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One

Her guests had always marveled at how young she looked.

“Lulu, don’t be ridiculous, darling—you can’t be eighty?”

In her ninth decade, Lulu Davenport still had the slim, supple body of a much younger woman. Her thick, straight hair, which she still kept long, usually braided or coiled into a loose bun with fetching whorls escaping at the nape of her neck, had gone completely white in her thirties and had always seemed part of her abundant natural gifts. Lulu had never been concerned with health or beauty. These were accidents of nature and one had simply been lucky. She walked everywhere, she gardened, and she ran Villa Los Roques—“the Rocks,” as everyone called her little seaside hotel at the eastern end of the island of Mallorca—and charmed her guests as she had for more than fifty years. That had kept her vigorous and happy, until one December afternoon when she was found sprawled in the Mediterranean sun among her yellow rosebushes by Vicente the handyman.

She looked no different after her stroke. She soon recovered her marvelous strength. In almost all respects, she appeared unchanged. But with the sudden tiny dam-burst of blood a tumbler had turned in Lulu’s brain, and she began to swear. Her new vocabulary was Lawrentian: fuck, cunt, shit, piss. She talked of the same things as always, with appropriate logic and context, but with her arresting new expressions filling and punctuating her speech. At first, her friends were hugely amused to sit and chat with someone they knew so well who spoke in a new, rather cinematic language. Yet after a while it was strangely alienating—it was, after all, a neurological disorder. Was this still really Lulu?

The other change was to her schedule. Its former rigidity eased—nothing extreme, no getting up in the middle of the night to trim the roses or take a walk—but after her stroke it was erratic. She set off to the market with her straw bag over her shoulder as ever, but at random hours. In this way she encountered her first husband, Gerald Rutledge, one afternoon late in March. They had both remained in the small town of Cala Marsopa after their divorce in 1949, yet by evolving antipodal routines they had managed to avoid each other almost entirely for half a century.

Though they were the same age, Gerald had not been as blessed by nature. He’d been a smoker all his life and now had emphysema. He’d suffered from arthritis for years. His hips needed replacing but he had a horror of hospitals and had resisted such a dramatic procedure. He walked slowly with a stick.

He was stooped, puffing a Ducados, gripping a small four-pack of yogurt in a tremulous hand when they ran into each other at the local comestibles. His brown legs and arms were wrinkled and emaciated in his baggy khaki shorts and short-sleeved pale blue shirt, cheap polyester garments bought at the HiperSol in Manacor. There were scabs of sun cancer on his scalp beneath the thin, lank gray hair.

“God, Gerald, you look fucking grim,” said Lulu. “Why are you here anyway, you cunt?”

Gerald’s mouth opened to form an answer, but his mind skittered off into confusion. Its tracking mechanism, unsteady these days anyway, was thrown further off balance by the coarseness of Lulu’s greeting. His memories of her—almost all of them stemming from the few happy weeks of their marriage almost sixty years before—could not reconcile such stark filth and venom. As his jaw moved, trying to form words, his eyes sought and found the small white scar, still visible, on her chin.

Lulu’s eye was caught by a heap of splendid blue-black aubergines. She began to move away and Gerald’s hand shot out and grasped her upper arm.

She turned toward him again. “Piss off, you wretched shit.” Lulu pulled her arm free. She walked away, toward the aubergines, pleased at the opportunity to cut Gerald, and at how decrepit he looked. She’d been mortified by her stroke; it wasn’t like her. And while adjusting to the unsettling intimations of mortality, it had occurred to her that Gerald might outlast her. She wanted him to die first, with urgency now.

She picked up an aubergine, rubbing her thumb across its firm squeaky skin. She finished her shopping with brisk efficiency and was soon outside.

Gerald stared after her. Some moments later, he became aware of a sensation in his hand. He looked down and saw that he had squeezed the yogurt containers too hard. Creamy curds of frutas del bosque were dripping from his trembling fingers.

•   •   •

After a day of cloudbursts, the clouds departed, as if they’d been waiting for an improvement in the weather themselves, moving away eastward across the sea like pink and purple galleons. Lulu walked home along the sandy, unpaved, still-puddled road between the white villas and their gardens of fruit trees and bougainvillea and the limestone shore stretching beyond the harbor. The road carried mostly foot traffic and mopeds, a popular, out-of-the-way walk in the summer but deserted the rest of the year. In places, the rough spongiform beige rocks between the road and the sea offered flat spots near their edges where for years Lulu and the Rocks’ guests who didn’t want to walk as far as the beach had spread their towels to lie in the sun, launched themselves into the cool water, and climbed back up again.

Lulu walked happily and slowly, enjoying the warmth of the sun—it had been an unusually cool and rainy winter in Mallorca. She was comforted by the familiar nubs and contours of the rocks and the gentle sound of the sea that rose and sucked at them.

She didn’t notice Gerald following her. He was walking at a speed that had become unusually fast for him, though no more than a normal walking pace. His legs weren’t working properly. Everything in them was worn, and the regular mechanisms had grown so sloppy that they were threatening to fold the wrong way and collapse. His hips were killing him. Sweat beaded his forehead, his neck and upper lip. His face had grown pale as the depleted oxygen in his blood chugged toward his heart and lungs, leaving him panting, wheezing heavily. He was dying to stop and light a cigarette but then he would lose her. He pushed furiously on, like a man walking underwater.

He caught up with Lulu just outside the Rocks. He grabbed her arm again with strength fueled by rage, and spun her round.

“You never—” he started, with a smoker’s bubbling growl, but his chest was empty of air, heaving spasmodically.

Again, Lulu shook off his grip. But she was surprised and immensely pleased to see the effort Gerald had made, how overwrought, breathless, and unwell he was. It occurred to her that with just a nudge he might easily die of a heart attack right in front of her. “You’re pathetic, Gerald. An empty, hobbling husk of a man.” A flame of old anger rose in her. “You’re a bolter! A miserable, wretched shit of a fucking—”

“You never developed the film! Did you!” The furious, strangled words erupted wetly out of Gerald’s chest, his body pitching forward. “I lured them away!Do you understand? I got them away! I—” His blue-and-gray glistening face thrust into hers, but he had no more breath.

Lulu involuntarily snapped backward from the waist, repelled. But she recovered—or was recovering, as her shoulder bag, laden with aubergines, lemons, cheese, and wine, still swinging backward, tugged at her, and she began to lose her balance.

Gerald grabbed her arm again, this time—his instinct sure—to steady her, and Lulu clutched at his shirt, but they both leaned well past recovery and began to fall. As they fell, the sight of Gerald’s face so close to hers, spittle gathered in the corners of his thin rubbery lips, was so repugnant to Lulu that she whipped her head sharply aside with disgust. When they landed, her right temple hit a jagged spur of rock.

Gerald’s knees smashed into sharp, serrated limestone. He screamed—a brief empty wheeze—and writhed, pushing with his torso, his excruciating hips.

They rolled together, not toward one of the flat spots where guests spread towels. They tumbled off a ledge into the sea.

Two

According to the report of the coroner, the deaths are from drowning,” said the police inspector, flicking through pages on his desk. He was a slim young man, with the confident demeanor and close-cropped spiky-gelled black hair of a detective in a telenovela. “There was water in the lungs of both persons. But there are the external injuries, primarily in the head of Señora Davenport and the knees of Señor Rutledge . . . and there are other abrasions. . . .” He looked up at the middle-aged man and woman across his desk. “However, nothing is missing. We found Señora Davenport’s purse in her bag, and money in Señor Rutledge’s pocket. Nothing was taken from them, so we don’t believe it was an attack—a robbery. More probably, these lacerations occurred during the fall into the water.”

He spoke in Spanish. Luc Franklin, the son of the Davenport woman, and Aegina Rutledge, the daughter of the Rutledge man—both of them ingleses, as were the deceased—had addressed him in fluent Spanish during their introduction. The Rutledge woman appeared completely Spanish to the inspector. Dark hair, dark eyes, olive complexion, old enough to be his mother, but still, as a woman, very attractive—perhaps a certain polish from the English side. The man, Franklin—he spoke Spanish well, though his accent was not as good as the woman’s—looked like simply another graying middle-aged inglés. They showed no emotion as he talked of the death of their parents and detailed the contusiones found on the bodies. But that did not fool the inspector. He noticed they had barely glanced at each other. They avoided expressions of warmth and comfort that would have led to tears, at least embraces or hand-holding between old friends, and proper expressions of grief, for which the inspector had well-tested soothing words to offer.

These two didn’t like each other.

The inspector continued. “There is only the question of why they fell.”

“My mother had a stroke in December,” said Luc Franklin. “Maybe she had another one and Gerald—Señor Rutledge—was trying to help her.”

“They were very old friends,” said the Rutledge woman, supporting this scenario. “If she’d been in trouble, I’m sure my father would have tried to help her, even though he wasn’t well himself.”

“Claro,” said the inspector. “This seems most likely what happened. Señora Davenport had a head injury, here”—he touched his temple—“probably because of a fall on the rocks, perhaps as you say, because of another stroke, or”—he looked at the Franklin man, suggesting gently—“perhaps she just fell—she was quite old. She was carrying a heavy bag. It happens.”

“Possibly,” said the Franklin man. He appeared strangely uninterested. The inspector had seen this before: grief expressed as detachment. The dead were now dead, how they got that way no longer mattered.

The inspector pressed on, limning a scene that spoke for itself. “Yes. And Señor Rutledge was there”—he looked over at the daughter, his face showing the unselfish kindness he presumed of her father—“he attempted to help her. They fell, perhaps together, first onto the rocks beside the road, and then—it is not wide, the rocks there, I went to see—into the water. The injuries are consistent with such an accident. Unless you have reason to suspect somebody attacked them—”

“No, no, not at all,” said the Franklin man, now impatient.

“I’m sure it was an accident,” said the Rutledge woman.

The inspector nodded gravely. “A tragic accident for such old friends.” He rose. “My deepest condolences.”

•   •   •

Together they rode the elevator down to the underground police parking garage. They were silent until Aegina said, “Luc, I’m sorry about your mother.”

“And your father,” said Luc, glancing at her reflection in the brushed aluminum door just as it opened and erased her.

They walked toward the parked cars.

“Luc.” Aegina stopped. “You don’t think—honestly—they actually had a fight?”

“Aegina . . .” He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“But what were they doing together? They haven’t seen each other for . . . since Algeciras?”

At the mention of Algeciras, Luc looked away to some bleak corner of the garage. “I wouldn’t know.”

“I can’t imagine why he was there, outside the Rocks,” said Aegina. But she remembered episodes as she spoke. She looked at Luc. “How are you feeling?”

“Numb,” he said. “The way I always felt about her.”

“I’m sure that’s not true.”

“Well, never mind.” He glanced at her again. “I’m sorry about your father. I liked him.” He turned and walked toward a white Land Rover, Lulu’s car. It beeped and blinked its lights as he pressed the remote locking device.

“Are you going to be here long?” she called.

“I don’t know,” Luc said, opening the door. He climbed in and shut the door and started the engine. She stood aside as the Land Rover backed out. She watched it speed off toward the exit.

Aegina looked around the unpainted concrete cavern, trying to remember what car she had rented that morning. She had driven straight from Palma airport to Pompas Fúnebres González to see the body, and then to the police station.

•   •   •

Driving up the long, still-unpaved track to C’an Cabrer, her father’s farmhouse, Aegina couldn’t believe he wouldn’t be there. The drive from Palma, through the villages, or now more often than not on the new roads built around them, past the endless new developments of blocky little villas, finally the shimmering sea opening up ahead, and up the hill through the olive trees to the house—the whole headlong journey from London or anywhere else had always been filled with the anticipation and certainty of seeing him at the end of it. He had come up to London only twice in her life. Otherwise, whenever she had seen him, it had been here, in this one place. There had never been a time when she had been in the house and her father had not been there, or out and shortly expected back, as constant and fixed as the stones of its structure and the land around it.

High on the hill, the drive turned sharply and ran level through a stand of lemon trees toward the old pigsty—her father’s workshop—at the side of the house. Aegina stopped the car and got out. It was hot now; the air buzzed with cicadas.

She climbed the steps at the side of the house and entered the large kitchen. Aegina stood still. A teapot, its strainer and top, a chipped mug, a china plate, a large bone-handled dinner knife, lay clean and dry in the wooden dish drainer above the large, square, ceramic sink. He had cleaned these things and then gone out and died. Now she knew she would not find him, either here making tea, or in his study, or reading in the living room, or wandering through the gardens or the olive and lemon groves—what was left of them—on the hill surrounding the house.

She walked through the book-filled rooms into her father’s bedroom. He had made the bed neatly too—shipshape as always—before going out to the market that last morning.

She had been conceived here.

Beside the bed stood the small, rough, old bookcase made of local pine that contained the original core of her father’s library, the books he had brought ashore from his boat—or saved when it sank, she was never sure which—in 1948: J. B. Bury’s A History of Ancient Greece; Seymour’s Life in the Homeric Age; various editions of The Odyssey; a book of photographs of the Aegean, the sea her father had named her for.

She sat down on the bed and pulled out a faded blue Oxford University Press hardback. Its pages long ago rippled from damp, The Odyssey of Homer embossed on the spine. On the front cover, in faded gold on top of the blue cloth, was a circular indented depiction of a small fourteen-oar galley. The figure of a bearded man, Odysseus, was bound by ropes to the mast. In the water below the ship, looking up at him, singing, were the Sirens who bewitched anybody hapless enough to draw within hearing of their liquid song—wingèd harpies clutching bones in their talons, who captured and imprisoned sailors and turned them to skeletons as the skin withered upon their bones.

Aegina opened the cover. The inscription, written in faded black ink on the first blank, yellowed, damp-spotted page:

For Lulu. An odyssey.

Love always, Gerald

20 July 1948.

One

Why shouldn’t I go? It’s her seventieth birthday,” said Charlie. He was slouched in a chair at the large oak table in the center of the kitchen, picking from a small pile of raw almonds in front of him, one nut at a time. “Just because you and Grandpa loathe her guts—”

“That’s not true, Charlie,” said Aegina. She was making dinner, chopping onions and garlic and pine nuts at the other end of the table. “I don’t loathe her. I don’t even think about her.”

“Yes you do,” said the boy.

“I don’t have the energy to loathe anybody. And I agree with you. Of course you should go if you want to. Have you been invited?”

“Mum,” he said with pitying exasperation, “you don’t have to be invited to go to the Rocks. People just go. I’ve been going there all my life.”

“I know, but isn’t it going to be a big to-do?”

“Yeah, that’s the point: everyone’s going. But as a matter of fact, Lulu invited me.”

“She what?” came the voice from the living room.

A moment later Gerald appeared in the doorway. “Why did she invite you? How does she know you?” He looked over his reading glasses at his grandson, who was tall and lithe, with his mother’s dark Spanish coloring. The boy had leapt across some boundary from childhood into strapping youth since the previous summer when Gerald had last seen him. He was a foot taller, already shaving. He looked like a louche young matador, Gerald thought. God help him.

“Grandpa, I’ve been going there for years,” said Charlie. “Of course she knows me. She’s asked me to be the DJ for her party. It’s a job. She’s paying me five thousand pesetas.”

“That’s nice,” said Aegina evenly. “Why you, sweetheart?”

“She likes the music I like. And I like what she likes.”

“Like what?” asked Aegina.

“Oh, old stuff, newer stuff. She’s got a turntable and all these classic old vinyl LPs. You really should come down and see sometime—if you don’t hate her guts.”

“Now stop it, Charlie. I’ve just got plenty to do, and I like to spend my evenings here.”

“I’m sure she likes your concentration camp music,” said Gerald.

Charlie’s latest enthusiasms, played more than Gerald would have liked on the gramophone in the living room, were Henryk Górecki’s Third Symphony, Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, with Dawn Upshaw’s ululant soprano filling the house with waves of mournful music—lyrics, Charlie informed his grandfather, that had been scrawled on the wall of a Gestapo cell—and Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, composed in a German prisoner-of-war camp. Charlie’s music teacher at school was currently keen on Holocaust music.

“She doesn’t have any of that.”

“Lucky her,” said Gerald. He stood irresolutely in the doorway for a moment, and then said: “Does she know who you are? I mean, that you’re connected to . . . us?”

“Of course she does, Grandpa. Lulu knows everyone.”

Gerald glanced at his daughter. Aegina met his eyes before looking down at her chopping board.

“Sounds like you two are terrific chums,” he said.

“Well, Bianca and I go there a lot. She invited both of us to her birthday party.”

“Ah,” said Gerald. Bianca, the daughter of Aegina’s best friends in Cala Marsopa, was Charlie’s age, fifteen. She had grown up noticeably the past year. She now looked at least twenty-five, he thought.

“And people your age go to the Rocks?”

“Sometimes,” said Charlie, nonchalantly munching almonds. “After dinner.”

“They don’t serve you drinks, do they?”

“No, Coke. Or TriNaranjus.”

Coming from Charlie, this lolling, smoldering youth, it sounded like a joke. Gerald was unsure if his leg was being pulled. Perhaps they drank like fishes now at fifteen and he was the last to know. “Really?” He looked over at Aegina.

“They drink Coke, Papa.”

Gerald said, “Hmm,” in a way that he himself detested as soon as he heard it because it made him sound like a hopelessly reactionary dotard.

“Will Tom and Milly be there?” he asked.

Aegina looked up at him. “Papa, they’ve been dead for years.”

“Oh, right.”

He returned to the living room, sat on the old sagging leather couch, and picked up what he had put down before going into the kitchen: his book, The Way to Ithaca. Out of print for more than forty years, a new edition was being brought out by Doughty Books, Ltd, in London. Doughty had published a line of short works about ancient history, small, attractively designed hardback books written in lively, readable prose by experts who managed to avoid the pedantry of scholarship. They had proved popular and sold well. Founded only seven years earlier, Doughty had twice won The Sunday Times’ Small Publisher of the Year Award.

Ten months ago, out of the blue, Gerald had found a letter from Kate Smythe, Doughty’s editor in chief, in his dusty letter box under the carob trees at the bottom of the drive. One of her authors had “discovered” The Way to Ithaca, the original John Murray edition, in a library sale and sent it to her. She thought the book “absolutely brilliant in its accessible and charming approach to the modern, nonnautical, reader, and still as relevant to the world of today as on the day it was first published.” Everybody at Doughty believed that with a “very little light editing,” it would stand neatly alongside their recent books on the Parthenon, the Greco-Persian Wars, the Elgin Marbles. They agreed that Gerald’s original black-and-white photographs were “essential to the book, classic in composition, and conveying a timeless sense of the Mediterranean that appeared to give the modern reader contemporary snapshots of the Homeric world.” (In other words, Gerald had remarked to Aegina, they think I’m three thousand years old.) Did Gerald have a literary agent to whom they could present their offer? If not, Kate Smythe would be happy to refer him to an agent with whom Doughty did frequent business and whose impartiality and commitment to Gerald’s best interests were guaranteed. And did he have a phone number?

Skeptical, suspecting this offer would evaporate before anything came of it, Gerald had written back that he did not at present have a literary agent (he’d never had one) but that he would be pleased to consider their offer. Within days of dropping his return letter in the yellow Correos box in Cala Marsopa, he received a gushing phone call from Kate Smythe in London. She sounded sincerely enthusiastic. She told him again how much she loved his book, how excited Doughty would be to bring out a new edition, how well they thought it would do.

“How very nice,” Gerald told her, still not convinced, looking abstractedly at bottles of his own honey-colored olive oil that sat on the shelf beside the phone. (When he’d finally allowed the installation of a phone in 1987, he’d wanted it out of the way and put it in the larder.)

Less than an hour later, he was back in the larder, answering the phone again. The caller identified herself as Deborah Greene. She was a literary agent, authorized by Doughty Books to convey to Gerald their offer of an advance on royalties of fifteen thousand pounds.

Gerald had left England many decades before decimalization had shrunk the pound to one hundred recessive pence from the glories of its twenty shillings and two hundred forty useful pennies that had formed notions of plenitude in his childhood; when a thrupenny bit had purchased sixteen lemon drops at a farthing apiece. Gerald still thought of wealth in terms more suited to living on a boat: a sufficiency of food, properly stored against weather and misadventure, to last a fixed period into the uncertain future. Fifteen thousand pounds was a sum he could associate only with train robberies or the wages of film stars.

As the literary agent spoke, Gerald stood in the larder, staring again at his olive oil. For a long time afterward, whenever he thought of his new publisher and his fifteen-thousand-pound advance—and whenever he came into the larder for any reason—he envisioned a rich oil-like sap sliding over him to encase him like a golden amber.

Deborah Greene was saying something about foreign rights, Doughty already having a strong response from an American publisher, the book going into profit quite quickly, Gerald might see additional royalties in the years following publication—he didn’t understand most of it.

Gerald either did or didn’t say aloud, “Whatever you think best.”

She asked if he had another book idea that might serve as a follow-up, for which she believed she could secure an additional healthy advance. He didn’t, offhand, but he would have a think, he told her.

He had staggered out of the larder and finally made a pot of tea.

A few weeks later, a check for £6,375 (half of his advance, after his new agent’s commission, the remaining half to follow on publication) arrived in his letter box beneath the carob trees. He deposited it in his account at the Banco Santander in Cala Marsopa and wondered what to do with it. Months later, he decided to have some roof tiles replaced. He sent a check for a thousand pounds to Aegina for her birthday—“Of course, it will all be yours someday,” he wrote grandly—and a hundred pounds to Charlie for his birthday.

Now, almost a year after that first letter from Kate Smythe, his new book, this late-life miracle coming when he was seventy years old, lay open, pages down on the leather cushion, in front of Gerald. The publishers had added a subtitle: A Sailor’s Discovery of the Route of Homer’s Odyssey. The dust jacket showed a detail of an old wall mosaic of Odysseus surrounded by the six heads of Scylla, a vivid scene full of action, rather than the stilted two-dimensional Grecian-vase rendering one might expect. Here, inside this book—as Kate Smythe had put it to Gerald over the phone—the cover promised a big, action-packed story. He thought it very handsome, the mosaic surrounded by a Mediterranean blue that was somehow aged and watermarked—very clever.

But the elation, and the pleasant if vertiginous sensation of having so much money in the bank, had given way to panic. The publishers had invited him—pressed and flattered him, with phone calls from Kate and her editors and production team, and even Aegina had joined them in urging him—to come to London for the book’s launch party. This was to take place in three days’ time, in the Duveen Gallery of the British Museum, which housed the Elgin-looted Parthenon Marbles, and Kate had, by some sleight of evolving phone calls, got Gerald to agree to read an extract from his book at the party. He’d spent the last few weeks in the grip of a virulent and mounting stage fright. He woke now in the predawn hours in a sweating panic, picturing himself surrounded by a Scylla-like throng of smiling, teeth-gnashing heads belonging to clever, literary academics, all of them vastly more knowledgeable about his subject than himself—a Cambridge don whose specialty was the Parthenon was among Doughty’s recent authors. He was sure he would stammer, splutter, find himself robbed of the power of speech, possibly even have an accident in his trousers, or be so inclined to do so that he would be unable to leave the museum’s toilet. Meanwhile, he had to prepare for this “impromptu” address. He had to find something in his book to read; something “fun,” Kate had suggested.

As he picked up the book again, Gerald’s synapses snapped him back to what had made him put it down minutes before and go into the kitchen: hearing his grandson talk of that woman. He looked down at the beautiful cover and realized that, in any edition, the book itself would always carry an ineradicable taint.

Charlie passed through the room. “See you later, Grandpa.”

“Aren’t you staying for supper?”

“No, thanks. I’m going to eat with friends in town.”

Soon Gerald heard the strong torrent of Charlie’s urine stream crashing heedlessly into the toilet bowl in the adjoining bathroom. Such an enviably strong, vigorous contrast to his own sadly diminished and fitful effort.

“You don’t mind him going to that party, then?” Gerald asked as he and Aegina were eating in the dining room.

“No. They all go there. I don’t want to spoil it for him.”

“And you feel all right about leaving him here? I’ve told you, I’m quite capable of getting myself to London and back.”

“I’m not sure about that. He’ll be fine, Papa. Penny and François are very happy to have him—”

“I’m sure Bianca will be too.”

“Yes, she will. They’re wonderful friends.”

“But are they . . .”

“Are they having sex? I don’t think so. I expect they’re kissing. Maybe a bit more. But they’re close friends. I think it’s all right. Anyway, you’re mad if you think I’m not coming to your fabulous book bash. I mean, come on—the British Museum. And the relaunch of your book, which had basically disappeared before I was old enough to read it. I want to see you in your hour of glory.”

“Humiliation, more like.”

“You’ll be great. They’re so impressed by your book. You don’t have to make a speech or anything. You just say, Thanks so much, read a few words, and they’ll do the rest. It’ll be fun.”

“Hmmm,” Gerald said again. They ate silently for a minute. Aegina had made the tumbet she had learned from her mother: a Mallorcan dish full of aubergines, tomatoes, onion, garlic, goat cheese, and olives from Gerald’s trees. His eyes ranged over Aegina’s paintings that hung on the walls: landscapes around his property and eastern Mallorca in a range of burnt and raw umbers, lines and shadows as familiar to him now as the veins and splotches on the backs of his own brown, weathered hands. They’d hung there for many years.

“Are you painting much these days?” he asked her.

“No. Not at all, actually. I’d like to get back to it at some point, and I will. I don’t seem to have had the time—well, I guess that really means I haven’t had the interest.”

“I hope you will. I love your paintings, you know that. You’re a very fine artist.”

“Sweet of you, Papa.”

“Does Charlie paint, or draw?”

“No, just the music. Well, you’ve heard him play his keyboard in his room.”

“I know, he’s amazing. But you were musical too. Always playing songs on your little record player that you took everywhere with you. I remember that one you liked about flying to the moon.”

“‘Everyone’s Gone to the Moon.’”

“That’s it. Rather a lonely song, I thought.”

•   •   •

Two days later they stood in a long line of sun-blistered British tourists—most of them dressed as if they’d just come off the beach—and their piles of luggage snaking toward the Iberia check-in counter at Palma airport.

“These people can’t all be on our flight, surely?” said Gerald. He was neatly dressed in faded blue canvas trousers, tennis shoes, a white shirt so laundered that it had become almost transparent, and a threadbare but clean cream-colored linen jacket of a type popular with British schoolmasters in the 1930s.

“They are,” said Aegina. “And more coming.”

“How can they possibly fit them all onto a single aeroplane?” asked Gerald, for whom there would always be only one spelling and pronunciation of the word—that machine forever being the size and kind that he had come to know during the war. In 1942, after he’d lied about his age and enlisted in the Royal Navy, Gerald sailed aboard the battle cruiser turned aircraft carrier HMS Furious, as she ferried RAF Supermarine Spitfires and Hawker Hurricanes between Portsmouth and Malta. Dainty aircraft, pretty as small sailboats and operating in much the same way: featherlight airfoil sections controlled by wire the size of fishing line. They had the tenuous rigidity of large box kites and wobbled like shrubbery as they were pushed about on the flight deck. Gerald thought them marvelous until he began to see them crash. Pretty aeroplanes hurtling from the sky in fiery descents, in every case to explode spectacularly into the sea or on rocky coastlines. Even without antiaircraft bombardment, they suddenly seemed too improbable, the conceit of mad inventors. During the war and after, Gerald sailed all over the Mediterranean, between Alexandria and Gibraltar, in every kind and size of watercraft. Some of these had leaked, a few had foundered, but at no more than a stately cruising speed, and one always had the chance of swimming or paddling away from wreckage in the water. It had been a natural decision that he would never board an aeroplane. Once he’d lost his own vessel in the waters off Mallorca, Gerald had been effectively marooned. In the absence of convenient alternatives, he made one round-trip journey by air between Mallorca and London in 1979 for Aegina’s wedding. It had surely been the freakish unreality attending every aspect of the reissue of his book that had flattered and sufficiently unmoored him into agreeing to fly to London for what was in fact no more than a cocktail party at the British Museum. Had they told him he would have to fly in an aeroplane to see his book in print and pick up his fifteen thousand pounds, he might not have agreed. He would have recognized it as a chimerical Siren lure.

“Perhaps we won’t get on,” he said, hopefully.

Aegina smiled at him. “We’ve got tickets, we’ll get on.” She wrapped her arm around his. “Don’t worry, you’ll live. We’ll go have a coffee and a bocadillo after we check in.”

Two

Lulu had arranged numerous birthday presents for herself. No one knew what she wanted as well as she did. The first was a hot, flaky, sugar-powdered ensaïmada, the spiral-shaped Mallorcan pastry, for breakfast. She rarely ate them, but they looked so lovely and retained an allure (usually dispelled on eating more than one) because of the infrequency of her indulgence. One, every now and then, was satisfactory and sufficient.

Floriana was another birthday present, though this was simply an addition to the normal weekly routine. The strong, silent, Indian-featured Brazilian woman came at four to give Lulu a massage. They were not friends. Floriana said, “Bon dia, señora,” and got on with it. She oiled, kneaded, swept her strong hands over the long, still quite tautly fleshed, lissome body on her table with some kind of dowser’s absorption of the secrets summoned from the nerves and muscles beneath Lulu’s skin, until Lulu felt herself falling and letting go any shards of tension, any disagreeable thoughts.

She had her big present planned for later.

•   •   •

Luc woke from his siesta to the chatter of voices, the clinking of plates outside the closed shutters. He’d arrived late last night and he’d drunk too much wine at lunch. The room was noticeably cooler, the light softer than the stabbing hard-edged bars that had shimmered beneath the louvers when he’d fallen asleep. A gentle flower-scented breeze played across his face and chest; he heard the wind in the pines outside.

He rose from the bed, naked, walked to the window, and cracked open the shutters. Below, in the wide courtyard beneath the wrack-boughed canopy of pines, the catering crew hired for his mother’s birthday party—young, dark-haired Mallorcan men and women in tight black trousers, black trainers, and white shirts—were laying the tables. The massive, enigmatic Bronwyn, in baggy shorts, a vast T-shirt not concealing the roll of her breasts and belly, was briefing the crew grouped around her.

Luc’s eye rested on one of the crew. She was tall; he could only see her back, a narrow but well-rounded ass in tight black pants, dark tightly waving hair pulled back. A billowy white shirt that told him nothing about what it covered. She turned, and he saw that she had a pronounced high-bridged, hooked nose. He watched her as she listened to Bronwyn with her mouth attentively open, until she walked quickly toward the kitchen and out of sight.

Luc closed the shutters. He was staying in the end room in the two-story addition to the main house, which contained most of the guest rooms. The barracks, his mother called it: a long rectangular building, white, tile-roofed, its windows framed with shutters painted the same sage green as the shutters on the main house. Its looming monolithic shape had softened over the decades as Cape honeysuckle, bougainvillea, palms and geraniums had grown and spread around its base and walls. Other than during the brief period at the beginning of his life when his father had been married to his mother, Luc had never had a permanent room of his own in his mother’s home. Out of season, or when there were few guests, and he’d stayed in a small room in the main house. In his teen years, before the barracks had been built in 1970, he’d fashioned a lair inside a terra-cotta block-and-stucco hut near the back wall of the property, one of several rude original outbuildings used for gardening tools, perhaps at one time for animals. He’d fixed it up himself with a mattress on boards and bricks, a string to hang clothes on, shelves for books, and an electric wire run from the house whose two exposed ends he twisted around the screws in a lightbulb socket to read by. It was the size of a small solitary cell, but Luc felt at home in it. It was as far as possible from the house and the bar and the other guests and, most of all, his mother. He could come and go by the path to the garage without seeing anybody or being seen. He could live a secret life. People forgot about him for hours, sometimes days, at a time. Between his long summers in Mallorca, when Luc was back at school in Paris, living in his father’s high-ceilinged, tall-windowed apartment in the sixth arrondissement, the walls inside his toolshed grew black with mold and had to be repainted white. He arrived every July to his newly painted hovel, holed up with books, with immense plans for sex, and lived through the season at the Rocks in a background corner like a watchful spider. But his little bunkhouse and the other outbuildings had been torn down to make room for the barracks, and since that time Luc had always occupied one or other of the rooms—wherever a guest was not—in the new building.

He saw himself in the mirror on the wall and pulled in his stomach. Still okay for mid-forties. He put on a bathing suit, a T-shirt, grabbed a towel, and padded barefoot down the tiled stairs. He walked around the tables and the caterers, heading across the courtyard toward the gate to the road.

“Hello, Lukey, darling!” a guest called from the bar across the patio.

“Hi,” he said, waving.

He found April across the road, on the narrow ledge of rocks above the sea. She was lying faceup on a towel, topless. She had just come out of the water. Drops of seawater beaded on her pale, oiled skin.

“Hi,” he said. “How are you doing?”

“Oh, hi.” She put her hand to her eyes and squinted up at him. “I’m doing great. Are you going in? The water’s, like, incredible.”

“I might,” said Luc. He spread his towel beside her and sat down on it. He didn’t feel like going into the water, getting wet, jolting his still sleep-warm body awake. April had removed her hand from her face and lay with her eyes closed.

“Aren’t you going to get burned out here?” he said.

“Uh-uh. I’m covered with bulletproof sunblock.”

April was in her mid-twenties. She’d been cast in the film she had just wrapped, which Luc had written, for her ethereal, almost translucent milk-white skin, strawberry-blond hair (above and below). The sets and locations were monochromatic in tone: an urban wasteland of apartment towers in Paris’s banlieues; the movie was shot almost entirely during the crepuscular hours of dawn and dusk. The exposed film had been desaturated of most of its color, so the girl (April), stalked by her obsessive former boyfriend, could blend or vanish into concrete wherever she went, and drive him insane. The unreal, liminal effect of her character was heightened by the fact that before shooting, Luc and the director had decided to cut most of April’s dialogue and have the rest dubbed in breathy whispers to avoid the shattering effect of her San Fernando Valley accent on even the most monosyllabic French.

She looked healthier now. Her skin, faintly freckled up close, was alive—light goose bumps rose on her arms; the peach-pink areolae around her nipples had contracted and puckered as the salt water evaporated off her in the light sea breeze. Luc bent forward and placed his mouth over her cool, wet nipple, licking salty drops—

April flinched, pulling away. “Don’t!” she said.

“Why not?”

“Someone might see you.”

“There’s no one here.”

“Well, I’m not comfortable with you doing that in public.”

“Whatever makes you comfortable, then.”

Luc pulled his knees up to his chest. He looked out over the flat blue sea at a gigantic insect-shaped motor yacht steaming inshore to round the easternmost point of the island on its way perhaps from Palma to Pollença, or to drop its anchor off the plush Hotel Formentor.

“So, okay,” said April, her eyes still closed, “I want to talk about your mother.”

“Okay.”

“Well. She’s very beautiful.”

“That’s nice.”

“I mean, like, I can’t believe she’s seventy!” she said, ending forcefully, as if Luc had been deceiving her about his mother’s age for months.

“You think she looks younger.”

April made a sharp exhalation. “Yeah! Like, forty? Maybe? And she has a really—I don’t know—is that an upper-class English accent?”

“That’s what it sounds like now. It’s what used to be called RP, or Received Pronunciation. It was the way some people in England spoke about ninety years ago. You hear it in old newsreels where they talk about the Suez ‘Ca-nell.’”

“Then how come you have sort of an American accent when you speak English?”

“Because I am an American. I told you, my father was American. When I spoke English, I spoke with him.”

April was silent but cogitative in the sun for a moment. “So what happened with your mother and father? How come they split up?”

“Why does anyone break up? They didn’t get on.”

“So, does she, like, have a boyfriend?”

“Not in the way you think of it.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s had friends. And visitors. Friends who fly down for a few days.”

“You mean they come down to see her and they have sex?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, wow. That’s different. Does she know to use protection?”

“You know what, April sweetheart? I don’t go there.”

“Well, she’s from an older generation, and she’s, you know, out there.”

“I leave those things to her. It’s sweet of you to concern yourself, though. Are you coming in soon?”

“In a while. I’m just, like, it’s so peaceful here.”

“Take your time.”

Luc stood up and walked back across the road.

•   •   •

There you are,” said Lulu, gliding across the patio between the bar and the main house. Their paths crossed.

“Hello, Mother. Are you having a nice birthday?”

“Yes, I am, darling. Come inside and have tea with me.”

Luc followed his mother into the house.

“I’ll have my tea now, Bronwyn,” Lulu called as they passed the kitchen door. “And will you bring a cup for Luc?”

“Right!” came the reply, in stolid Estuary English.

They went into the living room that looked out over the shaded front patio, over the bougainvillea that obscured the dirt road but revealed the Jerusalem stone–colored rocks and the sea. Lulu arranged herself on the pale blue slipcovered sofa. Luc sprawled in a battered leather club chair opposite her.

“She’s very lovely, your April.”

Ah yes, he thought, here it comes. “She is.”

“And is she any good?”

“What?”

“Is she a good actress?”

“Oh. She’s not bad. You know. She’s just starting out. She did well, as far as it went. She looked right—”

“And are you pleased with this film? Are you hopeful?”

“Well, it’s not going to be Lawrence of Arabia.” Luc’s favorite movie, the benchmark for what films once were, against which he measured the subsequent impoverishment of cinema.

“Why not, darling?”

Luc smiled indulgently. “It’s small, Mother. An indie film. A sort of noirish thriller. But it’s edgy. I think I did a good job with what they gave me. Depending how well it turns out, if it gets some good reviews, has some legs, then my stock will go up; if it doesn’t, or if it disappears, then I’m none the worse off, it’s been a reasonable payday, and I’m on to the next.”

“And what decides how well it turns out?”

“How it all cuts together. What the performances are like. What they—”

“Who are they, darling?”

“The director, the editor, the producer—”

“I thought you were going to produce your next film.”

He laughed good-humoredly. “Well, I’m trying. It’s not that easy. Lawrence of Arabia may be the greatest film ever made, but it couldn’t get made today—”

“You told me yourself—you’ve complained for years, in fact—that the writer has no power. You’re a hireling. But if you produce it, you’re the boss. You get the right people and tell them how you want it done, and you have control of the end result.”

“Yes, but—”

“But you have to come up with your own project, right?”

“Yes, Mother. That’s right. And the money. And that’s what I’m trying to do. I’ve told you. I’m writing stuff, I’m always reading, looking at properties, talking with people—”

“Now you sound like a schoolboy making excuses about your homework. Luc, you’re forty-five. You can’t be a beginner forever. You’re treading water. You’ll be none the worse off if this film drops into a black hole because nobody’s ever heard of you. What happened to that novel you were going to write? It sounded wonderful. Why don’t you write that?”

“I did write it, Mother. You read it. You thought it was rubbish. Evidently, you were right, because no one wanted to publish it.”

“You were going to write a better one. I’m talking about that wonderful novel. Why don’t you write it? Look at the rubbish that sells. You’re a better writer than that. Write a good book.”

“That’s a great idea. I hadn’t thought of that—”

“I can’t stand to see you wallowing in failure.”

“Mother—” Luc took a deep breath. He smiled. “I’ve written four films and made some money. I own a nice apartment in Paris—”

“Your father’s apartment.”

“Never mind, it’s mine now, and I own it. It’s worth a fortune. I work. I have friends. A nice life. Where, exactly, is the failure part of that?”

“You’re throwing yourself away on dross. And look at this one—this girl you’ve brought down. She’s pretty, sweet—extremely simple—but is she the girl for you? I mean, what are you doing, darling?”

“Listen to you: this one, she says,” Luc said more irritably than he’d wished. “I mean, what about you? When’s the last time you tried having a relationship with someone?”

“Darling, I have many dear friends, as you know. I don’t dorelationships, like taking the waters at Baden-Baden.”

“I know. You’re completely self-sufficient, apart from regular servicing. I, on the other hand, try to engage with the human race now and then. I try to have relationships. They’re difficult, but at least I try. I’d still even like to have children someday. I should think you’d be pleased that I bring someone down, but you’re not. Instead you’re—I mean, what are you talking about, Mother?”

Lulu looked at him steadily. “I’m talking about the joke you once told me, about the position of the writer in the film industry.”

“Which of the many jokes was that?”

“The one about the starlet who’s so stupid that she sleeps with the writer.”

“Ah.” Luc looked at his watch—his father’s old stainless steel Rolex—as if reminded of an appointment. He stood up. “Well, I’m going to have a shower before I dress.”

Bronwyn came in with a tray.

“I’ve got your tea,” she said to Luc. “Do you want to take it with you?”

“No, thanks, Bronwyn.” He left the room.

Outside, Luc started toward the barracks, then changed his mind, swerved left, and walked across the patio.

“Hallo!” said the cheerful blonde behind the bar. Lulu’s staff were always British girls, usually very young and fantastically thrilled to spend a season in Mallorca for very little pay. Luc hadn’t met this one. She was wearing a loose sarong.

“Hi. A San Miguel, please. I’ll just have it in the bottle.”

“Sure. You’re Luc, aren’t you, Lulu’s son?”

“Yes. And you are?”

“Sally! Hi!” She stretched her hand across the bar and Luc shook it.

“Of course you are,” he said.

“You’re the film producer!”

“Just a screenwriter.”

“Oh, brilliant!”

Another cretin.

“No, no, Luc, her name really is Sally!” said an elderly man sitting on a nearby barstool. He appeared to be naked, except for the salami-sized cigar in one hand, and all but the rear strip of his tiny Speedo concealed by a large belly. “This Sally’s a Sally!”

For most of the 1960s, the Rocks’ universally beloved bartender had been a plump, pretty, effusive English blonde named Sally. The regular annual guests had thereafter called all successive bartenders Sally.

Sally pulled a San Miguel from the thick-doored icebox-style fridge with the handle that clicked shut, and placed the bottle, immediately frosting with condensation, on top of the bar.

“I’ll try to remember,” said Luc. “How are you, Richard?”

“I’m well, old bean,” said the man with the cigar. “And how are you? Arabella’s jolly excited to see you. And to meet your friend.”

“I’m looking forward to seeing her,” said Luc. “You can put it on my tab,” he told Sally.

“Brilliant!” she said.

Peripherally, Luc noticed the younger couple at the bar smiling broadly at him. He could tell, a prickling in his skin, that they were just about to say to him, with a rapid and thrilled rise in inflection, “Oh, do you work in films, then?” He turned quickly away.

Luc took the beer and walked across the courtyard and sat at a table that had not yet been laid for dinner. He raised the icy bottle to his lips. His first San Miguel this year. It had been Luc’s first alcoholic drink, 1965, the summer he turned fifteen. The first one had been too bitter, but a few days later he’d had another and soon they began to taste just right. Those bubbles on the roof of his mouth and the clean, hoppy flavor. Every year since, the first San Miguel became his madeleine. As he drank it, scenes from all those summers spent at the Rocks and around Cala Marsopa rose up whole and three-dimensional before him with all their hopes, intrigues, and desires that had somehow never been slaked.

He drank half the bottle immediately while it was as cold as possible. Of course, if he did make Lawrence of Arabia, it wouldn’t be good enough for his mother (she had only seen the film once and found “all that desert excruciatingly boring”). Her job as a mother, which she took seriously, had always been to goad him with his complacent wallowing in mediocrity. His persistent nonarrival. The little triumphs—a César nomination for one of his screenplays—were heard, when he mentioned them, pronounced “how nice for you, darling,” and never mentioned again. The success and good fortune of managing to get jobs, make money, were ignored. The two years he’d spent in Los Angeles developing a screenplay that went nowhere, but for which he’d made good money, was an opportunity to offer sympathy over yet more failure. “I know you wanted it, darling, but I do think it’s as well nothing came of it. It was such absolute rubbish.” Trouble was, he agreed with her: when was he going to make it—really make it? When was he going to be more than an also-ran? At forty-five, could there still be something big ahead, or was this it? Small movies, made for not a franc more than the anticipated box office of German, French, and middle-European territories, ennobled by the appellation noirish, destined for certain oblivion; enough money to live less than another year on; and the perks of per diems, good hotel rooms, and someone like April Gressens?

The old, cold horror gripped him: was he fated to hack his way through mediocrity?

“Perdó.”

He looked up. It was the catering girl with the hooked nose.

She’d spoken reflexively in mallorquí, but now she said in Spanish, “Perdóneme”—her hands were full of plates, cutlery—“tengo que—”

“Yes, of course,” Luc answered in fluent Spanish. “I’m in your way.” He started to rise.

“No, you can sit,” she said, “if I won’t disturb you. I have to lay the table.”

She worked efficiently around him. Now he saw that she was impressively ugly. A gargoyle on the wall of an Egyptian crypt. Large black eyes, a low brow, a wide full mouth, everything asymmetrical, and that nose, like a Tintin villain. Everything else, though, was pretty good: the thick dark Spanish hair, a dancer’s body.

“You’re mallorquina?” he asked.

“My ancestors are from here. I live in Barcelona but I’ve come here to Mallorca every summer of my life.”

“Ah, like me, except for the ancestors,” said Luc. “What are you called?”

“Montserrat,” she said.

“I’m called Luc—Lluc in Catalan.”

“Yes, I know,” she said. She smiled at him suddenly, as if she knew something he didn’t that amused her intensely. “Pleased to meet you.”

“And you,” he said. “This what you do?”

“No. This is work for the summer. I’m studying art history, religious iconography, at the University of Barcelona.”

The best university in Spain. Not just an asymmetrical face, then. “Are you religious?”

“When I need to be.” She grinned. Sharp white teeth in wine red gums. “Nice to meet you—at last.” She went off to set another table.

At last? What’s that all about?

Now he couldn’t take his eyes off her. Montserrat. Her ancestors, easily discerned, were Roman, Moorish, Catalan. She was the highly evolved product of all of Mediterranean history and cultures. Luc understood her immediately as he would never fathom the opaque shallows of the homogenized April from California. Intelligence poured off her. She was quick, knowing (she knew more than he did about something, apparently), and funny. She would understand him too, he knew it absolutely. He sipped his beer, watching Montserrat swing her lean thighs and narrow hips around a table. Her quick eyes and hands adroitly covering a table. She had strong hands. Her genetic makeup contained eons of domestic skills. She could probably herd goats just as well, with children on her hip. He imagined her in Paris. Reading a book on religious iconography in the Luxembourg Garden. In his apartment. He imagined the view from just above the knees upward between Montserrat’s thighs. Maybe she could transfer to the Sorbonne.

He’d got her all wrong, he realized. She wasn’t ugly at all. Her face was a Picasso.

His mother was, of course, right again: What was he doing with April? Like a good Californian, she was skilled in bed, but with a rote avidity that smacked more of conscious performance than lust, and was, not astonishingly, beginning to bore him. He would undoubtedly bore her too before long, with his frame of reference that might as well be allusions to the Upanishads for all that April understood at any given moment what he might be on about. He ought to find someone like Montserrat, warm, real, unconcerned about his mother’s sexual protection. Like old Gerald had done: married a local woman who’d given him a child and stuck to him, and devoted herself to him until she’d dropped. He imagined the children he and Montserrat would make together: dark-haired, beautiful, artistic, extraordinary, asymmetrical. They would all be Picassos—

“Hey!” said April.

Luc tensed reflexively as she dropped into his lap with a proprietorial heedlessness.

“Look. What. Your. Mother. Gave me,” she said, her voice full of amazed reverence. “Aren’t they just, like, incredibly beautiful?”

“They are,” he agreed.

They were straps of braided gold yarn containing glinting metallic filaments. They looked exotic, fabled, Levantine. They had the burnished golden hue of ancient coins.

“You wear them on the top of your feet,” she said, raising her bare foot.

“I know. I’ve seen them before.”

April didn’t seem to hear him. “You put this loop around the second toe, like this, and then they go over the top of the foot and then around the ankle and fasten like this.” She put the pair on her feet, which were like a child’s feet: pale, unveined, undistorted by ill-fitting footwear, now dressed as if for a toga party.

“Your mother just, like, floated over to me when I came in and gave them to me. To keep!”

“She’s taken a shine to you.”

“Really? Aw. She is totally beautiful. Look, what do you think?” She lifted her legs, pivoting them for angled views of her adorned feet, unaware (or perhaps not) of the way her buttocks ground into Luc’s lap.

He looked over her scissoring legs at Montserrat, who had moved off to a more distant table.

“Aren’t they amazing?” said April. “You wear them on bare feet, without shoes.”

“Yes, they’re amazing. They were made in the sixties by someone who lived here. A friend of mine.”

“I’m going to wear them tonight.”

April rubbed her gilded foot along Luc’s leg. She moved her buttocks again, consciously now. “Mmm. What’s this?”

Only his body’s brainless response; Luc wasn’t interested in pursuing it. “Nothing much.”

April got up and stood beside Luc. She raised her leg, stretching her foot aloft balletically, and then brought it down onto Luc’s lap, pushing into him.

“Hey,” he said.

April gazed at her feet. “These things are making me feel, like . . . I don’t know . . .” She raised her arms and began to sway. She’d shown him her belly-dance technique several times. That’s what’s coming, he realized. He stood up as the towel around April’s hips began to twitch and her gold-topped feet darted toward him. Again, he looked at Montserrat, across the patio.

“Okay,” he said. He took her hand and tried to lead her toward the barracks, but April, gyrating slowly, pulled her arm away. He turned and walked on quickly toward the barracks. He leapt up the stairs toward his room.

Three

Late in the afternoon, Charlie rode his bike down the rutted dirt driveway from C’an Cabrer, his grandfather’s farm. It was another kilometer along the paved road into Cala Marsopa. He met Bianca at the English and German bookshop and café off the plaza. They bussed each other on both cheeks and walked, Charlie pushing his bike, through town to the port.

“Ho-laaa,” Rafaela, the pale, lightly mustached, dark-haired woman who owned the Bar-Restaurante Marítimo, greeted them both with affection.

“Hola,” Charlie replied, with a smile, “cómo estás?” He’d been brought to this restaurant overlooking the port as an infant in a basket, and he’d come back every summer of his life. Rafaela always knew him. It wasn’t so everywhere in Cala Marsopa. A week ago, buying a bag of hot churros from the gnarled vendor whom Charlie had known since toddlerhood and remembered like an uncle who always had a treat for him, the old man had looked at him—now a six-foot youth—without recognition, and asked him for “fünfundzwanzig pesetas,” and Charlie had been cut to the quick.

Rafaela led them to a table on the terrace overlooking the yachts and the fishing boats in the harbor. They ordered hamburguesas, papas fritas, and Cokes. Before the food arrived, Sylvestre, Natalie, and Marie joined them. Rafaela had known them for years too: the children of children of foreign residents who had lived on or come back to the island since Rafaela had been a child herself. They ordered calamari.

“On va tout le monde à l’anniversaire de Lulu au Rocks?” asked Sylvestre.

“Yeah. I’m going to be the DJ,” said Charlie.

“Ahhh, non!” said Marie, expectorating the first word with exasperation. “Putain, j’en ai marre de cette musi-i-i-que.”

“No, it’s cool,” said Charlie agreeably. “Anyway, it’s what Lulu wants.”

After they’d eaten, Sylvestre and the two French girls walked back through town.

The sea breeze had died. It was hot near the stucco apartment buildings and concrete walls that had replaced the shade of bent pines and crumbles of limestone that defined the edges of the old fishing harbor that still appeared in postcards of Cala Marsopa. Charlie and Bianca climbed the steps to the top of the breakwater and walked out to the blinking light at the far end where they sat in the shadow of its structure, out of the flash. It was cooler above the water.

They kissed wetly, hungrily, like people eating steadily under a time constraint. Charlie put his hand inside Bianca’s shirt and slipped her precocious breasts free of her bra. She threw her legs over his lap and let her hand rest on Charlie’s thigh. Charlie’s own crossed legs prevented, he hoped, Bianca feeling his erection pulsing spasmodically beneath her. As a child, Bianca had been skinny. When Charlie saw her the summer they were both twelve, she’d become softer. At thirteen, she was heavier. This year, at fifteen, Charlie’s age, that heaviness had concentrated in her sizable breasts, and her hips. Now he thought of Bianca ceaselessly when he masturbated, but they’d been playmates since they were children and he didn’t want to spoil their friendship. Sex had come over them, and they played with it nicely like friends playing dolls. They went no further. By unspoken agreement, they’d settled on this decent plateau of intimacy. Charlie liked Bianca too much to make her uncomfortable.

After a bit, he looked at his watch and said, “I better get going.”

At the bottom of the steps, Charlie got on his bike. Bianca sat on the crossbar and he pedaled them down the quay. He dropped her close to the plaza and she said, “À toute à l’heure,” as he pedaled away.

Five minutes later, he swung into the small driveway off the alley and laid his bike against the wall outside the kitchen.

At seven, with the tables set, dinner being prepared, most of the Rocks’ guests were in their rooms, bathing, dressing, or still taking a siesta. A few were sitting at the bar in bathing suits. Charlie walked across the patio toward the bar, past two middle-aged men hunched over a backgammon board. Dominick Cleland, even hunched, was tall and thin, with a thatch of straight gray-blond hair that made him look like a dissolute version of a well-known British cabinet minister. He was wearing a royal blue Turnbull & Asser shirt over Speedo briefs. His long, hairless legs, shapeless and knobbed as a giraffe’s, entwined around themselves, ended in long sockless feet and white Gucci loafers. He had written pulp novels about the misbehavior of the British upper classes, but his subject no longer held the public’s interest and he hadn’t published a book in twenty years. With a small annuity left to him by an uncle, he lived most of the year in a tiny flat in South Kensington, and spent his summers at the Rocks. He felt at home there. If he was near the phone in the bar when it rang, Dominick liked to answer it by shouting into the receiver, “Los Roques! Dígame?” regardless of the fact that no one but Anglophones ever telephoned the Rocks.

His opponent, and physiological opposite, Cassian Ollorenshaw, resembled, even in his youth, the actor Edward G. Robinson at his most toadlike and implacable. Now, his face blotchy red from inflamed rosacea, he peered at the board through small, round, yellow-lensed glasses. His body below his large head was inconsequential, swallowed in a voluminous white T-shirt and skirt-sized swimming trunks. They played fast and silently. They’d been there, playing backgammon at a table on the patio, every summer—except a couple of years when Cassian had been in prison—since Charlie’s father had first brought him to the Rocks as an infant. They’d been there when he played in the pool as a child with the children of guests, and with those same children when they returned as teenagers. They were more familiar to him than most of his relatives. Cassian looked up now and said, with a small smile, “Hallo, Charlie.”

“Hi, Cassian.”

“Hallo, Charlie,” said Sally, as he approached the bar. “I’m supposed to give you whatever you want to drink tonight.”

“A Coke, please. Just the bottle’ll be great, thanks.”

He took his Coke into the small room off the bar that once housed the gas bottles. It was no wider than its two glass doors. Inside stood a chair and a table that supported a turntable. Charlie set his Coke down on the table and began going through the vinyl albums that filled a wall of shelves.

Lulu came out of the house, gliding across the patio in a gauzy linen djellaba that billowed behind her. She smiled serenely.

“Lulu, darling,” Dominick Cleland greeted her loudly, while shaking a cup of dice. “Are you having the most wonderful birthday ever, my love?”

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Rocks"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Peter Nichols.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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