The Saint in the Sun (24 page)

Her brown eyes darkened and tightened.

“You knew him?”

“So very slightly-and at the wrong time. Just before he committed suicide. I wish I’d known him before. He must have been quite a guy.” [See the story Hollywood in THE SAINT GOES WEST.]
She studied him suspiciously for several seconds, but he faced the probe just as frankly and unwaveringly as the preceding challenge.

“I’m glad you said that,” she told him finally. “That’s how I try to think of him. And I think you meant it.”

“I’m glad you believe that,” he answered. “Now I won’t have spoiled your appetite. That would have been a crime, with what we’re looking forward to. That’s another department where I’d prefer to keep my history in the surroundings: food. When these walls around us were new, the spécialité de la maison was probably something like boiled hair shirts. I’d love to see the face of a Michelin inspector being served the product of an ancient French kitchen. Did you know that it was about a century and a half after the Popes took their dyspepsia back from Avignon to Rome before the French learned the elements of the fancy cooking they’re now so proud of?”

“Yes, I know. And it was another Italian who brought it—Catherine de’ Medici, when she married Henri the Second and became queen of France. Saville taught me that-“

The conversation slanted off into diverting but safely impersonal byways which brought them smoothly through their two main courses and surprised the Saint with more discoveries of her range of knowledge and breadth of interests.

Of course, he remembered, she had had the advantage of the best tutors, conventional schools, and finishing schools that money could buy. But she was a living advertisement for the system. Sometimes she was so fluent and original that he found himself fascinated, listening as he might have listened to some prefabricated sex-pot with a press-agent’s contrived and memorized line of dialectic, completely forgetting how different she looked from anything like that.

On the other hand, having convinced herself of his sincerity, his attention seemed to draw her out to an extent that he would hardly have expected even when he had promised himself the attempt the night before. And as her defensiveness disappeared, it seemed to make room for a personal warmth towards him to grow in the same ratio, as if in gratitude for his help in letting down her guard.

A discreet interval after they had disposed of the last of the pink and succulent lamb, the head waiter was at the table again with his final temptations. Rowena unhesitatingly and ecstatically went for the Charlotte Prieure, while the Saint was happy to settle for a fresh peach.

“I’m sure you think I’m awful,” she said, “finishing all my potatoes and then topping them with this rich sweet goo. You’re like Saville-you can enjoy all the tastiest things, and hold back on the fattening ones, and keep a figure like a saint. The hungry kind, I mean.”

By this time they were on the verge of being old friends.

“I guess we’re the worrying types,” he said. “Or the vain ones. A longish while ago, I took a good look at some of the characters who had the same tastes that I have, and decided that I could beat the game. I wanted to live like them without looking like them. I figured that the solution might be to have your cake and not eat all of it. Anyway, it seemed like an idea.”

“So you could always be young and beautiful, like Orlando in his prime.”

“I should be so lucky. But there are worse things to try for.”

“Such as being a fat slob like me.”

“Not a slob,” he said carefully. “But why don’t you do something about being fat?”

“Because I can’t,” she said. “I know you think it’s just because I eat too much. That’s how it started, of course. When I was a child I felt unwanted, so I took to desserts and candy in the same way that people become alcoholics or drug addicts. The psychologists have a word for it… Then, in my teens, because I was so fat, I didn’t get any dates, and the other girls always made fun of me. They were jealous of all the other things I had, and were just looking for something to torment me with. So I just stuffed myself with more desserts and candy, to show I didn’t care. And so I ended up with adipochria.”

‘With who?”

“It means a need for fat. Just before my mother died, I’d finally started trying to go on a diet, and I’d lost some weight, but I began to feel awful. Tired all the time, and feeling sick after meals, and getting headaches constantly. So Saville took me to a specialist, and that’s what he said it was. I’d conditioned my metabolism to so much rich food and sweets, all my life, that something glandular had atrophied and now I can’t get along without them.”

The Saint stared at her.

“And the remedy is to keep eating more of the same?”

“It isn’t a remedy-it’s a necessity. If I cut them out, it’s like a normal person being starved. In a month or two I’d die of anemia and malnutrition.”

“And that’s all he could tell you? To stay fat and get fatter?”

“Just about. Well, he gave me a lot of pills, which he hopes will change my condition eventually. But he absolutely forbade me to try any more dieting until I feel a positive loathing for any sweet taste. He said that would be the first symptom that my system was starting to become normal.”

Simon shook his head incredulously.

“That’s the damnedest disease I ever heard of.”

“Isn’t it?” she said resignedly. “That’s another reason why I escape into those historical romances. They’re what I’ll have to be satisfied with until some hero comes along who likes fat girls.”

But there was a soft moistness in her eyes that he did not want to look at, and he concentrated on peeling a second peach.

“Why not?” he said. “The Vogue model type would never have got a tumble from any of those old-time swashbucklers, to go by the contemporary prints and paintings. They didn’t need skinny little waifs to make them feel robust. And yet the interesting thing is that when it came to architecture they put up buildings that were big but graceful, and full of ornament, too much of it sometimes, but always delicate. No huge lumpish monstrosities like some of the modern jobs I’ve seen. Talking of which, what ancient memorials are we heading for this afternoon?”

“I wanted to see the Pont du Card at Uzčs, and …”

And once again the conversation was steered back into a safe impersonal channel.

He drove to Uzčs and parked down beside the river, and they walked to survey the magnificent Roman aqueduct from both levels and across the span. Then it was only another fifteen miles to Nîmes, where they parked in front of the extraordinarily preserved Arenas, which could still have served as a movie set if they had backgrounded chariots instead of Citroëns, and walked on up the Boulevard Victor Hugo to visit the somewhat disappointing Maison Carrée, and then on to the Jardin de la Fontaine for the view from the Tour Magne, which- But this is not the script of a travelog. Let us leave it that they walked a lot and saw a lot which has no direct bearing on this story, and that the Saint was not truly sorry when they came to Tarascon on the way home and found it was too late to visit the Chateau, though it was picturesque enough from the outside.

“I’ll have to make it another day,” Rowena said. “I couldn’t go away without seeing it. Tartarin de Tarascon was the first French classic I had to read in school, and I can still remember that it made me cry, I was so sorry for the poor silly man.”

“Don Quijote was another poor silly man,” Simon said. “And so am I, maybe. Lord, have mercy on such as we-as the song says. But thank the Lord, a few people do … Why did you feel an unwanted child?” he asked abruptly.

She took about a mile to answer, so that he began to think she was resenting the question; but she was only brooding around it.

“I suppose because I never seemed to have any parents like the other girls. I had a series of stepfathers who sometimes pretended to be interested in me, but that was only to impress Mother. They weren’t really fatherly types, and they soon stopped when they found that she couldn’t have cared less. Motherhood was something she had to try once, like everything else, so she tried it; but after a few years it was just another bore. So I was pushed on to governesses and tutors and all kinds of boarding schools-anything to keep me out of her hair. And yet she must have loved me, in a funny way, or else she still had a strong sense of duty.”

“Why-how did she show it?”

“Well, she did leave me everything in her will. I don’t get control of it until I get married or until I’m thirty-until then, Seville’s my guardian and trustee-but in the end it all comes to me.”

It went through the Saint’s head like the breaking of a string on some supernal harp, the reverberation which is vulgarly rendered as “boinng”, but amplified to the volume of a cathedral bell as it would sound in the belfry.

He didn’t look at her. He couldn’t.

But she had spoken in perfect innocence. His ears told him that.

His hands were light on the wheel, and the car had not swerved. The moment of understanding had only been vertiginous in his mind, exactly as its subsonic boom had sounded in no other ears.

“You get on better with Saville than the other stepfathers, I take it.”

“Well, I was a lot older when he came along, so he didn’t have to pretend to like children. As a matter of fact, he loathes them. But he’s been very good to me.”

“I’m sure there’s a moral,” Simon said trivially. “We’re always reading about misunderstood children, but you don’t hear much about misunderstood parents. And yet all parents were children themselves once. I wonder why they forget how to communicate when they change places.”

“I must try to remember, if I’m ever a mother.”

It was only another half-hour’s drive back to the Petite Au-berge, and he was glad it was no longer.

He had a little thinking to do alone, and there would not be much time for it.

As they turned in at the entrance and headed up the long driveway through the orchards, she said: “It’s been a wonderful day. For me. And you must have been terribly bored.”

“On the contrary, I wouldn’t have missed it for anything,” he said truthfully.

“I might have believed you if you’d let me pay for lunch. But that crack of yours, that I couldn’t afford it-it still sticks in my mind. You meant something snide, didn’t you?”

He brought the car to a gentle stop in front of the inn.

“I meant that if I let you buy my lunch you might have thought you could buy more than that, and then I’d ‘ve had to prove how expensive I can be to people I don’t like. And I’d begun to like you.”

“Then do you still like me enough to join us for dinner, if Saville pays?”

He smiled.

“Consider me seduced.”

She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, and got out before he could open the door.

The Saint shaved and showered and changed unhurriedly, and sauntered out on to the terrace to find Saville Wakerose sipping a dry martini.

“Hi there,” he said breezily. “How’s the ailing automobile?”

“Immobile,” Wakerose said lugubriously. “May I offer you one of these? They really make them quite potably here.”

“Thank you.” Simon sat down. “What’s the trouble-did the mechanic outsmart you?”

“The mountebank took the fuel pump apart and found something broken which he couldn’t repair. We went all over the province looking for something to replace it with, but being an American car nobody had anything that would fit. Finally I had to telephone the dealers in Paris and have them put a new pump on the train, which won’t get to Avignon till tomorrow morning. And after he picks it up, the charlatan at the garage will probably take at least half the day to install it.”

“Aren’t you being a bit hard on him?” Simon argued. “You’d be liable to run into the same thing if you took a French car into a small-town American garage. Just like they say you should drink the wine of the country, I believe in driving the car of the country you’re in, or at least of the continent.”

“When they make air-conditioned cars in Europe,” Wakerose said earnestly, “I shall have to consider one.”

Simon had forgotten during the course of the day that Wakerose was a lifeman who never stopped playing, but he accepted the loss of a round with great good nature and without any undignified scramble to retrieve it. He could afford now to bide his time.

Rowena gave him the first opening, as he knew she must, when she came down and joined them.

“I suppose you’ve heard the news,” she said. “Isn’t it aggravating?”

“Not to me,” Simon said cheerily.

“I know, you can take your sightseeing or leave it alone. But tomorrow is market day in Arles, and I’ve read that it’s one of the biggest and best in all the South, and it’s heartbreaking to miss it—”

“Can’t you hire a car?”

“I’ve been trying to make inquiries,” Wakerose said. “But this isn’t exactly Hertz territory. And I can’t send Rowena off with some local taxi-driver who doesn’t speak English, in an insanitary rattletrap-“

“Which might break down anywhere, like the best American limousine,” Simon said sympathetically. “I see your problem. But if Rowena could stand another day in my non-air-conditioned Common-Market jalopy, I’d be glad to offer an encore.”

It was extraordinary how beautiful her face was, when you looked at it centrally and the dim light made the outer margins indefinite, especially when that luminous warmth rose in her eyes.

“It’s too much!” she said. “I know how you hate that sort of thing, and yet you know I’ll just have to take you up on it. How can you be such an angel?”

“It comes naturally to a saint,” he drawled. “And I get my kick out of seeing the kick you get out of everything. As I told you last night, I’m not on any timetable, and another day makes no difference to me.”

“A rare and remarkable attitude in these days,” Wakerose said, “when anyone who claims to be respectable is supposed to have a Purpose In Life, no matter how idiotic. I envy you your freedom from that bourgeois problem. But not your marketing excursion tomorrow. Rowena will quite certainly transmute you from a cavalier into a beast of burden, laden with every gewgaw and encumbrance that attracts her fancy. You need not try to look chivalrously skeptical, Mr Templar. I have been with her to the Flea Market in Paris.”