Dickie's smile. 'Paid your way! What do you know! He's getting desperate, isn't he?' Dickie closed the door again. 'He approached me in a bar in New York,' Tom said. 'I told him I wasn't a close friend of yours, but he insisted I could help if I came over. I told him I'd try.' 'How did he ever meet you?' 'Through the Schrievers. I hardly know the Schrievers, but there it 42  The Talented Mr Ripley was! I was your friend and I could do you a lot of good.' They laughed. 'I don't want you to think I'm someone who tried to take advantage of your father,' Tom said. 'I expect to find a job somewhere in Europe soon, and I'll be able to pay him back my passage money eventually. He bought me a round-trip ticket.' 'Oh, don't bother! It goes on the Burke-Greenleaf expense list. I can just see Dad approaching you in a bar! Whicb bar was it?' 'Kabul's. Matter of fact, he followed me from the Green Cage.' Tom watched Dickie's face for a sign of recognition of the Green Cage, a very popular bar, but there was no recognition. They had a drink downstairs in the hotel bar. They drank to Herbert Richard Greenleaf. 'I just realised today's Sunday,' Dickie said. 'Marge went to church. You'd better come up and have lunch with us. We always have chicken on Sunday. You know it's an old American custom, chicken on Sunday.' Dickie wanted to go by Marge's house to see if she was still there. They climbed some steps from the main road up the side of a stone wall, crossed part of somebody's garden, and climbed more steps. Marge's house was a rather sloppy-looking one-storey affair with a messy garden at one end, a couple of buckets and a garden hose cluttering the path to the door, and the feminine touch represented by her tomato-coloured bathing suit and a bra hanging over a window-sill. Through an open window, Tom had a glimpse of a disorderly table with a typewriter on it. 'Hi!' she said, opening the door. 'Hello, Tom! Where've you been all this time?' She offered them a drink, but discovered there was only half an inch of gin in her bottle of Gilbey's. 'It doesn't matter, we're going to my house,' Dickie said. He strolled around Marge's bedroom-living-room with an air of familiarity, as if he lived half the time here himself. He bent over a flower pot in which a tiny plant of some sort was growing, and touched its leaf delicately with his forefinger. 'Tom has something funny to tell you,' he said. 'Tell her, Tom.' Tom took a breath and began. He made it very funny and Marge laughed like someone who hadn't had anything funny to laugh at in years. 'When I saw him coming in Raoul's after me, I was ready to climb 43  The Talented Mr Ripley out of a back window!' His tongue rattled on almost independently of his brain. His brain was estimating how high his stock was shooting up with Dickie and Marge. He could see it in their faces. The climb up the hill to Dickie's house didn't seem half so long as before. Delicious smells of roasting chicken drifted out on the terrace. Dickie made some martinis. Tom showered and then Dickie showered, and came out and poured himself a drink, just like the first time, but the atmosphere now was totally changed. Dickie sat down in a wicker chair and swung his legs over one of the arms. 'Tell me more,' he said, smiling. 'What kind of work do you do? You said you might take a job.' 'Why? Do you have a job for me?' 'Can't say that I have.' 'Oh, I can do a number of things--valeting, baby-sitting, accounting--I've got an unfortunate talent for figures. No matter how drunk I get, I can always tell when a waiter's cheating me on a bill. I can forge a signature, fly a helicopter, handle dice, impersonate practically anybody, cook--and do a one-man show in a nightclub in case the regular entertainer's sick. Shall I go on?' Tom was leaning forward, counting them off on his fingers. He could have gone on. 'What kind of a one-man show?' Dickie asked. 'Well -' Tom sprang up. 'This for example.' He struck a pose with one hand on his hip, one foot extended. 'This is Lady Assburden sampling the American subway. She's never even been in the underground in London, but she wants to take back some American experiences.' Tom did it all in pantomime, searching for a coin, finding it didn't go into the slot, buying a token, puzzling over which stairs to go down, registering alarm at the noise and the long express ride, puzzling again as to how to get out of the place--here Marge came out, and Dickie told her it was an Englishwoman in the subway, but Marge didn't seem to get it and asked, 'What?'--walking through a door which could only be the door of the" men's room from her twitching horror of this and that, which augmented until she fainted. Tom fainted gracefully on to the terrace glider. 'Wonderful!' Dickie yelled, clapping. Marge wasn't laughing. She stood there looking a little blank. Neither of them bothered to explain it to her. She didn't look as if she had that kind of sense of humour, anyway, Tom thought. Tom took a gulp of his martini, terribly pleased with himself. 'I'll do 44  The Talented Mr Ripley another for you sometime,' he said to Marge, but mostly to indicate to Dickie that he had another one to do. 'Dinner ready?' Dickie asked her. 'I'm starving.' 'I'm waiting for the darned artichokes to get done. You know that front hole. It'll barely make anything come to a boil.' She smiled at Tom. 'Dickie's very old-fashioned about some things, Tom, the things he doesn't have to fool with. There's still only a wood stove here, and he refuses to buy a refrigerator or even an icebox.' 'One of the reasons I fled America,' Dickie said. 'Those things are a waste of money in a country with so many servants. What'd Ermelinda do with herself, if she could cook a meal in half an hour?' He stood up. 'Come on in, Tom, I'll show you some of my paintings.' Dickie led the way into the big room Tom had looked into a couple of times on his way to and from the shower, the room with a long couch under the two windows and the big easel in the middle of the floor. 'This is one of Marge I'm working on now.' He gestured to the picture on the easel. 'Oh,' Tom said with interest. It wasn't good in his opinion, probably in anybody's opinion. The wild enthusiasm of her smile was a bit off. Her skin was as red as an Indian's. If Marge hadn't been the only girl around with blonde hair, he wouldn't have noticed any resemblance at all. 'And these--a lot of landscapes,' Dickie said with a deprecatory laugh, though obviously he wanted Tom to say something complimentary about them, because obviously he was proud of them. They were all wild and hasty and monotonously similar. The combination of terra cotta and electric blue was in nearly every one, terra cotta roofs and mountains and bright electric-blue seas. It was the blue he had put in Marge's eyes, too. 'My surrealist effort,' Dickie said, bracing another canvas against his knee. Tom winced with almost a personal shame. It was Marge again, undoubtedly, though with long snakelike hair, and worst of all two horizons in her eyes, with a miniature landscape of Mongibcllo's houses and mountains in one eye, and the beach in the other full of little red people. 'Yes, I like that,' Tom said. Mr Greenleaf had been right. Yet it gave Dickie something to do, kept him out of trouble, Tom supposed, just as it gave thousands of lousy amateur painters all over America something to do. He was only sorry that Dickie fell into this category as 45  The Talented Mr Ripley a painter, because he wanted Dickie to be much more. 'I won't ever set the world on fire as a painter,' Dickie said, 'but I get a great deal of pleasure out of it.' 'Yes,' Tom wanted to forget all about the paintings and forget that Dickie painted. 'Can I see the rest of the house?' 'Absolutely! You haven't seen the salon, have you?' Dickie opened a door in the hall that led into a very large room with a fireplace, sofas, bookshelves, and three exposures--to the terrace, to the land on the other side of the house, and to the front garden. Dickie said that in summer he did not use the room, because he liked to save it as a change of scene for the winter. It was more of a bookish den than a living-room, Tom thought. It surprised him. He had Dickie figured out as a young man who was not particularly brainy, and who probably spent most of his time playing. Perhaps he was wrong. But he didn't think he was wrong in feeling that Dickie was bored at the moment and needed someone to show him how to have fun. 'What's upstairs?' Tom asked. The 'upstairs was disappointing: Dickie's bedroom in the corner of the house above the terrace was stark and empty--a bed, a chest of drawers, and a rocking chair, looking lost and unrelated in all the space--a narrow bed, too, hardly wider than a single bed. The other three rooms of the second floor were not even furnished, or at least not completely. One of them held only firewood and a pile of canvas scraps. There was certainly no sign of Marge anywhere, least of all in Dickie's bedroom. 'How about going to Naples with me sometime?' Tom asked. 'I didn't have much of a chance to see it on my way down.' 'All right,' Dickie said. 'Marge and I are going Saturday afternoon. We have dinner there nearly every Saturday night and treat ourselves to a taxi or a carrozza ride back. Come along.' 'I mean in the daytime or some weekday so I could see a little more,' Tom said, hoping to avoid Marge in the excursion. 'Or do you paint all day?' 'No. There's a twelve o'clock bus Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. I suppose we could go tomorrow, if you feel like it.' 'Fine,' Tom said, though he still wasn't sure that Marge wouldn't be asked along. 'Marge is a Catholic?' he asked as they went down the stairs. 46  The Talented Mr Ripley 'With a vengeance! She was converted about six months ago by an Italian she had a mad crush on. Could that man talk! He was here for a few months, resting up after a ski accident. Marge consoles herself for the loss of Eduardo by embracing his religion.' 'I had the idea she was in love with you.' 'With me? Don't be silly!' The dinner was ready when they went out on the terrace. There were even hot biscuits with butter, made by Marge. 'Do you know Vic Simmons in New York?' Tom asked Dickie. Vic had quite a salon of artists, writers and dancers in New York, but Dickie didn't know of him. Tom asked him about two or three other people, also without success. Tom hoped Marge would leave after the coffee, but she didn't. When she left the terrace for a moment Tom said, 'Can I invite you for dinner at my hotel tonight?' 'Thank you. At what time?' 'Seven-thirty? So we'll have a little time for cocktails?--After all, it's your father's money,' Tom added with a smile. Dickie laughed. 'All right, cocktails and a good bottle of wine, Marge!' Marge was just coming back. 'We're dining tonight at the Miramare, compliments of Greenleaf pére!' So Marge was coming, too, and there was nothing Tom could do about it. After all, it was Dickie's father's money. The dinner that evening was pleasant, but Marge's presence kept Tom from talking about anything he would have liked to talk about, and he did not feel even like being witty in Marge's presence. Marge knew some of the people in the dining-room, and after dinner she excused herself and took her coffee over to another table and sat down. 'How long are you going to be here?' Dickie asked. 'Oh, at least a week, I'd say,' Tom replied. 'Because -' Dickie's face had flushed a little over the check- bones. The chianti had put him into a good mood. 'If you're going to be here a little longer, why don't you stay with me? There's no use staying in a hotel, unless you really prefer it.' 'Thank you very much,' Tom said. 'There's a bed in the maid's room, which you didn't see. Ermclinda doesn't sleep in. I'm sure we can make out with the furniture that's scattered around, if you think you'd like to.' 47  The Talented Mr Ripley 'I'm sure I'd like to. By the way, your father gave me six hundred dollars for expenses, and I've still got about five hundred of it. I think we both ought to have a little fun on it, don't you?' 'Five hundred!' Dickie said, as if he'd never seen that much money in one lump in his life. 'We could pick up a little car for that!' Tom didn't contribute to the car idea. That wasn't his idea of having fun. He wanted to fly to Paris. Marge was coming back, he saw. The next morning he moved in. Dickie and Ermelinda had installed an armoire and a couple of chairs in one of the upstairs rooms, and Dickie had thumb-tacked a few reproductions of mosaic portraits from St Mark's Cathedral on the walls. Tom helped Dickie carry up the narrow iron bed from the maid's room. They were finished before twelve, a little light-headed from the frascati they had been sipping as they worked. 'Are we still going to Naples?' Tom asked. 'Certainly.' Dickie looked at his watch. 'It's only a quarter to twelve. We can make the twelve o'clock bus.' They took nothing with them but their jackets and Tom's book of traveller's cheques. The bus was just arriving as they reached the post office. Tom and Dickie stood by the door, waiting for people to get off; then Dickie pulled himself up, right into the face of a young man with red hair and a loud sports shirt, an American. 'Dickie!' 'Freddie!' Dickie yelled. 'What're you doing here?' 'Came to see you! And the Cecchis. They're putting me up for a few days.' 'Ch'elegante! I'm off to Naples with a friend. Tom?' Dickie beckoned Tom over and introduced them. The American's name was Freddie Miles. Tom thought he was hideous. Tom hated red hair, especially this kind of carrot-red hair with white skin and freckles. Freddie had large red-brown eyes that seemed to wobble in his head as if he were cockeyed, or perhaps he was only one of those people who never looked at anyone they were talking to. He was also overweight. Tom turned away from him, waiting for Dickie to finish his conversation. They were holding up the bus, Tom noticed. Dickie and Freddie were talking about skiing, making a date for some time in December in a town Tom had never heard of. 'There'll be about fifteen of us at Cortina by the second,' Freddie 48  The Talented Mr Ripley said. 'A real bang-up party like last year! Three weeks, if our money holds out!' 'If we hold out!' Dickie said. 'See you tonight, Fred!' Tom boarded the bus after Dickie. There were no seats, and they were wedged between a skinny, sweating man who smelled, and a couple of old peasant women who smelled worse. Just as they were leaving the village Dickie remembered that Marge was coming for lunch as usual, because they had thought yesterday that Tom's moving would cancel the Naples trip. Dickie shouted for the driver to stop. The bus stopped with a squeal of brakes and a lurch that threw everybody' who was standing off balance, and Dickie put his head through a window and called, 'Gino! Gino!' A little boy on the road came running up to take the hundred-lire bill that Dickie was holding out to him. Dickie said something in Italian, and the boy said, 'Subito, signor!' and flew up the road, Dickie thanked the driver, and the bus started again. 'I told him to tell Marge we'd be back tonight, but probably late,' Dickie said. 'Good.' The bus spilled them into a big, cluttered square in Naples, and they were suddenly surrounded by push-carts of grapes, figs, pastry, and watermelon, and screamed at by adolescent boys with fountain pens and mechanical toys. The people made way for Dickie. 'I know a good place for lunch,' Dickie said. 'A real Neapolitan pizzeria. Do you like pizza?' 'Yes.' The pizzeria was up a street too narrow and steep for cars. Strings of beads hanging in the doorway, a decanter of wine on every table, and there were only six tables in the whole place, the kind of place you could sit in for hours and drink wine and not be disturbed. They sat there until five o'clock, when Dickie said it was time to move on to the Galleria. Dickie apologised for not taking him to the art museum, which had original da Vincis and El Grecos, he said, but they could see that at another time. Dickie had spent most of the afternoon talking about Freddie Miles, and Tom had found it as uninteresting as Freddie's face. Freddie was the son of an American hotel-chain owner, and a playwright--self-styled, Tom gathered, because he had written only two plays, and neither had seen Broadway. Freddie had a house in Cagnes-sur-Mer, and Dickie had stayed with him several weeks before he came to Italy. 49  The Talented Mr Ripley 'This is what I like,' Dickie said expansively in the Galleria, 'sitting at a table and watching the people go by. It does something to your outlook on life. The Anglo-Saxons make a great mistake not staring at people from a sidewalk table.' Tom nodded. He had heard it before. He was waiting for something profound and original from Dickie. Dickie was handsome. He looked unusual with his long, finely cut face, his quick, intelligent eyes, the proud way he carried himself regardless of what he was wearing. He was wearing broken-down sandals and rather soiled white pants now, but he sat there as if he owned the Galleria, chatting in Italian with the waiter when he brought their espressos. 'Ciao!' he called to an Italian boy who was passing by. 'Ciao, Dickie!' 'He changes Marge's traveller's cheques on Saturdays,' Dickie explained to Tom. A well-dressed Italian greeted Dickie with a warm handshake and sat down at the table with them. Tom listened to their conversation in Italian, making out a word here and there. Tom was beginning to feel tired. 'Want to go to Rome?' Dickie asked him suddenly. 'Sure,' Tom said. 'Now?' He stood up, reaching for money to pay the little tabs that the waiter had stuck under their coffee cups. The Italian. had a long grey Cadillac equipped with Venetian blinds, a four-toned horn, and a blaring radio that he and Dickie seemed content to shout over. They reached the outskirts of Rome in about two hours. Tom sat up as they drove along the Appian Way, especially for his benefit, the Italian told Tom, because Tom had not seen it before. The road was bumpy in spots. These were stretches of original Roman brick left bare to show people how Roman roads felt, the Italian said. The flat fields to left and right looked desolate in the twilight, like an ancient graveyard, Tom thought, with just a few tombs and remains of tombs still standing. The Italian dropped them in the middle of a street in Rome and said an abrupt good-bye. 'He's in a hurry,' Dickie said. 'Got to see his girl friend and get away before the husband comes home at eleven. There's the music hall I was looking for. Come on.! They bought tickets for the music-hall show that evening. There was still an hour before the performance, and they went to the Via Veneto, took a sidewalk table at one of the cafes, and ordered 50  The Talented Mr Ripley americanos. Dickie didn't know anybody in Rome, Tom noticed, or at least none who passed by, and they watched hundreds of Italians and Americans pass by their table. Tom got very little out of the music-hall show, but he tried his very best. Dickie proposed leaving before the show was over. Then they caught a carrozza and drove around the city, past fountain after fountain, through the Forum and around the Colloseum. The moon had come out. Tom was still a little sleepy, but the sleepiness, underlaid with excitement at being in Rome for the first time, put him into a receptive, mellow mood. They sat slumped in the carrozza, each with a sandalled foot propped on a knee, and it seemed to Tom that he was looking in a mirror when he looked at Dickie's leg and his propped foot beside him. They were the same height, and very much the same weight, Dickie perhaps a bit heavier, and they wore the same size bathrobe, socks, and probably shirts. Dickie even said, 'Thank you, Mr Greenleaf,' when Tom paid the carrozza driver. Tom felt a little weird. They were in even finer mood by one in the morning, after a bottle and a half of wine between them at dinner. They walked with their arms around each other's shoulders, singing, and around a dark corner they somehow bumped into a girl and knocked her down. They lifted her up, apologising, and offered to escort her home. She protested, they insisted, one on either side of her. She had to catch a certain trolley, she said. Dickie wouldn't hear of it. Dickie got a taxi. Dickie and Tom sat very properly on the jump seats with their arms folded like a couple of footmen, and Dickie talked to her and made her laugh. Tom could understand nearly everything Dickie said. They helped the girl out in a little street that looked like Naples again, and she said, 'Grazie tante!' and shook hands with both of them, then vanished into an absolutely black doorway. 'Did you hear that?' Dickie said. 'She said we were the nicest Americans she'd ever met!' 'You know what most crummy Americans would do in a case like that--rape her,' Tom said. 'Now where are we?' Dickie asked, turning completely around. Neither had the slightest idea where they were. They walked for several blocks without finding a landmark or a familiar street name. They urinated against a dark wall, then drifted on. 'When the dawn comes up, we can see where we are,' Dickie said cheerfully. He looked at his watch. 'S only a couple of more hours.' 51  The Talented Mr Ripley 'Fine.' 'It's worth it to see a nice girl home, isn't it?' Dickie asked, staggering a little. 'Sure it is. I like girls,' Tom said protestingly. 'But it's just as well Marge isn't here tonight. We never could have seen that girl home with Marge with us.' 'Oh, I don't know,' Dickie said thoughtfully, looking down at his weaving feet. 'Marge isn't -' 'I only mean, if Marge was here, we'd be worrying about a hotel for the night. We'd be in the damned hotel, probably. We wouldn't be seeing half of Rome!' 'That's right!' Dickie swung an arm around his shoulder. Dickie shook his shoulder, roughly. Tom tried to roll out from under it and grab his hand, 'Dickie-e!' Tom opened his eyes and looked into the face of a policeman. Tom sat up. He was in a park. It was dawn. Dickie was sitting on the grass beside him, talking very calmly to the policeman in Italian. Tom felt for the rectangular lump of his traveller's cheques. They were still in his pocket. 'Passporti!' the policeman hurled at them again, and again Dickie launched into his calm explanation. Tom knew exactly what Dickie was saying. He was saying that they were Americans, and they didn't have their passports because they had only gone out for a little walk to look at the stars. Tom had an impulse to laugh. He stood up and staggered, dusting his clothing. Dickie was up, too, and they began to walk away, though the policeman was still yelling at them. Dickie said something back to him in a courteous, explanatory tone. At least the policeman was not following them. 'We do look pretty cruddy,' Dickie said. Tom nodded. There was a long rip in his trouser knee where he had probably fallen. Their clothes were crumpled and grass-stained and filthy with dust and sweat, but now they were shivering with cold. They went into the first café they came to, and had caffe latte and sweet rolls, then several Italian brandies that tasted awful but warmed them. Then they began to laugh. They were still drunk. By eleven o'clock they were in Naples, just in time to catch the bus for Mongibello. It was wonderful to think of going back to Rome when they were more presentably dressed and seeing all the museums 52  The Talented Mr Ripley they had missed, and it was wonderful to think of lying on the beach at Mongibello this afternoon, baking in the sun. But they never got to the beach. They had showers at Dickie's house, then fell down on their respective beds and slept until Marge woke them up around four. Marge was annoyed because Dickie hadn't sent her a telegram saying he was spending the night in Rome. 'Not that I minded your spending the night, but I thought you were in Naples and anything can happen in Naples.' 'Oh-h,' Dickie drawled with a glance at Tom. He was making Bloody Marys for all of them. Tom kept his mouth mysteriously shut. He wasn't going to tell Marge anything they had done. Let her imagine what she pleased. Dickie had made it evident that they had had a very good time. Tom noticed that she looked Dickie over with disapproval of his hangover, his unshaven face, and the drink he was taking now. There was something in Marge's eyes when she was very serious that made her look wise and old in spite of the naive clothes she wore and her windblown hair and her general air of a Girl Scout. She had the look of a mother or an older sister now--the old feminine disapproval of the destructive play of little boys and men. La dee da! Or was it jealousy? She seemed to know that Dickie had formed a closer bond with him in twenty-four hours, just because he was another man, than she could ever have with Dickie, whether he loved her or not, and he didn't. After a few moments she loosened up, however, and the look went out of her eyes. Dickie left him with Marge on the terrace. Tom asked her about the book she was writing. It was a book about Mongibello, she said, with her own photographs. She told him she was from Ohio and showed him a picture, which she carried in her wallet, of her family's house. It was just a plain clapboard house, but it was home, Marge said with a smile. She pronounced the adjective 'Clabbered', which amused Tom, because that was the word she used to describe people who were drunk, and just a few minutes before she had said to Dickie, 'You look absolutely clabbered!' her speech, Tom thought, was abominable, both her choice of words and her pronunciation. He tried to be especially pleasant to her. He felt he could afford to be. He walked with her to the gate, and they said a friendly good-bye to each other, but neither said anything about their all getting together later that day or tomorrow. There was no doubt about it, Marge was a little angry with Dickie. 53  The Talented Mr Ripley IO FOR three or four days they saw very little of Marge except down at the beach, and she was noticeably cooler towards both of them on the beach. She smiled and talked just as much or maybe more, but there was an element of politeness now, which made for the coolness. Tom noticed that Dickie was concerned, though not concerned enough to talk to Marge alone, apparently, because he hadn't seen her alone since Tom had moved into the house. Tom had been with Dickie every moment since he had moved into Dickie's house. Finally Tom, to show that he was not obtuse about Marge, mentioned to Dickie that he thought she was acting strangely. 'Oh, she has moods,' Dickie said. 'Maybe she's working well. She doesn't like to see people when she's in a streak of work.' The Dickie-Marge relationship was evidently just what he had supposed it to be at first, Tom thought. Marge was much fonder of Dickie than Dickie was of her. Tom, at any rate, kept Dickie amused. He had lots of funny stories to tell Dickie about people he knew in New York, some of them true, some of them made up. They went for a sail in Dickie's boat every day. There was no mention of any date when Tom might be leaving. Obviously Dickie was enjoying his company. Tom kept out of Dickie's way when Dickie wanted to paint, and he was always ready to drop whatever he was doing and go with Dickie for a walk or a sail or simply sit and talk. Dickie also seemed pleased that Tom was taking his study of Italian seriously. Tom spent a couple of hours a day with his grammar and conversation books. Tom wrote to Mr Greenleaf that he was staying with Dickie now for a few days, and said that Dickie had mentioned flying home for a while in the winter, and that probably he could by that time persuade him to stay longer. This letter sounded much better now that he was staying at Dickie's house than his first letter in which he had said he was staying at a hotel in Mongibello. Tom also said that when his money gave out he intended to try to get himself a job, perhaps at one of the hotels in the village, a casual statement that served the double purpose of reminding Mr Greenleaf that six hundred dollars could run 54  The Talented Mr Ripley out, and also that he was a young man ready and willing to work for a living. Tom wanted to convey the same good impression to Dickie, so he gave Dickie the letter to read before he sealed it. Another week went by, of ideally pleasant weather, ideally lazy days in which Tom's greatest physical exertion was climbing the stone steps from the beach every afternoon and his greatest mental effort trying to chat in Italian with Fausto, the twenty-three-year-old Italian boy whom Dickie had found in the village and had engaged to come three times a week to give Tom Italian lessons. They went to Capri one day in Dickie's sailboat. Capri was just far enough away not to be visible from Mongibello. Tom was filled with anticipation, but Dickie was in one of his preoccupied moods and refused to be enthusiastic about anything. He argued with the keeper of the dock where they tied the Pipistrello. Dickie didn't even want to take a walk through the wonderful-looking little streets that went off in every direction from the plaza. They sat in a café on the plaza and drank a couple of Fernet-Brancas, and then Dickie wanted to start home before it became dark, though Tom would have willingly paid their hotel bill if Dickie had agreed to stay overnight. Tom supposed they would come again to Capri, so he wrote that day off and tried to forget it. A letter came from Mr Greenleaf, which had crossed Tom's letter, in which Mr Greenleaf reiterated his arguments for Dickie's coming home, wished Tom success, and asked for a prompt reply as to his results. Once more Tom dutifully took up the pen and replied. Mr Greenleaf's letter had been in such a shockingly businesslike tone-- really as if he had been checking on a shipment of boat parts, Tom thought--that he found it very easy to reply in the same style. Tom was a little high when he wrote the letter, because it was just after lunch and they were always slightly high on wine just after lunch, a delicious sensation that could be corrected at once with a couple of espresso; and a short walk, or prolonged with another glass of wine, sipped as they went about their leisurely afternoon routine. Tom amused himself by injecting a faint hope in this letter. He wrote in Mr Greenleaf's own style:... If I am not mistaken, Richard is wavering in his decision to spend another winter here. As I promised you, I shall do everything in my power to dissuade him from spending another winter here, and in time--though it may be as long as Christmas--I may be able to get him to stay in the States when he goes over. 55  The Talented Mr Ripley Tom had to smile as he wrote it, because he and Dickie were talking of cruising around the Greek islands this winter, and Dickie had given up the idea of flying home even for a few days, unless his mother should be really seriously ill by then. They had talked also of spending January and February, Mongibello's worst months, in Majorca. And Marge would not be going with them, Tom was sure. Both he and Dickie excluded her from their travel plans whenever they discussed them, though Dickie had made the mistake of dropping to her that they might be taking a winter cruise somewhere. Dickie was so damned open about everything! And now, though Tom knew Dickie was still firm about their going alone, Dickie was being more than usually attentive to Marge, just because he realised that she would be lonely here by herself, and that it was essentially unkind of them not to ask her along. Dickie and Tom both tried to cover it up by impressing on her that they would be travelling in the cheapest and worst possible way around Greece, cattle-boats, sleeping with peasants on the decks and all that, no way for a girl to travel. But Marge still looked dejected, and Dickie still tried to make it up by asking her often to the house now for lunch and dinner. Dickie took Marge's hand sometimes as they walked up from the beach, though Marge didn't always let him keep it. Sometimes she extricated her hand after a few seconds in a way that looked to Tom as if she were dying for her hand to be held. And when they asked her to go along with them to Herculaneum, she refused. 'I think I'll stay home. You boys enjoy yourselves,' she said with an effort at a cheerful smile. 'Well, if she won't, she won't,' Tom said to Dickie, and drifted tactfully into the house so that she and Dickie could talk alone on the terrace if they wanted to. Tom sat on the broad window-sill in Dickie's studio and looked out at the sea, his brown arms folded on his chest. He loved to look out at the blue Mediterranean and think of himself and Dickie sailing where they pleased. Tangiers, Sofia, Cairo, Sevastopol... By the time his money ran out, Tom thought, Dickie would probably be so fond of him and so used to him that he would take it for granted they would go on living together. He and Dickie could easily live on Dickie's five hundred a month income. From the terrace he could hear a pleading tone in Dickie's voice, and Marge's monosyllabic answers. Then he heard the 56  The Talented Mr Ripley gate clang. Marge had left. She had been going to stay for lunch. Tom shoved himself off the window-sill and went out to Dickie on the terrace. 'Was she angry about something?' Tom asked. 'No. She feels kind of left out, I suppose.' 'We certainly tried to include her.' 'It isn't just this.' Dickie was walking slowly up and down the terrace. 'Now she says she doesn't even want to go to Cortina with me.' 'Oh, she'll probably come around about Cortina before December.' 'I doubt it,' Dickie said. Tom supposed it was because he was going to Cortina, too. Dickie had asked him last week. Freddie Miles had been gone when they got back from their Rome trip: he had had to go to London suddenly, Marge had told them. But Dickie had said he would write Freddie that he was bringing a friend along. 'Do you want me to leave, Dickie?' Tom asked, sure that Dickie didn't want him to leave. 'I feel I'm intruding on you and Marge.' 'Of course not! Intruding on what?' 'Well, from her point of view.' 'No. It's just that I owe her something. And I haven't been particularly nice to her lately. We haven't.' Tom knew he meant that he and Marge had kept each other company over the long, dreary last winter, when they had been the only Americans in the village, and that he shouldn't neglect her now because somebody else was here. 'Suppose I talk to her about going to Cortina,' Tom suggested. Then she surely won't go,' Dickie said tersely, and went into the house. Tom heard him telling Ermelinda to hold the lunch because he wasn't ready to eat yet. Even in Italian Tom could hear that Dickie said he wasn't ready for lunch, in the master-of-the-house tone. Dickie came out on the terrace, sheltering his lighter as he tried to light his cigarette. Dickie had a beautiful silver lighter, but it didn't work well in the slightest breeze. Tom finally produced his ugly, flaring lighter, as ugly and efficient as a piece of military equipment, and lighted it for him. Tom checked himself from proposing a drink: it wasn't his house, though as it happened he had bought the three bottles of Gilbey's 57  The Talented Mr Ripley that now stood in the kitchen. 'It's after two,' Tom said. 'Want to take a little walk and go by the post office?' Sometimes Luigi opened the post office at two-thirty, sometimes not until four, they could never tell. They walked down the hill in silence. What had Marge said about him, Tom wondered. The sudden weight of guilt made sweat come out on Tom's forehead, an amorphous yet very strong sense of guilt, as if Marge had told Dickie specifically that he had stolen something or had done some other shameful thing. Dickie wouldn't be acting like this only because Marge had behaved coolly, Tom thought. Dickie walked in his slouching, downhill gait that made his bony knees jut out in front of him, a gait that Tom had unconsciously adopted, too. But now Dickie's chin was sunk down on his chest and his hands were rammed into the pockets of his shorts. He came out of silence only to greet Luigi and thank him for his letter. Tom had no mail. Dickie's letter was from a Naples bank, a form slip on which Tom saw typewritten in a blank space: $500.00. Dickie pushed the slip carelessly into a pocket and dropped the envelope into a wastebucket. The monthly announcement that Dickie's money had arrived in Naples, Tom supposed. Dickie had said that his trust company sent his money to a Naples bank. They walked on down the hill, and Tom assumed that they would walk up the main road to where it curved around a cliff on the other side of the village, as they had done before, but Dickie stopped at the steps that led up to Marge's house. 'I think I'll go up to see Marge,' Dickie said. 'I won't be long, but there's no use in your waiting.' 'All right,' Tom said, feeling suddenly desolate. He watched Dickie climb a little way up the steep steps cut into the wall, then he turned abruptly and started back towards the house. About half-way up the hill he stopped with an impulse to go down to Giorgio's for a drink (but Giorgio's martinis were terrible), and with another impulse to go up to Marge's house, and, on a pretence of apologising to her, vent his anger by surprising them and annoying them. He suddenly felt that Dickie was embracing her, or at least touching her, at this minute, and partly he wanted to see it, and partly he loathed the idea of seeing it. He turned and walked back to Marge's gate. He closed the gate carefully behind him, though her house was so far above she could not possibly have heard it, then ran up the steps two at a time. He slowed as he climbed the last flight of 58  The Talented Mr Ripley steps. He would say, 'Look here, Marge, I'm sorry if I've been causing the strain around here. We asked you to go today, and we mean it. I mean it.' Tom stopped as Marge's window came into view: Dickie's arm was around her waist. Dickie was kissing her, little pecks on her cheek, smiling at her. They were only about fifteen feet from him, but the room was shadowed compared to the bright sunlight he stood in, and he had to strain to see. Now Marge's face was tipped straight up to Dickie's, as if she were fairly lost in ecstasy, and what disgusted Tom was that he knew Dickie didn't mean it, that Dickie was only using this cheap obvious, easy way to hold on to her friendship. What disgusted him was the big bulge of her behind in the peasant skirt below Dickie's arm that circled her waist. And Dickie -! Tom really wouldn't have believed it possible of Dickie! Tom turned away and ran down the steps, wanting to scream. He banged the gate shut. He ran all the way up the road home, and arrived gasping, supporting himself on the parapet after he entered Dickie's gate. He sat on the couch in Dickie's studio for a few moments, his mind stunned and blank. That kiss--it hadn't looked like a first kiss. He walked to Dickie's easel, unconsciously avoiding looking at the bad painting that was on it, picked up the kneaded eraser that lay on the palette and flung it violently out of the window, saw it arc down and disappear towards the sea. He picked up more erasers from Dickie's table, pen points, smudge sticks, charcoal and pastel fragments, and threw them one by one into corners or out of the windows. He had a curious feeling that his brain remained calm and logical and that his body was out of control. He ran out on the terrace with an idea of jumping on to the parapet and doing a dance or standing on his head, but the empty space on the other side of the parapet stopped him. He went up to Dickie's room and paced around for a few moments, his hands in his pockets. He wondered when Dickie was coming back? Or was he going to stay and make an afternoon of it, really take her to bed with him? He jerked Dickie's closet door open and looked in. There was a freshly pressed, new-looking grey flannel suit that he had never seen Dickie wearing. Tom took it out. He took off his knee-length shorts and put on the grey flannel trousers. He put on a pair of Dickie's shoes. Then he opened the bottom drawer of the chest and took out a clean blue-and-white striped shirt. 59  The Talented Mr Ripley He chose a dark-blue silk tie and knotted it carefully. The suit fitted him. He re- parted his hair and put the part a--little more to one side, the way Dickie wore his. 'Marge, you must understand that I don't love you,' Tom said into the mirror in Dickie's voice, with Dickie's higher pitch on the emphasised words, with the little growl in his throat at the end of the phrase that could be pleasant or unpleasant, intimate or cool, according to Dickie's mood. 'Marge, stop it!' Tom turned suddenly and made a grab in the air as if he were seizing Marge's throat. He shook her, twisted her, while she sank lower and lower, until at last he left her, limp, on the floor. He was panting. He wiped his forehead the way Dickie did, reached for a handkerchief and, not finding any, got one from Dickie's top drawer, then resumed in front of the mirror. Even his parted lips looked like Dickie's lips when he was out of breath from swimming, drawn down a little from his lower teeth. 'You know why I had to do that,' he said, still breathlessly, addressing Marge, though he watched himself in the mirror. 'You were interfering between Tom and me--No, not that! But there is a bond between us!' He turned, stepped over the imaginary body, and went stealthily to the window. He could see, beyond the bend of the road, the blurred slant of the steps that went up to Marge's house level. Dickie was not on the steps or on the parts of the road that he could see. Maybe they were sleeping together, Tom thought with a tighter twist of disgust in his throat. He imagined it, awkward, clumsy, unsatisfactory for Dickie, and Marge loving it. She'd love it even if he tortured her! Tom darted back to the closet again and took a hat from the top shelf. It was a little grey Tyrolian hat with a green-and-white feather in the brim. He put it on rakishly. It surprised him how much he looked like Dickie with the top part of his head covered. Really it was only his darker hair that was very different from Dickie. Otherwise, his nose--or at least its general form--his narrow jaw, his eyebrows if he held them right - 'What're you doing?' Tom whirled around. Dickie was in the doorway. Tom realised that he must have been right below at the gate when he had looked out. 'Oh--just amusing myself,' Tom said in the deep voice he always used when he was embarrassed. 'Sorry, Dickie.' Dickie's mouth opened a little, then closed, as if anger churned his words too much for them to be uttered. To Tom, it was just as bad as if he had spoken. 60  The Talented Mr Ripley Dickie advanced to the room. 'Dickie, I'm sorry if it -' The violent slam of the door cut him off. Dickie began opening his shirt scowling, just as he would have if Tom had not been there, because this was his room, and what was Tom doing in it? Tom stood petrified with fear. 'I wish you'd get out of my clothes,' Dickie said. Tom started undressing, his fingers clumsy with his mortification, his shock, because up until now Dickie had always said wear this and wear that that belonged to him. Dickie would never say it again. Dickie looked at Tom's feet. 'Shoes, too? Are you crazy?' 'No.' Tom tried to pull himself together as he hung up the suit, then he asked, 'Did you make it up with Marge?' 'Marge and I are fine,' Dickie snapped in a way that shut Tom out from them. 'Another thing I want to say, but clearly,' he said, looking at Tom, 'I'm not queer. I don't know if you have the idea that I am or not.' 'Queer?' Tom smiled faintly. 'I never thought you were queer.' Dickie started to say something else, and didn't. He straightened up, the ribs showing in his dark chest. 'Well, Marge thinks you are.' 'Why?' Tom felt the blood go out of his face. He kicked off Dickie's second shoe feebly, and set the pair in the closet. 'Why should she? What've I ever done?' He felt faint. Nobody had ever said it outright to him, not in this way. 'It's just the way you act,' Dickie said in a growling tone, and went out of the door. Tom hurried back into his shorts. He had been half concealing himself from Dickie behind the closet door, though he had his underwear on. Just because Dickie liked him, Tom thought, Marge had launched her filthy accusations of him at Dickie. And Dickie hadn't had the guts to stand up and deny it to her! He went downstairs and found Dickie fixing himself a drink at the bar shelf on the terrace. 'Dickie, I want to get this straight,' Tom began. 'I'm not queer either, and I don't want anybody thinking I am.' 'All right,' Dickie growled. The tone reminded Tom of the answers Dickie had given him when he had asked Dickie if he knew this person and that in New York. Some of the people he had asked Dickie about were queer, it was true, and he had often suspected Dickie of deliberately denying knowing them when he did know them. All right! Who was making an 61  The Talented Mr Ripley issue of it, anyway? Dickie was. Tom hesitated while his mind tossed in a welter of things he might have said, bitter things, conciliatory things, grateful and hostile. His mind went back to certain groups of people he had known in New York, known and dropped finally, all of them, but he regretted now having ever known them. They had taken him up because he amused them, but he had never had anything to do with any of them! When a couple of them had made a pass at him, he had rejected them--though he remembered how he had tried to make it up to them later by getting ice for their drinks, dropping them off in taxis when it was out of his way, because he had been afraid they would start to dislike him. He'd been an ass! And he remembered, too, the humiliating moment when Vic Simmons had said, Oh, for Christ sake, Tommie, shut up! when he had said to a group of people, for perhaps the third or fourth time in Vic's presence, 'I can't make up my mind whether I like men or women, so I'm thinking of giving them both up.' Tom had used to pretend he was going to an analyst, because everybody else was going to an analyst, and he had used to spin wildly funny stories about his sessions with his analyst to amuse people at parties, and the line about giving up men and women both had always been good for a laugh, the way he delivered it, until Vic had told him for Christ sake to shut up, and after that Tom had never said it again and never mentioned his analyst again, either. As a matter of fact, there was a lot of truth in it, Tom thought. As people went, he was one of the most innocent and clean-minded he had ever known. That was the irony of this situation with Dickie. 'I feel as if I've -' Tom began, but Dickie was not even listening. Dickie turned away with a grim look around his mouth and carried his drink to the corner of the terrace. Tom advanced towards him, a little fearfully, not knowing whether Dickie would hurl him off the terrace, or simply turn around and tell him to get the hell out of the house. Tom asked quietly, 'Are you in love with Marge, Dickie?' 'No, but I feel sorry for her. I care about her. She's been very nice to me. We've had some good times together. You don't seem to be able to understand that.' 'I do understand. That was my original feeling about you and her-- that it was a platonic thing as far as you were concerned, and that she was probably in love with you.' 'She is. You go out of your way not to hurt people who're in love with you, you know.' 62  The Talented Mr Ripley 'Of course.' He hesitated again, trying to choose his words. He was still in a state of trembling apprehension, though Dickie was not angry with him any more. Dickie was not going to throw him out. Tom said in a more self-possessed tone, 'I can imagine that if you both were in New York you wouldn't have seen her nearly so often--or at all--but this village being so lonely -' 'That's exactly right. I haven't been to bed with her and I don't intend to, but I do intend to keep her friendship.' 'Well, have I done anything to prevent you? I told you, Dickie, I'd rather leave than do anything to break up your friendship with Marge.' Dickie gave a glance. “No, you haven't done anything, specifically, but it's obvious you don't like her around. Whenever you make an effort to say anything nice to her, it's so obviously an effort.' Tm sorry,' Tom said contritely. He was sorry he hadn't made more of an effort, that he had done a bad job when he might have done a good one. 'Well, let's let it go. Marge and I are okay,' Dickie said defiantly. He turned away and stared off at the water. Tom went into the kitchen to make himself a little boiled coffee. He didn't want to use the espresso machine, because Dickie was very particular about it and didn't like anyone using it but himself. He'd take the coffee up to his room, and study some Italian before Fausto came, Tom thought. This wasn't the time to make it up with Dickie. Dickie had his pride. He would be silent for most of the afternoon, then come around by about five o'clock after he had been painting for a while, and it would be as if the episode with the clothes had never happened. One thing Tom was sure of: Dickie was glad to have him here. Dickie was bored with living by himself, and bored with Marge, too. Tom still had three hundred dollars of the money Mr Greenleaf had given him, and he and Dickie were going to use it on a spree in Paris. Without Marge. Dickie had been amazed when Tom had told him he hadn't had more than a glimpse o£ Paris through a railroad station window. While he waited for his coffee, Tom put away the food that was to have been their lunch. He set a couple of pots of food in bigger pots of water to keep the ants away from them. There was also the little paper of fresh butter, the pair of eggs, the paper of four rolls that Ermelinda had brought for their breakfast tomorrow. They had to buy 63  The Talented Mr Ripley small quantities of everything every day, because there was no refrigerator. Dickie wanted to buy a refrigerator with part of his father's money. He had mentioned it a couple of times. Tom hoped he changed his mind, because a refrigerator would cut down their travelling money, and Dickie had a very definite budget for his own five hundred dollars every month. Dickie was cautious about money, in a way, yet down at the wharf, and in the village bars, he gave enormous tips right and left, and gave five-hundred-lire bills to any beggar who approached him. Dickie was back to normal by five o'clock. He had had a good afternoon of painting. Tom supposed, because he had been whistling for the last hour in his studio. Dickie came out on the terrace where Tom was scanning his Italian grammar, and gave him some pointers on his pronunciation. 'They don't always say “voglio" so clearly,' Dickie said. They say “io vo' presentare mia arnica Marge, per esempio."' Dickie drew his long hand backwards through the air. He Always made gestures when he spoke Italian, graceful gestures as if he were leading an orchestra in a legato. 'You'd better listen to Fausto more and read that grammar less. I picked my Italian up off the streets.' Dickie smiled and walked away down the garden path. Fausto was just coming in the gate. Tom listened carefully to their laughing exchanges in Italian, Straining to understand every word. Fausto came out on the terrace smiling, sank into a chair, and put his bare feet up on the parapet. His face was either smiling or frowning, and it could change from instant to instant. He was one of the few people in the village, Dickie said, who didn't speak in a southern dialect. Fausto lived in Milan, and he was visiting an aunt in Mongibello for a few months. He came, dependably and punctually, three times a week between five and five-thirty, and they sat on the terrace and sipped wine or coffee and chatted for about an hour. Tom tried his utmost to memorise everything Fausto said about the rocks, the water, politics (Fausto was a Communist, a card-carrying Communist, and he showed his card to Americans at the drop of a hat, Dickie said, because he was amused by their astonishment at his having it), and about the frenzied, catlike sex-life of some of the village inhabitants. Fausto found it hard to think of things to talk about sometimes, and then he would stare at Tom and burst out laughing. But Tom was making great progress, Italian was the only thing he had 64  The Talented Mr Ripley ever studied that he enjoyed and felt he could stick to. Tom wanted his Italian to be as good as Dickie's, and he thought he could make it that good in another month, if he kept on working hard at it. 11 TOM walked briskly across the terrace and into Dickie's studio. 'Want to go to Paris in a coffin?' he asked. 'What?' Dickie looked up from his watercolour. 'I've been talking to an Italian in Giorgio's. We'd start out from Trieste, ride in coffins in the baggage car escorted by some Frenchmen, and we'd get a hundred thousand lire apiece. I have the idea it concerns dope.' 'Dope in the coffins? Isn't that an old stunt?' 'We talked in Italian, so I didn't understand everything, but he said there'd be three coffins, and maybe the third has a real corpse in it and they've put the dope into the corpse. Anyway, we'd get the trip plus the experience.' He emptied his pockets of the packs of ship's store Lucky Strikes that he had just bought from a street peddler for Dickie. 'What do you say?' 'I think it's a marvellous idea. To Paris in a coffin!' There was a funny smile on Dickie's face, as if Dickie were pulling his leg by pretending to fall in with it, when he hadn't the least intention of falling in with it. Tm serious,' Tom said. 'He really is on the lookout for a couple of willing young men. The coffins are supposed to contain the bodies of French casualties from Indo-China. The French escort is supposed to be the relative of one of them, or maybe all of them.' It wasn't exactly what the man had said to him, but it was near enough. And two hundred thousand lire was over three hundred dollars, after all, plenty for a spree in Paris. Dickie was still hedging about Paris. Dickie looked at him sharply, put out the bent wisp of the Nazionale he was smoking, and opened one of the packs of Luckies. 'Are you sure the guy you were talking to wasn't under the influence of dope himself?' 65