by Jane Arbor
"Now ?"
"Well—" Rose's glance went to the newspapers, but Madame Durand was already thrusting these into the satchel across her shoulders. "There has been no earthquake and the President has not been assassinated. The news will wait," she said, and was up the stairs ahead of Rose before the latter could stop her.
She was introduced to Sylvie, accepted a cup of coffee and then settled down to give them the 'this and that' about Maurinaire in full and graphic detail.
She spoke in a patois which Rose did not always understand and which Sylvie could follow scarcely at all—a fact for which Rose was thankful when Madame Durand laughed to scorn her anxious ques-
tion as to the length of Maurinaire's tourist season, how many tourists came and where they stayed when they did.
"Tourists? Foreign visitors? We get none to speak of, mademoiselle !"
Rose felt her cheeks blanch. "No tourists? But surely— ?"
"Oh, a stranger or two here and there," Madame Durand allowed. "Par exemple, those who trouble to turn off the main coast road and to go back to it again when they have seen Maurinaire. Also those who come to visit relatives here. But we are neither a Nice nor a Cannes nor a Monte Carlo. In the winter we are plagued with both the mistral—you would have felt its savagery yesterday, no doubt—and the vent d'Italie—our wind from the east. And for the rest, Monsieur Saint-Guy does not encourage le tourisme, and for our part we are content to remain a working town, making our living from our neighbours' day-to-day needs and almost all of us serving the Saint-Guy estates at some season of the year as our families have done for generations."
`Monsieur Saint-Guy does not encourage tourism! Well, well Canute ordering the sea to roll back?' thought Rose. Aloud she asked, "But I don't understand? I know that English visitors and Germans and Americans are positively flowing to the south of France. So how does Monsieur Saint-Guy manage to keep them out of Maurinaire alone? And why?"
"He owns Maurinaire," she was reminded gently. "He does not build villas for them on our narrow foreshore, nor strip the countryside of valuable cork in order to rent them sites for their caravan camps.
And we are content to have it so, for the cork forests are the Saint-Guy heritage and, as I have told you, our menfolk's livelihood too."
And can you get much more head-in-sand or feudal-minded than that? was Rose's further thought. Then, remembering a phrase in her aunt's first letter —`a few souvenirs for the summer tourists' (just how few ?)—she decided to get the worst confirmed. In a place as small as Maurinaire there must be a limit to its absorption of fancy goods, and if Tante Elise had few tourist customers, what kind of a living could she have made?
Madame Durand answered with a shrug. "Comme ci, comme ca—she did well enough—the birthday greeting card here, the little gift there. But naturally she lived as modestly as the rest of us, and of course it helps us all that Monsieur Saint-Guy regards the rent of our houses as a nothing, a mere bagatelle for which he does not trouble us often nor even at all."
The implications of that left Rose quite nonplussed. You could fight a landlord for your tenancy rights as long as you paid rent. But if he demanded none, where did you stand? What was more, she now understood the reason for the small stock the shop carried, but how were both she and Sylvie to live on `the birthday card here, the little gift there'? Aloud she said,
"Surely that is very unbusinesslike of Monsieur Saint-Guy?"
"On the contrary, mademoiselle—kind."
"All the same, I'd have thought his agent would advise him to collect his rents from everyone able to pay," Rose persisted.
But for that Madame Durand had the mildly snubbing reproof of, "Ah, but it is he who is master, not Georges Cassis, his agent. Besides, when Madame Saint-Guy had control of the estates, she was never greedy for the rents either."
Rose knit her brows. "Madame Saint-Guy?" she queried.
"Monsieur's mother, widowed long before he came of age. His father was killed, fighting with the Free French. There were no other children, and Madame still acts as mistress at the Chateau."
"Then Monsieur Saint-Guy isn't married ?"
"No. Not that you may not hear talk in the town, mademoiselle. Of a possible match between him and Madame Flore Michelet, herself a young widow. But rich— ! Her late husband was a Michelet of Grasse, leaving her sole heiress to his perfumery business there, where she lives, though she keeps a summer villa here too— But there ! If I go on, behind my back you will call me the idle gossip which I never was," said Madame Durand with conscious virtue as she set down her coffee cup and extended a parting hand.
Rose promised to let her know if they needed her, and when they were alone again she set about putting Sylvie into the picture.
But not fully in.. . For Sylvie's hearing she found herself toning down both their landlord's part in discouraging summer visitors from Maurinaire and also his apparent assumption that if he paid the piper by demanding no return from his tenants, he was entitled to call the tune to which they danced. Because she knew that, if Sylvie were sharply critical of him for
this, by some odd quirk of reasoning she, Rose, might spring to his defence. And while they both saw him as their Enemy Number One, could you get much more contrary than that?
She was still not sure this morning what Sylvie really wanted to do, and was glad when Sylvie reminded her they had agreed overnight to forget the whole thing for today. So they went out as they had planned. They bought a picnic lunch of fresh rolls, cheeses, fruit and a bottle of wine and then went down to the sea by an easy path which did not tax Sylvie too much.
The shore was all Rose had hoped to find it—rocky, sheltered, dappled with sun and shadow beneath pine trees which grew almost to the water's edge and here and there even dipped their lower branches in the lacy surf. The air had a clarity which in England always presaged more rain to come, but which here made it possible to believe yesterday's evil-tempered weather had never happened and would not be repeated.
They played ducks and drakes with pebbles on the sea, paddled in rock pools and even spotted the swift dart of a lizard while they were eating their lunch. They lingered until the air cooled and the shadows began to lengthen, then climbed back by the way they had come, to find that outside La Boutique a car was standing.
The driver was a bareheaded, fair young man in a polo-necked sweater. The car radio was thudding out beat music, but it was switched off as they approached and the young man got out of the car.
He held out a hand. "Miss Drake ? Miss Lyon?
I'm Blaise Varon," he said in English; then at their blank look, added in an attractive accent, "None the wiser ? Ah well, who am I to expect Saint-Guy to have forwarded a letter of introduction ? So—I am his cousin, and I've been sent to bring you both up to the Château if you'll be good enough to come. For what purpose? To meet his mother, my aunt. When ? As soon as you were ready, were my orders. But take your time, if you're not. Mine is my own and I have plenty of it, and it won't hurt my little Caesar of a cousin to be kept waiting for once."
Rose looked at Sylvie, who murmured through lips which scarcely moved, "Summoned to the presence !" But it did not escape Rose that she regarded a young man with a crinkly smile who spoke their own tongue as manna to a hungry world. So Rose said,
"Thank you. We'd like to come, if you don't mind waiting while we get rid of this picnic gear. I hope you haven't had to wait too long already?"
Blaise Varon glanced at his watch. "About an hour. But as the local grapevine told me without being asked that you had set out on foot 'with an air of pique-nique,' I judged you'd be back before dusk. So I parked and took a nap."
For the drive to the Château, Rose urged Sylvie into the front seat, taking the rear herself. On the way Sylvie made hay while the sun shone by plying their companion with questions, all of which he answered in easy, idiomatic English.
How far was it to the Château ? Something over a kilometre—rather less than a mile.
Did he li
ve there himself ? For his sins, he did.
Was he in the cork-growing industry too? No. You
might, allowed Blaise, say he lived, slept and ate in the shadow of cork, but otherwise had as little as possible to do with it.
Then what did he do? Nothing. With a puckish smile which melted Sylvie—he had been variously described as a parasite, an idler, a playboy—did Sylvie mind?
And her last question before they were at their journey's end— Where had he learned to speak such wonderful English? In England itself, where, believe it or not, he had, for a couple of years, been one of the world's workers. Running a motel in the Lake District with a friend.
That was all before he brought the car to a halt on a wide crescent of driveway before a stone mansion whose four-square solidity owed little to the accepted idea of a château's narrow windows and crenellated turrets. This house, with its tall, balconied windows, had been designed to greet the sun and, surrounded on three sides by trees, for shelter from the winds of the Mediterranean winter. At one end it was separated by a wide arch from its outbuildings; at the other, beyond another archway, was a smaller house or wing.
As they alighted from the car Blaise Varon introduced it. "The Château Saint-Guy. The main house, this. There—" a hand gesture towards the smaller annexe— "the dower house to which my aunt will retire when Saint-Guy marries. The gardens climb the terraces behind." Then the door was being opened to them by an elderly woman in black and he showed them into a wide hall where, in the embrasure of a window to the right, a tea-table was laid, its lace, its silver, its eggshell-thin china presided over by a lady,
in repose as ramrod-erect as was the high carved back of the antique chair in which she sat.
Madame Saint-Guy. Rose thought, She must have been lovely when she was young. For though, to judge by her silvering hair and the etching of wrinkles at eyes and jaw, she was now in her early sixties, the bone-deep beauty was still there. And how like to her had been Rose's brief impression of her son—here there was the same hollowing below the arch of the cheekbones, the same aquiline cast of the nose, the same arrogance of the turn of the silver head as of the dark ...
She turned her head now as, with an irritable, "T'ch—you'd think electricity cost the earth !" her nephew flicked on lights, causing her to flinch and to shade her eyes with a thin, veined hand. She said in reproof, "We have firelight and it's not yet dusk. But leave them on now," as, without rising, she bowed from her chair to Rose and Sylvie.
Blaise introduced them to her and she greeted them in French. Her good manners ignored Sylvie's slight limp, but when she asked if Sylvie were quite comfortable in the chair she had taken, the girl met the enquiry with an uncomprehending smile, and Madame Saint-Guy turned to Rose.
"Your stepsister does not understand French, mademoiselle?"
"Not very well yet."
"Then we must all speak English. As you will have found, my nephew has a good command of it; I am much more rusty, but I was 'finished' at an English school and have not forgotten it all, and my son has English commercial connections and understands it well enough. Blaise, you must help me," ordered
Madame Saint-Guy. "For it would be very ill-bred of us to leave one of our guests out of our conversation just for the sake of saving ourselves a little trouble."
"No trouble at all. A pleasure," grinned Blaise, wrinkling his nose at Sylvie. As he passed tea and petits-fours to the girls he asked his aunt, "Where is Saint-Guy, by the way?"
He was told, "He expected you sooner with our guests. Since Cassis came up to see him on estate affairs they are probably still together. But he asked that Miss Drake and Miss Lyon should stay until he was free, as I believe he has some business to talk over with Miss Drake." Madame Saint-Guy turned to Rose. "No doubt you think it too 'en grand seigneur'—rather pompous of us to call my son `Saint-Guy' between ourselves. But I should explain that his first name, Guy, was also my husband's, and as he was always 'Guy' to me, so our son became `Saint-Guy' by habit and has remained so."
The explanation was disarming, and Rose said, "I understand, madame," feeling that one of the props of her prejudice against the man had been snatched from under her. As she joined in the general polite small talk of the tea-table a corner of her mind was toying with the name.
Guy Saint-Guy ... Certainly that was top-heavy, over-weighted. But Saint-Guy on its own—yes, she had to admit that it fitted the arrogance of its owner. A name that had roots . . . sure of itself. With as much reluctance as she had bade farewell to her prejudice against it, she realised she liked it; even that her thoughts were already willing to drop the handle of 'Monsieur' before it ...
Madame Saint-Guy apologised for entertaining them in the hall, explaining, "I myself only returned from Paris yesterday, Blaise from staying with a friend in Avignon, and Saint-Guy from Tangier, where he has some cork-plantation interests also. So the house has been closed since shortly after New Year, and you will understand that our small staff has not had much time to open up the rooms yet. You must come again when we are better settled. The work on our own plantations begins at once and we shall not be away from home again for the rest of the year."
She went on to enquire for Madame Bonnard, and it was while Rose was giving her an outline of their own circumstances that Saint-Guy joined them and the moment she had been dreading was upon her.
To her relief, however, he made their meeting easy. She introduced him to Sylvie, and upon his mother's aside that Sylvie spoke very little French, he was quickly at ease with her in fluent English.
His manner with Rose was equally urbane. Not by so much as a lifted eyebrow did he refer to her blush-making gaffe of yesterday. Her imagination had prepared her for at least some oblique humour at her expense, and she was grateful that his only reminder of their first ill-starred encounter was to report that Monsieur Courtes-Jambes, whom he had seen again that morning, wished to apologise for his last evening's sharp practice.
"Mr.—Short Legs? Oh, the little dachshund? Well, tell him, will you, that he is fully forgiven ?" laughed Rose, and when Madame Saint-Guy smiled too, "Ah, he is well known, that one, for trickeries with which
he doesn't deceive us !" it was plain that she had heard that part of the story from her son, but not the embarrassing part.
There was a brief exchange in French between the two of them, Saint-Guy answering his mother's question by telling her that while they had been away, his agent had not wasted his time. He had recruited all the female labour they would need for the scrub-clearing, and though there wasn't yet a full complement of skilled pruners, there were enough to make a start.
To which Madame Saint-Guy said with some complacence, "Bien. You have only to pay them better than our competitors do, to be able to command as many as you need." And when her son did not reply at once, she urged, "Well, that is so, isn't it? Saint-Guy wages must be known for the best in the region, as they've always been—no?"
"Of course," he agreed tersely, then set down his cup and asked her to excuse himself and Rose.
"Just a formality in the matter of mademoiselle's sub-tenancy of La Boutique," he explained. "Cassis advises we should put some minor points in writing, and I'd like her to see his suggested draft in my office."
Rose glanced at Sylvie to see the tiny approving gesture of Sylvie's raised thumb. Then her host's hand was lightly at her elbow, guiding her down the hall.
In his office he offered her a chair and himself sat behind the leather embossed table which served him as a desk. Meeting her glance at its surface, clear of papers of any kind, "A white lie, that, I'm afraid," he said coolly. "For the moment I haven't any draft agreement for you to see."
Rose looked her surprise. "Not? Then why—?"
"Simply in order to get clear of yesterday's cross-purposes in private. I thought you would prefer it that way."
"Of course I do. But though I'm grateful to you for not passing on to Madame Saint-Guy some of the outrageous things I said last night, our cross
-purposes weren't of my making. At any moment, by telling me who you were, you could have stopped me from running on as I did," she reminded him.
"Stopped you? Once you were in full cry on the scent of your imaginary dragon of a landlord ? But surely, while you were working so much prejudice out of your system, it would have been unchivalrous of me to cut the ground from under your feet ?"
Rose tensed against the irony of his tone. "I believe you actually enjoyed letting me make a fool of myself," she said.
"On the contrary, I was so intrigued by your image of this tyrannical Saint-Guy that I needed time to adjust to the idea of myself as such a monster. Rather as one needs to sneak a second look in a distorting mirror for reassurance that one isn't quite as hideous as all that. And I couldn't know then that Marie Durand was going to rob me of the coals of fire I meant to heap upon your aggrieved head."
"Then, before we parted, you did mean to tell me who you were?" asked Rose.
"I don't know. I had to risk that you would ask my name, but if you hadn't, I think I might have left you to nurse your misconceptions of me for a while longer. Because they were misconceptions, you know. I don't grind the faces of the poor, nor obstruct for obstruction's sake. And though I reserve the right
of veto on any tenants of my properties, there was never any question of my refusal to allow you to carry on Madame Bonnard's business in her absence."
Feeling she merited the rebuke of that, Rose said, "I'm sorry. I'm afraid my only excuse is that my stepsister and I had set such store on our plans for the shop that I was ready to find any scapegoat for the damping reality we found it."
"Yes, I see. You feel your aunt misled you as to the prospects La Boutique has to offer ?" Saint-Guy queried.
Rose said, "It was my fault. I'd rosily pictured Maurinaire as a miniature Cannes, with a busy winter season and swarms of souvenir-hunting tourists in the summer. If it were, I argued, a shop like La Boutique could be a little gold-mine. But the range of its stock and Madame Durand have put us right on that."