Leslie Charteris - The Saint Around the World

“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.

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.