"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."
Her brown eyes darkened and tightened.
"You knew him?"
"So very slightly — and at the wrong time. Just before he committed suicide. I wish I'd known him before. He must have been quite a guy." {See the story Hollywood in The Saint goes west.}
She studied him suspiciously for several seconds, but he faced the probe just as frankly and unwaveringly as the preceding challenge.
"I'm glad you said that," she told him finally. "That's how I try to think of him. And I think you meant it."
"I'm glad you believe that," he answered. "Now I won't have spoiled your appetite. That would have been a crime, with what we're looking forward to. That's another department where I'd prefer to keep my history in the surroundings: food. When these walls around us were new, the spécialité de la maison was probably something like boiled hair shirts. I'd love to see the face of a Michelin inspector being served the product of an ancient French kitchen. Did you know that it was about a century and a half after the Popes took their dyspepsia back from Avignon to Rome before the French learned the elements of the fancy cooking they're now so proud of?"
"Yes, I know. And it was another Italian who brought it — Catherine de' Medici, when she married Henri the Second and became queen of France. Saville taught me that—"
The conversation slanted off into diverting but safely impersonal byways which brought them smoothly through their two main courses and surprised the Saint with more discoveries of her range of knowledge and breadth of interests.
Of course, he remembered, she had had the advantage of the best tutors, conventional schools, and finishing schools that money could buy. But she was a living advertisement for the system. Sometimes she was so fluent and original that he found himself fascinated, listening as he might have listened to some prefabricated sex-pot with a press-agent's contrived and memorized line of dialectic, completely forgetting how different she looked from anything like that.
On the other hand, having convinced herself of his sincerity, his attention seemed to draw her out to an extent that he would hardly have expected even when he had promised himself the attempt the night before. And as her defensiveness disappeared, it seemed to make room for a personal warmth towards him to grow in the same ratio, as if in gratitude for his help in letting down her guard.
A discreet interval after they had disposed of the last of the pink and succulent lamb, the head waiter was at the table again with his final temptations. Rowena unhesitatingly and ecstatically went for the Charlotte Prieure, while the Saint was happy to settle for a fresh peach.
"I'm sure you think I'm awful," she said, "finishing all my potatoes and then topping them with this rich sweet goo. You're like Saville — you can enjoy all the tastiest things, and hold back on the fattening ones, and keep a figure like a saint. The hungry kind, I mean."
By this time they were on the verge of being old friends.
"I guess we're the worrying types," he said. "Or the vain ones. A longish while ago, I took a good look at some of the characters who had the same tastes that I have, and decided that I could beat the game. I wanted to live like them without looking like them. I figured that the solution might be to have your cake and not eat all of it. Anyway, it seemed like an idea."
"So you could always be young and beautiful, like Orlando in his prime."
"I should be so lucky. But there are worse things to try for."
"Such as being a fat slob like me."
"Not a slob," he said carefully. "But why don't you do something about being fat?"
"Because I can't," she said. "I know you think it's just because I eat too much. That's how it started, of course. When I was a child I felt unwanted, so I took to desserts and candy in the same way that people become alcoholics or drug addicts. The psychologists have a word for it… Then, in my teens, because I was so fat, I didn't get any dates, and the other girls always made fun of me. They were jealous of all the other things I had, and were just looking for something to torment me with. So I just stuffed myself with more desserts and candy, to show I didn't care. And so I ended up with adipochria."
"With who?"
"It means a need for fat. Just before my mother died, I'd finally started trying to go on a diet, and I'd lost some weight, but I began to feel awful. Tired all the time, and feeling sick after meals, and getting headaches constantly. So Saville took me to a specialist, and that's what he said it was. I'd conditioned my metabolism to so much rich food and sweets, all my life, that something glandular had atrophied and now I can't get along without them."
The Saint stared at her.
"And the remedy is to keep eating more of the same?"
"It isn't a remedy — it's a necessity. If I cut them out, it's like a normal person being starved. In a month or two I'd die of anemia and malnutrition."
"And that's all he could tell you? To stay fat and get fatter?"
"Just about. Well, he gave me a lot of pills, which he hopes will change my condition eventually. But he absolutely forbade me to try any more dieting until I feel a positive loathing for any sweet taste. He said that would be the first symptom that my system was starting to become normal."
Simon shook his head incredulously.
"That's the damnedest disease I ever heard of."
"Isn't it?" she said resignedly. "That's another reason why I escape into those historical romances. They're what I'll have to be satisfied with until some hero comes along who likes fat girls."
But there was a soft moistness in her eyes that he did not want to look at, and he concentrated on peeling a second peach.
"Why not?" he said. "The Vogue model type would never have got a tumble from any of those old-time swashbucklers, to go by the contemporary prints and paintings. They didn't need skinny little waifs to make them feel robust. And yet the interesting thing is that when it came to architecture they put up buildings that were big but graceful, and full of ornament, too much of it sometimes, but always delicate. No huge lumpish monstrosities like some of the modern jobs I've seen. Talking of which, what ancient memorials are we heading for this afternoon?"
"I wanted to see the Pont du Card at Uzès, and. "
And once again the conversation was steered back into a safe impersonal channel.
He drove to Uzès and parked down beside the river, and they walked to survey the magnificent Roman aqueduct from both levels and across the span. Then it was only another fifteen miles to Nîmes, where they parked in front of the extraordinarily preserved Arenas, which could still have served as a movie set if they had backgrounded chariots instead of Citroëns, and walked on up the Boulevard Victor Hugo to visit the somewhat disappointing Maison Carrée, and then on to the Jardin de la Fontaine for the view from the Tour Magne, which — But this is not the script of a travelog. Let us leave it that they walked a lot and saw a lot which has no direct bearing on this story, and that the Saint was not truly sorry when they came to Tarascon on the way home and found it was too late to visit the Chateau, though it was picturesque enough from the outside.
"I'll have to make it another day," Rowena said. "I couldn't go away without seeing it. Tartarin de Tarascon was the first French classic I had to read in school, and I can still remember that it made me cry, I was so sorry for the poor silly man."