Yarns Without Threads 

'When do you start taking your clothes off?' Simon Templar asked, with a faint hint of malice.

George McGeorge wriggled unhappily inside his pastel-blue silk shirt and sharply-creased slacks. ...

'Not before everyone else does, anyway' he said. ...

For this island ... is the beneficiary of an official dispensation which remains unique among the local ordinances of Europe.

'You see,' Mr McGeorge had explained it, 'over there it's perfectly legal for anyone - I mean women as well as men - to go around in a sort of triangular fig-leaf effect, and nothing else.' ...

'Oh,' said the Saint. 'A kind of semi-nudist colony.'

'Not even semi,' the other said. 'That's only in the village. When they go swimming, they're allowed to take everything off. And the point is, it isn't a colony or a club. It isn't private property and you don't have to belong to anything or join anything. Anybody can go there. And you don't even have to take your hat off if you don't want to. It's just that there's no law against taking off practically everything if you like - and from the pictures I've seen, most of them seem to like.'

'Zat is right.' Raymond Vidal, ... chimed in with genially expansive corroboration. 'It was about nineteen 'undred twenty, zat two docteurs from Paris, name Durville, very serious men, wish to bring people to be cured by ze sun, and zey start to make ze village which zey call Héliopolis. And so zat za patient can get ze most sun wiz ze least clozing, zey arrange a tolérance from ze Commune of Hyères so, zat no one 'as to wear more zan ze slip minimum. But it is all quite open. It is very beautiful, very natural. You should go zaire and see it.'

The other passengers, some thirty of them on that early run, could mostly be separated, without much difficulty into two broad groups. One, which could be distinguished by generally paler skins, a subtle tendency towards superfluities of apparel or ornament, consisted of the inevitable sightseers and perhaps a few tentative recruits. The others, usually marked by a deep tan, a simpler carelessness of costume, and a more earnest or relaxed demeanour, could be picked out with relative certainty as habitués or at least full-fledged initiates. The Saint, with his bronzed skin, in the cotton shirt and old shorts and espadrilles which he had sensibly chosen to wear, could easily have passed for one of the latter. McGeorge, on the other hand, was easily the most conspicuous example of the first category. Anyone seeing them together would have assumed at once that it was the Saint who had business on the island, and that McGeorge was the one who had decided to come along for the ride - and was now vainly regretting the impulse. It was a switch that Simon found highly diverting.

None of the passengers had yet disrobed to any unorthodox extent, but McGeorge did not seem to derive much solace from the delay. His eyes had become fixed on a flattish promontory of rock that stood out a little towards them from the body of the island. On it, tiny figures could be seen lying or strolling and sometimes plunging into the water like seals.

'Would you,' McGeorge asked huskily, at last, 'say that they had anything on?'

Simon kept his eyes focused as the point drew steadily nearer.

'No,' he said at last. 'I wouldn't.'

'Oh, Lord,' said McGeorge, as if right up until that moment he had been clutching a wisp of hope that all the reports about the Ile du Levant might still somehow prove to be a myth.

[Uncle Waldo:] '... But I know you've been dying to meet Nadine.'

He pushed forward a fair-haired golden-skinned girl who had been standing near him. She smiled, making dimples in a mischievous, pretty face.

'How do you do,' she said, with only a little accent.

Mr McGeorge did not look as if he had been dying to meet her, but as if he might well die from doing it. His savoir faire, which probably no normal contretemps could have ruffled, was plainly unequal to the requirements of being presented to a shapely young woman who seemed unconscious of wearing nothing above the waist. A crimson flush swept over his face, and he groped blindly for her outstretched hand with his eyes fixed glazedly on a point just over the top of her head.

The walk to the beach at Rioufrède was mostly downhill, across the central intersection of Héliopolis and down a road that started at right angles to the one they had trudged up from the port, so that Mr Oddington's energetic pace was easy even for McGeorge's unconditioned legs to keep up with. ...

... Simon ... was wearing his 'minimum' with all the aplomb he could muster, as he had promised himself, but the white stencil left by his regular swimming-trunks was something that no mere resolve could obliterate.

'Don't feel like a freak,' Mr Oddington said sturdily. 'Every one of us has been through the same stage. But did you ever have a more comfortable walk?'

'It's certainly the perfect costume for a hot day,' Simon admitted. ...

Presently they turned off the road, down a well-worn footpath to the right. The path started mildly, grew rapidly steeper, and finally became precipitous. When it was little more than a goat-track slanting down the side of a cliff, the stunted bushes thinned out to unmask the first sudden view of the cove it was leading down into. It was a deep little bay enclosed between two steep slopes of rock, hardly big enough to contain a football field, and reaching back to a broad crescent of pebbly beach. There were half a dozen heads bobbing in the water and three or four dozen people lying or sitting or walking about on the beach; and the actuality of their freedom from inhibition, which could be basically established at the first glance, was a momentary jolt even to the Saint. He thought it was merciful for McGeorge that the condition of the path made it extremely hazardous for the eyes to wander for most of the remainder of the descent.

But that took no longer than a few flights of stairs, and then they were down on the beach themselves, with the astonishing display of epidermis all around them. Apparently this cove was a little too far for the ambition of the majority of merely curious sightseers, who probably felt that they had worked hard enough for a sensation by the time they had struggled up to the village centre, or else the route was not too well publicised, for the Saint fascinatedly counted exactly one scattered handful, two men and three women, who were even technically over-dressed for a game of Adam and Eve.

'Well, now we can make ourselves comfortable,' said Mr Oddington.

And, untying the string, he stepped gratefully out of his irksome habiliment.

Nadine Zeult touched his arm.

'Will you come for a swim with me?' she suggested tactfully.

A little triangle of cloth fluttered down on to the beach as she ran into the water.

The Saint ran in after her. ... He stumbled into a plunging dive and swam violently for about twenty yards without lifting his head, until the effort had neutralised the first cool contrast of the water. Then he turned over and pushed his hair back, treading water, and found the girl not far away.

'It's good, isn't it?' she said.

'Very good,' he smiled.

He had an idea she was referring to something more than just the ordinary goodness of a temperate sea, but his reply was safe and would have been the same anyway. Somehow it was always a new surprise, because the opportunities were so rare, to rediscover the fantastic difference between swimming in the raw and swimming in anything else at all. Perhaps it was not only the unfamiliarity of total physical liberation, but a throwback of memory to old swimming holes and boyhood truancies and golden days of innocence that could never come again.

She swam idly along fro a while, drifting towards one side of the bay, and the Saint paddled lazily beside her because it was the most natural thing to do. Presently they were close to a smooth step of rock, and the girl climbed out on to it and sat there, shaking the water out of her yellow hair, like a sea-nymph. After a moment, the Saint pulled himself up beside her.

'Tell me now what you think,' she said.

'I'm enjoying myself,' he told her.

'You should stay a long time.'

'That's another matter. This is quite an experience, sort of out of this world - and there aren't a lot of things I haven't done. But I was never curious to go to the ordinary kind of nudist colony. There was something that didn't appeal to me about the secretiveness, about having to join up, and the feeling that you'd be somehow committed to a Cause. I've had my own crusades, but I hate being organised. This is different, I admit. This is a lot of people being allowed to do what they want to do, and taking advantage of it, and yet really doing it on their own. But - '

'You think there is something queer about us?'

'To be honest, I half expected to see a rather freakish-looking bunch of people. I was wrong about that. As a matter of fact, I'd say that on the whole they're a hell of a lot better-looking than the average of what you'd find on any ordinary beach. I'm glad there's a place like this for them, since this is what they want. But as a way of life it doesn't mean the same to me that it does to Uncle Waldo.'

'Then if we are not queer, we are foolish.'

'Not that either.' He crossed his arms over his knees and rested his chin on them, frowning into the glare. 'Maybe the rest of the world would be a lot better if it learned your kind of tolerance - about minding your own business and letting everyone do what they like as long as they aren't hurting anyone else. But I couldn't settle for just that simple Utopia. Perhaps that's my loss.'