“Because she should be sophisticated enough to know that they’re the only kind she could live with—or who could live with her. The day after this historical hero swept her off her feet, she’d start trying to housebreak him. She’d decide that she couldn’t stand the battered old tin suit he rescued her in, and take him down to the smithy for a new one, which she would pick for him. The cavalier who spread his coat over a puddle for her to walk on with her dainty feet would find that she expected to repeat the performance at home while he was wearing it.”
“Is that really what you think about women—or just about me, Mr Templar?”
“It couldn’t possibly be personal, Miss Flane, because I never had any reason to think about you before,” said the Saint calmly and pleasantly. “It’s what I think about most modern women, and especially American women. They want a lion as far as the altar, and a lap-dog from there on. They think that chivalry is a great wheeze for getting cigarettes lighted and doors opened and lots of alimony, but they insist that they’re just as good as a man in every field where there’s no advantage in pleading femininity. So being accustomed to having the best of it both ways, they’d go running back to Mother or their lawyers if the fine swaggering male who swept them off their feet had the nerve to think he could go on being the boss after he’d carried them over the bridal threshold. The difference is that some motherless poor girls might figure it was better to put up with that horrible brute of a Prince than go back to being Cinderella, but the rich girl has no such problem.”
Her big brown eyes darkened, but it was not with anger. And he was finding it a little less easy to meet her gaze.
“How do you know what other problems she has?” she retorted. “Or does being called the Robin Hood of Modern Crime make you feel you have to hate all rich people on principle?”
“Not for a moment,” he said. “Some of my best friends are millionaires. I’ve even become fairly rich myself—not by your standards, of course, but enough so that nobody could write a check that’d make me do anything I didn’t want to. Which is all I ever wanted.”
“Well spoken, sir,” murmured Wakerose with delighted irony. “Rowena will be glad to know that at last she’s met one man who isn’t a fortune hunter.”
“Thank you,” said the Saint. “At this stage of my chameleon career, it’s cheering to find one crime I still haven’t been accused of.”
“I didn’t mean to be rude with that Robin Hood crack,” Rowena said. “It was meant as an honest question, like yours.”
“And an understandable one,” Simon said cheerfully. “So if you’re worried about all the jewels you’ve got with you, I give you my word of honor I won’t steal them while you’re here. Where is your next stop?”
Wakerose chuckled again.
“I’m afraid we’re staying here for at least a week, while Rowena explores all the ruins within reasonable driving range, before and after the luncheon stops which I shall select. I have convinced her that this is a much more civilized procedure than trying to combine transit with tourism, unpacking in a different hotel every night and having to pack up again every morning to set forth like gypsies without even a bathroom to call our own. Here we are assured of modern rooms and comfortable beds and clean clothes hung up in our closets, and returning in the evening is a relaxation instead of a scramble. So you will have left long before us.”
“I knew there’d be a catch somewhere. So what are you planning to see tomorrow?”
“Nothing but a very unhistoric local garage, unfortunately. The fuel pump on my car elected to break down this afternoon—luckily, we were only just outside Châteaurenard. I expect to spend tomorrow spurring on the mechanic to get the repair finished by the end of the day and pretending I know exactly what he should be doing, while hoping that he will not detect my ignorance and take advantage of it to manufacture lengthy and expensive complications.”
Simon could not have told anyone what made him do it, except that in a vague but superbly Saintly way it might have seemed too rare an opportunity to pass up, to take the wind out of Saville Wakerose’s too meticulously trimmed sails, but he said at once, “That sounds rather dull for Rowena, I’d be happy to take her sightseeing in my car, while you keep a stern eye on the mechanical shenanigans.”
Rowena Flane stared at him from behind a mask that seemed to have been hastily and incompletely improvised to cover her total startlement.
“Why should you do that?” she asked.
He shrugged, with twinkling sapphires in his gaze.
“I hadn’t any definite plans for tomorrow. And I told you I didn’t have to do anything I didn’t want to.”
“We couldn’t impose on you like that,” Wakerose said. “Rowena has plenty of books to read—”
“It’s no imposition. But if she’d feel very stuffy about being obligated to a stranger, and it would make her feel better, she can buy the gas.”
“And the lunch,” she said.
“Oh, no. You couldn’t afford that. The lunch will be mine.”
Suddenly she laughed.
She had an extra chin and ballooning bosoms to make a billowy travesty of her merriment, yet it had something that lighted up her face, which was in absolute contrast to her stepfather’s polite and faultless smile.
And from that moment the Saint knew that his strange instinct had once again proved wiser than reason, and that he was not wasting his time…
She was half an hour late in the morning, but went far beyond perfunctory apologies when she finally came downstairs.
“I’m sure you’ll think I’m always like this, and I don’t blame you. But Saville promised to call me, and he overslept; I was furious. I think there’s nothing more insulting to people than to make them wait for you. Who was it who said that ‘Punctuality is the politeness of princes’?”
“I like the thought,” Simon said. “Who was it?”
“I don’t know. I wish I did.”
“That makes me feel better already. Now I won’t be quite so much in awe of your historical knowledge.”
“Honestly, it’s not as frightening as Saville tries to make out.” She held up the Michelin volume on Provence, “I just read the guide books, like you.”
“All right,” he said amiably, as he settled beside her at the wheel of his car, and opened a road map. “You name it, and I’ll find it.”
It was a busy morning. In spite of their belated start, they were able to walk the full circuit of the Promenade du Rocher around the Palace of the Popes in Avignon, enjoying its panoramas of the town and countryside and the immortal bridge which still goes only halfway across the Rhône, before taking the hour-long guided tour of the Palace itself, which the Saint found anticlimactically dull, having no temperament for that sort of historical study. He endured the education with good grace, but was glad of the release when he could drive her over the modern highway across the river, a few kilometers out to the less pretentious cousin-town of Villeneuve-les-Avignon, for lunch at the Prieuré.
It was not that she had made the sightseeing any more painful for him than it had to be—in fact, she had displayed an irreverence towards the more pompous exhibits which had encouraged his own iconoclastic sense of humor—but the bones of the past would never be able to compete for his interest with the flesh of the present, even when it was as excessive as Rowena Flane’s.
The shaded garden restaurant was quiet and peaceful, and a Pernod and water with plenty of ice tinkling in the glass was simultaneously refreshing to the eye, the hand, the palate, and the soul.
“Of all civilized blessings,” he remarked, “I think ice would be one of the hardest to give up. And you must admit that it improves even historical epics when you can watch them in an air-conditioned theater, and enjoy the poor extras sweating up the Pyramids while you sit and wish you’d worn a sweater.”
“The Roman emperors had ice,” she said. “They had it brought down from the Alps.”
“So I’ve heard. A slave runner
set out with a two-hundred-pound chunk, and arrived at the palace with an ice cube. I guess it was just as good as a Frigidaire if you were in the right set. But who daydreams about being a slave?”
“Unless she catches the eye of the handsome hero.”
“I know,” said the Saint. “The kind of part your father used to play so well.”
He saw her stiffen, and the careless gaiety drained down from her eyes.
“Was anything wrong with that?” she challenged coldly.
“Nothing,” he said disarmingly. “It was a job, and he did it damned well.”
The head waiter came then, and they ordered the crêpes du Prieuré, the delicately stuffed rolled pancakes which he remembered from a past visit, and to follow them a gigot à la broche aux herbes de Provence which he knew could not fail them, with a bottle of Ste Roseline rosé to counter the warmth of the day.
But after that interruption, she stubbornly refused its opportunity to change the subject.
“I suppose,” she said deliberately, “you were like everyone else. When he stopped playing those parts so well, you joined in calling him a drunken bum.”
Simon made no attempt to evade the showdown.
“Eventually, that’s what he was. It was a shame, when you remember what he did and what he looked like, before the juice wore him down. Unfortunately that was the only period when I knew him.”
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.”
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 Prieuré, 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 anaemia 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 Gard at Uzès, and…”
And once again the conversation was steered back into a safe impersonal channel.
He drove to Uzès 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 s
till 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 Château, 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. Tartarni 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, Saville’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.
The Saint in the Sun (The Saint Series) Page 19