She trod water, the slow swell lifting her small brown face against the intense sky, her eyes fixed on him inexorably.
“What was the idea — lashing out at Maurice like that?”
“Did you see what he did?”
“I heard about it. But you didn’t have to paste him that way.”
“I just slapped him,” said the Saint calmly. “Isn’t he on the beach today? Well, if I’d really pasted him he’d’ve spent the next six weeks in a hospital — getting his face remodeled.”
The Saint steered himself neatly around a drifting jellyfish seeking for its mate. “My dear, if you’re really upset about my slapping a conceited daffodil like Walmar for carrying a joke to those lengths, you haven’t the good taste I thought you had.”
There was a certain chilliness about their parting that the Saint realized was unavoidable. He swam back alone, floating leisurely through the buoyant sea and meditating as he went. He knew well enough that a set of diamonds like those displayed by Mrs Porphyria Nussberg are rarely obtained without some kind of inconvenience, but those incidental troubles were merely a part of the most enchanting game in the world.
Back on the sands, he stretched himself out beside Mrs Nussberg’s chair and chatted with no more than ordinary politeness. On the following morning he did the same thing. There was no hint of a pressing advance about it — it was simply the way in which any normal holiday acquaintance would have been expected to behave — but the Spanish Cow’s soured belligerence had lost its sting. Sometimes she looked at him curiously, with the habitual suspicion hesitating in the background of her beady eyes, as if the impact of a more common courtesy was still too strange to be taken at its face value.
That evening he walked with her along the beach. It was well into cocktail time, and the young brown bodies had taken themselves off the sands to refresh themselves at the Casino or the Perroquet, or to dance before dinner at Maxim’s. The last survivor was a shabby mahogany-tanned old man with a rake, engaged in his daily task of scratching the harvest of cigarette-ends and scraps of paper and orange peel out of the sand to leave it smooth and clean for the morrow’s sacrifices — a sad and apocryphal figure on the deserted shore.
They went by the almost empty Fregate, and Simon recalled the caricature in the entrance. It was still there — a brutal, sadistically accurate burlesque. Mrs Nussberg stared fixedly ahead, as if she had forgotten it, but he knew that she had not.