"Don Quijote was another poor silly man," Simon said. "And so am I, maybe. Lord, have mercy on such as we — as the song says. But thank the Lord, a few people do… Why did you feel an unwanted child?" he asked abruptly.
She took about a mile to answer, so that he began to think she was resenting the question; but she was only brooding around it.
"I suppose because I never seemed to have any parents like the other girls. I had a series of stepfathers who sometimes pretended to be interested in me, but that was only to impress Mother. They weren't really fatherly types, and they soon stopped when they found that she couldn't have cared less. Motherhood was something she had to try once, like everything else, so she tried it; but after a few years it was just another bore. So I was pushed on to governesses and tutors and all kinds of boarding schools — anything to keep me out of her hair. And yet she must have loved me, in a funny way, or else she still had a strong sense of duty."
"Why — how did she show it?"
"Well, she did leave me everything in her will. I don't get control of it until I get married or until I'm thirty — until then, Seville's my guardian and trustee — but in the end it all comes to me."
It went through the Saint's head like the breaking of a string on some supernal harp, the reverberation which is vulgarly rendered as "boinng", but amplified to the volume of a cathedral bell as it would sound in the belfry.
He didn't look at her. He couldn't.
But she had spoken in perfect innocence. His ears told him that.
His hands were light on the wheel, and the car had not swerved. The moment of understanding had only been vertiginous in his mind, exactly as its subsonic boom had sounded in no other ears.
"You get on better with Saville than the other stepfathers, I take it."
"Well, I was a lot older when he came along, so he didn't have to pretend to like children. As a matter of fact, he loathes them. But he's been very good to me."
"I'm sure there's a moral," Simon said trivially. "We're always reading about misunderstood children, but you don't hear much about misunderstood parents. And yet all parents were children themselves once. I wonder why they forget how to communicate when they change places."
"I must try to remember, if I'm ever a mother."
It was only another half-hour's drive back to the Petite Auberge, and he was glad it was no longer.
He had a little thinking to do alone, and there would not be much time for it.
As they turned in at the entrance and headed up the long driveway through the orchards, she said: "It's been a wonderful day. For me. And you must have been terribly bored."
"On the contrary, I wouldn't have missed it for anything," he said truthfully.
"I might have believed you if you'd let me pay for lunch. But that crack of yours, that I couldn't afford it — it still sticks in my mind. You meant something snide, didn't you?"
He brought the car to a gentle stop in front of the inn.
"I meant that if I let you buy my lunch you might have thought you could buy more than that, and then I'd 've had to prove how expensive I can be to people I don't like. And I'd begun to like you."
"Then do you still like me enough to join us for dinner, if Saville pays?"
He smiled.
"Consider me seduced."
She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, and got out before he could open the door.
The Saint shaved and showered and changed unhurriedly, and sauntered out on to the terrace to find Saville Wakerose sipping a dry martini.
"Hi there," he said breezily. "How's the ailing automobile?"
"Immobile," Wakerose said lugubriously. "May I offer you one of these? They really make them quite potably here."
"Thank you." Simon sat down. "What's the trouble — did the mechanic outsmart you?"
"The mountebank took the fuel pump apart and found something broken which he couldn't repair. We went all over the province looking for something to replace it with, but being an American car nobody had anything that would fit. Finally I had to telephone the dealers in Paris and have them put a new pump on the train, which won't get to Avignon till tomorrow morning. And after he picks it up, the charlatan at the garage will probably take at least half the day to install it."
"Aren't you being a bit hard on him?" Simon argued. "You'd be liable to run into the same thing if you took a French car into a small-town American garage. Just like they say you should drink the wine of the country, I believe in driving the car of the country you're in, or at least of the continent."
"When they make air-conditioned cars in Europe," Wakerose said earnestly, "I shall have to consider one."
Simon had forgotten during the course of the day that Wakerose was a lifeman who never stopped playing, but he accepted the loss of a round with great good nature and without any undignified scramble to retrieve it. He could afford now to bide his time.
Rowena gave him the first opening, as he knew she must, when she came down and joined them.
"I suppose you've heard the news," she said. "Isn't it aggravating?"
"Not to me," Simon said cheerily.
"I know, you can take your sightseeing or leave it alone. But tomorrow is market day in Arles, and I've read that it's one of the biggest and best in all the South, and it's heartbreaking to miss it—"
"Can't you hire a car?"
"I've been trying to make inquiries," Wakerose said. "But this isn't exactly Hertz territory. And I can't send Rowena off with some local taxi-driver who doesn't speak English, in an insanitary rattletrap—"
"Which might break down anywhere, like the best American limousine," Simon said sympathetically. "I see your problem. But if Rowena could stand another day in my non-air-conditioned Common-Market jalopy, I'd be glad to offer an encore."
It was extraordinary how beautiful her face was, when you looked at it centrally and the dim light made the outer margins indefinite, especially when that luminous warmth rose in her eyes.
"It's too much!" she said. "I know how you hate that sort of thing, and yet you know I'll just have to take you up on it. How can you be such an angel?"
"It comes naturally to a saint," he drawled. "And I get my kick out of seeing the kick you get out of everything. As I told you last night, I'm not on any timetable, and another day makes no difference to me."
"A rare and remarkable attitude in these days," Wakerose said, "when anyone who claims to be respectable is supposed to have a Purpose In Life, no matter how idiotic. I envy you your freedom from that bourgeois problem. But not your marketing excursion tomorrow. Rowena will quite certainly transmute you from a cavalier into a beast of burden, laden with every gewgaw and encumbrance that attracts her fancy. You need not try to look chivalrously skeptical, Mr. Templar. I have been with her to the Flea Market in Paris."
"I promise," Rowena said. "Anything I buy I'll carry myself."
"And don't think I won't hold you to that," Simon grinned at her.
"You've got a witness," she smiled back.
Wakerose heaved a sigh of tastefully controlled depth.
"You must both rest your feet at the Jules César," he said. "It is right in the middle of the main street, and as I recall it they serve a most edible lunch. And Rowena should appreciate a hotel named after such a genuine historical hero instead of some parvenu tycoon as they usually are in America. Come to think of it, I believe there are six or seven different towns called Rome in the United States, and I'll wager that not one of them has even a motel called the Julius Caesar."
The conversation continued with light and random variety through dinner.
Characteristically, Wakerose suggested Parma ham and melon for a start, followed by flamed quail and a green salad, to which Simon was quite contented to agree; but for Rowena it was foie gras to begin with, and then chicken in a cream sauce with tarragon, and pommes Dauphine.