The Rocks

by Peter Nichols

  I’ve made the most terrible mistake.

  Seven

  Luc was sick of sailing. It was the most excruciating pastime he’d ever encountered. Going, essentially, nowhere, indirectly, uncomfortably, and agonizingly slowly. At the same time he was a prisoner, forced to endure and negotiate Szabó’s notions about plot and story and what would please a distributor, and the bludgeoning monotoneity of his poodle wife and her lobotomized (until today) sister. All through lunch, and afterward, as the boat lurched and turned and drifted slowly farther from the land that remained tantalizingly in view, Luc kept seeing his mother leaping overboard, a sublime act of defiance and independence that he admired and envied increasingly as the hours dragged by. He saw himself in the sea, swimming away from the yacht, its noise and foolishness diminishing over the waves.

  During lunch, he became invisible. He said little, then nothing. Nobody paid any attention to him. He was a known commodity to the group on the boat and to the guests from the Rocks, but they were new meat to one another and, evidently, mutually fascinated. After lunch he went below to his cool cabin to lie on his bunk and read.

  • • •

  Luc awoke disoriented. It was light; for a moment he thought it was morning. Then he heard the voices on deck, indistinctly, and remembered who was aboard.

  It was oddly quiet. After a moment he realized the engine was off. The yacht was rising and falling gently, and rolling slowly from side to side. Through the small porthole beside his bunk he could see that the light outside had softened, hitting the water at a more oblique angle, the sky was bluer, past the shattering white heat of the middle of the day.

  He lay on his bunk for a while, lulled by the peaceful motion of the boat and the disinclination to get up and go on deck and talk with anybody. He wanted to get off the boat and have dinner with his mother. He looked at his watch: almost five o’clock. They must be sailing back to port on a favorable wind, close to arrival. He sat up.

  When he came on deck and looked forward over the bow he saw only the sea. He finally found Mallorca low on the horizon and far away—eight miles, he guessed from the distances he’d learned to estimate on the cruise so far. He was confused: the big square sail had been rolled up like a windowshade, the mainsail set and hove flat amidships in a way that Luc had come to understand was meant not for propulsion but to steady the rolling of the yacht.

  Sarah’s voice, edged with stridency, came from the cockpit: “Any news, Luc?”

  He turned. Sarah, Dominick, Fergus, and Mireille sat in the cockpit, presenting a strange tableau. Except for Mireille, they looked like people in a station waiting for a train. Mireille, topless, sat beside Fergus, one leg raised, with her foot planted on the teak bench, the other stretched out with its foot on the table, her bikinied crotch getting a good airing. Luc had never seen her drunk but she looked it now.

  “When are we going back?” Luc asked.

  Sarah made a face of theatrical chagrin and reached for a wineglass on the table.

  Mireille giggled.

  “Well, that’s the sixty-four-thousand-peseta question right now,” said Dominick.

  “What do you mean?” said Luc.

  “THE ENGINE’S CONKED OUT!” Sarah shouted. “Where have you been?” She was red with sunburn in the face and across her shoulders and Pouter pigeon bosom above her small bikini top.

  Now Mireille laughed loudly.

  “It’s not funny!” Sarah snapped. “I’ve got children waiting for me. They’ll be wondering where I am.”

  “Yes, me too, but at least they know we’re all right,” said Fergus consolingly. “We’ve been in sight of the Rocks the whole time—”

  “Then they must be going out of their bloody minds wondering why we’re just sitting here!” said Sarah. “My God, I wish I’d jumped overboard with Lulu! She knew! She bloody well knew!”

  “She didn’t know,” said Luc. “She just doesn’t go out on boats.”

  “Well, now I know why! My God—”

  Luc went below and found the engine room door open. Inside the cramped compartment, filled with pipes, hoses, wires, dials, valves, Tony was sitting on a small milk crate beside the engine. Parts of it were unbolted, rubber hoses unclamped, oily bits and pieces sat in a red plastic tub at his feet. He was bolting or unbolting something with a socket wrench worked by a clicking ratchet. Roger, the ponytailed crewman, was squatting nearby, holding tools like a nurse beside a surgeon.

  “Hi,” said Luc.

  “Hiya,” Tony said pleasantly. He didn’t quite look at Luc, inclining his head toward the door, his eyes alighting briefly on a pipe near Luc’s head.

  “I missed all the excitement, I guess. I’ve been asleep. What happened?”

  “Nothing too exciting,” said Tony. “Engine overheated. Had to shut it down. We sucked a bag or something up into the seawater heat exchanger. Got through the strainer plate in the hull. Blocked the water to the impeller, which burned out and broke into pieces. Got a spare impeller, of course, but I’ve got to clear the system of whatever the obstruction was, and burned bits of impeller and what have you.”

  “How long do you suppose it’ll take to fix?”

  “Dunno,” said Tony, as if it were an intriguing philosophical conundrum, suddenly presented and greatly worth pondering. His face looked unusually thoughtful for a moment. “Done when it’s done, is my best guess,” he concluded cheerfully, looking down at the engine as if it were a naughty child. Then he turned to Roger with a knowing look and said: “At least it’s not a Volvo Penta.” Roger laughed, catching some tacit witticism, but Tony merely smiled complacently.

  Luc had noted Tony’s serene, Buddhistic detachment in the course of their cruise. Perhaps from long exposure to the whims of charterers and the vagaries of mechanical or marine problems, the captain was blithely unruffled by changes of plan, contradictory orders, disappointments such as no dock space at Portofino, tension or moods, adversity of any kind. He kept to himself, either near the helm on the aft deck when under way, or unobtrusively going about ship’s business, listening to weather forecasts on the radio, navigating, tightening or adjusting the odd bit of gear, instructing his crew with very few words. He was not a front-of-house captain or a raconteur who entertained guests with sea stories or salty charm. He was peripherally ever present, his eyes generally fixed either on the horizon or some piece of boat, a vague, low-wattage stoner smile deflecting any invitation to chat or intimacy.

  “Right,” said Luc.

  He started to turn away, and Fergus appeared beside him, stooping to push his head into the engine room.

  “How’s it going?” Fergus asked with forced cheeriness.

  “Yes, coming along,” said Tony, lifting his head for a moment, with a pleasant smile.

  “Oh good!” said Fergus, with relief. “Be on our way soon, will we?”

  “Ah. That I can’t tell you,” said Tony genially.

  “Oh. Right. Well . . . Look, can we get in touch with somebody ashore? We’d like to let them know we’re all right and when we’ll be back. Do you have some sort of radio thingy we might call the Rocks on?”

  “Yes, of course,” said Tony. “Roger can do that for you up at the nav station. Rodge, try the Real Club Náutico on two-one-eight-two. They can probably patch you through to a telephone ashore. Would that help?”

  “That would be super,” said Fergus.

  Roger laid his tools down, wiped his hands on a cloth, and came out of the engine room. Fergus followed him.

  Luc went into the galley to get a beer. Véronique and Gaspard were going through the fridge and freezer, taking smoking packages out and re-storing them, talking at a fierce argumentative pitch, gesticulating emphatically, snorting with disgust, but agreeing absolutely, about the threat of Danish butter to the European Economic Community. They paid no attention to Luc as he crept between them and reached into
the fridge.

  “Where’s Gábor?” he asked.

  “Don’t disturb him,” said Véronique. “He’s lying down. He’s completely stressed with all these people with their problems.”

  “What problems?”

  “They want to go home! What can he do?”

  “I’m sure no one thinks it’s his fault.”

  “Of course it’s not his fault!” said Véronique.

  Luc took his beer outside, passing through the navigation cubbyhole as Roger was saying, “Real Club Náutico, yacht Dolphin, over . . . Real Club Náutico . . .” into the radio, while Fergus looked on.

  Outside, the unhappy captives looked expectantly at Luc as he came on deck. Mireille had disappeared.

  “What’s the word on the engine?” asked Dominick. Strands of his normally slicked-back hair were hanging down on either side of his forehead, signs of spillage stained his shirt. Much of the detritus of lunch had been cleared away, but their half-filled wineglasses still sat on the table. A bottle bobbed with the motion of the yacht in a silver bucket of melted ice.

  “I don’t know,” said Luc. “They’re working on it.”

  “But this is ridiculous, Luc!” said Sarah. “I mean, how long are we going to sit here, drifting out to sea? I mean, look! We’re bloody miles away now! Jessica and the others will be frantic!”

  “Fergus is trying to call the Rocks now.”

  “Luc, what about the dinghy?” said Dominick, pointing to the large rubber Zodiac dinghy with an outboard motor hanging from davits over the stern. “Can’t they run us ashore in that thing?”

  “I don’t know,” said Luc. It was the yacht’s tender, used in every port or anchorage to run the guests to and from shore. It was fast, stable, and sped across the water like a commando boat used to storm a beach. He looked forward and noticed Tim and Ian, Dolphin’s other two crewmen, sitting up in the bow, smoking.

  “Could you please go find out, Luc?” Sarah implored.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Thank you!”

  Rather than run it by the blissed-out Tony down in the engine room, Luc walked forward to the two crewmen in the bow. Both were English lads, perhaps working through a gap year.

  “Hi,” said Luc as he approached.

  “Oh, hi, Luc,” said both Tim and Ian.

  Luc smiled at them pleasantly. “Could you run a few of us back ashore in the Zodiac?” He inclined his head aft. “They’ve got to get back to their kids.”

  “Oh . . .” Tim frowned for maximum effect, conveying a convincing middle ground between tremendous willingness and expert doubt. “I dunno. It’s quite a ways now. I mean, we’re at least six miles offshore. You’d better ask Tony, I think.”

  “Could you ask him while I get our group ready? We really have to go.”

  “Sure,” said Tim, throwing his cigarette overboard and loping gamely down the deck.

  “Great. Thanks,” said Luc, coming behind him.

  In the cockpit, Sarah and Dominick sat up and looked expectantly at Luc.

  “Tim’s going to go see about it,” he said brightly.

  “Brilliant! Thank you so much, Luc!” said Sarah. She and Dominick stood up, as if their train was approaching.

  Fergus came out on deck. “They can’t seem to get through on the blower for some reason—”

  “Never mind,” said Sarah, “we’re going back in the rubber boat. Luc arranged it.”

  “Oh, fantastic,” said Fergus, nodding to Luc across the chasm of their mutual acquaintance. “Well done.”

  Tim appeared. “I’m afraid Tony says it’s too far to go in the Zodiac.”

  “What?” said Sarah, indignantly. She turned to Luc. “I thought you said we could go?”

  “Well, I thought we could. I just asked Tim if he could ask the captain.”

  “It really is too far, actually, to go in a dinghy,” said Tim. He frowned again, tremendously sympathetically. “It could be quite dangerous over such a distance.”

  Fergus addressed Tim. “Why aren’t we sailing back right now? You’ve got the sails, at least. Why are we simply floating here? Can’t you work on the engine while we sail back? Or sail us back and work on it tomorrow? I mean, we’ve got obligations ashore, you know. The engine’s not our concern. Will you go tell that to your captain, please?”

  “Yeah, I will, absolutely,” said Tim. But he stood in place, bobbing slightly, hesitantly. “The thing is, we would of course sail back if we could, but there’s not much wind right now, and what there is, is coming off the land, actually blowing us away from Mallorca, and the yacht’s very heavy, so we couldn’t actually get anywhere under sail alone, at least in that direction. Right now we’re sort of hove to so we don’t drift even farther away. So, unless there’s a change in the weather, we can’t really get back to shore until they fix the engine.”

  “But that’s ridiculous!” said Sarah, appealing to them all. “We can’t just sit here and drift all over the bloody Mediterranean! We’ve got obligations—I’ve got children waiting for me ashore! I mean, it’s all right for Gábor, who’s obviously gone to bed or something, but we didn’t sign on for a bloody cruise, did we? We came for lunch! I mean, it’s just not on!”

  “Absolutely,” said Tim, now bobbing with sympathetic concurrence. “Look, I’ll just go get Tony, shall I? You can talk to him about it.”

  Unhesitatingly, he disappeared into the saloon.

  Dominick lifted the dripping wine bottle out of its bucket. “Anybody fancy a top-up?”

  Sarah snatched a glass off the table and shoved it toward him. “I do!”

  Eight

  After she’d showered off the salty, slightly oily residue of her swim in the port, Lulu put on white cotton shorts and a large white linen shirt and told Claire that she would have a salad beneath the leafy trellis out on her front terrace that overlooked the rocks and the sea and was not used by guests.

  As she ate her salad, she could see Dolphin rolling slowly in the light breeze about a mile offshore, its sails billowing. How picturesque—that fatuous man!—but she was happy to see the yacht, off in the distance like that, because it made her intensely glad she was not aboard.

  Her body convulsed with an involuntary shiver.

  She’d tried for Luc’s sake—he had no idea what concessions she’d made to herself—but it had been a mistake. She’d broken a rule and look what had happened. She would never set foot on a boat again, not for any reason.

  After lunch, Lulu took her siesta. She woke at four and swam fifty slow laps in the pool. She showered again. It was cool finally in the house. She put on a cotton djellaba with nothing underneath and went into the kitchen. Claire was preparing dinner: merluza con samfaina, a Mediterranean fish sautéed with tomatoes, peppers, aubergines; a cobbler made with gooseberries Judy Plumley had just brought down from England; and Claire’s homemade peach ice cream.

  “Perfect, Claire,” said Lulu.

  “Lulu?”

  Cassian stood in the kitchen doorway. In one hand a silver cocktail shaker that dripped with condensation, in the other two crystal glasses half full of olives. “Martini?”

  “You don’t know how much.”

  They went out onto the front terrace. Lulu arranged herself on the wide white sofa; Cassian sat in a large wicker armchair. He poured their drinks, passed a glass to Lulu, and put his feet up on an ottoman upholstered with a threadbare piece of kilim. “You didn’t go out with the others, I see,” he said.

  “No. I escaped.”

  “I thought you might have.”

  “And thank God too.” She peered out at the sea. “They’ve disappeared. They’ve either sunk or gone round the corner somewhere. God knows how anyone can stick it for hours at a time, floating so near to where you want to go but not getting there—as often as not on purpose. It must be a very particular e
nthusiasm, like Morris dancing. Torture if you ask me.”

  “That’s because you need to be the captain of your own ship, Lulu.”

  “Bless you, darling. Someone understands.” Lulu sipped her martini. “Perfection. Your sainted father taught you well. The trouble with most Englishmen is that they learn to drink in pubs, where a properly prepared cocktail is a mystery on the order of turning mercury into gold.”

  Cassian smiled. “When was the last time you were in a pub, Lulu?”

  “I don’t go to pubs, darling.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “I was in one during the war. It was horrible,” she said, in the tone people use when referring to distressing wartime experiences best forgotten. “Salud.”

  They sipped.

  “Did you know that Gerald Rutledge doesn’t have a telephone up at his house?” asked Cassian.

  “I’m not surprised. Why do you ask?”

  “Because Fergus Maitland has given out your number here for people to contact him.”

  “Yes, darling, everyone does. I don’t mind.”

  “No, quite.”

  They sipped.

  Cassian said, “Have you heard of El Niño?”

  “No. What is he, a bullfighter?”

  “Possibly. The one I’m talking about is a periodic weather phenomenon occurring in the Pacific Ocean, which brings unusually warm water to the west coast of South America. It makes more rain on the land. It happened this last winter. There were catastrophic floods in Paraguay.”

  “Poor Paraguay.”

  “Actually, it changes the weather all over the world. Australia got less rain than usual, and had lots of fires instead. Drought in Africa.”

  “Poor old Australia. Africa’s always been completely ruined.”

  “The thing is, last winter’s El Niño caused billions of pounds of damage in Paraguay and Brazil and Australia and lots of other places.”