Perfect Freedom (19 page)

“You know,” Stuart suggested tentatively, “I think it's about time we had a taste of our own creation. I think we should have a real bang-up touristy night on the town. Cocktails, dinner, nightclubs, everything. Find out what the summer folk see in it.”

“That'd be wonderful.” Robbie laughed abruptly and inexplicably. The laughter ended as suddenly as it had begun. “It's funny. The kids at school know more about St. Tropez than I do.”

“That's what comes of being one of the underprivileged. Now we're definitely
nouveaux riches
. Do you have an elegant shirt you can lend me for the occasion? I'm afraid mine are all rather threadbare.”

“I guess so. But what'll we do about Mum? Her clothes look like something the cat dragged in.”

“Do they? I'm afraid I hadn't noticed. She must have something put away for best.”

“I'll go see what she's doing.” Robbie stood up in one lithe movement and sand showered from him. He looked at Stuart sideways, his dark hair falling over his forehead. His eyes were beautiful like Helene's, but with a hard, penetrating look that revealed nothing. “You did mean tonight?” he asked.

“Oh yes, definitely tonight. Tell your mother it's to be a thoroughly trashy evening.”

Robbie threw his head back with more laughter and went leaping off up the rocks. Stuart watched him reflectively until he was gone. He lay back on the warm sand and looked up at the sky. White puffs of clouds passed above him, giving him the uncomfortable sensation of feeling the earth turning, and he closed his eyes.

Robbie's laughter echoed in his ears, a reward. The boy needed to get out more, have fun, find his place in the world. Well, the money was there. A fuller life for Robbie. The new house. Some new clothes for himself and Helene. A new car or two so that they could get about a bit less sedately than in the Rolls. That was as far as he could see now. This was clearly a beginning, a starting all over again; it was also a farewell.

Farewell to the land and its creatures. Farewell to Antonin and the others and to the jolly vintage parties and shared toil. His riches and the grand new house would finally sever whatever link still existed between them. There would be no more Odettes. Farewell to her, too, to the sweet animal warmth she had offered at the beginning. Farewell to the world in which shopkeepers didn't want to be paid and Boldoni fed you like a king just for the fun of it. Farewell to all of it.

And Helene? he thought, wondering. Perhaps their farewell had taken place a long time ago. When his work had kept him in the fields for long hours he could tell himself that any withdrawal he felt in her was the result of his having so little energy left to devote to her. There had been the bad year after Robbie's illness when she had seemed to recoil from any physical intimacy. He had worked his way through that but he hadn't been able to recapture the old passion. When the appeal was pending and he had little will to work on land whose ownership lay in the balance, he had learned that whatever had happened between them had happened, that whatever had been lost was lost. He had counted on the past to bridge the gap of the years, but the past had given him no insight into the placid agreeable remote woman who looked out at him from Helene's once burning eyes.

He had learned that you can't start over again with people. The past is there and sometimes it's a barrier. No matter what people say, you can't always build on it. He loved her, she loved him, but he knew they had missed something along the way. Perhaps it was only time taking its inexorable toll. Was he ready for a mistress? He wondered why he felt so little inclination to stray. He hoped that Odette had cured him of thinking that lighthearted liaisons could do no harm. He sat up suddenly and wiped the sand off his hands, squinting against the light on the sea.

Why? he thought. Why am I living? Given life, it was easy enough to fill it one way or another. But why had be been placed on earth? If one didn't see oneself as a function of some divine plan, what was the meaning, what was the purpose? He thought of how simple everything had seemed at the beginning when he believed that all he had to do was take his clothes off and get into the sun. This view seemed hopelessly inadequate now. People were fighting all over the place. Was that what you needed to give you a sense of purpose? Not even the Abyssinians seemed to expect anybody in his right mind to help them once the important powers had failed to take any concerted action, but should he volunteer to join the Loyalists in Spain? He had given it serious thought during the last year when he wasn't thinking about money. Somebody was going to have to stop Hitler and Mussolini from bullying the world, but the right moment always seemed to slip past. His generation had already lived through a war and he couldn't see that it had accomplished much. He doubted if there would be another one in his time simply because the people who devoted their lives to thinking about money, like his father, hadn't figured out how to make it pay. There was too much danger that the Reds might walk off with all the stakes. He should probably be grateful for the opportunity to find some answers in himself.

He stood up, shaking sand from his trousers, and followed Robbie slowly up the rocks.

The place was a shambles. There were piles of building materials everywhere; work on the first of their proposed houses, here on the edge of the cliff overlooking the small beach, was to begin day after tomorrow. Just in the last few weeks he had arranged for preliminaries to get underway. Plumbing was being installed in the old house, which was to be expanded into a guest house and the glade was crisscrossed with trenches.

Stuart paused when he reached the top of the rocks and looked around him in order to see it in his mind's eye, the landscaped terraces, the fountains, the great rooms opening wide to the sea. The final plans were settled on and drawn up. He couldn't wait to get started. He leaped a ditch and ran down the glade to the house. He found the door to Robbie's room closed and he heard them laughing behind it. Robbie's room was being turned into a modern bathroom. His bed and chest of drawers stood in the middle of the living room. He called out and Robbie answered.

“Don't come in. We're trying to repair the ravages of time.” This was followed by an explosion of laughter and muffled exclamations. Stuart smiled at the door and then pulled off his shirt and went to the kitchen corner to wash.

He was rubbing his chest briskly with a towel when Robbie flung open the door and announced, “
La Reine de St. Tropez
.” Helene followed, not liking to be in the position of asking for Stuart's approval but doing so because Robbie expected it of her. She stood beside Robbie and took his arm. She was wearing a white skirt and blouse she had had for years but Stuart was scarcely aware of her clothes. They had worked on her hair, arranging it softly around her face. Her eyes and mouth were subtly made up, her tanned skin glowed, her hair shone, her body looked rich and ripe and desirable. She bloomed. It seemed to Stuart that she must have been storing up her beauty for this moment. There was poise and maturity in it but none of the blurring or softening of age; she looked indestructible and eternal. Stuart stared in dumb amazement and Helene looked from him to Robbie with a slight shrug as if repudiating his admiration.

Stuart moved forward to her. “Give me a kiss. You're the loveliest in the land.” She turned her cheek to him and laughed deprecatingly. Then she slipped away from him.

“Let's see what you have in the way of a shirt for the old man.” Stuart followed Robbie into the embryonic bathroom.

They left the house when the setting sun was bathing the land in a rosy glow. Even the piled-up sacks of cement beside the garage had acquired a luster. The air felt new. Their voices as they walked to the car fell into the glade clear and liquid. The shared felicity of being washed and cool and looking their best drew them together and created the illusion of profound harmony.

“Let's tell everybody you're my sister,” Robbie said excitedly to Helene. She blushed and looked up at him adoringly.

“My poor motherless children,” Stuart said. Robbie laughed and took a couple of exuberant skips beside them.

Everything stood out separate and distinct as they drove up through the woods to the main road; every twig, every leaf seemed to make a shadow of its own. Our park, Stuart thought. “Woods” wasn't grand enough to go with the new house.

When they reached the town Stuart let the Rolls drift with the crowd along one side of the port and around the other, past the British admiral's yacht. He found a parking place at the end of the quai near the old tower. There was a perilous-looking gangplank leading across the rocks to it and a sign in lights over the door proclaimed it to be
LA TOUR ENGLOUTIE.

“Well,” Stuart said, “where shall we start? The Café de la Mer or whatever it's called now?” They climbed down from the car and paused, bracing themselves to face the crowd. Robbie was looking around, wide-eyed and solemn. “Yes. It has seniority—like us. Come on, into the fray.” He took them both by the arm. The bear bicycled past them, wheeled sharply, and pedaled off down the quai. Stuart burst into laughter at the look of amazement on Robbie's face.

“This looks like fun,” the youth exclaimed.

Stuart guided them across the quai to what had once been the Café de la Mer. He noticed that the men they passed cast speculative glances over Helene and he was proud of her. He caught the eyes of a few girls himself. He saw both males and females doing double takes at Robbie. The place had already acquired a reputation for sexual variety. They were a triple threat.

When they reached the edge of the plot of red and white tables enclosed by boxes brimming over with pink and mauve petunias, they stopped. Every table seemed to be taken. A plump dark man in a waiter's white jacket was in front of them, bowing and smiling.

“Ah, Monsieur Cosling. We are so glad to see you at last. How fortunate there is still a little room, though of course for you we would always find a place.”

Stuart glanced from Helene to Robbie, feeling rather pleased with himself.

“Very kind of you,” he murmured. They followed the waiter through a narrow aisle to a vacant table wedged in between the others. People looked up from their drinks with curious stares as they passed. When they had seated themselves the waiter rubbed his hands.

“Now what can I offer you? A nice champagne wine? The management would be proud to offer you a bottle.”

“Why, yes,” Stuart said, “that would be very nice, thank you.” He waited until he was sure that the waiter was out of hearing and exploded with laughter. Helene and Robbie joined in.

“Well,” he said when they had subsided, “it apparently pays to play hard to get.” The sky was a pink dome shading down to reddish orange at the horizon, and the yachts rode motionless in a copper sea. Stuart was so intrigued by a woman who strolled by with a curious loose-jointed sway that it took him a moment to realize that it was Marlene Dietrich. He leaned forward to impart this information to Helene and Robbie. Music began to thump from the interior of the café. The waiter returned and presented the champagne with a flourish.

“I trust this will be the first of many visits, Monsieur Cosling.”

“Thank you, I'm sure it will be.” The Coslings caught each other's eyes and their mouths twitched with amusement. Stuart lifted his glass when the waiter had left them and bowed first to Helene and then to Robbie.

“To the first family of St. Tropez,” he said solemnly, and they all drank.

The color faded from the sky as they drank their champagne and the blue-gray mist of twilight drifted over them. The sea turned to lead and the encircling hills became an inky black. The day was dying and the languor induced by the white heat of the sun was thrown off. People sat up in their chairs, voices grew sharper, eyes looked into eyes with a new intensity. Music erupted from the row of cafés in sudden blasts. There was laughter in the air, tense and anticipatory. Lights glared on all the way around the quai, limiting the world to the area they illuminated.

“Well, you must admit it's nicer than the way it used to be,” Helene said to interpose herself between father and son. Stuart was treating Robbie like a contemporary, urging him to drink up and ragging the boy about his inability to keep pace with him. She was already aware enough of Robbie's increasing maturity.

“Come on. We'll share the dregs,” Stuart teased.

“The bubbles tickle.” Robbie giggled and almost upset his glass as he put it down.

“Remember how you got drunk the day we bought the place?”

“I did
not
get drunk.” The fun drained out of his expression.

“Oh, yes you did. We had to put you to bed in the car.” Helene and Stuart laughed at the recollection but Robbie couldn't join in. Any suggestion of grossness in front of his mother troubled him. He fixed a pale smile on his lips.

“Isn't it about time for dinner?” Helene suggested, watching him. They had settled on the restaurant on the fishermen's port that was reputed to be the best or certainly the most expensive in town. They emptied their glasses and rose and the round little waiter was once more at their side, assuring them of the joy of the management at being so honored. Stuart gave him a handsome tip.

The dingy little square of the old port had been transformed. The great tree was still there but under it the whole area was filled with tables that glittered with silver and crystal. Again, Stuart thought at first glance that every table was taken and again he was greeted by name.

“Ah, Monsieur Costing, you should have called for a table,” the maître d'hôtel cried with elaborate dismay as he hurried up to them. “Of course, we'll find room for you but it won't be the best:” He snapped his fingers and issued orders to waiters who swarmed around him. Yes, this was definitely celebrity and definitely agreeable.