“I’m not a religious fellow, my boy, but I’d hesitate before I provoked the Almighty. And now that I’ve performed my avuncular duty, let’s concentrate on lunch. We’re having sole.”

  Waiters began to fuss over them with cloths and cutlery, they chatted, they ate their carefully selected meal. Sir Bennett was still lingering over some admirable brandy when it was time for Stuart to catch the train back. The two men rose for farewells.

  “I’ll expect to see you when I come in January,” Sir Bennett said. “Perhaps I’ll be invited to—what’s the name of your place?”

  “St. Tropez.”

  “Never heard of it. Beyond St. Raphael, you say?”

  “A bit, but the trains are terrible. You’d better hire a car.”

  “Odd part of the coast to choose. House all ready to move into, you say?”

  Stuart grinned. “I forgot to tell you—there isn’t any house worth mentioning. That’s one of the things I like best about it. We’ll just build what we need as we go along. I’ve seen what happens to people who get stuck with houses. I hope I never have a house I’d mind leaving. Freedom—that’s what I’m after. What more could I buy with Aunt Ada’s money?”

  Sir Bennett waved his hand dismissively. “You must be quite mad. I say, I do hope you can afford to buy some clothes before I see you next.”

  Stuart lolled on the hard bench of the empty third-class car as the train carried him back past Nice and Juan-les-Pins and Cannes, and thought of the immediate future. The die was cast, if only the owner, mad M. Giraudon, would come back to sign the papers. Regardless of M. Giraudon, he was committed now to the challenge he had chosen. Talking about it with Ben had made him see it a little more clearly. He and Helene would be embarking on a life that neither of them, let alone little Robbie, knew anything about, but he had yet to feel a twinge of apprehension. In New York, the word that had been bandied about when he talked about his vague plans was “escapism.” People said, “You’re trying to turn your back on your times”—but was he? He hadn’t turned his back on the twenties and had the memory of a thousand hangovers to prove it. If he hadn’t known rich people, the twenties would have turned their back on him. What were “his times”? He was alive and the world was all around him. Why not use his unearned freedom to take what he wanted from it?

  He was fairly sure that what he wanted made sense for Helene too, although he couldn’t quite see her drawing water from a well or tending chickens. They had come to each other slowly—the best way, he eventually came to believe. He had been inclined in his youth to fall in love blindly and extravagantly, ready, with any encouragement, to indulge in all the fireworks of a grand passion. When it happened with Helene, she reacted like a sleepwalker, shuttered and withdrawn. He learned that she was terrified of passion; she felt responsible for her husband because she had been unable to match what proved to be his insane love for her.

  Slowly, he had learned balance, he had learned to curb the demands he was accustomed to make of love. He discovered that he could breathe freely in the space Helene created around them. She was passionate in bed but otherwise they treated each other like loving friends, with delicate consideration and reticence. Her husband’s death was the removal of a nuisance; by then, they were too firmly established together for it to amount to more. Stuart couldn’t imagine anything changing between them now, no matter what they did.

  At St. Raphael, he changed to a tiny, antique train for the second leg of the journey to his remote peninsula. Slowly the seats filled up. He thought of himself just a few months ago, riding the subway with hordes of hard-faced men studying the disasters recounted in the financial columns. How good to be away from it all! How good to strip off the harness of city life, the ties and garters and heavy shoes, and let in the sun and air. How good to be with people who couldn’t even imagine the world he had left behind. He was grateful for the discomforts of the journey. If his land were easy to get at, it wouldn’t be going for a song.

  The last months in New York had been more distressing than he had realized until he was well out of it. He had been appalled by the fear-dazed eyes of his friends, intelligent cultivated people stricken by the loss not of anything real, but of an illusion of guaranteed ever-increasing material prosperity. Few of them lost their jobs. None of them was hungry. Watching his own unexpected and superfluous fortune dwindle to a shadow of its former self threatened to infect him with the same virus of terror. He clung to sanity by reminding himself that his self-made father’s dedication to accumulating possessions had never inspired him with envy or respect. Better to find something worthwhile to do with the money that was left than to be sickened by greed for more. Olives and grapes growing on his own land. That was real. He hoped he would never again live in a world where money for its own sake could get such a grip on people’s minds. A narrow escape. He would buy freedom.

  A muffled rumbling filled the air. The whole train started to shake. The passengers fell silent and sat tensely, looking straight ahead of them. Suddenly the engine uttered a piercing scream. There was an enormous hissing and the train lurched forward. Stuart closed his eyes as the first cloud of smoke enveloped the passengers.

  An hour or so later they reached the peninsula and the crossroads where Stuart changed to still another little train to make the final run out to St. Tropez. He was covered with grit but he had a pleasant memory of pretty little stations covered with bougainvillea and surrounded by zinnias and daisies, of rocky coves overhung by wind-twisted pines, of sea and sky and the explosive good humor of his fellow passengers. None of them had heard of General Motors Preferred.

  Crossing from one train to the other in a grove of venerable parasol pines, he caught sight of Maître Barbetin, the notary handling the property transaction, and he hurried forward.

  “Any news of M. Giraudon?” he asked as he had every time he had encountered the old gentleman in the last three weeks. The notary was a little bearded old man tightly buttoned into a rusty frock coat. He wore no tie but on his head was a hard squarish black hat with a hard curly brim.

  “None, my dear sir. None at all.” His chin whiskers bobbed up and down as he began a rambling account of his progress in straightening out the boundary dispute. Since it involved an adjoining property whose owners had died twenty years earlier, leaving no heirs, Stuart suspected the old man made much of it only to enhance his own importance.

  “In any case,” Stuart put in as soon as Maître Barbetin paused for breath, “I’ll have the money in two weeks. You’ll have time to get everything in Order.” He let himself get separated from the notary and settled down to wait for the first glimpse of what he was beginning to think of as home.

  Located halfway out on a peninsula that thrust a ridged and wooded finger into the Mediterranean, St. Tropez seemed destined to escape forever the tourist invasion that had overrun the rest of the coast. We’ll damn well keep it that way, Stuart thought. The train offered a succession of vistas as it chugged nearer. His first view of the town, as they rounded a bend, made him catch his breath. The sun, dropping toward the horizon, had turned it to gold. Sea and sky flowed around it; it was a golden citadel set in azure, rectangular patterns piled up in a jagged pyramid against a low hill. In the foreground, the slanting bough of a pine tree served as an oddly oriental frame and the town seemed cut off from the mainland, floating between sea and sky, lighted from within by a golden fire. Yes, Stuart thought as he looked at it with a touch of awe, this will do. Unexpectedly, his eyes filled with happy tears.

  As the train clattered into the station, Stuart caught sight of the enormous Rolls-Royce, part of his legacy that had been waiting for him in London, and a second later, Helene, standing a little apart from the villagers who had come to watch the train’s arrival. He jumped off and ran over to her, tempted to throw his arms around her, but curbing his exuberance to kiss her decorously.

  As they looked at each other, the pleasure they felt in each other’s company spread and enclosed them. Helene thought as usual of how distinguished he looked in the midst of this noisy jostling crowd. Even in his rumpled casual clothes, he had great style. He saw the admiration in her eyes and took her hand.

  She was grandly beautiful. The fashion of the day didn’t suit her. She suggested trailing Edwardian elegance, ropes of pearls, great plumed hats to add shadowed mystery to her enormous dark eyes. She had recently had her hair chopped off and Stuart still regretted it. He thought again of the primitive life he was planning for them and he smiled at the incongruous picture of Helene as a farm woman. He looked around and saw that Robbie wasn’t with her.

  “Where’s our young man?” he asked, taking her arm and turning her toward the car. As he did so he caught sight of a dark, cheerfully pretty girl across the heads of an intervening group and for a moment their eyes met. Stuart lifted his hand in a perfunctory gesture that bore no relationship to the glance they had exchanged.

  “Who did you wave to?” Helene asked.

  “Oh, uh, Maître Barbetin,” Stuart said as the notary passed ahead of them. Helene saw his scurrying figure and then, turning slightly, she, too, caught sight of the girl. Following the direction of her eyes, Stuart said, “Oh, there’s Odette,” feeling like an idiot. Did he think she was blind?

  “Don’t let’s stop,” Helene said. “I left Robbie with that little monster at the inn.”

  Stuart shrugged. It was true that Michel, Boldoni’s little boy, was not very clean and used foul language, but it was good for Robbie to grow up with all kinds, especially since his difficult birth had made it impossible for him to have any brothers or sisters.

  He helped Helene into the car and climbed in beside her and set the enormous thing into motion, all the while telling her about Uncle Ben and Greta Garbo and his brief conversation with the notary.

  “We’ve done everything we can do,” he said as he edged the car around the corner into the narrow main street. “You do think we’ll get it, don’t you?”

  “If you want anything as much as you want this, you usually get it,” Helene said with a little laugh.

  “As much as we want it,” he corrected.

  “Of course,” she said, settling back against the cushions. Of course. Yet all the changes that had taken place in the last few months had left her rather bewildered. The inheritance, Stuart’s decision to give up his job, their haphazard arrival in St. Tropez, the weird little man who was ready to practically give away a vast estate, their uncertainty now that he had disappeared—it was a lot to assimilate after the familiar routine of existence in New York. There, their numerous interests, their wide circle of friends combined to give her the illusion of being a normally wedded woman.

  It was rather thrilling to be reminded that she wasn’t, that they were adventurers, that they were once more embarked on the unknown. Only Robbie provided the drag of domesticity. Already, she had begun to realize that the child who fitted so unobtrusively into their New York life could easily become a source of resentment. As on other occasions, she could have gone with Stuart today if it hadn’t been for Robbie. If they were going to isolate themselves, she sometimes wished it could be an isolation shared only with Stuart even though she had always been frightened of becoming obsessively dependent on him. The memory of her husband’s mad eyes would always haunt her. Carried to its highest pitch, passion brushed insanity.

  The view of the port opening out ahead of her looked as remote from the world she knew as anything she could imagine. It was enclosed on two sides by buildings set well back from the wide quais. They were plastered with a local ochre clay that, in the rays of the setting sun, turned to gold, and they leaned against each other exhaustedly, some of them rising as high as five stories. Painted shutters hung crookedly on their faces, pale blue, pink, orange, faded by the wind and the sea air. Halfway along one quai a sheer wall rose mightily and stopped in a jagged clutter of ruined masonry, the remains of a fortified château. Next to it was a dingy bar, the Café de la Mer. At the end were additional fortifications and a squat medieval tower.

  In the port, a dozen or so wide clumsy-looking tartanes, the coastal traders, creaked lazily on the still water, their painted hulls glowing deep red, black, dark green in the late sun. Two of them were being loaded with bundles of cork. An ox drew a heavy cart laboriously along the quai. Otherwise the port was quiet. St. Tropez in the autumn of 1930.

  Stuart brought the big Rolls to a halt near the Café de la Mer. “Let’s get Robbie and go out to the place,” he said. “I want some measurements. I wouldn’t mind a swim, either. I’m filthy.”

  “That ghastly train,” Helene murmured sympathetically.

  “It’s sort of fun,” he said.

  They penetrated the village on foot through a high, thick, arched portal and mounted a narrow stepped street, across which high pointed arches were flung at irregular intervals. Little groups of old women, bundles of black rags, sat in the street in straight-backed chairs, gossiping, some of them working over long dark coils of fishnet. Children went careening by. Men were scarce. Helene and Stuart nodded occasionally to people they passed. Because they had been living at the inn, they had had little opportunity to know many of the tradespeople but those they’d met had struck them with the agreeable eccentricity of their business methods.

  “I don’t know the price. I will have to look it up. You can pay next time.” Who could bother to look up a price for the sake of a few centimes?

  After a steep climb, they came out at the top of the village in front of Boldoni’s inn, which commanded a view of the whole bay and of St. Tropez’s orange-tiled roofs.

  Robbie must have been watching for them because he came hurtling out of the inn to greet them. He collided with Stuart’s legs and hugged him. “You’re back, Daddy,” he shouted. He looked up at Stuart adoringly. “Did you buy our house? What’s an emmerdeur?”

  “I’ll explain if you really want to know. It’s not a pretty word.”

  “Is it something you can’t say in front of ladies?” Robbie asked hopefully. He was big for his nine years and both Helene and Stuart had contributed to his features. His mouth was his father’s, with the slight fullness of the upper lip; his eyes were enormous like Helene’s and his hair was dark like hers.

  “Most definitely not for ladies,” Stuart said with a wink at the handsome little boy. “Want to come with us? We’re going for a ride.”

  “Sure. There’s nothing to do around here. Michel is an awful boy.” He moved in close against his mother and they started down through the town again. Stuart experienced a twinge of jealousy as he watched the child put his arm around Helene’s waist and he promptly mocked himself. Look at me. Pay attention to me. It was downright sordid. He stayed a little behind them on purpose to see if Robbie would turn to include him. When he didn’t, he told himself that it served him right for thinking of such a silly little test.

  “What is an emmerdeur, Daddy?” Robbie asked again as they were driving out of town. He looked tiny bobbing about in the extensive reaches of the back seat.

  “Well, you know what merde means, don’t you?” Stuart asked, stealing a glance at Helene. She didn’t always approve of his frankness with the boy.

  “Yes,” Robbie admitted with a trace of hesitation, the enormity of the word beginning to dawn on him. By the time Stuart had completed his explanation, the child had subsided into self-conscious silence. He wanted to be the good boy they expected him to be, but it wasn’t always easy to get it right. They praised him for his sweet nature, his nice instincts, his good manners and truthfulness, and he hoped they were right about these things but he wondered sometimes. They of course were perfect, like God, but he couldn’t help noticing that they often took opposite sides, without actually putting it into words. His father enjoyed talking to him about all the interesting naughty things that kept catching his attention; his mother obviously felt that a good boy shouldn’t find them interesting.’ He did his best to satisfy them both.

  They followed the road that led out to the end of the peninsula, passing vineyards, scattered farmhouses, an occasional terrace of olive trees. Eventually they turned off to the left toward a wooded rise. The road grew increasingly difficult, twisting through uncultivated land sparsely broken with pines and high cane. As they reached the top of the rise at the edge of the wood, the road narrowed still more and Stuart stopped the car. They dismounted and continued on foot along the cart track. This was the beginning of the domain that Stuart hoped would soon be his.

  The trail descended gently through cork oaks and pines, offering occasional glimpses of the sea. They walked in silence. Under the trees, crumbling retaining walls indicated that this whole tract had once been terraced.

  The trail took a final turn and came out into a wide glade just above the sea. Seven thick twisted olive trees had survived the encroaching forest here, and just beyond them was the ruin of the one-room stone house. Below, red rocks jutted into the water, enclosing a short sandy cove.

  Stuart stopped and looked toward the house. The day had had a special importance after all; the meeting with his uncle made him feel that the place finally belonged to him. He even hoped for some sign of M. Giraudon’s return, but all was silent. He shrugged and put his arm around Helene and hugged her to him.

  “I’m going to plunge stark naked into our sea,” he exclaimed. “It shall possess me as utterly as I intend to possess it.” She laughed and pushed him from her. He peeled off his clothes and stood carelessly naked, his body lean and finely muscled. Helene caught her eyes wandering admiringly over him and, remembering Robbie, turned hastily away. She was intensely jealous of his body and the casual way he exposed it made her feel it more acutely; she couldn’t help thinking of him in the full splendor of his erect masculinity. If Robbie weren’t here, he could easily coax her out of her clothes.

  “How about you, infant?” Stuart demanded of the boy. “Coming in with the old man?”