Read The Saint in the Sun for Free Online Page B

for its own sake, they could do it all over the ocean without bothering anyone. But no. They always have to work as close as they can to what they hope is an admiring audience, and half-swamp anyone who’s only trying to have a quiet peaceful time on the water.”
    “But the girl who’s skiing isn’t doing that,” Maureen pointed out. “It’s Undine who’s driving.”
    “Using her to get more attention.” The skier fell off then, trying to jump the wake, and Simon sat up with a short laugh. “What a pity that wasn’t him! But I’m sure he wouldn’t ski himself and risk anything so undignified … Come on, let’s forget him for a while and have a dunk.”
    She swam well and with surprising endurance for her slight build, not with the brief burst of speed fizzling out into breathlessness that he would have expected. He followed her for about five hundred yards, and when they turned around she seemed quite capable of making it five kilometers.
    “I won all the athletic prizes in school,” she said when he complimented her. “That’s probably my trouble, being the good sister instead of the home-wrecker type.”
    “If I treat you like a brother,” he said, “it’s only because David stuck me with it.”
    After the sun had dried them again she said: “I don’t want to spoil your day, but I’m not tanned like you are, and it might ruin everything if I meet Undine this evening looking like a raspberry sundae.”
    “It’s lunch-time, anyway. I have an idea. Let’s drive up to Ramatuelle. There’s a little restaurant there, Chez Cauvičre, where they make the best paella this side of the Pyrenees and perhaps the other side too. Then I’ll take you back to the hotel for a siesta, and by seven o’clock you’ll feel fit to cope with a carload of Undines-if you can stand the thought.”
    The ambrosial hodge-podge of lobster, chicken, octopus, vegetables, and saffron-tinted rice was as good as he boasted; the unlabelled rosé of the house was cool insidious nectar; and by the end of the meal they were almost old friends. He felt an almost genuinely brotherly concern when he left her and had to remember that all this had been only an interlude.
    “Is there anything else I can do?” he asked.
    “Yes,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about it. Do you suppose you could come by the cafe about eight o’clock, and say hullo to me? Then if it seems like a good idea by that time I can make like we had a date. It might get me out of something. Even just as a card up my sleeve, it’d do a lot for my morale. That is, if you aren’t already tied up-“
    “I can’t think of anything better,” he smiled. “You can count on me.”
    She had already told him which cafe was referred to. The quais which face the harbor of St Tropez are lined almost solidly with restaurants and cafes, where everyone who knows the routine turns out in the evening to be seen and to see who else is being seen; but ever since “Saint-Trop” became known as the rendezvous of a certain artistic-bohemian set for whom the Riviera westward from Cannes was either too princely or too bourgeois, “the” cafe has always been the Sénéquier, and the others have to be content with its overflow-which is usually enough to swamp them anyway. Although many of the original celebrities have since migrated to less publicized havens, the invading sightseers who put them to flight continue to swarm there and stare hopefully around, most of the time at each other. But even in this era a permanently reserved table at Sénéquier was still a status symbol which Sir Jasper Undine would inevitably have had to display, whatever the price.
    Simon strolled slowly along the Quai Jean-Jaurčs a little before eight, allowing himself a leisured study of the scene as he approached.
    It was impossible not to spot Undine at any distance: he stood out even amidst the rainbow patchwork of holiday garb on the terrace with the help of a blazer with broad black and