The Rocks

by Peter Nichols

  At the end of this summer term, her last at St. Hilary’s, Aegina had spent the first few days of the holiday staying with her best school friend, Penny, in London. They went to parties, and Aegina shopped for clothes to take to Mallorca. Then she took the train down to Sevenoaks. Billie was waiting in front of the Railway and Bicycle when Aegina came out of the station.

  “Did you have a nice time in town, pumpkin? How’s Penny?”

  “Great, thanks, Billie. Penny sends love.” Aegina pulled on her helmet and goggles. In all weathers, and despite the flap and barrier of protective gear and clothing, their companionable side-by-side positions on the bike meant that they were used to conversing in an ordinary way, though at volume, on the road. As Billie tore up Mount Harry Road with a snorting rise to the note of the exhaust, Aegina shouted: “GUESS WHAT? I’M THINKING OF GOING TO MOROCCO, BILLIE.”

  “REALLY?” Billie shrilled.

  “I FOUND A SHIRT AT THIS SHOP ON THE KING’S ROAD. IT’S FROM MARRAKECH IN MOROCCO. I’M SURE I COULD SELL MORE LIKE IT IN MALLORCA—AND IN LONDON TOO. I DON’T WANT TO MAKE ANY MORE SANDALS. SO I WANT TO GO BUY SOME SHIRTS. I NEED THE MONEY FOR ART SCHOOL. WHAT DO YOU THINK?”

  “AN INTERESTING IDEA, PUMPKIN,” Billie shouted noncommittally.

  At home, Billie piled and fastened the long braid of her waist-length gray hair on the top of her head and laid out lunch—nettle soup, homemade granary bread, various cheeses, with their sine qua non accompaniment, Branston pickle, a Mackeson stout for herself, and a weak Rose’s lime cordial for Aegina—while Aegina showed Billie the black Moroccan shirt she’d found at a shop called Granny Takes a Trip, on the King’s Road, and talked about her plan.

  Over the last few years, her father had been forced to sell two small parcels of his land, down on the road, to pay for Aegina’s school fees and costs, but he didn’t have enough money for her to go on to art school. She’d applied for a scholarship, but even if she got that, she was going to have to find some sort of job to make more money. During the previous few summers she’d made a little money selling small foot thongs she’d woven out of gold-colored hemp to some of the shops in Cala Marsopa, and to guests at the Rocks, but their novelty was done and she was tired of them. She had saved almost a hundred pounds. There were return flights to Morocco for under thirty pounds. If she went down and bought sixty or seventy shirts—the girl in the shop whose boyfriend had bought them in Marrakech thought they had cost no more than a pound each—and sold each for five pounds, she could clear over two hundred pounds; enough, perhaps, with a scholarship, to get through a year at art school. And if it worked out, perhaps she could do it again in the holidays next year.

  “But you’re not thinking of going alone, pumpkin?” said Billie.

  “I knew you’d say that. I’ve been thinking of who I could ask. Trouble is, everybody’s got plans. Do you think I should ask Dennis?”

  Dennis was Aegina’s nominal local boyfriend. He’d been a pupil at Sevenoaks School but had also just taken his A levels and would be going on to university. They’d met just before last Christmas at an end-of-term dance engagement organized by St. Hilary’s and Sevenoaks School—neither school being coed—to get the boys and girls together to refine their social skills. Dennis had taken her out at the beginning and end of each term since they’d met. He was sweet, Dennis, and musical, sort of: he played the five-string banjo with some school friends in a bluegrass band called the Ide Hill Boys. Aegina had gone with him to watch them play at the Feathers in Tonbridge. Dennis stood in the back behind the fiddle and the mandolin players, his teeth bared with palpable effort, as if he were running behind them in a road race and trying to catch up. On the last few occasions they’d seen each other, they’d kissed. Aegina had liked that all right—she found Dennis attractive enough, tall and thin with curly black hair and amazingly long eyelashes—but she hadn’t wanted to go any further. She’d realized she found him a little boring.

  “Do you want to go with Dennis?” asked Billie.

  “Not really. He’d be all right, but I think I’d be looking after him.”

  “Probably. But it’s good to be seen with somebody. I’m pretty sure your father will feel the same. I mean, I have no idea what Morocco’s like—do you? Is it safe?”

  “I’m eighteen now, though. I can go where I want, can’t I?”

  “Well, you’re just eighteen, but that’s not the point if we’re being sensible. Your father and I will both be worried about you, Aegina, and I think with good reason. Going off to Africa? I really think you’ve got to get somebody to go with you. It needn’t be a boy. What about Penny?”

  “She wanted to go, but they’re all going to Scotland and she’s signed up for a sort of Swallows and Amazons sailing course for half the summer.” Aegina could feel the clammy hands of reason strangling her wonderful idea. She was determined to go but she didn’t want to fight Billie over it. Beneath her loving support, Billie was obdurate when she believed she was right. Billie would win.

  Billie had some of the same hesitation to disagree with Aegina. She had the authority but Aegina was very independent—a wild trait, Billie thought, from her mother—and she could be fiercely willful if she thought her cause was just.

  Billie brought their drinks to the table and sat down and took a long draft of her Mackeson. “Well, it’s a jolly good idea, pumpkin—very enterprising. Don’t let it go. We just need to find someone to go with you. What about your friends in Paris?”

  “I’m sure they’re all going down to Mallorca.”

  “Well, so are you. But they might like a little trip beforehand. Why don’t you ring a few of them after lunch?”

  Three

  On her second morning in Paris, Aegina dressed quickly, wrote a note for Florence, and left the house. She didn’t like Passy. It was too quiet and bourgeois and Right Bank and full of money and made her feel poor and disenfranchised. She preferred the Left Bank, where she’d stayed with Sylvie on her earlier trips to Paris, but Sylvie and her family were already in Mallorca.

  “Maroc! Bien sûr je viens avec toi!” Florence had shrieked down the phone two days ago. “Viens immédiatement!” But once Aegina had arrived in Paris, things were different. Florence’s parents were adamant. Two girls alone in Morocco? Mais vous êtes folles? Absolutely not—unless one of their male friends would go with them.

  Pas de problème, said Florence. She phoned Natalie and Aymar and François—all friends from summers in Cala Marsopa—and they met at the Café Flore. Aymar was leaving the next day for two weeks at Éric Tabarly’s école maritime in Brittany. Skinny, floppy-haired François was going down to the Vaucluse to cycle the Mont Ventoux section of the Tour de France course, hoping for a place as a domestique on next year’s La Vache Qui Rit team. Serge and Alain too were already in Mallorca.

  Et quoi de Luc? Aegina asked with perfect nonchalance. On the train to Dover, on the ferry across the Channel, on the train again all the way to the Gare du Nord, she’d found herself thinking about Luc. She hadn’t seen him for four years. Not since the horrible summer.

  “Luc?” said Florence. She shrugged and looked around the table. They hardly saw him anymore, even in Paris, she said. Sylvie thought he’d gone to New York. No, said Aymar, he’d seen Luc a few weeks ago: he thought he was going to Rome to work on a movie for the summer.

  Don’t worry, said Florence, we’ll get someone. She couldn’t go anyway until after the Doors concert; she’d already scored tickets for next week.

  • • •

  Aegina took the Métro, full of early-morning commuters, to Cluny–La Sorbonne and walked up boul’ Mich. She bought a croissant at a café on place Edmond-Rostand and walked into the Luxembourg Garden. Billie would be livid if she went on her own. Her father would be frightened, and full of silent rebuke that would find her in the middle of the Sahara. Besides, they were probably right: it would be better to go with someone. />
  She felt the threat of defeat. Always the horrible, stunting gap between dream and desire and practicality. If she didn’t go to Morocco, what would she do? Go to Mallorca, try to sell more of her foot thongs, wait to hear from art schools—wait, wait, wait. Wait for life.

  She finished her croissant, buttery, flaky, beside the verger, the little enclosed orchard bordering rue Auguste-Comte. Out on the street, through the railing, people in dark coats walked furiously by on their way to work, but on the sandy paths between the grass contours and around the ruminative busts of Baudelaire and Sainte-Beuve, it was quiet. She watched the uniformed gardeners snipping at the long espaliers of pear and apple trained to spread their limbs like set designs for a ballet.

  She looked in her worn canvas handbag for the napkin on which Aymar had scribbled Luc’s number. Actually, it was his father’s apartment but Luc was still living there, Aymar said.

  He was probably off somewhere, like they’d said, Rome or New York.

  She wondered if he’d even talk to her.

  Out on rue d’Assas, she found a telephone. “Allo, oui?” She recognized his voice.

  • • •

  They met at the café Saint-Médard in the fifth, on the edge of the Quartier Latin, where the tumbling rue Mouffetard and other streets debouched like streams into the small-scale square Saint-Médard.

  Luc had in fact gone to Rome. Through Fabio, a friend and classmate at the American University of Paris, he had an incredible summer job lined up, he’d thought, on a Fellini movie shooting at Cinecittà, but the job had fallen through. He’d stayed with Fabio at his parents’ apartment in Prati, going out to the studio daily, hoping something else would turn up, but it hadn’t and he’d felt in the way at the apartment and finally returned to Paris. He was going down to Mallorca at some point over the summer, but later. Lulu had had a building she called the barracks built beyond the pool in the back of the property—in the process, knocking down the toolshed in which Luc had made his home at the Rocks for the last ten years—and everything was still a mess. Luc could imagine his mother barking at workmen and at him too, roping him in somehow. He didn’t want to go down until the middle of August at the earliest. He was at a loose end. And then Aegina had turned up with her Moroccan shirt caper.

  He’d always felt this strange, not altogether pleasant, but intimate connection between them because their parents had briefly been each other’s first spouse. As if he and Aegina were sort of step-siblings by a near miss. Luc had always liked Gerald, the little he’d seen of him; he was pleasant to Luc. His mother never spoke of Gerald, her first husband. It had been a very short marriage before her only slightly longer marriage to her second husband, Luc’s father. When Luc had tried asking her about Gerald she would only say dismissively that it had been a colossal mistake, and nothing more. He wondered what Aegina knew.

  She looked unbelievable. Dark as dark hair could be without being black, the olive Spanish complexion. Tight blue jeans, a loose red-embroidered blouse from Cochabamba. He hadn’t seen her for years (he’d been away, she’d avoided him) since Cala Marsopa, the summer she was fourteen. How much of that did she remember? He remembered all of it.

  “I don’t have a lot of money,” he said, hedging.

  “Nor have I,” said Aegina. “I’ve got enough for the shirts, and I want to stay in just the most incredibly cheap pensions. We could get student train fares. It shouldn’t be too much.”

  She sounded so English now.

  “Actually,” Luc said, “we could take my car. It’s pretty old, but it doesn’t use much petrol.”

  “What, drive from here to Morocco? And back?”

  “Yeah. I’m sure it would make it. And we could sleep in the car.”

  That image settled on both of them.

  “I mean, we could take turns driving,” Luc said. “One of us could always drive while the other slept. It would be cheap and we wouldn’t have to stop.”

  “No, right. Yeah. That would be good.”

  “Yes. You know, I’m not . . .” How to say this, exactly? “I’m not suggesting anything. I have a, sort of, girlfriend.”

  “Oh, good!” said Aegina. “I have a boyfriend. That’s all right, then.”

  “Great,” said Luc.

  They sipped their coffees.

  “How come he couldn’t come with you?” asked Luc.

  “Oh, he’s busy. He’s a musician. He’s got—he’s playing music somewhere.”

  “Ah.”

  “Who’s your girlfriend?”

  “Oh, she’s an actress. Well, she’s just done a few things.”

  “Fantastic. What’s her name?”

  “Sophie. What’s your boyfriend’s name?”

  Aegina raised her coffee cup and sipped. “Dennis,” she said from behind the cup.

  “What instrument does he play?”

  “The banjo.”

  • • •

  Luc’s father took them both to dinner at his favorite restaurant, Chez René. He asked about the trip, the route, the plan. It sounded like a wonderful adventure, he said. He knew of a journalist in Tangier if they needed local help. He asked Aegina how she liked school in England. He didn’t ask her about her father at all. Then he gave Luc five thousand francs in case of an emergency.

  Four

  Luc was driving again when the first light crept into the mirror, navy blue against the black ahead through the windshield. The light encircled the horizon until he could make out the silhouette of the Atlas Mountains ahead and to the left.

  The road, a gray line trending away over the shallowly contoured plain like a road in a children’s book, gained elevation as they approached Marrakech. They entered the Département de l’Haut Atlas and the land became greener, hillier, supporting small farms and vineyards, resembling the backcountry of Andalusia in southern Spain, which they had driven through before reaching Algeciras. They navigated with the Michelin map of Maroc. At a bookseller in the rue de l’Odéon, Luc had found a guidebook Marrakech et Sa Région, eight years old, published by Guides Pol; édition 1962; thirty-one pages and a town map. The center of the town, and its most undoubted attraction, assured the guide, was the great central square, the Djemaa El-Fna, one of the busiest market squares in Africa, around which spread the labyrinthine streets and alleys of the vast souk, the largest market in Morocco. Inside the medina, or old town, of convenient access to the Djemaa El-Fna and the souk, would be found a number of riads, large old houses converted to guest accommodations with rooms around a central courtyard.

  They passed through the walls of the medina. The streets immediately grew narrow and crowded with people. Luc followed the few signs for the Djemaa El-Fna until the signs stopped and the serpentine streets, lined with wavy-sided, outward-leaning brown walls pocked with irregular doorways and small windows, twisted away into an unnavigable maze. He turned, trying to follow a fading sense of direction, and was soon lost.

  “Look,” said Aegina, who had the guidebook open on her knees. “A riad. Al Hamoun. It’s in the book. Shall we try it?”

  • • •

  Ah, oui, bien sûr,” said the shyly smiling, lightly bearded concierge/maître d’hôtel.

  He led them to the second floor, where a balcony landing wrapped around a courtyard garden and gurgling fountain. The room was spacious. White walls, the long narrow French window framed with a wide strip of royal blue. A large double bed with a thin mattress, sagging in the center but covered with inviting-looking clean white sheets. Aegina went to the window, opened it inward, and pushed out the louvered shutters. There was a view of an alley, rooftops, some green palms beyond a wall.

  Aegina turned to Luc, grinning with excitement. “I don’t think I want a nap now. I want to go explore.”

  • • •

  After the press of narrow streets between contiguous ragged-walled cinnamon build
ings, an inward-toppling adobe pueblo continuum, the Djemaa El-Fna opened before them like a stadium-sized flea market. Rows of stalls shaded with cloth; idle donkeys; carts, tables covered with beads, necklaces, gems, fossils, dates, pistachios; orange juice stalls; snake charmers; chained Barbary apes; dervish dancers with wrist cymbals; drummers; beriberied beggars; bent pretzel-twisted snot-streaming emaciated blind cripples extending palms to the high floating clouds; water sellers dressed like London’s Beefeaters with brass cups and bulging, darkly sweating goatskins full of water.

  Like a swarm of gnats, packs of feral boys in ragged shorts and T-shirts found them and tugged at their arms.

  “Hippie! Hippie! What you want?”

  “Come, hippie! Just for look!”

  “You want kif?”

  Cheerful grinning boys with glaucoma-clouded eyes, tooth-gapped scurvied gums, pellagra lesions.

  “Berber bag!”