The Saint in the Sun (23 page)

“Why not?” Simon said agreeably, but looked at the fat girl for his cue.

She smiled her indorsement with a readiness which suggested that the invitation could actually have been her idea.

“Thank you,” Simon said, and sat down beside her.

Liqueurs came with the coffee-a Benedictine for her, a Chatelaine Armagnac for Mr Wakerose. Simon decided to join him in the latter.

“It makes an interesting change,” said Mr Wakerose. “And I like to enjoy the libations of the territory, whenever they are reasonably potable. And after all, we are nowhere near Cognac, but much nearer the latitude of Bordeaux.”

“And those black-oak Gascon casks make all the difference from ageing in the limousins,” Simon concurred, tasting appreciatively. “I think it takes a harder and drier brandy to follow the more rugged wines of the Rhône-like this.”

As an exercise in one-upmanship it was perhaps a trifle flashy, but he had the satisfaction of seeing Saville Wakerose blink.

“Are you just on the trail of food and drink?” Rowena asked. “Or is it something more exciting?”

“Just eating my way around,” said the Saint carelessly, having accustomed himself to these gambits as a formality that had to be suffered with good humor. “That can be exciting enough, in places like this.”

“You sound as if you’d evolved a formula for handling silly questions. But I suppose you’ve had to.”

It was Simon’s turn to blink-though he was sufficiently on guard, from instinct and habit, to permit himself no more than a smile. But it was a smile warmed by the surprised recognition of a perceptivity which he had been guilty of failing to expect from a poor little fat rich girl.

“You’ve probably had to do the same, haven’t you?” he said, and it was almost an apology.

“It appears that we all know each other,” Mr Wakerose observed drily. “Although I did forget the ceremonial introductions. But I’m sure Mr Templar made the same subtle inquiries about us that we made about him.”

Simon realized that Wakerose was also a gamesman, and nodded his sporting acknowledgement of the ploy.

“Doesn’t everybody?” he returned blandly. “However, I was telling the truth. The only clues I’m following are in menus. I stopped looking for trouble years ago-because quite enough of it started looking for me.”

Saville Wakerose trimmed his cigar.

“We haven’t only been eating our way around, as you put it, in all those places where you’ve been seeing us,” he said. “We’ve also been seeing all the historic sights. Are you familiar with the history of these parts, Mr Templar?”

Simon joyously spotted the trap from afar.

“Only what I’ve read in the guide-books, like everyone else,” he said, skirting it neatly and leaving the other to follow.

Wakerose just as gracefully sidestepped his own pitfall.

“Rowena loves history, or at least historical novels,” he explained, “and I prefer to read cook books. But I let her drag me around the ancient monuments, and she lets me show her the temples of the table, and it makes an interesting symbiosis.” It was a stand-off, like two duellists stopped by a mutual discovery of respect for the other’s skill, and accepting a tacit truce while deciding how-or whether-to continue.

Simon was perfectly content to leave it that way. He turned to Rowena again with a new friendliness, and said: “Historical novels cover a lot of ground, between deluges-from the Flood to Prohibition. Do you like all of ‘em, or are you hooked on any particular period?”

“It’s not the period so much as the atmosphere,” she said. “When I want to relax and be entertained, I want romance and glamor and a happy ending. I can’t stand this modern obsession with everything sordid and complicated and depressing.”

“But you don’t think life only started to be sordid and depressing less than a hundred years ago?”

“Of course not. I know that in many ways it was much worse. But for some reason, when writers look at the world around them they only seem to see the worst of it, or that’s all they want to talk about. But when they look back, they bring out the best and the happiest things.”

“And that’s all you want to see?”

“Yes, if I’m paying for it. Why spend money to be depressed?”

“I could see your point,” Simon said deliberately, “if you were a poor struggling working girl with indigent parents and a thriftless husband, dreaming of an escape she’ll never have. But if we put the cards on the table, and pretend we know who you are—why do you need that escape?”

Wakerose had suddenly begun to beam like an emaciated Buddha.

“This is prodigious,” he said. “Mr Templar is putting you on, Rowena.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Simon said quickly, but without taking his eyes off her. “It was meant as an honest question.”

“Then you tell me honestly,” she said, “why a rich girl with no worries shouldn’t prefer to dream about knights in shining armor or dashing cavaliers, instead of the kind of men she sees all the time.”

“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 Modem 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 himself 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 crępes du Prieuré, the delicately stuffed rolled pancakes which he remembered from a past visit, and to follow them a gigot ŕ 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.”