"Do you know, Betty," he said, "that you are out tonight with not just a square, but a four-dimensional cube? I still haven't seen a Twist session in full swing. Would you chaperone me in there for just long enough to see what it's all about?"
"That's the last thing I'd have expected you to suggest," she said respectfully. "Let's try it."
It was still early enough for the place to be packed only halfway to suffocation, but they were able to find one stool to share at the bar while they waited for a table which Simon felt cynically prepared to decline if and when it was finally offered. Meanwhile he absorbed the scene which he had come in to see, endeavoring in what he felt must have been a rectangular way to fathom the motivations of the customers who wriggled and twitched to a simple monotonous beat like a horde of frenetic dervishes freshly sprinkled with itching powder.
"Well?" she teased at last. "Don't you want to try it?"
"Thank you," sighed the Saint. "But I'm oldfashioned. Dancing went out for me when it stopped being an excuse to snuggle a girl up close and whisper wicked suggestions in her ear with a helpful background of seductive music. These arm's-length athletics — the jitterbug, the rumba, and now this — seem like an awful waste of energy and opportunity."
"You sound as if you had a one-track mind," she said; but she smiled.
"Doesn't everyone, any more? In my young days, they did. "
Suddenly she was no longer listening. She was staring into the quivering mob with a fixity that seemed scarcely justified by any of their individual contortions. Her hand fell on his arm.
"Look — over there! The elderly man in the Madras jacket, with the platinum babe in the red sweater."
Simon found it easier to track the assigned target through the babe, who stood out not only because of the color of her sweater but by reason of what filled it. Even at his most chivalrous, he could not take issue with the "Babe" description, which fitted not only the artificial whiteness of the hair but the blend of hardness and looseness in the face. If she was not the kind of company available to any lonesome visitor for a phone call and a fee, she had certainly made a democratic effort to look like it.
Her partner, who was identifiable mainly because she looked and shook in his direction more than in any other, was a man of entirely average size with rimless glasses and insufficient strands of gray hair meticulously plastered over the top of his head in a laborious but absurdly vain attempt to disguise the fact that there was no supporting growth underneath them. His other features somewhat resembled those of a puritanical rabbit, with a reservation that at that moment it was apparently playing truant. Simon guessed him to be no older than 50, and reflected sadly that the adjective "elderly" was as descriptive of the person who used it as of the person it was applied to.
"Anybody you know?" he asked.
"It's Mr. Prend — the undertaker who handled my uncle's funeral!"
"Not Aloysius?"
"Yes. Did you ever hear of such a name?"
He decided that it was hardly worth giving her a discourse on St Aloysius Gonzaga of Castiglione, who died of the plague in Rome in 1591 at the tender age of 23, and was designated the patron saint of young people; but Mr. Aloysius Prend was certainly doing credit to his name in the youthful if untrained exuberance with which he quivered and cavorted in uninhibited emulation of his tarty companion.
"After all," Simon reasoned at length, "I suppose even undertakers have to relax sometimes. He wouldn't dare be seen looking anything but solemn and mournful around Lake Worth, so he has to go out of town to let off steam. And it's a million to one that none of his prospective customers would catch him in a place like this."
"And that babe he's with!"
"I expect he has to take what he can get. It wouldn't be too easy for him to date a nice home-town gal who knew what business he was in. Be charitable, and try not to let him see you. It 'd only ruin his evening."
"It seems almost indecent," she persisted. "You'd think he was celebrating something. And his place was burgled only the other night. Who on earth would do a thing like that?"
"Most likely some juvenile delinquents on a dare," said the Saint. "And he's celebrating because they didn't drink up his expensive embalming fluid. Now could you stand it if we moved on to some joint with a floor show more suitable for my hardening arteries?"
He was able to get her out before Mr. Prend seemed to have noticed her; but his flippant dismissal of the subject of Mr. Prend's incongruous relaxation was activated only by a reluctance to argue about it with an interlocutor who was not likely to contribute any more to his peculiar sensitivities.
But the truth was that he had become intensely interested in Mr. Aloysius Prend.
The Saint had an apperception of oddities of behavior and circumstance like the reaction of a musician to a false note. It was nothing that could be taught or acquired, or explained to anyone whose inner hearing was not so finely tuned. Nor was he governed by the sterile assumption that anything unusual or unconventional must have some reprehensible connection; far from it. But he conceded that all crime is a deviation from the current norm, and it was his instinct for the kind of abnormality most likely to be linked with skullduggery in the process of cooking-up or concealment that had led him into more strange situations perhaps than any other single factor in the complex equation of his life.
During the next few hours, he tried to fill in a picture of the uncle whose mortal disposition had accidentally enabled Betty Winchester to discover the incongruous other side of Mr. Prend.
Ernest Cardman, he learned by assembling and coordinating a great variety of disorganized and personalized information which he coaxed from her as innocuously as possible, as the elder brother of two sisters who had selfishly flipped off and got married before he felt qualified for such a plunge, had been left holding the bag (if we may be excused the expression in this context) and had been forced to become the comforter, counsellor, and companion of their widowed mother, who had lingered through manifold ailments until she was well over 80. By that time, Uncle Ernest had either become habituated to his way of life or had decided that he liked it, for he took no advantage of his belated liberation. He went on living in the same modest beach house on South Ocean Boulevard down towards Lake Worth, although the land it stood on could by then have been sold to a hotel or motel for five times the value of the building, with no friends and no apparent ambition to make any, poring endlessly over the charts and analyses supplied by a dozen or more stock market advisory services to which he subscribed, which were his only recreation and his only reading except for the world news which had to be studied for its potential reflection in the markets.
He punctiliously invited Betty and her cousin, the son of his other sister, to visit him for a week each year during the season, but made no effort to give them entertainment, and seemed to derive nothing from their company except the relief they volunteered him from his household chores. He still did his own shopping, cooking, and housekeeping, as he had done it for his mother, who in her later years became so temperamental and exacting that no paid servant would stay with her. That was, until a couple of years ago, when his own health betrayed him and he had been obliged to hire a former hospital nurse who was willing to double as housekeeper to take care of him.
"She's quite a jewel — not that she doesn't know it," was the description of Mrs. Velma Yanstead. "The motherly sort, even though she's a good deal younger than Uncle Ernest. But I suppose that was just what he wanted."