The Rocks

by Peter Nichols

  “I don’t get seasick. I just don’t go aboard yachts,” said Lulu emphatically. “You know that.”

  “I know,” said Luc. “But Gábor keeps going on about you. I think he’s arranged the whole lunch just to see you again.”

  “I can’t help that. He can come here if he wants to see me.”

  “It’s just a lunch.”

  “It’s a boat.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake!” said Luc. “Just because you had a rotten time with your first husband on some little boat a hundred years ago, what’s that got to do with life now?”

  “That won’t help, darling.”

  “I know. You don’t do what you don’t want to do. I know that. What an idiot I am to think you’d make an exception for me.”

  Abruptly, he left and zoomed off on his motorcycle.

  She was immune too to the cajoling of Sarah Bavister. “Oh, Lulu, you’ve got to! Look at that bloody boat! Come on, we’ve got to go see it. Really, don’t you want to?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  After breakfast Lulu pulled on gloves and picked up secateurs and climbed the steps to the garden above the pool. Yesterday’s light breeze was gone. What remained, barely felt on the skin, produced a sound like gentle exhalation overhead in the canopy of the pines that shaded much of the garden. She snipped at the rosebushes planted along the back wall. They were doing awfully well. She’d sprinkled Tom’s and Milly’s ashes in the rose beds in May. They had died in a small plane crash on the way to a fishing holiday in Scotland—just when they’d become wonderfully rich from all those strawberry punnets. Cassian had brought them down from London in two large Horlicks bottles. Tom and Milly had rented Villa Los Roques during the summers after the war. They’d invited Lulu down, and then loaned her the money to buy the place. “We’ll keep it in the family!” they said.

  Dear Milly. Was she was being fanciful to imagine that the roses had never looked better? Snip . . . snip . . .

  Luc was intelligent, of course, but she was no longer sure of his talent. She had read his prose—the beginnings of abandoned novels, the one he had finished which she thought poor and which had been roundly rejected by publishers. He’d talked about another novel, a story of a journalist in Paris during the occupation. That at least sounded commercial because it had Nazis in it. Then he had started writing screenplays instead. Snip . . . snip. She had to admit he had some sort of facility for film writing. She saw the scenes he wrote clearly, but she wondered why anyone would go to see such films, full of aimless people with a knack for self-destruction. She disliked recognizing Luc in these characters—they all seemed pathetic, and therefore quite believable. Snip . . . At least he was making a little money. She’d helped him out a number of times, but it was always disappointing to give money to a grown man.

  Snip . . . snip . . .

  This ludicrous film producer obviously liked him. He’d invited Luc on holiday. He had money. He was full of praise for Luc’s work. He might actually make the film.

  Snip. Miss you so, Milly, darling. What do you think?

  Later, as she came down the steps from the garden, she found Sarah beside the pool.

  “I will come to lunch with you,” announced Lulu.

  “Oh, darling Lulu, how wonderful!” said Sarah.

  “What time do we have to be there?”

  “One, I think.”

  “We’ll go in my car.”

  She went into the house to change.

  “I’m so glad Lulu’s coming!” Sarah said.

  “I’m surprised,” said Dominick, who lay nearby, eyes closed, glistening with oil in the noonday sun. “Lulu doesn’t do boats, you know.”

  “You’re coming, aren’t you?” asked Sarah.

  “Oh yes,” said Dominick. “I want to see inside that boat. I bet it’s got a fuck nest the size of the Great Bed of Ware.”

  • • •

  Fergus’s Range Rover purred along the quay just before ten. He parked beside the yacht. Dolphin’s deck was five or six feet above him and he could see no one aboard. Gingerly, holding its rope rail, he mounted the narrow, unsteady, aluminum gangplank thingy.

  “Hello,” he said when a crewman, polishing a brass thingy, came into view. Then he saw the film producer farther away on the foredeck, his shirt off, his wife doing something to his back. He could tell the man had forgotten.

  “Hallo!” said Fergus again. “Did you still want to see our property?”

  “Of course! I am coming.”

  Five minutes later, Fergus was driving him through town. “Are you in fact looking for property?”

  “Always,” said Szabó. “The Côte d’Azur, the Cinque Terre, all too crowded now. Not peaceful. So I look around anywhere. I would like a villa in a quiet place near the sea in the sun. Not a long flight from Paris. There is an airport here, yes?”

  “Oh, absolutely,” said Fergus. “Palma, an hour and a half away. Flights all over Europe. Probably two hours to Paris. Four hours door to door. That wouldn’t be bad, eh?”

  • • •

  Gerald was pruning the olive trees—trees that were no longer his, technically, though he was unsure of the exact demarcation between his land and the lot he had now officially sold to Fergus and his cabal of developers. Hopefully they wouldn’t chop them all down, even those on their parcel, but build their villas to blend into the landscape and preserve as much of it as possible—as Fergus had assured him was their intention. It had even occurred to Gerald that they might not be able to sell their lots and the development might come to nothing in the end. So until some villa-owning holidaymaker told him to clear off out of his front garden, Gerald would continue to prune and look after as many trees as were left standing.

  Now he heard Fergus’s voice in the nearly still morning air. That breezy, chummy, confident waffle, though he couldn’t make out the words. Gerald immediately grabbed his small pruning saw and the large, worn straw basket he’d brought with him, and scuttled away, his espadrilles making no sound in the brush. He moved upslope out of the line of sight that Fergus, and whoever was with him, would have across the property toward the town and the sea view. He was well up the hill among the prickly pear and the cork oak when he saw them below: Fergus, in Panama hat, and a large man wearing a blue shirt the size of a bedspread. Gerald crouched and watched. They continued a short distance and stopped. Fergus pointed and gestured around him with expansive enthusiasm. Gerald could see from his stolid posture and cursory glances around him that the man in the shirt was unimpressed. Good. He made only a few comments before turning away, leaving Fergus to follow him back the way they’d come, still chattering.

  Gerald moved along the hill above them, keeping them in view until they disappeared below the house. He waited until he heard the Range Rover moving down the drive.

  He found Aegina painting in her studio off the kitchen.

  “Who was Fergus with?” Gerald asked. Rivulets of sweat marked the dust along his temples and neck.

  “Some film producer off a yacht in the port. He was showing him the land. Did you talk to them?”

  “No. I went to ground.”

  Aegina laughed. “Of course you did.”

  Gerald looked at the canvas on her easel. It was a view of where he had just come from: the olive trees, the land falling away to the sea, the distant ridgeline to the north. Aegina had taped a color photograph of the scene to the easel above the canvas. “It’s beautiful,” he said.

  Aegina turned to him. “You’ll always have it to look at.”

  Gerald leaned over and kissed his daughter. Then he said, “Where’s Charlie?”

  “Penny came and took him to the beach with Bianca. I have a free morning.”

  Gerald went back outside. He picked up his basket and pruning saw and walked back around the hill to the olive grove. He continued pruning, shaping the t
rees for how he would want to see them and pick their fruit in fifty years’ time. He knelt and held the small trimmed branches against his thighs and cut them into shorter lengths for the basket. He would burn them in the fireplace over the winter.

  • • •

  As she painted her picture of her father’s olive grove, Aegina listened to her father’s records. He liked the pastoral music of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century English composers: Vaughan Williams, Elgar, Butterworth, Holst, Finzi, Alwyn, Bantock, Parry, Bridge, Delius, Moeran. Gerald liked to read the novels of Thomas Hardy, Arnold Bennett, Anthony Powell, while listening to a stack of his LPs on the old HMV record player. He imagined, Aegina knew, the landscapes of Dorset, the Lake District, and the fen country, London, and the Five Towns in Victorian gaslight, as he read. To Aegina, however, it was all indigenous Mallorcan music—the music she’d listened to growing up. When she heard it she saw the landscape around C’an Cabrer, all the pictures that rose up from her life in Mallorca.

  Seeing Luc in town had disassembled her. They had imprinted themselves upon each other in the way babies and animals do with life’s earliest emotional and olfactory associations. It would always be Luc, and then everyone else. Would Charlie and Bianca also grow up with a sense of fated inevitability about each other? Naked together at the beach with fat little hands sharing clumps of sand, naked later with hands exploring each other’s bodies? Would their whole hermetic world, built of the idea of each other, also rupture and be lost?

  In some now unrecallable way, Fergus had seemed the correct antidote to Luc. Stable, cheerful, amusing, massively self-confident, unneurotic, presentable, tall, clean, wearer of suits. A property developer, not an artist or a dreamer. Not her type at all. An odd, incongruent presence at a party seven years earlier at the Sydney Close studio of one of her Chelsea School of Art instructors, Jonquil Thorn, R.A. Half a head taller than everyone else at the party, his pinstripe weaving through a sea of denim and leather.

  Fergus had chatted her up as soon as she’d arrived.

  “Are you one of Jonquil’s students?”

  “I was,” said Aegina. “I work now.”

  “Ah. But you’re an artist?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know a thing about art,” he said blissfully.

  “Why are you here?”

  “Jonquil tells me what to buy. I’ve bought some of her big abstract thingies. What sort of stuff do you do?”

  “Not abstract.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, landscapes, drawings, portraits. Very boring.”

  “Actually, I need some landscapes.”

  The next evening he appeared at the door to Aegina’s small basement flat off Gloucester Road.

  “How did you know where I live?” she asked.

  “I found your address in Jonquil’s Filofax. Can I come in and see your stuff?”

  She was offended and flattered. “Does she know?”

  “Doubt it.”

  “Well, since you’re here.”

  He had to stoop through the doorway.

  “I like this one,” Fergus said, picking up a dark, smudged-looking riverscape, one of Aegina’s attempts at a Whistler “nocturne” of the Thames. “It’s awfully good—isn’t it?”

  She was involuntarily charmed that he admitted he didn’t know (or affected that he didn’t) and asked her, the artist. “Well, it’s never as good as one wants it to be—”

  “Do you want to sell it? How much do you want for it?”

  That was the other thing about Fergus: money.

  “I have no idea,” she said. He was interested for the wrong reasons. It was embarrassing.

  “Two hundred pounds?”

  “It’s certainly not worth that. You can get a decent nineteenth-century landscape at Christie’s for two hundred pounds.”

  “Well, I like it.”

  “You don’t know a thing about art. You said so yourself.” She nodded at her painting in his hand. “QED.”

  “What’s not good about it, then?” Fergus persisted. “What would Jonquil say about it?”

  “You’d better ask her—”

  “I did. Not about this, obviously, but about you—as an artist. She thinks you’re good. Two hundred sounds reasonable, then. You’ve seen the rubbish out there for ten times that. Right?”

  He made her nervous and she wanted him to go away. But she was broke too—always—it infected the way you thought about everything; it weakened resolve. “If you insist.”

  “I do. Have you eaten?”

  It seemed churlish to refuse him. She was even more uncomfortable now. But also hungry.

  On the Fulham Road, they were engulfed by a flock of pigeons taking to the air, and Fergus quickly threw his arm around her. He placed himself between her and the pigeons.

  He took her to San Frediano. The food and wine were good. Fergus told her about a pigeon he had found and kept for a few days in his dormitory at boarding school. “It shat all over Matron, in her starched white uniform, when she discovered it. I got into terrible trouble.”

  Aegina laughed. “What happened?”

  “Six of the best!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A jolly good caning! Six strokes, well laid on.”

  “You mean they beat you for that?” She saw him as a little boy, hit repeatedly with a bamboo cane.

  He asked her out again. She was flattered but not interested. He was ten years older. He was the sort of businessman type she felt she had nothing in common with. He was almost too tall. She put him off, several times.

  In late spring, Fergus knocked at the door to her flat.

  “You’ve been gone,” he said.

  “I was in Morocco.” She explained that she’d flown to Morocco and bought some shirts and other clothing and brought them back to sell at various shops, a small but profitable excursion she’d made several years in a row that had helped put her through art school.

  “Will you come to dinner? San Fred all right?”

  She was off guard, unprepared to think of a good excuse. She was exhausted but, again, hungry, and remembered the food. And he suddenly seemed . . . likable. “All right. But not late, if that’s okay with you.”

  At dinner he told her about the converted barn he’d just bought in Dorset. It needed paintings. There was an auction of British and European nineteenth-century paintings coming up at Christie’s, and he wondered if she’d come with him sometime in the next few days and help him pick out a few things.

  “I thought you liked modern art,” she said.

  “I don’t know that I like it at all, but one ought to have some of it. I want the older stuff for the barn. You know, cows and hay wains, that sort of thing. Oh, come on.”

  They went to a viewing on the Thursday before the auction. Aegina recommended a pair of oils of the Bay of Naples by Arthur Meadows: they were good and she believed they would prove good investments.

  He drove her home by a circuitous route. “Can I use your fantastic eye for something else?”

  He took her to a block of older flats in Fulham. “I’ve just bought the building.” They climbed stairs to a flat on the second floor. “Look, you can just get a view of the river and Wandsworth out this window. What do you think of that molding? I can knock down a few walls and make larger flats of several of these, put an extra bathroom in each. Big open-plan kitchen. Got to put in a lift. What do you think?”

  “They’d be fantastic flats,” said Aegina, seeing her version of what he saw.

  “I’m going down to my barn this weekend. Why don’t you come?”

  Automatically, but graciously, she declined.

  “Oh, come on,” he said. “What are you planning on doing otherwise?”

  “I’m going to paint. Go for a walk in the park.�
��

  “Well, you can paint in the barn. Bring down whatever you need. Walk along the Dorset cliffs. Pretty nice, actually—have you read The French Lieutenant’s Woman? That part of the world. I’ve got masses of work to do. We’ll only see each other for meals. Your own bedroom and bathroom, of course. Fireplace in your bedroom. Nice pub. I’ll just be too busy to spend any time with you, that’s all.”

  “If you’re that busy, why should I come?” But she had already begun to think about it.

  “Well, I can make time for you if you insist. But I really want you to see it and tell me what sort of things you think I should get for it.”

  In the country Fergus wore Levi’s. He didn’t work that weekend, she didn’t paint. He proved to be an indefatigable lover. Friday night, Saturday morning, Saturday night, Sunday morning. On the drive back up to London, he suggested they stop for dinner at San Frediano. It had been a lovely weekend, she said, but she just needed to go home to her flat.

  The next day her vagina was red and inflamed. Not surprising, she thought, but a day later it was worse. She went to her doctor. A yeast infection, he pronounced, often the result of activity after a hiatus; might that be a possibility? Yes, said Aegina. She asked if the man might now have it too. Very possibly, her doctor said; he suggested she inform her friend that if he did have anything, it wasn’t serious.

  Mortified, she rang Fergus.

  “I’ve got a vaginal yeast infection. It’s nothing bad, it’s not VD, but you might get it or have it too. I’m sorry.”

  “No, don’t be sorry—I’m so sorry—did I give it to you?”

  “No, probably not. Don’t worry about it. It just happens. You’re okay, then?”

  “Tip-top, when I last looked. But Aegina, I’m so sorry you’re unwell. What can I do for you? Can I take you out to dinner?”

  “I’m fine. I’m not unwell, really. I think I’ll stay in, though, thank you anyway.”

  But Fergus was launched on a trajectory of gallant solicitude. He brought flowers and food—a cooked chicken, soup, asparagus, and trifle, from Foxtrot Oscar, a cold bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé—round to her flat. “I’m not inviting myself in,” he said. “This is just for you. I’ll leave. Please ring me when you need anything.” He turned to go, but of course she asked him to stay to help her eat (there was more than enough, it happened, for two). A few days later she brought food to his flat and made them dinner. He had a huge kitchen full of professional equipment.