“How far do we have to go?” McGeorge asked.
“It’s only half a mile from the port to the village center, and my place is just a little further up.”
Mr Oddington’s stringy legs maintained a remarkably youthful pace, and his bare feet did not even seem to notice the stony roughness of the slope on which McGeorge frequently stumbled in his elegant shoes. But when McGeorge fell behind, Nadine Zeult moved in front of him, looking from that angle as if she were wearing nothing whatever except a piece of string. The Saint saw McGeorge shudder and turn on a panicky burst of speed that took him safely ahead of the sight, and Simon found himself walking beside the girl.
“How long have you been here?” he asked, to make conversation.
“Since May, this year. Is it your first time here?”
“Yes.”
“I came first in August last year, only because a boy I was with wanted to see it, and I have been here ever since. Perhaps you will be the same.”
“It’s a little early to think about that,” Simon murmured.
“I think you will enjoy it.” She looked at McGeorge’s back, to which the shirt was already clinging sweatily. “But I do not think Mr Oddington’s nephew will. Do you know him well?”
“As a matter of fact, I hardly know him at all.”
“They are not a bit alike. I can tell. Already I’m wondering why Mr Oddington is so fond of him,” she said with astonishing frankness.
Before Simon could decide on a suitable answer, Mr Oddington announced, “Here we are. This is Héliopolis!”
A stranger might not have recognized it at once as the village center if he had not been told. Since leaving the shadow of the restaurant that overlooked the harbor, they had passed signs indicating other restaurants and hotels, and a shop, on other equally rough roads that branched off to their left to follow the contours of the hill and which doubtless served the villas which had been more visible from the sea. Now there was only a very slightly increased concentration of commercial activity: a few yards above another restaurant and bar which they had just passed there was a grocery store on the right, and opposite that a stall festooned with an indeterminate variety of merchandise ranging from pottery to postcards, while facing them was a hotel rather poetically named the Pomme d’Adam, with another shop a little above it on the hill to the right, and another hotel farther along in the same direction. The fact that all these enterprises were loosely grouped around a fairly large bare open space where three roads met still fell rather short of making it a kind of sun city’s Times Square.
Mr Oddington led the way into the grocery store, where he and Nadine chatted and chaffered with sociable lengthiness over the purchase of a disproportionately small quantity of victuals. The proprietor and his wife, Simon noticed, were completely and conventionally clad, but entirely uninterested in the condition of their customers. When the goods had been collected in a string bag, and the total added up on the margin of an old newspaper, Mr Oddington opened a horizontal zipper near the upper margin of his cache-sexe. George McGeorge, who now had a rosy flush from no other cause than the exertion of the recent climb, at this point reversed his system of color changes and turned pale. Mr Oddington, unaware of having provoked any consternation, extracted from the unzippered pocket a tightly folded wad of paper money, counted out enough to cover his bill, replaced the remainder together with his change, and calmly zipped the pocket up again.
“After all, George,” Simon observed reasonably, “even in this Garden of Eden they use money, and where else could he have a pocket?”
Mr Oddington picked up the string bag and herded his party across the street. He waved an expansive hand towards a string of fragments of fancifully printed cotton hanging over the proscenium of the stall, which at first glance would have been taken for a row of ornamental pennants.
“Now,” he said, with a twinkle that was faintly suggestive of a challenge, “you can choose your minimums.”
The young woman behind the counter leaned forward to spread out a wider choice of patterns. She was herself modeling one of her own skeletal creations — apparently the working and trading personnel of the village were freely divided between those who took the maximum advantage of their legal liberty and those who preferred to ignore it. McGeorge grabbed blindly for the nearest piece of cloth, and the girl pointed out to him, giggling, that he had picked out a female model. With the air of a Greek philosopher accepting a cup of hemlock, he took the first alternative she offered and turned rapidly away.
“You pay,” he said to the Saint. ‘I’ll settle up with you later.”
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.