Патриция Хайсмит – The Talented Mr Ripley / Талантливый мистер Рипли (страница 3)
The atmosphere of the city became stranger as the days went on. As if New York lost its reality or importance and became a show just for him, an exciting show with its buses, taxis, and hurrying people, its television shows in all the Third Avenue bars, and its sound effects of thousands of horns and human voices. As if when his boat left on Saturday, the whole city of New York would disappear.
Or maybe he was afraid. He hated water. He had never travelled anywhere before on water. His parents had drowned in Boston Harbour, and Tom, as long as he could remember, was always afraid of water, and he had never learned how to swim. It gave Tom a sick, empty feeling at his stomach to think that in less than a week he would have water below him, miles deep, and that he would have to look at it most of the time, because people on ocean liners spent most of their time on deck. And he was afraid to be seasick.
2
The morning of his sailing, the morning he was waiting for with such excitement was a sunless day, and the city was already like some grey, distant land.
A steward came out, 'Visitors ashore, please! All visitors ashore!' The ship was moving before Tom went down to his cabin. He saw a big basket of fruit on the floor by his bed. He took the little white envelope quickly. The card inside said:
The basket had apples and pears and grapes and a couple of candy bars and several little bottles of liqueurs. Tom had never received a bon voyage basket. To him, they were something for fantastic prices. Now he found himself with tears in his eyes, and he put his face down in his hands suddenly and began to cry.
His mood was calm but he did not want to meet any of the people on the ship, though when he saw the people with whom he sat at his table, he greeted them pleasantly and smiled. He wanted his time for thinking. He began to play a role of a serious young man with a serious job ahead of him. He was polite and well-mannered.
He had a sudden wish to buy a conservative bluish-grey cap of soft English wool. He could wear it in different ways. He could pull it down over his face when he wanted to sleep in his deck-chair. He could look like a country gentleman, a criminal, an Englishman, a Frenchman, or a plain American eccentric, depending on how he wore it. Tom tried it in his room in front of the mirror. He always thought he had the dullest face, that could be easily forgotten. A real conformist's face.The cap changed all that. Now he was a young man with a private income, not long out of Princeton, perhaps. He also bought a pipe to go with the cap.
He was starting a new life. Good-bye to all the second-rate people he had known in the past three years in New York. He felt as immigrants when they left everything behind them in some foreign country, left their friends and relatives and their past mistakes, and sailed for America. A new start!
When Mr Greenleaf's money was spent, he might not come back to America. He might get an interesting job in a hotel, for instance, where they needed somebody who spoke English. Or he might become a representative for some European firm and travel everywhere in the world. Or somebody might need a young man, who could drive a car, who was quick at figures. The world was wide!
In the mornings he walked on the deck very slowly, so that the people could see him two or three times, then sat down in his deck-chair for more thought on his own life. After lunch, he stayed in his cabin, enjoying its privacy and comfort, doing absolutely nothing. Sometimes he sat in the writing-room, writing letters. The letter to the Greenleaf's began as a polite greeting and a thank-you for the bon voyage basket and the comfortable cabin. Then he added an imaginary paragraph about finding Dickie and living with him in his Mongibello house, about the slow but steady progress in persuading Dickie to come home, about the swimming, the fishing, the cafe life, and he got so excited that it went on for eight or ten pages but he knew he would never send any of it.
On another afternoon, he wrote a polite note to Aunt Dottie:
Dear Auntie [which he seldom called her in a letter and never to her face],
As you see by the writing paper, I am on the open sea. A sudden business offer which I cannot explain now. I had to leave suddenly, so I was not able to go to Boston and I'm sorry, because it may be months or even years before I come back.
I just wanted you not to worry and not to send me any more cheques, thank you. Thank you very much for the last one. I am well and extremely happy.
Love Tom
That made him feel better, because it without doubt ended any contact with her. After his letter to Aunt Dottie, he got up and went to the deck. Writing her always made him feel angry. He didn't want to show politeness to her. Yet until now he had always wanted her to know where he was, because he had always needed her cheques. But he didn't need her money now. He would not depend on her any longer.
Lying in his deck-chair, excited by the luxurious surroundings and delicious food, he tried to take an objective look at his past life. The last four years had been a waste. A number of jobs, long intervals with no job at all and as a result depression because of having no money, and then making friends with stupid, silly people in order not to be lonely. He couldn't be proud of this, because he had come to New York with high ambitions. He wanted to be an actor, but at twenty he did not have the idea of the difficulties, the necessary training, or even the necessary talent. He thought he had the necessary talent and the only thing he had to do was show a producer a few of his original one-man parodies – but his first three failures killed all his courage and his hope. He had no money, so he had to take the job on the banana boat, which at least removed him from New York. He was afraid that Aunt Dottie had called the police to look for him in New York. After all, he hadn't done anything wrong in Boston, just run away from her to start his own life as millions of young men had done before him.
His main mistake was that he never remained at one job, he thought, like the accounting job in the department store but he was really disappointed at the slowness of department-store promotions. Well, he blamed Aunt Dottie for his lack of patience; she never gave him praise when he was younger. He had won a silver medal from the newspaper once. It was like looking back at another person to remember himself then, a thin boy with runny nose, who had still managed to win a medal. Aunt Dottie didn't praise him, she hated him when he had a cold and she used to take her handkerchief and almost twist his nose off.
He remembered the promises he had made, even at the age of eight, to run away from Aunt Dottie, he imagined the violent scenes – Aunt Dottie trying to hold him in the house, and he hitting her with his fists, pushing her to the ground, and finally killing her with a knife in her throat. He ran away at seventeen and they brought him back, and he did it again at twenty and succeeded. And it was a surprise and pity how naive he was, how little he knew about the way the world worked, as if he had spent so much of his time hating Aunt Dottie and planning how to escape her, that he had not had enough time to learn and grow.
'Mr Ripley?' he heard suddenly from one of the Englishwomen who he had seen the other day during tea. 'We were wondering if you could join us for a bridge in the game-room? We're going to start in about fifteen minutes.'
Tom sat up politely in his chair. ' Thank you very much, but I think I'd like to stay outside. I'm afraid, I'm not too good at bridge.'
'Oh, neither are we! All right, another time.' She smiled and went away.
Tom sank back in his chair again, pulled his cap down over his eyes. His lack of interest, he knew, was producing a little comment among the passengers. He imagined how the passengers might guess: Is he an American! I think so, but he doesn't act like an American, does he? Most Americans are so noisy. He's extremely serious, isn't he, and he can't be more than twenty-three. He must have something very important on his mind.
Yes, he had. The present and the future of Tom Ripley.
Paris was no more than a very short view out of a railroad station window, like a tourist poster illustration, a series of long station platforms down which he followed 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 who said something with the word 'Pisa[16] ' in it. Tom went into the corridor to get a better look at it, looking automatically for the Leaning Tower[17], though he was not at all sure that the city was Pisa or that the tower would even be seen from here, but there it was! – a thick white column, leaning at an angle that he couldn't imagine was possible! It seemed to him a good sign. He believed that Italy was going to be everything that he expected, and that everything would go well with him and Dickie.