Perfect Freedom (4 page)

“Marvelous,” Helene said, trying to believe in it.

“Of course, next year if we've saved enough by living here, I'd like to build a proper house. How about over here? We could use the other for guests or give it to Robbie. What do you say, my lad?” He turned back to the boy, who was trailing after them. “Would you like to have that house all to yourself?”

“Perhaps when I'm bigger, it'd be nice.”

“We'll have steps coming up from the beach to a terrace,” Stuart went on, scratching at the ground with a stick. “And we'll put the house here.”

Helene laughed suddenly with the peaceful joy that only he could offer her. “Oh, darling, you're absolutely incredible. It's such a dream. I just can't believe it.” Stuart looked about him with surprise, trying to see it as she saw it, but his imagination carried him beyond his modest plans. He saw it as it might be if one were rich and had a taste for that sort of thing—enormous arched openings, perhaps a few classic touches, fountains, a colonnade, a few statues, exotic flowers. But that was not what he was after. He wanted no elaborate screen to stand between them and nature. They would live under the sky, bathe in the sea, nourish themselves from their own labor on the land.

“Just wait and see,” he said confidently.

“And what are we going to call it?” she asked teasingly. “Something clever like ‘Eden'?” When she smiled it was with elegance, lowering her head slightly and looking up with glowing eyes. Her lovely mouth was incapable of being stretched out of shape. They laughed together.

“I don't intend to be turned out. And we'll have no Cains and Abels, either,” he added with a small pang of regret. Not that he was sure Robbie might not have at least a half-brother somewhere. He seized the boy by the scruff of the neck and shook him playfully. “Come on. It's time to get back. Old Boldoni will throw us out if we're late for another meal.”

The inn where they were staying had no name. It was known simply as Boldoni's. For a few dollars a day, Boldoni produced meals of stupefying proportions. Lobsters, mussels, sea urchins, fish stews, slabs of ham, spiced sausages, partridges, quail, roasted baby boar, jugged hare, mushroom pies, dark stews of tomatoes and hearts of artichoke and eggplant, mountains of fruit, and whole cheeses were regular fare and the one thing Boldoni couldn't stand was a finicky appetite.

Of the rooms, nothing could be said except that there were four and they were clean. If they could live this well in a hotel, Stuart figured that they could get by easily for three hundred dollars a month in a house of their own, leaving some leeway within the limits of his income.

He couldn't wait to tell Boldoni about his successful mission to Monte Carlo and share his new sense of proprietorship. It was the innkeeper who had found the Giraudon place for them in the first place. “Well, the money's on the way,” Stuart announced when he found the big shapeless man slumped at a table near the kitchen door, a bottle of
pastis
in front of him. Helene had taken Robbie up to get ready for dinner. Boldoni grunted and reached for a glass and poured a drink for Stuart. “You don't think old Giraudon will change his mind, do you?”

Hair sprouted from Boldoni's nose and mingled with a small moustache. His carelessly shaven beard grew close to his eyes and above them were generous brows. He peered out from a good deal of hair and shrugged. “His mind? He can't change what he hasn't got.”

Stuart laughed. Although Boldoni didn't appear to make friends with his clients or concern himself with what they did when they weren't eating or drinking, Stuart had the feeling that the Frenchman had taken him under his wing, perhaps because he ate a lot. He counted on his encouragement. “You said I could trust his word.”

“He won't sell to anyone else even if they offer twice what you've agreed on. He's refused to sell to any of his neighbors. He's fought with all of them. He'll sell to a foreigner to spite them.”

“Then why doesn't he get it over with?”

“He's mad. He hears voices. Maybe they've told him the “He hasn't come yet. Doesn't Maitre Barbetin know we're waiting?”

“No, I saw him at the train. He just goes on talking about the boundaries.”

“You mustn't pay money if the title isn't clear. When you first spoke about looking for property, I almost didn't mention the Giraudon place. The family used to own the whole peninsula. They've been selling off pieces for generations. There might be complications.”

“Nothing of great importance. There's some old dispute about a small part of it. It doesn't matter to me. I just want the part I know is clear.”

Boldoni shrugged again and refilled their glasses. “I don't know about such things. What does a man need in life? Plenty to eat. Plenty to drink. A sensible woman who keeps out of his way. Why does he want to break his back over a lot of land?”

Stuart smiled. Simple-minded but it corresponded more closely to what he was after than his uncle's ornate view of life. “The land is supposed to provide all that food and drink,” he said.

“Ah, there is that.” Boldoni's eyes twinkled through the hirsute maze. “What are your plans if M. Giraudon is never seen again?”

“Don't even talk about it,” Stuart protested. The memory of his brief dealings with M. Giraudon a month ago was bright and clear in his mind. A tiny old man in a tattered frock coat, a dirty handkerchief knotted around his throat, black trousers stuffed into high boots. His eyes had glittered with maniac gleeful guile but Stuart hadn't had a moment's doubt that he knew exactly what he wanted and was delighted to get it. They had made a quick tour of the property together. They had made a formal call on the notary. The deal had been set in motion. M. Giraudon had disappeared but it had taken Stuart until today to consider the possibility that the transaction might be imperiled. “I've got to get the place,” he said with a new note of urgency. “Until now, I haven't quite been able to believe in it. But it's got to be mine now. I feel it. I'll never find anything else that makes such complete sense. Don't you have any idea how I can find the old fool?”

“I'll inquire but he has no family. No friends, I shouldn't think. What can you expect? He lives on boiled roots and wild berries.”

He said it as if there were nothing to hope for from such a miserable creature, but Stuart's sense of possession was undiminished, and sharpened his enjoyment of the Saturday night festivities a few days later.

On Saturday night Boldoni's turned into a dance hall. Boldoni had a mechanical piano and at one end of his trellised terrace he had laid a patch of cement. Every week, dock-workers, fishermen, sailors—the “rough” element of St. Tropez—spent a share of their earnings here. Boldoni's wife and his boy, Michel, spent the evening carrying up wine from the
cave
while Boldoni kept the piano cranked up. A warning painted on the wall of the inn testified to the explosive nature of these evenings:
Les rixes doivent poursuivre à l'exterieur.
All brawls will be settled outside. There was a shortage of women, for St. Tropez's three prostitutes could only be split so many ways, and while the sailors were used to dancing with each other, this shortage led to violence.

What Boldoni's Saturday evenings lacked in finesse, they made up for in a sort of animal honesty. Stuart saw in them a microcosm of the way he would like the world to be and he had soon started talking to Helene about staying on. Here was life, simple needs being simply satisfied, the conflict of needs being met with the rough respect of man for man and, when the conflict broke social bounds, getting settled simply and with no major bloodshed by the matching of wits and muscle.

He found poetry in those evenings, too. When you stepped out from under Boldoni's vine-covered trellis, the clanking music of the mechanical piano become oddly haunting under the stars and the moon. The moon cast a ghostly sheen on the sea and glistened on the roofs of St. Tropez, and in the shadows you could see couples locked in each other's arms. Sometimes when Boldoni would forget to crank up the piano, the men would break into song, sweet songs of their childhood or bawdy songs of the barracks. It was tenderizing, Stuart thought once to himself wryly, searching for the equivalent of the French word,
attendrissant.
One could say “Wall Street” to oneself, and feel that if such a place existed it was only a momentary aberration of the race. The same was true of Greenwich Village. Stuart tried it with “speakeasy,” too. The effect, sitting under the southern moon in the soft night, was in each case mind-boggling.

Thinking of himself as a resident after his meeting with his uncle, Stuart found that the Saturday dance suddenly became a family event, the gathering of a community to which he belonged. As soon as he saw Odette, he felt the tensions that had been accumulating between them ease. There was no need to feel furtive about their playfully flirtatious friendship. After the last few weeks of provocative glances, the sexual undercurrents would run their course and give them something to laugh about in the future. They might be seeing each other for the rest of their lives. When they had danced together the first time over a month ago, she had unabashedly offered herself to him in the way she folded her body against his but she seemed to grasp his message of restraint and thereafter behaved more decorously. Still, the looks they'd continued to exchange were frequently inflammatory. To-night, Stuart's curiously tranquil yet euphoric conviction that he was home seemed to match her mood. They danced but drew over to the sidelines several times while she talked more about herself than she had earlier. She had been here only since the beginning of the summer, little longer than Stuart, and had come to join a girl friend who was working at the local brothel. She assumed that she would end up in the same establishment but so far had managed to scrape by and was still holding out.

“It's funny,” she said valiantly. “The pay's good and my friend says it's not so bad, but there's something about it I don't like.”

Stuart was delighted with this estimate of prostitution. Odette was a round jolly girl with a pretty dimpled smile who had reminded him from the beginning of Marguerite, his first love. Like Odette, Marguerite had been undisguisedly captivated by him. That had been just before the Great War during one of the rare periods when his mother had been occupying herself with him, though by that time he was quite able to take care of himself.

Stuart had long since forgotten the circumstances of that distant summer in France. How had they happened to go to that lost little village on the Brittany coast? What were they doing in Europe in 1914 within weeks of the outbreak of war? Why had his mother left him there? He remembered her coming and going all summer long.

He was always glad to see her go, for he had met Marguerite Sémillon. She was the daughter of shopkeepers. He had met her when he had gone into her family's establishment for some ink and she had smiled her radiant dimpled smile. She was little more than a child, scrubbed, plump, her pale-golden hair in plaits coiled around her head, but she became his mistress a few nights later on the beach. He was sixteen, a grown-up. He had wanted to marry her and told her so often and she would giggle delightedly and tell him to make love to her some more. Her enthusiasm matched his own. He was careful not to mention her to his mother until, when the summer was well advanced and the war was suddenly practically upon them, Marguerite told him she was pregnant. She was frightfully pleased with herself and they talked more about getting married. The next time his mother arrived on one of her brief visits, he told her all about it.

“But, my poor Stuart,” she said, poking at her brittle-looking tinted hair, “you're even more of a baby than I thought.”

“There's no point making a fuss about it, Mother,” Stuart said| coolly, feeling very adult in the face of paternity. “I've made up my mind.”

“And what are you going to live on, pray? You have a summer affair with a village girl and she tells you she's with child. And you believe her! There's barely been time for her to know. No, no, no, my baby boy, be thankful you have me to look after you.”

“Yes, Mother, except that even if she isn't with child, as you put it, I'm going to marry her.”

“Fortunately you're not of age, so we won't have to argue about it,” Mrs. Cosling said brightly. “Really, Stuart, think of your position.”

“What position?”

“Why, you're a Cosling, my dear. You're my son.” Stuart was tempted to make a rude reply but the occasion seemed too grave for flippancy.

“We'll see,” he said darkly.

“Indeed we shall, my dear, indeed we shall.”

That was at lunchtime. Later in the day, Mrs. Cosling came bustling into their modest hotel to join Stuart for tea.

“Well, we're off,” she announced. “It's all arranged. We're going back to Paris tonight.”

“I'm not. We have another week here.”

“A change of plans,” Mrs. Cosling cried, her eyes everywhere except on Stuart. “Everybody says a war is about to start.”

“But, Mother, you're out of your mind. What about Marguerite? What about—”

“Oh, I have news for you. It's just as I suspected. The whole thing's trumped up. She confessed everything.”

“You mean you've seen her?” Stuart gasped.

“Of course, my dear. Her and the parents. She broke down finally and made a clean breast of it. Naturally, you seemed a wonderful catch to her. And she
is
quite pretty. But really, darling, the parents!”

Stuart rushed from the hotel and ran in search of his love. He found M. Sémillon behind his counter and demanded his daughter. M. Sémillon told him that she had just left to visit some relatives in the country. Stuart was confused by the man's manner.

“Come, monsieur,” he said soothingly. “There has been a youthful folly. It is over. We live and learn.”