As he slid easily through the cool smooth water he looked back and saw the bright yellow bathing cap of the Spanish Cow bobbing in the sunlight close to the shore, as she paddled about with her clumsy breast stroke. He pillowed his face in the blue sea and drifted on with a sweep of long effortless arms, gazing down through the crystalline transparency to the misty depths where tiny fish flicked and turned like silver sparks, and decided that the time was ripe for Mrs Nussberg and her jewels to meet Romance.
2
It all began the day after Simon arrived at Juan-les-Pins. He was sitting on a high stool in a sandwich bar, refreshing his interior with a glass of iced orange juice, when the Spanish Cow came in. Simon did not then know her real name, nor had he become sufficiently interested to christen her, but, observing that she wore voluminous beach pyjamas with broad horizontal stripes of purple and yellow, which made her look like a great blowsy wasp, it is probable that some of the emotion he felt might have been detected by an eagle eye. The Saint’s sense of humor was very human, and the barman looked at him and grinned sympathetically, as one who in his day had also been confronted by the spectacle for the first time. It is therefore possible that the Saint’s face was not quite so woodenly disciplined as a meticulous politeness might have wished. It is possible that one of his eyebrows may have twitched involuntarily, or the corners of his mouth widened a slight half-millimetre, in answer to the barman’s confidence. And then he glanced at the vision again, and saw that it was staring at him through a pair of lorgnettes and pulling faces at him.
The Saint blinked. He regarded his orange juice suspiciously. To a man of his abstemious habits, it was a remarkable hallucination to affront the brain at eleven o’clock in the morning — even in a morning of such potent sunshine as those shores boast in July.
He looked again. Mrs Nussberg put out her tongue in a grimace of bloodcurdling menace.
Simon swayed slightly on his stool. His friends had frequently told him that he was quite mad, but he had never expected to lose his last vestige of sanity in quite so disturbing a way. He turned uneasily to an inspection of the other patrons of the bar, wondering if the portly Dutchman on his left would suddenly seem to be elongating and turning bright green, or if the charming honey-blonde damsel on his right would be pulling off her pink ears and stirring them into her coffee. Instead he found the other customers still of normal shape and hue, smiling broadly. He braced himself to look at the striped vision again. It applied its thumb to its nose and extended its fingers towards him, waggling them with hideous glee.
The charming damsel on his right spoke, through the daze of alarm that was rapidly enveloping him.
“Don’t pay any attention to her,” she said. “She’s always like that.”
“Bless you, darling,” murmured the Saint fervently. “For a moment I thought the heat had got me.”
“Who’s always like what?” screamed Mrs Nussberg.