PARIS was no more than a glimpse out of a railroad station window of a lighted cafe front, complete with rain-streaked awning, sidewalk tables, and boxes of hedges, like a tourist poster illustration, and otherwise a series of long station platforms down which he followed dumpy little blue-clad porters with his luggage, and at last the sleeper that would take him all the way to Rome. He could come back to Paris at some other time, he thought. He was eager to get to Mongibello.
When he woke up the next morning, he was in Italy. Something very pleasant happened that morning. Tom was watching the landscape out of the window, when he heard some Italians in the corridor outside his compartment say something with the word 'Pisa' in it. A city was gliding by on the other side of the train. Tom went into the corridor to get a better look at it, looking automatically for the Leaning Tower, though he was not at all sure that the city was Pisa or that the tower would even be visible from here, but there it was!—a thick white column, sticking up out of the low chalky houses that formed the rest of the town, and leaning, leaning at an angle that he wouldn't have thought possible! He had always taken it for granted that the leaning of the Leaning Tower of Pisa was exaggerated. It seemed to him a good omen, a sign that Italy was going to be everything that he expected, and that everything would go well with him and Dickie.
He arrived in Naples late that afternoon, and there was no bus to Mongibello until tomorrow morning at eleven. A boy of about sixteen in dirty shirt and trousers and G. I. shoes latched on to him at the railroad station when he was changing some money, offering him God knew what, maybe girls, maybe dope, and in spite of Tom's protestations actually got into the taxi with him and instructed the driver where to go, jabbering on and holding a finger up as if he was going to fix him up fine, wait and see.
Tom gave up and sulked in a corner with his arms folded, and finally the taxi stopped in front of a big hotel that faced the bay, Tom would have been afraid of the imposing hotel if Mr Greenleaf had not been paying the bill.
'Santa Lucia!' the boy said triumphantly, pointing seaward.
Tom nodded. After all, the boy seemed to mean well. Tom paid the driver and gave the boy a hundred-lire bill, which he estimated to be sixteen and a fraction cents and appropriate as a tip in Italy, according to an article on Italy he had read on the ship, and when the boy looked outraged, gave him another hundred, and when he still looked outraged, waved a hand at him and went into the hotel behind the bellboys who had already gathered up his luggage.
Tom had dinner that evening at a restaurant down on the water called Zi' Teresa, which had been recommended to him by the English-speaking manager of the hotel. He had a difficult time ordering, and he found himself with a first course of miniature octopuses, as virulently purple as if they had been cooked in the ink in which the menu had been written. He tasted the tip of one tentacle, and it had a disgusting consistency like cartilage. The second course was also a mistake, a platter of fried fish of various kinds. The third course—which he had been sure was a kind of dessert—was a couple of small reddish fish. Ah, Naples! The food didn't matter. He was feeling mellow on the wine. Far over on his left, a three-quarter moon drifted above the jagged hump of Mount Vesuvius. Tom gazed at it calmly, as if he had seen it a thousand times before. Around the corner of land there, beyond Vesuvius, lay Richard's village.
He boarded the bus the next morning at eleven. The road followed the shore and went through little towns where they made brief stops—Torre del Greco, Torre Annunciata, Castel-lammare, Sorrento. Tom listened eagerly to the names of the towns that the driver called out. From Sorrento, the road was a narrow ridge cut into the side of the rock cliffs that Tom had seen in the photographs at the Greenleafs'. Now and then he caught glimpses of little villages down at the water's edge, houses like white crumbs of bread, specks that were the heads of people swimming near the shore. Tom saw a boulder-sized rock in the middle of the road that had evidently broke off a cliff. The driver dodged it with a nonchalant swerve.
'Mongtbello!'
Tom sprang up and yanked his suitcase down from the rack. He had another suitcase on the roof, which the bus boy took down for him. Then the bus went on, and Tom was alone at the side of the road, his suitcases at his feet. There were houses above him, straggling up the mountain, and houses below, their tile roofs silhouetted against the blue sea. Keeping an eye on his suitcases, Tom went into a little house across the road marked POSTA, and inquired of the man behind the window where Richard Greenleaf's house was. Without thinking, he spoke in English, but the man seemed to understand, because he came out and pointed from the door up the road Tom had come on the bus, and gave in Italian what seemed to be explicit directions how to get there.
'Sempre seeneestra, seeneestra!'
Tom thanked him, and asked if he could leave his two suitcases in the post office for a while, and the man seemed to understand this, too, and helped Tom carry them into the post office.
He had to ask two more people where Richard Greenleaf's house was, but everybody seemed to know it, and the third person was able to point it out to him -a large two-storey house with an iron gate on the road, and a terrace that projected over the cliff's edge. Tom rang the metal bell beside the gate. An Italian woman came out of the house, wiping her hands on her apron.
'Mr Greenleaf?' Tom asked hopefully.
The woman gave him a long, smiling answer in Italian and pointed downward toward the sea. 'Jew,' she seemed to keep saying. 'Jew.'
Tom nodded. 'Grazie.'
Should he go down to the beach as he was, or be more casual about it and get into a bathing suit? Or should he wait until the tea or cocktail hour? Or should he try to telephone him first? He hadn't brought a bathing suit with him, and he'd certainly have to have one here. Tom went into one of the little shops near the post office that had shirts and bathing shorts in its tiny front window, and after trying on several pairs of shorts that did not fit him, or at least not adequately enough to serve as a bathing suit, he bought a black-and-yellow thing hardly bigger than a G-string. He made a neat bundle of his clothing inside his raincoat, and started out of the door barefoot. He leapt back inside. The cobblestones were hot as coals.
'Shoes? Sandals?' he asked the man in the shop.
The man didn't sell shoes.
Tom put on his own shoes again and walked across the road to the post office, intending to leave his clothes with his suitcases, but the post office door was locked. He had heard of this in Europe, places closing from noon to four sometimes. He turned and walked down a cobbled lane which he supposed led toward the beach. He went down a dozen steep stone steps, down another cobbled slope past shops and houses, down more steps, and finally he came to a level length of broad sidewalk slightly raised from the beach, where there were a couple of cafes and a restaurant with outdoor tables. Some bronzed adolescent Italian boys sitting on wooden benches at the edge of the pavement inspected him thoroughly as he walked by. He felt mortified at the big brown shoes on his feet and at his ghost-white skin. He had not been to a beach all summer. He hated beaches. There was a wooden walk that led half across the beach, which Tom knew must be hot as hell to walk on, because everybody was lying on a towel or something else, but he took his shoes off anyway and stood for a moment on the hot wood, calmly surveying the groups of people near him. None of the people looked like Richard, and the shimmering heat waves kept him from making out the people very far away. Tom put one foot out on the sand and drew it back. Then he took a deep breath, raced down the rest of the walk, sprinted across the sand, and sank his feet into the blissfully cool inches of water at the sea's edge. He began to walk.
Tom saw him from a distance of about a block—unmistakably Dickie, though he was burnt a dark brown and his crinkly blond hair looked lighter than Tom remembered it. He was with Marge.
'Dickie Greenleaf?' Tom asked, smiling.
Dickie looked up. 'Yes?'
'I'm Tom Ripley. I met you in the States several years ago. Remember?'
Dickie looked blank.
'I think your father said he was going to write you about me.'
'Oh, yes!' Dickie said, touching his forehead as if it was stupid of him to have forgotten... He stood up. 'Tom what is it?'
'Ripley.'
'This is Marge Sherwood,' he said. 'Marge, Tom Ripley.'
'How do you do?' Tom said.
'How do you do?'
'How long are you here for?' Dickie asked.
'I don't know yet,' Tom said. 'I just got here. I'll have to look the place over.'
Dickie was looking him over, not entirely with approval, Tom felt. Dickie's arms were folded, his lean brown feet planted in the hot sand that didn't seem to bother him at all. Tom had crushed his feet into his shoes again.
'Taking a house?' asked Dickie.
'I don't know,' Tom said undecidedly, as if he had been considering it.
'It's a good time to get a house, if you're looking for one for the winter,' the girl said. 'The summer tourists have practically all gone. We could use a few more Americans around here in winter.'
Dickie said nothing. He had reseated himself on the big towel beside the girl, and Tom felt that he was waiting for him to say good-bye and move on. Tom stood there, feeling pale and naked as the day he was born. He hated bathing suits. This one was very revealing. Tom managed to extract his pack of cigarettes from his jacket inside his raincoat, and offered it to Dickie and the girl. Dickie accepted one, and Tom lighted it with his lighter.
'You don't seem to remember me from New York,' Tom said.
'I can't really say I do,' Dickie said. 'Where did I meet you?'
'I think—Wasn't it at Buddy Lankenau's?' It wasn't, but he knew Dickie knew Buddy Lankenau, and Buddy was a very respectable fellow.
'Oh,' said Dickie, vaguely. 'I hope you'll excuse me. My memory's rotten for America these days.'
'It certainly is,' Marge said, coming to Tom's rescue. 'It's getting worse and worse. When did you get here, Tom?'
'Just about an hour ago. I've just parked my suitcases at the post office.' He laughed.
'Don't you want to sit down? Here's another towel.' She spread a smaller white towel beside her on the sand.
Tom accepted it gratefully.
Tm going in for a dip to cool off,' Dickie said, getting up.
'Me too!' Marge said. 'Coming in, Tom?'
Tom followed them. Dickie and the girl went out quite far—both seemed to be excellent swimmers—and Tom stayed near the shore and came in much sooner. When Dickie and the girl came back to the towels, Dickie said, as if he had been prompted by the girl, 'We're leaving. Would you like to come up to the house and have lunch with us?'
'Why, yes. Thanks very much.' Tom helped them gather up the towels, the sunglasses, the Italian newspapers.
Tom thought they would never get there. Dickie and Marge went in front of him, taking the endless flights of stone steps slowly and steadily, two at a time. The sun had enervated Tom. The muscles of his legs trembled on the level stretches. His shoulders were already pink, and he had put on his shirt against the sun's rays, but he could feel the sun burning through his hair, making him dizzy and nauseous.
'Having a hard time?' Marge asked, not out of breath at all. 'You'll get used to it, if you stay here. You should have seen this place during the heat wave in July.'
Tom hadn't breath to reply anything.
Fifteen minutes later he was feeling better. He had had a cool shower, and he was sitting in a comfortable wicker chair on Dickie's terrace with a martini in his hand. At Marge's suggestion, he had put his swimming outfit on again, with his shirt over it. The table on the terrace had been set for three while he was in the shower, and Marge was in the kitchen now, talking in Italian to the maid. Tom wondered if Marge lived here. The house was certainly big enough. It was sparsely furnished, as far as Tom could see, in a pleasant mixture o£ Italian antique and American bohemian. He had seen two original Picasso drawings in the hall.
Marge came out on the terrace with her martini. 'That's my house over there.' She pointed. 'See it? The square-looking white one with the darker red roof than the houses just beside it.'
It was hopeless to pick it out from the other houses, but Tom pretended he saw it. 'Have you been here long?'
'A year. All last winter, and it was quite a winter. Rain every day except one for three whole months!'
'Really!'
'Um-hm.' Marge sipped her martini and gazed out contentedly at her little village. She was back in her bathing suit, too, a tomato-coloured bathing suit, and she wore a striped shirt over it. She wasn't bad-looking, Tom supposed, and she even had a good figure, if one liked the rather solid type. Tom didn't, himself.
'I understand Dickie has a boat,' Tom said.
'Yes, the Pipi. Short for Pipistrello. Want to see it?
She pointed at another indescernible something down at the little pier that they could see from the corner of the terrace. The boats looked very much alike, but Marge said Dickie's boat was larger than most of them and had two masts.
Dickie came out and poured himself a cocktail from the pitcher on the table. He wore badly ironed white duck trousers and a terra cotta linen shirt the colour of his skin. 'Sorry there's no ice. I haven't got a refrigerator.'
Tom smiled. 'I brought a bathrobe for you. Your mother said you'd asked for one. Also some socks.'
'Do you know my mother?'
'I happened to meet your father just before I felt New York, and he asked me to dinner at his house.'
'Oh? How was my mother?'
'She was up and around that evening. I'd say she gets tired easily.'
Dickie nodded. 'I had a letter this week saying she was a little better. At least there's no particular crisis right now, is there?'
'I don't think so. I think your father was more worried a few weeks ago.' Tom hesitated. 'He's also a little worried because you won't come home.'
'Herbert's always worried about something,' Dickie said.
Marge and the maid came out of the kitchen carrying a steaming platter of spaghetti, a big bowl of salad, and a plate of bread. Dickie and Marge began to talk about the enlargement of some restaurant down on the beach. The proprietor was widening the terrace so there would be room for people to dance. They discussed it in detail, slowly, like people in a small town who take an interest in the most minute changes in the neighbourhood. There was nothing Tom could contribute.
He spent the time examining Dickie's rings. He liked them both: a large rectangular green stone set in gold on the third finger of his right hand, and on the little finger of the other hand a signet ring, larger and more ornate than the signet Mr Greenleaf had worn. Dickie had long, bony hands, a little like his own hands, Tom thought.
'By the way, your father showed me around the Burke-Greenleaf yards before I left,' Tom said. 'He told me he'd made a lot of changes since you've seen it last. I was quite impressed.'
'I suppose he offered you a job, too. Always on the lookout for promising young men.' Dickie turned his fork round and round, and thrust a neat mass of spaghetti into his month.
'No, he didn't.' Tom felt the luncheon couldn't have been going worse. Had Mr Greenleaf told Dickie that he was coming to give him a lecture on why he should go home? Or was Dickie just in a foul mood? Dickie had certainly changed since Tom had seen him last.
Dickie brought out a shiny espresso machine about two feet high, and plugged it into an outlet on the terrace. In a few moments there were four little cups of coffee, one of which Marge took into the kitchen to the maid.
'What hotel are you staying at?' Marge asked Tom.
Tom smiled. 'I haven't found one yet. What do you recommend?'
The Miramare's the best. It's just this side of Giorgio's. The only other hotel is Georgio's, but -'
'They say Georgio's got pulci in his beds,' Dickie interrupted.
'That's fleas. Giorgio's is cheap,' Marge said earnestly, 'but the service is -'
'Non-existent,' Dickie supplied.
'You're in a fine mood today, aren't you?' Marge said to Dickie, flicking a crumb of gorgonzola at him.
'In that case, I'll try the Miramare,' Tom said, standing up. 'I must be going.'
Neither of them urged him to stay. Dickie walked with him to the front gate. Marge was staying on. Tom wondered if Dickie and Marge were having an affair, one of those old, faute de mieux affairs that wouldn't necessarily be obvious from the outside, because neither was very enthusiastic. Marge was in love with Dickie, Tom thought, but Dickie couldn't have been more indifferent to her if she had been the fifty-year-old Italian maid sitting there.
'I'd like to see some of your paintings sometimes,' Tom said to Dickie.
'Fine. Well, I suppose we'll see you again if you're around,' and Tom thought he added it only because he remembered that he had brought him the bathrobe and the socks.
'I enjoyed the lunch. Good-bye, Dickie.' The iron gate clanged.