The Rocks

by Peter Nichols

  “No, of course not,” said Billie. She looked at Gerald as he glanced up at her. “So what happens now?”

  “I think they’re waiting for me to tell them when to turn off the machines.”

  Billie stood and went to the window and looked out at the street, the buildings, the lights, the dark. Thoughts came to her like Russian dolls, each opening and revealing another inside, only the dolls kept getting bigger.

  “God, Gerald.”

  Five

  On his whiny Rieju, Luc sped up the hill away from the sea, past small villas, slopes of pine, and terraced olive groves. Through the narrow streets of the polígono, the bike’s echo running the gauntlet between tall stone buildings sounding louder than the engine itself. Beyond town, the road skirted the foot of the dark scrub oak, pine, and prickly pear slope of Monte Turó, before bending southeast toward the coast again.

  The entrance to the Duhamel house was an unmarked gap in the pines and led uphill on a rutted dirt track. In the dark, Luc remembered the location and contour of most of the holes and rocks not quite illuminated or altered out of shape in the jarring swing of his weak headlamp. The house had no electricity. Luc had rarely been there during the day, so it always seemed a flickering, glowing place, first appearing from the outside as faint embers in the trees.

  Émile Duhamel, François’s father, had designed and built the place of unchinked limestone himself, with a few laborers, in 1959. It was his response, he said, to the Villa Arpel of Jacques Tati’s film Mon Oncle. Inside it was an intended maze of odd-shaped rooms and curving passages lit by paraffin lamps and candles. Its windows were irregular trapezoidal or oval openings without glass, with exterior shutters for light, ventilation, or protection from weather. Gas stove, paraffine refrigerator in the kitchen. The bathrooms contained open-plan showers and sinks fed by gravity tanks into which water was pumped from the cistern by hand with a large-volume marine bilge pump. Hot water flowed from the tank painted black on the roof. The toilets were outside in a stone shelter over a lime pit, a small row of fenestrated planks set in reposeful cubicles of stone discreetly walled from view of the house and each other but wide-open to the outdoors and equipped with moldering paperbacks.

  Émile was of course an architect. He had lived with François’s mother, Sza Sza, a painter, for many years, though he was still married to his wife, Béatrice. His two older children with Béatrice often came down to Mallorca for a week or two in the summer. Most nights the house hosted an ongoing salon, guests free to drop in and eat, talk, read, play guitars, flutes, bouzoukis, or records on battery-operated record players, sleep if they wished in any of several ascetic rooms containing simple pallets, coarse sheets, candles and matches, and books: the essais of Montaigne, Saint Augustine, the odd volume of the Alexandria Quartet, or Harold Robbins.

  The people who came to the Duhamels’ were like the Duhamels themselves: a community of non-Spanish Europeans living interesting, at times distressing personal lives, who owned modestly renovated small fincas and either lived on the island year-round, or spent their summers there year after year, often coming down in the spring during the time of the almond blossoms, and their children, and the friends the children might bring down to spend a few weeks with them. They were self-employed professionals, artists, writers, nonviolent sweet-natured criminals, mysteriously self-supporting or genteelly impoverished, living on small annuities or the eked-out proceeds from the sale of ancestral paintings and furniture or a flat or a house, occasionally sleeping with one another in a manner that disturbed no one. In unspoken ways, they recognized one another, and everything they did made perfect sense to them, though they often arrived on the island as pariahs of the outside world, but were soothed and taken in by their steady, tolerant, and nonjudgmental friends and lovers on Mallorca.

  It was past eleven but not too late for Luc to turn up chez Duhamel. Lounging on the pillows in the main room, he found the Duhamels, père et femme, puffing at a chillum, with Schooner Trelawny, who was in his sixties and always wore guayaberas to house his Old Holborn tins and matches, and Natalie Veilleux, who at seventeen slipped conveniently between generations and lay on her stomach on a dhurrie on the floor, chin on her hands, feet waving in the air, bare thighs rolling beneath them, gazing inscrutably (stoned) at Luc as he came in.

  “Lucas!” said Schooner, who knew this was not Luc’s name. “Teddy’s just now gone off in the motor to look for none other than you. You must have missed each other at the one-way in the polígono.” Teddy was Schooner’s sixteen-year-old son, who spent his summer holidays with his father in Mallorca.

  “Oh,” said Luc. “Has Aegina been here?”

  “She and François are in his room,” said Émile.

  “Thanks.”

  Luc wound through a labyrinthine passageway to Francois’s room. Though François lived in Paris most of the year too, they hardly ever saw each other there. In Mallorca, François was probably his best friend.

  They were lying on the floor, side by side, their heads propped against François’s bed, a mattress on the floor. Aegina’s eyes were closed. Nina Simone was singing “Mississippi Goddam” on the little blue and white battery-powered record player. Despite the open window, the air was filled with sweet, blue hashish smoke. Luc wondered if they’d been fucking, but they were dressed and the sheets were still neatly drawn up to the pillows, although they could have been rolling around on the floor together. He didn’t really know what Aegina and François got up to on their own. The three of them were still natural and giggly together, the way they had been as children, but this summer, when Luc was alone with Aegina—not often, but at the Miravista when everyone else was dancing or off in the loo, or at the beach or in his boat—he had become either speechless or prone to idiot wisecrackery, and twitchingly self-conscious about his occasional spots. Aegina was still only fourteen, though in her bikini she looked older. And there was something very different about her this summer. A wildness and impenetrability he hadn’t known behind what he knew so well, like a jungle he’d only just become aware of at the back of a beach he’d known forever. He hadn’t kissed Aegina, apart from normal cheek-bussing, but he thought about it all the time now. He didn’t want to ask François if he had.

  “Salut, mec,” said François.

  “Salut,” said Luc. He sat down on the floor between the window and the bed.

  François proffered a thick joint. “T’en veux?”

  Luc took it, put its soggy end between his lips and inhaled, and nodded toward Aegina. “She been here long?”

  “Hours, man. She’s completely wrecked.”

  Aegina’s head was pushed forward by the edge of the bed, her neck at an awkward angle. He took a toke and handed the joint back, but François waved it away. He was rolling another.

  “I’m thinking of having my ear pierced,” said François. “Just one. And then I’ll put a gold ring in it. Like a pirate.”

  “You’ll look like a pédé.”

  “No, straight guys are doing it. It’ll look cool.”

  “Putain,” said Luc. “Not me. It’ll fucking hurt.”

  He took another deep hit. He would get wrecked too, then.

  Six

  Sunday it rained, on and off, unusual for summer. In the late afternoon, the sun came out and dried the darkened patio tiles and the flower beds and bougainvillea of the Rocks, and brought out the guests who had been weather-bound in their rooms, tired of their books, scouring old newspapers for anything left unread, staving off or finally succumbing to obligatory sex with their spouses or the people they were putatively fucking.

  Cassian and Dominick had spent the afternoon playing backgammon to the accompaniment of desultory drips from the overhanging tiled roof at the corner table beside the bar. They played on into the twilight as guests, still in the beachwear they’d worn all day despite the weather, drifted out to the bar.

  A chubb
y blond woman, Susie Breedham, heaved herself onto a barstool beside them. “Christ, have you two been at it all day?”

  “We have, yes,” said Cassian.

  “Darling Susie,” said Dominick, “what have you been up to, sweetheart?”

  “Wanking when I got bored out of my fucking mind and couldn’t stand it any longer. Otherwise sleeping and reading and drinking. Not in that order.”

  “I’d have been happy to give you a hand if you’d only asked.”

  “Sweet of you, Dominick. I didn’t want to bother you.”

  “No bother at all.”

  “I’ll let you know if I can’t manage by myself.”

  “Do.”

  Richard Squibb appeared beside the backgammon players, in his tiny bikini beneath pink potbelly, hands on hips, puffing on his cigar. “Who’s won, who’s lost?”

  “Need you ask,” said Dominick. “He’s taken forty pounds off me.”

  “Well, why the bloody hell do you play with him, then?” asked Richard.

  Cassian looked up at Richard through his yellow lenses, one side of his mouth slightly raised in a tight-lipped half smile. “He likes playing the loser.” He lowered his eyes to Dominick across the table. “That’s his gambit.”

  “Yes, but he keeps losing,” said Richard. “I don’t understand.”

  “Richard, will you take that massive smoldering log out of my ear, please?” said Susie.

  “Sorry.” Richard walked to the other side of the bar. He saw Lulu coming across the patio from the garage. “Lulu. Have you just been on one of your long drives in the campo?”

  “I have, Richard, yes.”

  She paused as they pecked cheeks.

  “Wasn’t it a bit gloomy in this weather?”

  “Not at all, I love it,” said Lulu. “But I’m glad the rain’s gone, so we can have our live music.”

  “Yes, me too,” said Richard. “He’s good, isn’t he, old Jackson?”

  “Yes, he is.” Smiling beatifically, Lulu swept on. “Darlings,” she said in answer to several hails, and disappeared into the house.

  She’d caught Jackson Rale’s catatonic scotch-and-soda set at the Miravista weeks earlier. Mateo had no objections to Jackson playing somewhere else on his union-obligated contractual single night off, so he’d played at the Rocks for the last three Sunday nights, sitting like a Buddha in the shadows beside the pool, an electrical cord snaking up the steps to his amplifier, a hit among the local British and European residents, as well as Rocks guests. Sunday nights had turned into a money-spinner for Lulu. It wouldn’t have worked in the rain.

  Lulu passed through her bedroom, and ran a bath. She had driven from the other side of Artà, where she’d had a chat with Bartolomé Llobet in El Claustro—“the cloister”—he liked to call it: the small finca he’d fixed up as a sanctuary for study and contemplation during his family summers in Cala Marsopa. The spare dwelling had a small kitchen, books and writing materials, a fireplace, a large bed, and a telephone into which Llobet would voice soft entreaties to Lulu whenever he could get her on the phone. She knew his schedule well, the afternoons when he might call, and she’d instructed her staff as to when she was at home or not to the Spanish gentleman—her lawyer, she described him—who called to advise her on her affairs with increasing urgency as the summer advanced.

  “Querida,” he would say, his deep, sonorous madrileño accent in the earpiece making her think of stones grinding together on the shore under the pull of a retreating wave, and continuing in English, “I am here.”

  Lulu enjoyed Llobet’s company. He was intelligent and amusing, but he was an unintuitive lover. One didn’t want to have to give directions, and when she did, Llobet became narrowly focused to the point of tedium, requiring her soon to say, “That’s lovely, Barty. You can do something else now.” And he would.

  No one knew of her friendship with the youngest son of the old Nacionalista pirate Juan Llobet, Cala Marsopa’s most notorious citizen. Bartolomé Llobet was merely a rich madrileño maritime lawyer who brought his large, immaculate family across the sea to the patriarchal home every summer; a local grandee who presided over the opening of the Festa de Sant Llorenç in August, and was a principal of the Banco Llobet. He and Lulu had never formally met, but the previous spring at Palma airport a tall man in a blazer and tie with slicked-back silvering hair had begged her pardon for his intrusion but surely he knew her from somewhere? Of course, he said, smiling with recognition when they had worked it out: la dama de la Villa Los Roques in Cala Marsopa. Driving along the shore road, and in town, he had seen her. He was delighted to finally meet her.

  He worked assiduously at giving her pleasure. He took a boyish pride in maneuvering Lulu to her climaxes, which she bestowed rather than achieved. They were soft shudders, from which she quickly recovered. He was simple and undeviating in his own requirements, and dependable as good hotel plumbing.

  They rarely saw, and never acknowledged, each other outside El Claustro. No one would ever find her there. It was the sense of complete dislocation that she loved. The fact that their association at no point touched any part of the rest of her life, and that that could not change.

  But today Lulu had brought the physical side of their relationship to a close.

  “Dear Barty, it’s much better this way. Now we can truly be friends and know each other publicly. I can actually see you more often. Sex gets old and I don’t want that to happen with us. It’s been perfectly lovely, so let’s keep it that way.”

  They spoke in English. Lulu’s acquisition of Spanish, now decades old, had plateaued and calcified once she had mastered basic commands and necessary instructions—el baño absolutamente necesario ser reparada por seis de la tarde—and Llobet’s English, honed through dealings with the international maritime community, was faultless and capable of the subtlest nuance.

  He looked at her, dumbfounded. “But querida, I don’t understand. We have the perfect, indeed, the most extraordinarily ideal situation here. Absolute discretion. Fulfillment of our desire for each other, the most charming intimacy and friendship—unless I completely misunderstand you. You don’t want to marry me? You know it’s impossible—”

  “Good lord, no, Barty. I wouldn’t dream of marrying you or anybody. No, no, you see, really, I’ve come to like you too much. I want us to be real friends.”

  “But we are real friends,” he protested. “We have the most delicious, perfect friendship—”

  “Yes, but it’s hidden away here. We can’t be real friends like this, and that’s what I want us to be: real friends. I’d love to have you and Maria come to the Rocks for dinner.”

  “Maria? And me? Both of us, for dinner?”

  “Yes. Why not, Barty? If she’s your wife, she must be a wonderful woman. I’m sure we’d be great friends too, don’t you think?”

  Llobet stared at her. He stood and walked to the door that led into the little garden, where a fountain was surrounded by small orange trees. Then he turned and looked at her with a tragic expression. “Lulu. My darling. You are saying we will not make love again?”

  “Yes, Barty. It’s been very sweet. But let’s move on, no?” She smiled at him with a look of genuine friendship.

  • • •

  I’d like to get my leg over that,” said Dominick, his eyes following Lulu as she crossed the patio after they’d exchanged darlings. “What do you reckon my chances?”

  “Nil,” said Cassian. He shook the red leather dice cup and rolled eleven.

  “Really? Why not?”

  Cassian moved his pieces.

  “Where’s she getting it, then?” Dominick wondered aloud. Lulu was at least a decade older than either of them, but age in her case only meant enhancement. “She must be getting it off with someone. Who?”

  “It’s your move.”

  “Well, aren’t you interested
?” asked Dominick. “You’ve known her forever. What’s the game, then?” He was pretty sure Cassian wasn’t bent. He was about Dominick’s age, mid-thirties, not nearly as good-looking, short red hair brushed back, dressed like a schoolmaster on holiday, apparently entirely unaware of what had been going on in Carnaby Street and on the King’s Road. Supposedly Cassian had a girlfriend in London, but he never brought her down.

  “No, I’m not interested. There is no game.”

  “You don’t want her?” pressed Dominick.

  “Don’t be revolting. She’s a close friend of my parents’. She’s like an aunt to me.”

  Dominick looked at the house like a reconnoitering burglar. “Well, I’ve decided”—sotto voce—“I decided this winter, in fact—that this is the summer I’m going to give Lulu a tumble. I’m going for it, I can tell you. I’m going to give her such a thrashing—”

  “Oh, shut up and play, you idiot. It’s your move.”

  Seven

  They were eating pulpo, calamares a la plancha, hamburguesas and plates of papas fritas at the Marítimo in the port. Florence and Aymar, Sylvie, François, Teddy, Serge and Alain, Natalie, Aegina, and Luc. The gang. Les mecs de l’été. They sat at a table out on the edge of the terrace, away from the lights. Francesca, Rafael Soller’s wife, would serve them only Coca-Cola or TriNaranjus, but Aegina had given Natalie money to buy a liter of vino Planisi to put in Teddy Trelawney’s goatskin bota, and they passed the bag around under the table, filling their water glasses. Billie had given Aegina a thousand pesetas “just to spend as you like, sweetie. Treat yourself to something.” Aegina used the money to drink more and stay away from the house. Now that Billie had arrived, she visited the hospital less.

  “Mais c’est dé-gueul-asse, this shitting pulpo,” said François, with a show of averting his head as the dish of little saffron-dusted octopuses Luc had ordered was passed around. He stuffed his mouth with ketchup-smeared papas.