Fergus sat at the table in the corner of the patio near the bar, watching Cassian Ollorenshaw play backgammon with the Hungarian film producer off the yacht. After lunch, Fergus had driven François and Gerald back up the hill to C’an Cabrer, and written Gerald a check for six thousand two hundred fifty pounds, a quarter of the down payment for the transfer of ownership of five and a half hectares of Gerald’s land of designated coordinates in the town of Cala Marsopa to the Mallorca Ventures Company. Gerald had signed the document Fergus had prepared. Done.
Now Fergus was absorbed by the mood at the table. It had something of the repressed excitement of an auction room.
Cassian, in swimming trunks and a long-sleeved shirt, sat hunched, still, gnomelike, peering yellow-lensed at the board. His longish red hair was slicked back in an old-fashioned manner with some sort of pomade, curls escaping regimentation at the back of his neck, forehead slathered with zinc oxide which had run into the hair at his temples. Not a vain man. A red box of king-sized Dunhills and a gold crosshatch Dunhill lighter sat on the table beside his left elbow. Released from Her Majesty’s Pentonville prison in North London in April, he had spent most of his time since then sitting at this table in the corner of the patio. It had become his office. The bar’s phone, its extension line snaking along the tiles and disappearing behind the bar’s counter, sat on the table beside his cigarettes.
“I’ll simply pay the entire phone bill,” Cassian had told Lulu. “It’ll be easier than sorting out how much is mine, yours, whomsoever’s. Most of it will be mine.” He was usually on the phone all day. Snatching it up whenever it rang, he therefore took most of the Rocks’ incoming calls and had soon filled the reservations book with the bulk of the forthcoming season’s bookings. He was efficient at solving overlapping room conflicts, which Lulu, happy to accommodate room requests and leave time for people who were unsure of how long they wanted to stay, not good at dealing with the odd days of empty rooms, had never managed so adroitly. “It’s a much quieter room,” Cassian frequently advised a caller. “Otherwise you’ll be kept awake all night by the music from Ses Rotges up the road and awoken by the gardener and his boy at seven. But you must be out by the fourteenth.”
Szabó, lounging in a chair across the table, still in a sarong but wearing a clean, pale blue cotton shirt, was losing the game. He didn’t mind. He savored the engagement with an opponent of such great skill. It was like playing against an Arab in a souk. He had played Luc aboard the yacht, but Luc was an indifferent backgammon player, their games usually a foregone conclusion, and Szabó had been bored. Nor had they played for money. Cassian was taking real money off him.
“I hear you’re going to be building up on the hill,” Cassian said to Fergus.
“Oh. Yes.” Fergus was surprised but not displeased to be the subject of deal-making news. He assumed someone Aegina or François knew had spoken about it to someone else. “We’ve just signed, in fact.”
“I know Johnny Barton,” said Cassian.
“Oh do you? Yes, he’s one of our investors. How do you know Johnny?”
“We were at Eton together.”
“Oh, right.”
“What are you building, if you don’t mind my asking you?” asked Szabó.
“No, not at all,” said Fergus. He outlined the scheme for two phases of tasteful villas occupying an unparalleled site overlooking the town with views over a wide swath of sea to the south and east and, on exceptionally clear days, even of Minorca.
“Where is the location?” asked Szabó.
“Just outside town, a kilometer from where we sit.”
“Are you fully subscribed?”
“You mean—”
“Have you already sold off all your lots?”
“Oh, no. No, not quite. We have some interest, people I know in London have put in, but yes, still room to get in.”
“And must you build all your houses to plan,” asked Szabó, “or could one purchase several lots from you and build something larger?”
“Ah. Well, I’m sure that could happen. As long as the house and the grounds were in keeping with the style of the surrounding development. Which is certainly extremely attractive. More like something you’d see on the Côte d’Azur.”
“It sounds marvelous. Could you show me the site?”
“Absolutely,” said Fergus. “Whenever you like.”
“Tomorrow morning? Ten o’clock?”
“Certainly. I’ll pick you up at your boat.”
“Fabuleux,” said Szabó. He briefly glanced down at the board again, threw the dice, moved, then looked up toward the yoga group under the pines. He found Lulu a compelling sight. They had been introduced before the session began and over the last hour he had watched her work through a sequence of repeating yet continually evolving movements, like the ringing of changes with church bells. He was mesmerized by Lulu’s astonishing flexibility, evidently verging on double-jointedness, and her slim, tautly muscled form, smooth brown skin that began to glisten as the class went on, the thick cord of white hair worn in a long braid bound loosely at her neck, the strongly etched dark eyebrows that contrasted with her white hair, her fluidity of motion, her liquid calm. An extraordinary woman. How odd, surprising, that she, this radiant graceful creature, so English, so old world in accent and affect, of such a distinct physical presence, was the mother of the insecure and twitchy Luc, who spoke French with fluent argot.
Lulu liked to finish her yoga sessions with short philosophical readings. She had lately been thumbing through an apposite-seeming volume titled The Awakening of Intelligence, by Jiddu Krishnamurti, left by a guest in one of the rooms. She found much of it incontrovertibly silly, but she liked the author’s name and the promise of the title. The cover photograph of the author, however, gave her pause. Krishnamurti was undoubtedly holy-looking, undeniably attractive in that Indian way that she herself frankly couldn’t bear but others were so impressed by, a sort of Beatle Gandhi. But if he was so enlightened, why the elaborate, swirling comb-over (unquestionably molded and controlled with hair spray) to conceal his obvious baldness? What a bald admission of self-consciousness and insecurity placed like a beacon of contradiction on the cover of a book touting inner truth or whatever it was. But the readings struck, she thought, the right note, forming a suitable bridge between the stirring and release of physical and spiritual energy and a subsequent gin and tonic.
While her acolytes lay flat on their mats, breathing with the trees sighing delicately above them, Lulu opened the book at a dog-eared page and began to read in her clear voice that carried across the pool and the patio to the bar with the modulation and accent of old radio clips:
“‘The old culture is almost dead and yet we are clinging to it. . . . Unless there is a deep psychological revolution, mere reformation on the periphery will have little effect. This psychological revolution . . . is possible through meditation. . . .’”
Soon the yoga practitioners came down to the patio with their mats and bags, breathing and stepping like dancers, glowing with perspiration and inner radiance. They settled at several tables. Dominick played bartender and brought them drinks.
Szabó stood, graciously thanking Cassian for such sport. “You will take a check tomorrow, I hope?” He had lost twelve hundred pounds to the Englishman.
“Sure,” said Cassian. “Unless you sail off first.”
Szabó laughed appreciatively. He crossed the patio and joined his wife, her sister, and Lulu and the other woman at their table. He arranged the sarong neatly about his legs as he sat down. “And how did you all enjoy the yoga?”
“Very pleasant,” said Véronique Szabó stonily.
“So it appeared,” said Szabó. “It’s a rare spot you have here, Lulu. Your own little Alhambra.”
“Hardly that,” said Lulu, “but it has become an enclave of sorts. One feels one can leave the world outside, to
some extent.”
“Thank God!” said Sarah Bavister. She was standing, pulling back her hair. She was shaped like a pouter pigeon, small and delicate but with disproportionately large breasts on top of a protuberant chest. “I’ve been coming here for years. The rest of the world becomes more and more horrible, but here it’s always exactly the same. Just like Lulu.”
“Darling Sarah,” said Lulu.
“Do you take outside guests for meals?” asked Szabó. “Because we would love to join you for dinner tonight. We are four, including your brilliant son.”
“We’d be very happy to have you,” said Lulu. “I’ll tell the cook.”
“And will you please be our guests for lunch aboard Dolphin tomorrow?” Szabó looked around the table.
“Ooh, yes, please!” said Sarah. “It’s such a fantastic-looking boat. I’m dying to come aboard and have a look.”
“Yes, thank you,” said Dominick.
“All of you, yes?” Szabó’s gaze stopped at Lulu.
“It’s very kind of you,” she said, smiling pleasantly, standing up. “Now I must go see Claire about dinner. We sit down at nine.”
Szabó watched her for a moment as she padded away on bare feet. Then he turned around in his chair to face the two men still at the corner table by the bar. “Gentlemen, you’ll come to lunch with us tomorrow aboard the yacht, I hope?”
“Thank you! Love to,” said Fergus.
Cassian simply smiled, thinly, acknowledging the invitation.
Szabó and his group finished their drinks and left to walk back to the port along the sea.
Fergus remained at Cassian’s table.
“Do you play?” asked Cassian, setting up the board.
Fergus laughed. “Not in your league.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” said Cassian. “We can play a game for fun.”
It didn’t sound like fun to Fergus. “Actually, I should push off pretty soon too.” But he sat and toyed with his drink. He’d heard of course that Ollorenshaw had been in prison for financial irregularities at a rarefied level. It was practically a credential. Fergus was intrigued by him.
“Your property plan sounds good,” said Cassian, arranging the backgammon pieces.
“Yes, I think so,” Fergus said cheerfully. “Should do jolly well.”
“Do you think you could have gone for a denser development of the property?”
Cassian was gazing at him like a lizard with heavy-lidded eyes through the yellow lenses of his glasses.
“Well, of course, we talked about it. It would have meant a lot more work. More money up front. And then a much bigger impact on the surrounding properties. Quite frankly, I don’t think we’d have got the go-ahead from old Gerald if we were looking to do anything more ambitious.”
“I see,” said Cassian. He rattled the dice in the cup and threw them down onto the board. A three and a one.
“Can’t tempt you?”
“Oh, all right,” said Fergus. “Just one game, then. I have to get into town pretty soon.”
• • •
Luc didn’t hang around after walking Szabó and his wife and her sister along the shore road to the Rocks and making introductions, pecking his mother’s cheek. He went into the garage and wheeled the old tinny Rieju Jaca out into the dusty street and jumped on the kick-starter. The bike fired right away. Gracias, Vicente. A thousand pesetas when I see you, amigo.
Luc cruised back to the port to pick up Gaspard, Dolphin’s Guadeloupean Creole chef, who needed to replenish the ship’s stores. He drove through Cala Marsopa with Gaspard on the back of the bike, pointing out the fruit and vegetable markets. He dropped him at the new supermarket behind the plaza.
“They’ll deliver to the boat,” Luc told him. “Most of the mercados too. Or they can call you a taxi to take you back to the port. The taxis will drive down along the quay to the boat.”
“Formidable,” said Gaspard. He cut an exotic figure among the doughy white European tourists in department store summer wear. Six-foot-four, skinny, café-au-lait complexion with pouting lips, enormous and frankly inquisitive, frankly gay blue eyes, kinky black ponytail. He wore a billowing white linen shirt and red capri pants, a tasseled Moroccan Berber satchel slung over his shoulders. “Merci, mon cher,” he said, blowing Luc a kiss and waving him away.
Luc idled the bike through town. The streets, now mostly macadamized, built up, newly fronted and sidewalked, still took him, by no matter what route, along inexorable azimuths backward into the past. He looked as always for a certain head, hair, body shape, general aspects that he wished or feared would suddenly shift and lock into vivid particularity. Most of all he wanted to see her face.
He stopped at the tabacos near the port, once a dark hole-in-the-wall selling cigarettes and lotería tickets with toothless fishermen sitting on chairs outside, now a smart glass-windowed retail space that also sold olivewood chessboards, botas, castanets, small felt-covered bulls, and bullfight posters. The fishermen and their chairs were gone. He bought a pack of Gitanes, and said bona tarda to the aged crone who no longer recognized him.
She was standing outside, looking at the Rieju, a little boy holding her hand, when he came out.
“It is yours,” said Aegina, “I thought so.”
She looked at him calmly, a small smile—he could read nothing else. The kid was dark-haired, olive-skinned, like Aegina, gazing up at him with large brown eyes.
“And this is yours?” Luc asked.
The kid moved behind Aegina when he saw Luc looking at him.
“Yes. This is Charlie. Charlie, will you say hello to Luc? He’s an old friend of mine.”
The little boy remained behind his mother, clutching her thigh.
“He’s beautiful, what I can see of him. Which is that he looks like you.”
“Luc, I’m so sorry about your father,” she said. Earlier in the year, Luc had sent her a letter, addressed to C’an Cabrer in Mallorca because he didn’t know her London address, telling her that his father had died of metastasized prostate cancer, a day before his sixty-first birthday. “I liked him very much when we met in Paris. I’m so sorry.”
“He liked you too,” Luc said. “And you heard about Teddy?” One of their cohort of childhood friends whose parents lived in or returned seasonally to Mallorca, whom they’d known and played with most summers as long as they could remember, Teddy Trelawney had overdosed on smack and died in New York that winter.
“Yes, I heard,” said Aegina, glancing down at Charlie, who started pulling his mother’s arm, holding on to her hand with both of his. “I can’t believe that, how he got to such a place. Teddy had a such a sweet and beautiful nature.”
“I’m sure he was sweet to the end,” said Luc. Her hair was shorter, shoulder length now, still deeply dark, black except in the sun, and otherwise she looked much as she had the last time he’d seen her, like this on the street four years ago—better, he decided: there was more of her in that face now. “You look good,” he said.
“You do too. You look thinner.”
“I’ve been running. I ran a marathon in April.”
“I can’t imagine that.”
Charlie was now tugging hard. “Wait a minute, Charlie,” she said. “Are you still in Paris?”
“Yeah.”
Her arm was stretched sideways, Charlie was leaning perilously away from her. “I want to go,” he said.
“Yes, we’re going, Charlie,” said Aegina. She looked at Luc, the kind of look that conveyed in less than a second an acknowledgment of the bildungsroman of their shared history.
“It’s good to see you. Bye.”
“Bye,” he said, feeling something like a bowling ball in his chest. He watched them walk away down the checker-textured sidewalk. Charlie had let her hand go, but now Luc saw Aegina’s hand and the boy’s move to
ward each other reflexively until they clasped.
Luc stuffed the cigarettes into his shirt pocket and climbed aboard the Rieju and rode away. It was after five, people were coming off the beaches. The streets were mobbed with strangers, British, Scandinavian, German tourists familiar with the town, owning it as if it were now theirs as it had once been his.
Three
A man named Block traveling with his wife steps off a train while it’s stopped in a station somewhere in Europe. He enters the station café to buy a newspaper. Inside, an elderly woman stumbles. Block catches her, she clings to him, saying something he can’t quite hear. People in the bar crowd around them to help. Block tries to get away—his train is leaving—but now the elderly woman is clutching fiercely at his lapels, babbling something into his ear with feverish insistence. Others support the woman, lay her down, and Block pulls free. He runs outside into pelting rain, but his train pulls away without him.
Soaking wet, he goes into the station, asks the woman in the ticket booth if he can get word to his wife on the train. She shrugs, she doesn’t think so. Block asks when the next train leaves. Not for another two hours. He walks back into the café. The old woman has died—she lies on the ground, quiet and still. People have pulled back, buzzing about what has happened, waiting for the police, ambulance. Block orders a coffee. As he drinks it, shivering in his wet clothes, a man appears at his elbow to thank him for trying to help the old woman. He did nothing, says Block, he was simply there when she stumbled. The man sees Block is cold and wet and buys him a Cognac. Gratefully, Block sips it. She appeared to be saying something to you, says the man who bought him the Cognac. I wasn’t listening, says Block, I was trying to get back out to my train. You must have heard something, the man says. Now Block looks at him, sensing, for the first time, something other than friendliness—
“But really, come on, Luc. We need to know,” Szabó said. “The whole movie turns on this, what she says to him. We don’t need to know this?”
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