Simon did not mind being stuck with the trivial cost, as he expected to be, with the almost certain compensation of seeing McGeorge forced to wear the article. He selected for himself a scrap of cotton print with an interesting motif of bees and flowers and the built-in zippered pocket whose utility he had seen demonstrated, and resolved that for McGeorge’s benefit he would wear it as if he had been doing it all his life.
Mr Oddington glanced around to reassemble his flock, and Simon discovered that Nadine was no longer with them. He saw her in a moment, across the street, talking to a young man of about her own age, who kept looking across at them. The young man had rather long well-oiled black hair and the build of a Greek statue; from the way he posed, and the rather spoiled set of his handsome face, one got an instant impression that he had familiarized himself with all his own natural assets in a great many mirrors.
“Nadine,” Mr Oddington called, somewhat peremptorily.
The girl smiled and waved back.
“Go on—I’ll catch up with you.”
Mr Oddington frowned, but led the way up the hill to the left. They climbed for a few more minutes, then turned down a still narrower side road.
“If you’re so fond of swimming, Uncle Waldo,” McGeorge said, with a slight edge in his voice, “why don’t you live near the water?”
“Much better view up here,” Mr Oddington said cheerfully. “And it’s wonderful exercise walking back and forth.”
He suddenly ducked down a winding path through a thicket of oleanders, and in another moment they were at the back door of a house. He opened it without recourse to a key, and they entered a little vestibule with an open kitchen on one side. Mr Oddington stopped there to put down his string bag of provisions and transfer some of them to the refrigerator.
“I see you don’t object to some modern conveniences,” Simon remarked.
“Why should I?” said Mr Oddington. “Science offers good things and bad things impartially. The test of intelligence is to take the good things and not feel that that obligates you to accept everything. Some people here have their own electric plants, but I get along nicely with bottled gas. It does nearly all the same things, except running a water pump. There’s a rain-water storage tank under the house: it fills up in the winter, and it’s big enough to last me all summer.” He pointed to a large lever on an exposed pipe in one corner. “We use that to fill a gravity cistern under the roof. It’s better than an electric pump. It never gets out of order, and it’s good for the biceps.”
He took them through an archway on the other side of the vestibule into the living room. It had a bare tile floor, bookshelves lining two walls, a desk with a typewriter, and a few cane chairs. Opposite the archway, big French windows stood open on to a terrace beyond which there was indeed a fabulous view over the sapphire sea, with a corner of Port-Cros at one side and the coast of the mainland in the distance.
Mr Oddington steered them off to the right into a short passageway, where he exhibited a tiled bathroom on one side and two small bedrooms on the other, both of them with French windows on to the same terrace that ran along the whole front of the villa. The bedrooms contained a Spartan minimum of furniture, but they did have beds.
“Don’t you sleep on the floor any longer, Uncle?” McGeorge inquired.
“Nadine pointed out to me that even birds build nests and line them with feathers,” Mr Oddington said. “I have been giving her argument a fair trial, and so far I have felt no ill effects.”
They went on out to the terrace and gazed at the panorama.
“How did you meet this girl?” McGeorge asked.
“Well,” Mr Oddington said, almost as if their relationship had been reversed, “I hate having to clean house, and also I needed someone to help me with the typing on my book—”
“What book?”
“I am writing a book about everything I have discovered which will enable anyone to live to be hale and hearty at a hundred. Of course, I won’t be able to publish it with real authoritativeness until I’m a hundred myself, but that gives me another thirty-six years to get all my facts and principles systematized.”
“I see. But how did you find Nadine?”
“I stuck an advertisement on the bulletin board at the Mairie, and she happened to see it. She was only over for the day, but the place had got her—it does that to some people, you know, like love at first sight, when they realize that there’s something here that they’ve always unconsciously wanted. But to stay here for more than a short holiday, she had to be able to earn a living. It was Fate, of course—a perfect example of it. She came to see me, and I liked her at once.”
“But you told me yourself that it was more than a business arrangement.”
“Later on, yes. She’s a very attractive girl, as you’ve seen for yourself by this time, and the idea that a man of over sixty is practically decrepit has only been built up by burlesque comedians on the strength of the type of specimens they see in their audience. I think we shall have a very happy marriage.” The Saint, who had been leaning on the balustrade and trying to look as though he were politely ignoring the conversation, turned in time to see McGeorge flinch as if he had taken a tap in the solar plexus.
“You haven’t done this already?”
“No, but we were only waiting till you could be here. After all, you’re the only family I have.”
“It’s as serious as that, is it?”
“You know my views about motherhood for women. I certainly mustn’t deprive Nadine of such a vital function. And to complete my studies of every phase of the natural life, I should have the experience of being a father.”
“All right,” McGeorge said, in a slightly strangled voice. “But you used to say that marriage was a barbaric formula—I can quote you—designed originally to perpetuate the servitude of women, and developed by modern courts to achieve the enslavement of man.”
“My dear boy, that is still true,” replied Mr Oddington blandly. “However, since we still live in a semi-barbaric society, we sometimes have to bow to its tabus. Nadine has reminded me that a child of unmarried parents, I refuse to call it illegitimate, is subject to an endless series of petty embarrassments which it would only be selfish to inflict on it when they can be averted merely by submitting to a few minutes of mumbo-jumbo and signing a piece of paper.”
Whether McGeorge would have found a ready answer to that remained unsettled, for he still seemed to be recovering from a state of shock when Nadine Zeult herself came out from the living room to join them.
“You are all so serious,” she said, taking them in with her impish amber eyes. “That is what always happens when men are left alone.”
“You were the one who left us,” Mr Oddington said, his mouth tightening irritably as at an unfortunately revived recollection.
The girl laughed, and went over to cuddle his arm and kiss him on the cheek.
“You are pretending to be jealous, Waldo,” she said blithely, “and it makes you adorable. Now I am here, what do you want us to do?”
Mr Oddington graciously allowed himself to recover his good humor while portentously studying a sundial set in a stone table permanently built into the terrace.
“We’ve used up so much of the morning that it’s hardly worth going to the beach now,” he said. “Let’s have an early lunch and go for a swim afterwards.”
“I will bring you a drink while I fix it.”
The girl left, and came back in a few minutes with a bottle of St Raphael and three glasses with ice in them. She disappeared again, humming light-heartedly, and Mr Oddington uncorked the bottle.
“How about an apéritif?”
“You’re full of surprises, Uncle Waldo,” said McGeorge, who had recovered some of his self-possession at last. “I didn’t think you approved of that sort of thing.”
“I have not changed my principles, but I am capable of expanding them,” Mr Oddington said severely. “It took me a long time to realize that wine and such
beverages were strictly vegetarian products and therefore did not conflict with my views on diet, I admit it, and I am not ashamed to have discarded a baseless prejudice. But I still do not drink the blood of animals or decoctions of dead bodies.”
Simon tentatively eased a package of Pall Malls from his pocket.
“Would you mind,” he ventured, “if I smoked a strictly vegetable cigarette?”
Mr Oddington chuckled with great good humor.
“Nobody maintains that all vegetables are good. Some are even poisonous—such as tobacco. I’m quite sure you know that. But the first law of this island is tolerance, and if you wish to gamble with your own health I can be sorry but I have no right to object.”
The Saint offered his pack to McGeorge, who took one defiantly, and lighted one for himself with an unfamiliar feeling that Mr Oddington had somehow come out disconcertingly ahead on points.
Lunch was a much better meal than he had expected. There was a minestrone so thick with vegetables and so heavily crusted with grated cheese that it was almost as satisfying as a meat stew, and a pilaff of rice and peanuts and mushrooms with a smothering of fried onions that was surprisingly tasty. With a bottle of Ste Roseline rosé to wash it down, and a fresh peach to finish it off, it was not too inadequate for a hot day.
“I shall now take a siesta for exactly half an hour,” announced Mr Oddington, when they had all helped with the dishes. “One day some pompous nincompoop of a physician will get himself a great reputation by officially prescribing what the Mediterranean people have always done by instinct.”
Simon found himself in the other bedroom, taking off his shirt, while George McGeorge sat and watched him morosely.
“Well, Templar, what do you think?”
“Me?” said the Saint. “I love your Uncle Waldo. He’s probably one of the few completely happy people in this complicated world. He’s found his Bali H’ai.”
“And the girl to go with it,” McGeorge said. “I heard her telling you on the way up about how she came here the first time with a boyfriend. And you saw the gigolo type she was talking to in the village, and the way Uncle Waldo felt about it. How much would you like to bet that that isn’t the same boyfriend? And that they haven’t had everything figured out all along?”
Simon pursed his lips.
“Yes, I had thought about that. I can see why it would bother you.”
“Don’t think I’m just going to sit and let it happen,” McGeorge said.
His habitually weary and rather querulous voice had such a cold-blooded intensity that the Saint realized for the first time, with an odd thrill of indefinable apprehension, how seriously he might have mis-estimated that effete and stuffy young man.
4
The walk to the beach at Rioufrède was mostly downhill, across the central intersection of Héliopolis and down a road that started at right angles to the one they had trudged up from the port, so that Mr Oddington’s energetic pace was easy even for McGeorge’s unconditioned legs to keep up with. Mr Oddington, whose siesta seemed to give him the fire to start an afternoon as if it were a whole new day, drew their attention to the rusty barbed wire on one side of the road and an occasional faded sign posted behind it, and held forth trenchantly about the recent invasion by the French Navy and its attempt to take over the whole island as a base for guided missile experiments, and the stubborn struggle of the residents to retain their foothold.
“Bureaucracy’s the same everywhere. As if they didn’t have half the Sahara desert doing no good to anyone, this was the only place they could pick on to play with their stupid toys. They couldn’t set up shop in a place like Timbuktu, which nobody would have missed. It was more fun to destroy a place that stood for just a little more freedom from regulations than anywhere else. But they got a surprise when they found that they’d stirred up a hornets’ nest!”
From the pugnacious thrust of jaw that went with that, Simon added to his observations the awareness that Mr Oddington was capable of fully as much stubborn aggressiveness as his nephew had unexpectedly revealed, and the new-born conviction grew on him that the inevitable conflict might not be pretty at all. But it was not easy to pursue that thought with the sun baking scent from the pines and the mellow air more consciously experienced by his skin than he would have thought possible. He was wearing his “minimum” with all the aplomb he could muster, as he had promised himself, but the white stencil left by his regular swimming trunks was something that no mere resolve could obliterate.
“Don’t feel like a freak,” Mr Oddington said sturdily. “Every one of us has been through the same stage. But did you ever have a more comfortable walk?”
“It’s certainly the perfect costume for a hot day,” Simon admitted. “But what’s it like here in the winter?”
“Hardly anyone stays, but I like it. We have heat in the house, and it never gets so cold outside that you can’t keep warm if you walk fast enough.”
Presently they turned off the road, down a well-worn footpath to the right. The path started mildly, grew rapidly steeper, and finally became precipitous. When it was little more than a goat-track slanting down the side of a cliff, the stunted bushes thinned out to unmask the first sudden view of the cove it was leading down into. It was a deep little bay enclosed between two steep slopes of rock, hardly big enough to contain a football field, and reaching back to a broad crescent of pebbly beach. There were half a dozen heads bobbing in the water and three or four dozen people lying or sitting or walking about on the beach; and the actuality of their freedom from inhibition, which could be basically established at the first glance, was a momentary jolt even to the Saint. He thought it was merciful for McGeorge that the condition of the path made it extremely hazardous for the eyes to wander for most of the remainder of the descent.
But that took no longer than a few flights of stairs, and then they were down on the beach themselves, with the astonishing display of epidermis all around them. Apparently this cove was a little too far for the ambition of the majority of merely curious sightseers, who probably felt that they had worked hard enough for a sensation by the time they had struggled up to the village center, or else the route was not too well publicized, for the Saint fascinatedly counted exactly one scattered handful, two men and three women, who were even technically over-dressed for a game of Adam and Eve.
“Well, now we can make ourselves comfortable,” said Mr Oddington.
And, untying the string, he stepped gratefully out of his irksome habiliment.
“Aren’t you coming for a swim, George?” he demanded. “You look dopey. It’ll wake you up.”
“It still isn’t quite a full hour since we finished lunch,” said McGeorge, clutching even at that swiftly vanishing straw.
“Nonsense,” scoffed Mr Oddington. “An old superstition. Look at seals. They swim while they’re eating.”
McGeorge somehow managed to refrain from mentioning that he was not a seal.
“I…I’m not so used to the sun as the rest of you,” he pleaded. “I don’t think I should have too much all at once. Besides”—he grabbed at another inspiration—“we’ve still got lots of things to talk about.”
“We’ll have the whole evening for that, my boy.”
“The last ferry leaves at five, doesn’t it?”
“But you weren’t thinking of going back today, were you?”
“Obviously. You know we didn’t bring any luggage.”
“I thought you might have a toothbrush in your pocket. You’d know I could lend you a razor. You knew that we didn’t wear clothes here. What on earth would you put in your luggage?” asked Mr Oddington, in devastating perplexity.
The Saint had been gazing around, inventorying details of the general scene with unabashed interest and studiously keeping aloof from the argument. At that moment his eyes came to rest on the statuesque figure of a man standing on a ledge of rock about thirty feet up the trail down which they had recently scrambled, staring steadily down at them. Simon
recognized him at once as the self-satisfied Adonis whom Nadine had been talking to in the village. It seemed unnecessarily imaginative to assume that the man had followed them there, but the Saint automatically re-scanned the walk through his mind like a film and confirmed that he had not had any occasion to look back. However, it would probably have been equally easy for anyone who knew Mr Oddington’s habits to foresee where he would go in the afternoon.
“I feel like talking now, Uncle Waldo,” McGeorge said stubbornly.
He put on the shirt which he had brought with him and sat down firmly, with his knees drawn up, huddling the shirt around him like a small tent.
Mr Oddington glanced wistfully at the new spear-gun which he had brought along with him. His jaw tightened, and then, surprisingly, he also sat down.
“All right, George, if that’s how you feel. We’ll talk a bit.”
Simon could not tell who else had seen the man on the rocks above.
Nadine Zeult touched his arm.
“Will you come for a swim with me?” she suggested tactfully.
A little triangle of cloth fluttered down onto the beach as she ran into the water.
The Saint ran in after her. Much as he would have given to find an excuse to stay and listen, there was nothing else he could do about it. He stumbled into a plunging dive and swam violently for about twenty yards without lifting his head, until the effort had neutralized the first cool contrast of the water. Then he turned over and pushed his hair back, treading water, and found the girl not far away.
“It’s good, isn’t it?” she said.
“Very good.” He smiled.
He had an idea she was referring to something more than just the ordinary goodness of a temperate sea, but his reply was safe and would have been the same anyway. Somehow it was always a new surprise, because the opportunities were so rare, to re-discover the fantastic difference between swimming in the raw and swimming in anything else at all. Perhaps it was not only the unfamiliarity of total physical liberation, but a throwback of memory to old swimming holes and boyhood truancies and golden days of innocence that could never come again.
The Saint Around the World (The Saint Series) Page 11
