Perfect Freedom (2 page)

Stuart knew that his background made him something of a misfit wherever he was. Why not make the most of it and create a life tailored to satisfy his individual needs? He wasn't quite sure what they were but he knew that New York and his job didn't weigh heavily in the balance. He discussed it with Helene all through that grim winter of '29 and into the dawning months of the thirties, and as summer approached and Robbie's school finished, he quit his job and they set sail, third class, for the unknown. It was a small reversal of the expatriate trend; everybody was hurrying home that year.

Their goal was modest—look around, see if they could find a place where they could make a good life on their limited income, take a year or two to work things out. If nothing came of it, they could always go back. The discovery of the property brought everything suddenly into focus. Stuart's capital was unencumbered but Sir Bennett had been given a controlling voice should Stuart wish to liquidate any part of it. Hence this meeting.

“It sounds jolly good,” Sir Bennett said when Stuart had completed his glowing description of the place he hoped to buy. “But what are you going to do with it?”

“Live on it,” Stuart said. “Settle down. Develop the land. Have a good life. I'd have asked you to take care of the money weeks ago, but the bloke who owns the place has disappeared. An old bachelor called Giraudon. He's quite batty but he's bound to come back eventually. Of course, I can't do a thing till he does.”

“What does Helene think of it?”

“She's crazy about it. Think how wonderful it'll be for Robbie.”

“Hmm. Still doing nothing about getting married?”

Stuart flushed and took a sip of his champagne. There was no way of making his uncle understand his and Helene's indifference to the legal forms of marriage. Their relationship had been necessarily illicit at the beginning, for her husband had been insane and she couldn't divorce him. By the time he died, Robbie had arrived and Stuart had adopted an attitude toward their irregular situation that made marriage superfluous. What had started as a youthful extramarital fling had become a completely satisfying union. What could a legal technicality change or add?

They had discussed the possibility of getting married to facilitate travel, but Helene's French passport was issued to Mrs. René de Chassart, her legal name, and it hadn't seemed worthwhile to take the time to have it changed. Although she hadn't lived in France for years and had Americanized her Christian name by dropping the accents, she was simply going home.

Stuart put his glass down carefully. “When we get settled, there'll be plenty of time to think about marriage,” he said quickly.

“Well, my boy, there's no question about your having the money but I can't say I'm mad about the idea.”

“Why not?” Stuart asked cheerfully.

“These are uncertain times. You can't afford to start eating into capital,” the older man said.

“Sure, but good Lord, Ben, with all that land, I'll be practically self-supporting. Besides, the dollar goes a long way here, God bless it.”

“What will you be doing? Something in the literary line?”

“God forbid. I'm going to be a beachcomber.” Stuart laughed. He knew that his uncle regarded him as “artistic” because of his job in publishing and that the move he was contemplating would be much more acceptable to the old man if it were given a gloss of creative or intellectual justification. Stuart refused to indulge in the pretense.

“What I mean to say, old boy, is what are you going to
do
?” Sir Bennett asked with gentle insistence.

“You're a great one to ask that, Ben,” he said.

“That's where you're wrong, my boy. I follow a very rigorous schedule. I'm in London for the season, I go to the villa on Como for the summer, I'm at Barstlow for the shooting, and I come to Monte for the winter season. Not now, heaven forbid. Dreadful sort of people here now. Don't know the place.” He made a gesture with his glass.

“You're a fraud, Ben. You just try to create the illusion of having something to do.”

“Illusion?” Sir Bennett cleared his throat and fixed Stuart with his pale blue eyes. “There's a good deal to be said for illusions if it comes to that. What would we do without them? Whole world's gone to jolly-oh since the war. No more illusions. No respect for the old values. It's all very well for a peasant to talk about living on the land. That's what he's made for, but you're not.”

“Okay, Ben, I promise not to live off the land,” Stuart said with a chuckle. People like Ben clung with innocent tenacity to the “old values.” As far as Stuart was concerned, the old values were permanently discredited. They cost too much money and injustice. He wanted to find new values. As a friend in New York had said, “You haven't any real roots. The usual rules don't apply to you.”

No roots. No compelling ties with any class or locality. No rules. Total freedom. Stuart went on playfully, “You don't mind a bit of animal husbandry and perhaps a touch of viniculture in a gentlemanly sort of way, do you? I just want to live on my own land and not bother anybody. Fish, grow things, give Robbie a good life. I'd have a thousand kids if Helene could have more. That's my religion—let nature take its course.”

“So be it. But I've learned one thing in my life. There's nothing more unnatural for a man than the so-called natural life. A man's mind won't let well enough alone. A fellow wants to feel part of something bigger than he is. Nothing duller than life if you don't believe you've been put on earth for some purpose.”

“That's because you don't live right, Ben.” Stuart enjoyed baiting his uncle. Why did people want to complicate matters so? Put on earth for some purpose? Why not accept life as a matter of satisfying one's natural appetites and let it go at that? “You wait and see,” Stuart said. “I'm going to have such a good life I won't have to pretend that God has selected me for some inscrutable mission. I won't even insist on a hereafter.”

“I'm not a religious fellow, my boy, but I'd hesitate before I provoked the Almighty. And now that I've performed my avuncular duty, let's concentrate on lunch. We're having sole.”

Waiters began to fuss over them with cloths and cutlery, they chatted, they ate their carefully selected meal. Sir Bennett was still lingering over some admirable brandy when it was time for Stuart to catch the train back. The two men rose for farewells.

“I'll expect to see you when I come in January,” Sir Bennett said. “Perhaps I'll be invited to—what's the name of your place?”

“St. Tropez.”

“Never heard of it. Beyond St. Raphael, you say?”

“A bit, but the trains are terrible. You'd better hire a car.”

“Odd part of the coast to choose. House all ready to move into, you say?”

Stuart grinned. “I forgot to tell you—there isn't any house worth mentioning. That's one of the things I like best about it. We'll just build what we need as we go along. I've seen what happens to people who get stuck with houses. I hope I never have a house I'd mind leaving. Freedom—that's what I'm after. What more could I buy with Aunt Ada's money?”

Sir Bennett waved his hand dismissively. “You must be quite mad. I say, I do hope you can afford to buy some clothes before I see you next.”

Stuart lolled on the hard bench of the empty third-class car as the train carried him back past Nice and Juan-les-Pins and Cannes, and thought of the immediate future. The die was cast, if only the owner, mad M. Giraudon, would come back to sign the papers. Regardless of M. Giraudon, he was committed now to the challenge he had chosen. Talking about it with Ben had made him see it a little more clearly. He and Helene would be embarking on a life that neither of them, let alone little Robbie, knew anything about, but he had yet to feel a twinge of apprehension. In New York, the word that had been bandied about when he talked about his vague plans was “escapism.” People said, “You're trying to turn your back on your times”—but was he? He hadn't turned his back on the twenties and had the memory of a thousand hangovers to prove it. If he hadn't known rich people, the twenties would have turned their back on him. What were “his times”? He was alive and the world was all around him. Why not use his unearned freedom to take what he wanted from it?

He was fairly sure that what he wanted made sense for Helene too, although he couldn't quite see her drawing water from a well or tending chickens. They had come to each other slowly—the best way, he eventually came to believe. He had been inclined in his youth to fall in love blindly and extravagantly, ready, with any encouragement, to indulge in all the fireworks of a grand passion. When it happened with Helene, she reacted like a sleepwalker, shuttered and withdrawn. He learned that she was terrified of passion; she felt responsible for her husband because she had been unable to match what proved to be his insane love for her.

Slowly, he had learned balance, he had learned to curb the demands he was accustomed to make of love. He discovered that he could breathe freely in the space Helene created around them. She was passionate in bed but otherwise they treated each other like loving friends, with delicate consideration and reticence. Her husband's death was the removal of a nuisance; by then, they were too firmly established together for it to amount to more. Stuart couldn't imagine anything changing between them now, no matter what they did.

At St. Raphael, he changed to a tiny, antique train for the second leg of the journey to his remote peninsula. Slowly the seats filled up. He thought of himself just a few months ago, riding the subway with hordes of hard-faced men studying the disasters recounted in the financial columns. How good to be away from it all! How good to strip off the harness of city life, the ties and garters and heavy shoes, and let in the sun and air. How good to be with people who couldn't even imagine the world he had left behind. He was grateful for the discomforts of the journey. If his land were easy to get at, it wouldn't be going for a song.

The last months in New York had been more distressing than he had realized until he was well out of it. He had been appalled by the fear-dazed eyes of his friends, intelligent cultivated people stricken by the loss not of anything real, but of an illusion of guaranteed ever-increasing material prosperity. Few of them lost their jobs. None of them was hungry. Watching his own unexpected and superfluous fortune dwindle to a shadow of its former self threatened to infect him with the same virus of terror. He clung to sanity by reminding himself that his self-made father's dedication to accumulating possessions had never inspired him with envy or respect. Better to find something worthwhile to do with the money that was left than to be sickened by greed for more. Olives and grapes growing on his own land. That was real. He hoped he would never again live in a world where money for its own sake could get such a grip on people's minds. A narrow escape. He would buy freedom.

A muffled rumbling filled the air. The whole train started to shake. The passengers fell silent and sat tensely, looking straight ahead of them. Suddenly the engine uttered a piercing scream. There was an enormous hissing and the train lurched forward. Stuart closed his eyes as the first cloud of smoke enveloped the passengers.

An hour or so later they reached the peninsula and the crossroads where Stuart changed to still another little train to make the final run out to St. Tropez. He was covered with grit but he had a pleasant memory of pretty little stations covered with bougainvillea and surrounded by zinnias and daisies, of rocky coves overhung by wind-twisted pines, of sea and sky and the explosive good humor of his fellow passengers. None of them had heard of General Motors Preferred.

Crossing from one train to the other in a grove of venerable parasol pines, he caught sight of Maître Barbetin, the notary handling the property transaction, and he hurried forward.

“Any news of M. Giraudon?” he asked as he had every time he had encountered the old gentleman in the last three weeks. The notary was a little bearded old man tightly buttoned into a rusty frock coat. He wore no tie but on his head was a hard squarish black hat with a hard curly brim.

“None, my dear sir. None at all.” His chin whiskers bobbed up and down as he began a rambling account of his progress in straightening out the boundary dispute. Since it involved an adjoining property whose owners had died twenty years earlier, leaving no heirs, Stuart suspected the old man made much of it only to enhance his own importance.

“In any case,” Stuart put in as soon as Maître Barbetin paused for breath, “I'll have the money in two weeks. You'll have time to get everything in Order.” He let himself get separated from the notary and settled down to wait for the first glimpse of what he was beginning to think of as home.

Located halfway out on a peninsula that thrust a ridged and wooded finger into the Mediterranean, St. Tropez seemed destined to escape forever the tourist invasion that had overrun the rest of the coast. We'll damn well keep it that way, Stuart thought. The train offered a succession of vistas as it chugged nearer. His first view of the town, as they rounded a bend, made him catch his breath. The sun, dropping toward the horizon, had turned it to gold. Sea and sky flowed around it; it was a golden citadel set in azure, rectangular patterns piled up in a jagged pyramid against a low hill. In the foreground, the slanting bough of a pine tree served as an oddly oriental frame and the town seemed cut off from the mainland, floating between sea and sky, lighted from within by a golden fire. Yes, Stuart thought as he looked at it with a touch of awe, this will do. Unexpectedly, his eyes filled with happy tears.

As the train clattered into the station, Stuart caught sight of the enormous Rolls-Royce, part of his legacy that had been waiting for him in London, and a second later, Helene, standing a little apart from the villagers who had come to watch the train's arrival. He jumped off and ran over to her, tempted to throw his arms around her, but curbing his exuberance to kiss her decorously.