The Rocks

by Peter Nichols

  He wasn’t Mr. Right. She knew that absolutely. They were so different. But she began to stop resisting him. Fergus was fun, unexpectedly amusing. Light. Generous. Dependable. This is what a man should be like, she thought, even if he wasn’t her sort. But what was her sort? What, actually, was missing? She felt looked after. She liked him—a lot, she decided. He wasn’t exactly good-looking, but attractive—a large part of it that incredible self-confidence. There was no drama. She worried that this was because she didn’t like him enough.

  Then he was knocked down by a taxi outside the Michelin building on Sloane Avenue and when she went to see him in hospital, his face was bruised and he looked so pleased to see her that she felt a surge of emotion that seemed true. She looked after him when he went home. She met his mother, a pleasant woman, when she came up from Basingstoke after the accident. . . .

  • • •

  The music had stopped. Aegina became aware of the solitary sound of her brush on the canvas.

  Somehow she always knew when Luc was in town, but she’d managed to avoid him for years. They had seemingly excised each other, like an amputation. But now she could feel the phantom limb; it still itched or stung but it felt like a natural part of her. In its place, Fergus was some sort of efficient prosthesis.

  Five

  Luc watched his mother’s SEAT 600—the Rocks’ car, in practice, the way she let everyone use it—come down the quay. The sun blazed off the windshield, he couldn’t see who was inside.

  After leaving her at breakfast, full of anger, he’d turned away from the coast, tooling the motorcycle inland along back roads all the way to the nowhere village of Ruberts, almost at the center of the island, a sinuous route remembered from visits to a friend who’d once owned a house there. Far enough to ensure he wouldn’t return to the yacht before the lunch. He didn’t want to tell Szabó that his mother wasn’t coming.

  When he stepped aboard Dolphin just before one o’clock, Fergus was the only guest, sitting around the wide cockpit table talking with Szabó, Véronique, and Mireille.

  “Ah, Luc!” Szabó seemed overjoyed to see him.

  No doubt, Luc thought, he was becoming fatigued by Fergus’s relentless bonhomie, though the two women were laughing and appeared to be enjoying Aegina’s husband. Mireille particularly. Szabó’s sister-in-law, a small creature with a muscular, almost simian build and a chronic poker face, had seemed catatonic to Luc so far, beyond the minimal energy she summoned for sunbathing, reading, and eating. “Véronique’s sister will be with us,” Szabó had said in Paris when outlining the cruise, working his eyebrows with the apparent suggestion of an intrigue. “She’s very attractive. Véronique has told her all about you.” The advance praise seemed to have worked against him. Luc found Mireille to be devoid of the remotest interest in him, almost to the point of aversion. She resolutely ignored him, or responded to his attempts to engage her in conversation with the polite sufferance accorded an overtalkative tradesman. Yet now, demonstrating unsuspected reserves of personality and humor, she was smiling, tittering, rocking in her seat with amusement, attending to every word Fergus was saying. It seemed like a miraculous medical recovery.

  The abiding mystery of Fergus. Luc had seen him frequently during the last few summers at the Rocks. An English sort Luc understood by the term “Hooray Henry,” a loud, shallow twit, though evidently successful at business. Money, Luc knew only too well, effected the most extraordinary alchemy on most women, but even so, he couldn’t put Fergus and Aegina together. He didn’t see how she could have made that work. The Aegina who could make a life with Fergus was as unsuspected as the suddenly effervescent Mireille.

  “Salut,” said Luc, choosing French, his own way of cutting Fergus.

  “Where are your mother and the others from the Rocks?” Szabó asked him plaintively, in English.

  “I guess they’ll be along soon.” Averting his eyes, he looked down the quay, and then saw the little SEAT. “Actually, here they are.”

  The car parked beside the yacht. Out came Sarah; Dominick’s long legs; then, incredibly, his mother. She glanced up and her eyes found him, and she smiled at him. Luc felt an unaccustomed rush of love for her.

  “Thank you, Mum,” he whispered, embracing her as she stepped from the aluminum passerelle onto the deck.

  “Just for you,” Lulu said quietly.

  Luc felt Szabó behind him and stepped aside as the producer swept forward across the deck like a grandee.

  “My dear lady,” said Szabó, beaming at Lulu, dipping forward twice with decorous precision, his large lips grazing each of her cheeks. He turned graciously to Sarah. “Hello,” he said, kissing her only a shade more perfunctorily, “and . . .”

  “Dominick,” said Dominick.

  Szabó shook his hand. “Thank you for coming. Are there no more of you?”

  “Just us,” said Sarah.

  “Fabuleux,” Szabó said. He gestured across the deck to where Fergus, Véronique, and Mireille were now standing. “Your friend Fergus is already with us. Will you have a glass of Champagne?”

  Roger, a deeply tanned, ponytailed young crewman in white T-shirt, white shorts, deck shoes, approached with a tray of fizzing golden flutes. Szabó passed them out to his guests.

  “What a fantastic yacht!” said Sarah.

  Szabó shrugged ineffably. “She is incredible,” he said simply.

  “Can we have a look inside?” asked Dominick.

  Even Mireille, who had been bored to death in every cubic foot of the boat, went below immediately ahead of Fergus as Szabó led his guests on a tour of the yacht’s interior.

  “Ooh, love-lee! Could I have a bath after lunch, please, Gábor?” said Sarah, when she came into the master bathroom. The bathtub, capacious enough for two, was made of vertical, inward-curving teak staving locked together with steel bands, resembling a large, shallow, elliptical barrel cut in half. Something pirates might have frolicked in with ladies of the night in old Port Royal.

  “Certainly,” said Szabó. “You may all have a bath.”

  Outside the bathroom, in the aft master cabin, Dominick gazed at the bed. It was strewn with white pillows and extended almost the full width of the ship, which tapered toward the large, asymmetrical, mullioned windows set across the stern, at the head of the bed, in the manner of an eighteenth-century galleon.

  “A swashbuckling fuck,” Dominick commented sotto voce to Lulu.

  “Completely silly,” Lulu quietly responded. “From the little I know of being at sea, one would roll about in this bed like a ball bearing and right out one of those cottage windows.”

  “Yes, but most boats like this never go to sea. They sit in marinas for years on end.”

  Lulu felt claustrophobic. “I’m going up on deck,” she said, heading for the stairs.

  Szabó said, “Is everyone ready for lunch? I’ve prepared a little surprise for you.”

  When they returned to the deck, the large cockpit table was covered with a linen cloth and set for lunch, with baskets of bread, ice buckets of white and rosé wines, bottles of Pellegrino. They sat around the table on royal blue cushions atop teak benches and deck chairs. Directly overhead, stretched taut on thin wire but appearing to float above them, hung a flat trapezoidal awning of royal blue canvas, casting a deep and comforting shadow across the cockpit.

  Two young crewmen appeared with bowls of salad. They poured wine for the guests. They went below and reappeared, each carrying a tray laden with plates of food. Gaspard followed them out. Véronique introduced the chef, who described the meal as the plates were handed out: cold grilled quail with a reduced fig sauce, tiny warm new potatoes, avocado halves filled with pomegranate seeds, plates of toast with pâté de foie gras.

  As the plates were set before them, Lulu felt the deck beneath her feet and the ship around her tremble.

  She turned to Szabó. “You’
ve turned on the engine. You’re not taking us out?”

  “It’s the generator, dear lady,” said Szabó. “It goes on and off all day. Now, please, dear Lulu, tell me how long you have owned your fabulous Rocks, and when did you come to Mallorca?”

  “I came down from London in 1947 to cook for friends who were renting the house that’s now the main building. Eventually I bought it—”

  Lulu’s eyes flicked from Szabó’s wide beaming face, which he had planted in front of her in an attempt to obscure most of her field of vision, to the long breakwater mole with the blinking-white-light structure at the end of it. Its relation to the yacht was changing. She looked toward the bow and saw that the long uptilted white bowsprit and wire forestay were slowly swinging across the view of the rocky shoreline on the other side of the harbor.

  “Why are we moving?” said Lulu sharply.

  Szabó’s face twinkled with a wonderful secret. He turned and nodded at the ponytailed crewman, who stood twenty feet forward on the deck at the foot of the mainmast. Roger quickly untied a line wrapped around a cleat. At the same moment, two crewmen on either side of the deck began hauling on lines, pulling with all their weight.

  No, thought Luc. He turned his head quickly aft to the large spoked wooden wheel, where he had learned that Tony, the captain, would be found during any significant maneuver of the yacht. Tony was now spinning the wheel.

  The guests were startled by a swishing, slipping sound of cloth on cloth overhead which quickly became a rumble as a heavy curtain of white translucent sailcloth dropped from the wide horizontal spar halfway up the mast. A tremor went through the ship. Slowly, the cloth ballooned outward; the coat of arms and leaping delphinus rippled and then became still, restrained by lines at its bottom corners, as the great square sail filled with the light breeze and tugged at its restraints; and now the yacht began to glide purposefully away from the quay toward the open end of the port.

  Lulu stood abruptly. “Put me ashore. I am not going anywhere on this boat.”

  “My dear Lulu,” said Szabó, clasping his hands in front of him, “I am only taking you away for a hour, to glide upon the sea as you eat your lunch. It is my whim, my wish. Please indulge me.”

  He smiled at her, certain of the irresistible spell of his mischief.

  “Fantastic!” said Sarah.

  Dominick’s eyes fastened on Lulu.

  “Gábor,” said Luc, also standing, “we must put her ashore. She won’t—”

  “Luc, it’s my gift to your mother and your friends,” Szabó said, now opening his arms toward the group around the table. “It is my pleasure.” (Even in his consternation, Luc briefly registered the echo of the same words, spoken in the same tone of magisterial grandeur, by Anthony Quinn, playing Auda abu Tayi of the Howeitat in Lawrence of Arabia, to Lawrence and his band of Arabs who have appeared miraculously out of the Nefud to enlist the Howeitat in an effort to attack Aqaba. “It is my pleasure,” Auda says, as he hosts a great feast in Wadi Rum.)

  Lulu turned from them and walked quickly aft along the deck to the stern, the part of the angled yacht closest to the receding shore. With a sudden movement, she flung her handbag away from her. It soared across twenty feet of water and landed on the concrete quay. She took off her espadrilles and threw them both after the bag. Then she stepped balletically up onto the raised bulwark and leapt overboard.

  Luc was still following her down the deck. He watched her plummet feetfirst into the water slipping by below. A moment later Lulu’s head broke the surface in the yacht’s wake, and she started swimming toward the concrete steps indented into the quay.

  Everyone from the table was standing at the rail, watching. They saw Lulu reach the steps and rise gracefully out of the water, as if she went swimming in the harbor with her clothes on every day. She didn’t look back but walked to her handbag and shoes, picked them up, and strode on to her car, dripping elegantly.

  “Golly,” said Fergus.

  “Ah,” said Dominick, grinning with admiration, “Lulu.”

  Szabó, astounded, turned to Luc. “But why, Luc? What happened?”

  “She doesn’t go out on boats, Gábor. She only came because she thought we were staying in port.”

  “Lulu!” shouted Sarah. “You all right?”

  Beside the car, Lulu turned and smiled. “Yes, thank you,” she called clearly and pleasantly. She tilted her head and squeezed water from her thick ponytail.

  “See you later, darling!” Sarah called back, waving. “We won’t be long!”

  They watched her get into the SEAT and drive away down the quay.

  Szabó masked his disappointment and barked out a laugh. “Mais elle est superbe!” he said. “An extraordinary woman, your mother, Luc.”

  “Yes,” said Luc. And you’re no Auda abu Tayi of the Howeitat. Suddenly he missed his mother. He wished he could jump overboard and swim away from Szabó and his ship of fools and spend the afternoon with her. He would have if he hadn’t pinned his movie hopes on Szabó’s pleasure.

  “Mais elle est dingue, cette femme,” Véronique muttered to Mireille, with a Gallic shrug of contempt.

  Szabó turned to his remaining guests with a determined smile. “Well, let us return to our splendid lunch.”

  Dolphin sailed on into the small slopping waves outside the port, pulled apparently by its large-bellied square sail, and the now set staysail and mizzen sail. But beneath its kitschy galleon glamour labored a heavy, ponderous tub propelled, in fact, by its thumping GM 671 diesel.

  Six

  Kneeling on the larder floor, Gerald worked a small plunger to transfer his olive oil from the large demijohns, in which it came from the press, to liter bottles.

  He paused. From the small ventilation brick high in the wall, came the angry insect whine of a chain saw. Gerald set the bottle and plunger down on a sheet of newspaper on the tile floor.

  Outside the kitchen door, he heard the chain saw below the carob trees, somewhere down near the road—undoubtedly on his land. The whine dropped to a low buzz for a moment and behind it Gerald heard the snorting of a diesel engine engaged in some fitful, grinding effort. He walked quickly downhill toward the noise.

  The whining and groaning became louder, more insistent. Gerald felt the machines eating into him. He began to run through the trees. Ahead something large was moving, leaping in spurts, snapping wood and trees like a maddened rhino. Something yellow.

  The woods opened up. On the slope leading down to the road, a tumble of felled trees and ripped limbs lay beside a wide, ragged swath of red-brown dirt that swept fifty yards uphill. At the bottom, twenty feet of the slumbering beige stone wall running beside the road had been breached, the rocks pushed in and swept aside. At the top of the torn gash in the hillside lurched a snorting yellow bulldozer. Gerald recognized the compact shape of Señor Gómez, the builder, in the driver’s seat. He wore a scarred white hard hat. His muscular brown arms worked two long control levers, driving the caterpillar tracks forward in bursts that pawed at the earth beneath them.

  Another man in a hard hat—younger, small like Gómez though beefier, his son perhaps—was scything his way up the slope above the bulldozer with the chain saw. The trees dropped as if slaughtered, limbs pawing skyward as they fell. The bulldozer came behind him, the blade uprooting the raw stumps, pushing everything into tangled heaps to the side of the chewed dirt wake stretching down to the road. The two men were progressing uphill at a walking pace. The air was filmy with the noxious particulate of diesel exhaust and the chain saw’s greasy blue smoke.

  Gómez, his eyes darting everywhere as he worked, noticed Gerald staring at them. Gómez flicked his head upward in greeting. Gerald’s eyes found his. The Englishman looked dazed. He seemed not to comprehend what the two men were doing. Gómez rested the bulldozer for a moment.

  “¡La carretera!” he shouted. He chopped a hand in fro
nt of him, uphill, then away to the right, indicating the path of the access road that would lead to the development in the olive grove. Then his hands returned to the levers and the bulldozer snorted and jolted ahead.

  Gerald remembered the road now. It was to start down at the main road and loop around the hill above his house and he’d never see it or hear it, Fergus had said. There would have to be a road of course, not only for the owners to reach their wretched villas, but up which cement mixers and lorries with building materials would rumble for months, years perhaps.

  Here it was—already. Gerald had pictured only the little suburb of villas depicted in the artist’s impression on the prospectus that Fergus had shown him. In that flat and literal ink and pastel illustration, a smudgily suggested but mature landscape surrounded the orange Spanishy houses with tile roofs and terraces and alternating window placements to distinguish one model from another. A tidy scene that could have been anywhere. Gerald—foolishly, he now realized—hadn’t thought about the wide borders of destruction that such a modest Eden would inflict on the edges of his remaining property. He hadn’t anticipated the noise. He was shocked by the suddenness of its arrival—for some reason, he’d imagined all this would start after the summer—and the vivid reality of what he had agreed to—all for six thousand pounds, to begin with.

  He watched for a few minutes as Gómez and his man continued on up the hill. He was stunned by their speed and brutal efficiency—they would surely hack a broad scar up and around the hill all the way to the olive grove in a matter of a day or two.

  Gerald looked at the sawn trunks, limbs, and torn, uprooted trees scattered across the hill like a slain army. Numbly, he turned and tramped back through the carobs toward the house.