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 Auberge, 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 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 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 unsanitary 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.”
“I promise,” Rowena said. “Anything I buy I’ll carry myself.”
“And don’t think I won’t hold you to that,” Simon grinned at her.
“You’ve got a witness,” she smiled back.
Wakerose heaved a sigh of tastefully controlled depth.
“You must both rest your feet at the Jules César,” he said. “It is right in the middle of the main street, and as I recall it they serve a most edible lunch. And Rowena should appreciate a hotel named after such a genuine historical hero instead of some parvenu tycoon as they usually are in America. Come to think of it, I believe there are six or seven different towns called Rome in the United States, and I’ll wager that not one of them has even a motel called the Julius Caesar.”
The conversation continued with light and random variety through dinner.
Characteristically, Wakerose suggested Parma ham and melon for a start, followed by flamed quail and a green salad, to which Simon was quite contented to agree, but for Rowena it was foie gras to begin with, and then chicken in a cream sauce with tarragon, and pommes Dauphine.
“I would propose a glass of Chante Alouette ’59 for all of us to start with,” Wakerose said, studying the wine list, “and Rowena can finish the bottle with her chicken. You and I, Mr Templar, can wash down our cailles with a red Rhône. Do you have any preference? They have a most impressive selection here. Or are you one of those people to whom all Châteauneuf du Pape is the same?”
“The Montredon is very good, I think,” Simon said, without glancing at the list. “Especially the ’55.”
The meal ended with the score about even and all the amenities observed, though by the end of it the Saint thought there was an infinitesimal fraying at the edges of Wakerose’s cultivated smoothness, and thought that he could surmise the reason. It was not that Wakerose would be seriously exasperated to have encountered an adversary who could meet him on level terms in his own specialty of going one better. Something more important seemed to preoccupy him, and the strain was cramping his style.
For dessert, Wakerose chose an almost calorie-free sorbet, but clairvoyantly anticipated Rowena’s yearning for the crêpes flambées which the Petite Auberge, proud of its own recipe, disdains to call Suzette. But this time the Saint decided that he had been dietetically discreet enough all day, and could afford the indulgence of leaving Wake
rose alone in his austerity.
“I’m so glad you can at least pretend to dissipate with me,” Rowena said, glowingly. “It makes me feel just a little less of a freak, even if you’re only doing it to be polite. I love you for it.”
Wakerose looked at her oddly.
“Mr Templar has that wonderful knack of making everybody feel like somebody special,” he commented. “It must have required superhuman will-power for him to remain a bachelor.”
“Maybe I just haven’t been lucky yet,” Simon said, easily. “I’m corny enough to be stuck with the old romantic notion that for every person there’s an ideal mate wandering somewhere in the world, and when they meet, the bells ring and things light up and there’s no argument. The coup de foudre, as the French call it. Some people settle for less, or too soon, and some people never find it, but that doesn’t prove that it can’t happen.”
His gaze shifted once from Wakerose to Rowena and back again, as it might in any normal generality of discussion, but he knew that her eyes never left his face.
“One might call it the ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ syndrome,” Wakerose said sardonically. “Well, each of us to our superstitions. I cling to the one which maintains that brandy or a liqueur at the end of a meal is a digestive, although I know that medical authority contradicts me. Rowena enjoys a Benedictine. What would appeal to you?”
“I shall be completely neutral,” said the Saint, “and have a B-and-B.”
They took their coffee and liqueurs outside on the terrace. Rowena ordered her coffee in a large cup, liégeois, with a dollop of ice cream in it, and used it to swallow a pill from a little jewelled box, but the caffeine was not sufficient to stop her contributions to the conversational rally becoming more and more infrequent and desultory, and Wakerose had still not finished his long cigar when she stifled a yawn and excused herself.
“I’m folding,” she said. “And I want to be bright tomorrow. Will you forgive me?” She stood up and gave her hand to the Saint, and he kissed it with an impudent flourish. “Thank you again for today—and what time does the private tour leave in the morning?”
“Shall we say ten o’clock again?”
“You’re the boss. And tonight I’ll leave my own call at the desk, so you won’t be kept waiting. Goodnight, Saville.”
Wakerose tracked her departure with elegantly lofted eyebrows, and made a fastidious business of savoring another puff of smoke.
“My felicitations,” he said at last. “You appear to have her marvellously intimidated, which is no mean feat. But I would advise you, if I may, not to presume too much on this docility. I’ve seen it before, and I feel I have a duty to warn you. Behind that submissiveness there lurks a tiger which even professional hunters have mistaken for a fat cat.”
There was an inherent laziness in the balmy Provencal evening which allowed the Saint to take a long leisurely pause before any answer was essential, which helped to cushion the abruptness of the transition he had to make.
“There was something I wanted to talk to you about,” he said, “but not quite as publicly as this.” He turned his head from side to side to indicate the other guests at adjacent tables, within potentially embarrassing earshot. “I wonder if you’d like to see my room? I don’t know what yours is like, but I think mine is exceptionally nice, and you might find it worth remembering if you ever come here again.”
Wakerose’s brows repeated their eloquent elevation, but after a pointedly puzzled pause he said, “Certainly, that sounds interesting.”
They went in through the foyer and past the stairs. Simon’s room was on the ground floor, in a wing beyond the inner lounge. He unlocked the door, ushered Wakerose in, and shut the door again behind them.
Wakerose looked methodically around, put his head in the bathroom, and said, “Very nice indeed. But you had something more than comparative accommodations to talk about, didn’t you?”
The Saint opened his suitcase, rummaged in it and took out a pack of cigarettes, and dropped the lid again. He opened the package and then put it down nervously without taking a cigarette.
“I haven’t seen you smoking before,” Wakerose said.
“I’m trying to quit,” Simon explained, and went on suddenly: “I won’t waste your time beating about the bush. I want to marry your step-daughter.”
Wakerose rocked back on his heels, and anything he had previously done with his eyebrows became a mere quiver compared with the way they now arched up into his hair line.
“Indeed? And what does Rowena think about it?”
“I haven’t asked her yet. It may be an old-fashioned formality, but I felt I should tell you first. I thought that a gentleman of the old school like yourself would appreciate that.”
“I do. Oh, I do, most emphatically. But you can’t seriously imagine that I would be so overwhelmed that I should give my permission, let alone my blessing, to a suitor such as yourself?”
“If Rowena isn’t twenty-one yet, she can’t be far from it. So she’d be able to make up her own mind soon enough. I just wanted to be honest about my intentions, and I hoped you’d respect them, and that we could be friends.”
Wakerose widened his eyes again elaborately.
“Honest? Respect?” he echoed. “After you gave your word of honor—”
“Not to steal her jewels,” Simon said. “Her heart isn’t a diamond—I hope. We’ve only spent one day together, but I think she feels a little the same about me as I do about her.”
“I could scarcely help noticing the feeling,” Wakerose said. “But I beg to doubt if its nature is the same. Rowena is a sweet girl, but you can’t seriously expect me to believe that she is attractive in that way to such a man as yourself.”
“When I take her to a good specialist, and she loses about fifty pounds,” Simon said steadily, “I think she’ll be one of the most beautiful young women that anyone ever saw.”
Wakerose laughed hollowly.
“My poor fellow. Now I begin to comprehend your delusion. Obviously she hasn’t told you what’s the matter with her.”
“About that ‘adipochria’?” Simon said steadily. “Yes, she has. And I’m prepared to bet my matrimonial future that there’s no such disease known to medical science, and that the doctor who diagnosed it is nothing but an unscrupulous quack.”
The other’s eyes narrowed.
“That is an extremely dangerous statement, Mr Templar.”
“It’ll be easily proved or disproved when she gets an independent opinion from a first-class reputable clinic,” said the Saint calmly. “And if I’m right, I shall then go on to theorize that it was you who snuck something into her food or her vitamin pills when she tried going on a diet, to produce the symptoms which gave you an excuse to lug her off to the first bogus specialist, whom you’d already suborned to prescribe still more carbohydrates and some pills which are probably tranquillizers or something to slow down her metabolism even more. That you deliberately plotted to make her as unattractive as possible, so as to keep her unmarried and leave her mother’s fortune in your hands until you could siphon off all that you wanted.”
He had confirmation enough to satisfy himself in the long silence that followed, before there was any verbal answer.
Saville Wakerose took one more light pull at his cigar, grimaced slightly, and carefully extinguished it in an ashtray.
“One should never try to smoke the last two-and-a-half inches. Very well,” he said briskly, “how much do you want?”
“For conniving to destroy a human being even more cruelly than if you poisoned her?”
“Come now, my dear fellow, let us not overdo the knightly act. There is no admiring audience. And blackmail is not such a pretty crime, either—that is the technical name for your purpose, isn’t it?”
“Then you admit to something you’d rather I kept quiet about?”
“I admit nothing. I am merely looking for a civilized alternative to a great deal of crude unpleasantness and publicity. Shall we
say a quarter of a million Swiss francs?”
“Don’t you think it’s degrading to start the bidding as low as that?”
“Half a million, then. Paid into any account you care to name, and quite untraceable.”
The Saint shook his head.
“For such a brilliant man, you can be very dense, Saville. All I want is to give Rowena a fair chance for a happy normal life, in spite of her money.”
“Don’t bid your hand too high,” Wakerose said with brittle restraint. “You are assuming that Rowena will immediately believe these fantastic accusations, regardless of who is making them and what obvious motives can be imputed to him. If it should come to what they call on television a showdown between us, although I would go to great lengths to avoid anything so unsavory, I hope she would prefer to believe my version of this tête-à-tête.”
Simon Templar smiled benignly.
He turned back to his suitcase, opened it again, pushed a soiled shirt aside, and extracted a plastic box no bigger than a book. A small metal object dangled from it at the end of a flexible wire, which now seemed to have been hanging outside the suitcase when the lid was closed.
“Have you seen these portable tape recorders?” he asked chattily. “Completely transistorized, battery operated, and frightfully efficient. Of course, their capacity is limited, so I had to use that cigarette routine for an excuse to switch it on when we came in. And the sound quality isn’t hi-fi by musicians’ standards, but voices are unmistakably recognizable. I wonder what version you can give Rowena that’ll cancel out this one?”
“How delightfully droll!” All of Wakerose’s face seemed to have gradually turned as gray as his hair, but it can be stated that he did not flinch. “I should not have been so caustic at the expense of television, but I thought that was the only place where these things actually happened. So what is your price now?”
Simon was neatly coiling the flexible link to the microphone, preparatory to tucking it away in the interior of his gadget, but still leaving it operational for the last syllables that it could absorb.
The Saint in the Sun (The Saint Series) Page 20