The Rocks

by Peter Nichols

  “Yes. I’ll be all right. Don’t worry, Papa. I’m fine.”

  She was amazing. Got her strength from her mother.

  “Well, what are you thinking?” he asked.

  “I’m thinking that my childhood is over. It just ended.”

  “No, no, not at all. You are still only fourteen—I mean, you’re just a girl, Aegina. Don’t worry, you’re not being packed off to England to grow up, you know. You’re just going to school. You’ll make new friends. Really, you’re still a young girl, you’ve got lots of time—”

  “I’m sure it will be great, Papa. But my childhood is over.”

  • • •

  It was that ruddy great darkie guitar player, Dominick realized, chomping away on an ensaïmada with quite amusing delicacy in the airport café.

  “You’re off as well, then, Jackson?” said Dominick.

  Jackson gazed at him. “Yes.”

  “Back to America?”

  “No, I’m going to Gibraltar. Got a job playing with a band on an ocean liner for the winter. Going to the Caribbean.”

  “Fantastic. Lucky old you. I wish I were in your shoes.” Indeed, what a swath old Jackson would cut through a shipload of widows cruising for a spot of excitement. “So will we see you back here next summer?”

  “I don’t know. Depends what comes up.”

  “All right, well, have fun aboard your ship of music lovers.”

  Dominick walked on toward his gate with the other people heading for the London flight. He saw two familiar faces: the father, the woman who wasn’t his wife—and the girl.

  “Hallo,” said Dominick cheerily. “Are you off back home too? We must be on the same flight.” It was Aegina. She looked like a child in her little shirt and skirt and cheap plastic sandals. Terribly sweet. “Well, Aegina, it was such fun seeing you this summer.” He grinned at her. “We must get together next year.”

  Aegina stepped quickly forward and kicked him in the balls.

  Dominick was completely surprised, but he could say nothing because her blow had been devastatingly accurate. He only grunted and crumpled forward, dropping the newspaper he’d bought at the airport shop.

  Aegina kicked again, but Dominick’s bent posture offered only his shins to her foot. She threw out her arms and launched herself at his chest, pushing him so that he fell sprawling on the hard marble airport floor.

  “Aegina?” said Billie.

  Gerald stepped forward and wrapped his arms around his daughter. She was a trembling, throbbing coil. He pulled her away, folding her tightly into his chest, and watched the man on the floor kicking his legs like a fallen horse, scrambling to get away.

  The mother and daughter arrived at the beach first.

  “¡Mira las olas, mamá!” yelled the four-year-old girl.

  “Sí, son grandes. ¿Qué dijo tu padre?”

  “Que tenemos que ser cuidadosos.”

  “Bueno. Claro,” said Paloma.

  They crossed the sand to their usual spot. “¿Dónde están?” cried the little girl.

  “Ya vienen.”

  There had been a storm somewhere to the north, said her father, who knew all about the sea, and today the waves at the beach would be large and strong. He was right; they were rolling in as booming funnels and breaking on top of one another close to the beach like something being delivered too fast. As soon as they dropped their towels on the sand, the girl dragged her mother to the water’s edge. The foamy water popped and crackled around them. The girl waded deeper, letting go of her mother’s hand, and a wave rushed at her. She screamed as it caught her and she fell. Her mother didn’t move. The wave surged out and the girl lay in the wet sand, laughing.

  “¡Mira, mamá! ¡Ahí están!” she shouted. She stood up and began waving at the woman approaching with the little boy. “¡Por aquí!”

  The other woman and the little boy, who was almost six, joined them in the shallows. The two women stood together while the children played around them.

  “Bueno,” said Preciosa. “Voy a sentarme. Luc, te quedas cerca de la playa y te cuidas de Aegina. ¿Entiendes?”

  On the beach, not far from the water, the women sat on their towels.

  “Aie, a madhouse,” said Preciosa.

  “What now?”

  “Oy! Everything, all the time. Take Luc to the beach, she says, while telling me to clean up the breakfasts, clean the rooms, do the laundry.”

  “She never takes Luc to the beach herself?”

  “That one? Never. She never goes to the beach, she doesn’t spend any time with him, poor thing.”

  “And the father? When does he arrive?”

  “I don’t think he’s coming this summer. He’s staying in Paris. He can’t take her, and I don’t blame him—¡Cuidado!” Preciosa yelled at the children.

  The waves, tumbling closely one atop another, insistently, left no respite after each surge. As the women watched, a retreating wave met a breaker larger than the others. A heap of water rose over the children and swept them off their feet, pulling them into the next wall, which broke and swallowed them in a chaotic vortex of heaping foam.

  Both women stood and walked into the water. They grabbed at shiny brown feet, hands, arms, legs indistinguishable from each other, and hauled the spluttering children into shallower water.

  “¡Cuidado con las olas!” said Preciosa. “Look out for the waves or you’ll be carried off to Minorca before we can get you.”

  “Don’t go out any farther,” said Paloma.

  The women walked back up to their towels. When they had sat down again, Preciosa said: “I saw Gerald down here again the other day.”

  Paloma stared hard at her. “Did he come in?”

  “No. Just walking on the road around Los Roques.”

  Paloma shook her head. “He’s still hooked by that witch.”

  “But he loves you, surely?” said Preciosa. “Not her. Not that one?”

  “It’s a sickness,” said Paloma.

  She looked out at the children.

  They were taunting the most vicious of the approaching waves.

  “¡Éste!” yelled Luc.

  “¡No, la próxima!” screamed Aegina, screeching like a bird.

  Another wave engulfed them. The water carried them under with unimagined force. It twisted and rolled them together so that neither child could tell whether the arms and legs and hands and feet thumping into their faces and bodies were their own or the other’s. They were one tumbling creature.

  And then the water was gone, and they were left sprawled together on the sand in a moment of unnatural quiet, shrieking and laughing. Shrieking and laughing. Before the next wave broke.

  One

  After three years on the island, Gerald no longer walked along the shore in front of Villa Los Roques. During the first year, he’d stopped at the house and knocked on the door on several occasions, but it had never been opened to him. Then he’d been shot by an air rifle while passing the house on the shore road, the .177 lead pellet (he’d picked it up after seeing it fall to the road beside him and put it in his pocket to keep as a memento of Lulu’s shifting feelings for him) stinging his thigh and later raising a small bruise. He now used calle Rotges, bordering the high wall at the back of the property, and occasionally he heard voices on the other side of the wall—Milly’s he could always make out—but never Lulu’s. Other voices, men and women; sometimes a boy’s, Milly’s son Cassian, he supposed. A little way on, a dirt path led down to the dirt road along the sea, well out of sight of the house. That would take him to the beach at Son Moll and then up to the main road close to his long rutted drive.

  Today he saw the man and the little boy again. He’d seen them before along the road here. He couldn’t be sure but he thought it was Lulu’s husband and son. They ate sometimes at the Marítimo, in the evenings whe
n Gerald was never in town—Rafael had told him. Lulu and her American husband and the baby boy and their friends from the house.

  They were coming toward him from the beach; the American man walking, hugging the little boy to his chest. As they drew close, the man nodded at Gerald with the polite acknowledgment of people who know each other only by infrequent sighting. Nothing deep or knowing in that look: he doesn’t know who I am, Gerald realized. With his straw hat and threadbare shirt and trousers, Gerald wouldn’t be taken for a holidaymaker. A yachtsman, perhaps, or a laborer.

  The child was fast asleep on his father’s shoulder. Gerald looked closely at its face for signs of Lulu, but it was simply a very small boy’s sleeping face—Gerald couldn’t tell how old children were by looking at them, but this one seemed convincingly less than two, which would be right. Just a pure sleeping-boy face, unaware of anything in the world.

  Gerald nodded back as they passed and walked on.

  Two

  Bernard! Good man,” said Tom when Bernie came in through the gate carrying the straw shoulder bag. Tom appeared to have just woken up. He sat splayed in a deck chair wearing Milly’s threadbare yellow dressing gown with traces of a pattern of sprouted tufts. He was blinking in the sunlight, taking in his surroundings—the tiled patio, the open doors to the house, the glimpse of the blue sea beyond the white wall—as if a hood had just been removed from his head.

  As usual, Bernie had been the first awake and he’d walked into town from Villa Los Roques along the unpaved shore road to the panadería.

  “Morning, Tom,” he said.

  Bernie went on into the house. Lulu and Milly, both dressed, were sitting at the kitchen table, the teapot between them. Milly, half a generation older than Lulu, wearing her usual sensible summer wear: a short-sleeved Aertex shirt, loose skirt to the knees, plimsolls: a schoolgirl’s outfit sized for a six-footer. Lulu, a schoolgirl in size against her, wore floral shorts and a sleeveless cotton shirt that displayed the lithe arms and legs that Bernie so admired. They were saying something about “guests” but stopped talking the moment he appeared. Lulu stood up. “I’ve just put your coffeepot on,” she said, going to the stove.

  “Thanks,” he said. Bernie again was aware of the sense he’d had for a few days: that Lulu and Milly were conspiring about something. He set the straw bag on the table and took out its contents: several round loaves and a mounded paper parcel with its two ends twisted together.

  “Ooh, lovely,” said Milly, reaching for the parcel, opening it, and pulling out a soft, round, spiral-shaped flaky pastry. “I must have my ensaïmada immediately, while they’re still hot. Thank you, Bernard. You’re a love.”

  “Yes, you are,” said Lulu, as if confirming this after some consideration.

  “You’re welcome,” said Bernie.

  Nobody called him Bernie, his preferred name, here. After two years of marriage, Lulu still wouldn’t call him Bernie. “I can’t, darling,” she’d said early on. “I just can’t say it. You might as well be called Siegfried. I couldn’t manage it.” He’d thought that charming at first. She evidently couldn’t manage Bernard either. She called him darling, and referred to him by name only when mentioning him to third parties. Ber-nard, or Buhnud, the way it came out. This, then, was what Milly and Tom and Lulu’s friends called him. Bernie was accustomed to the American emphasis on the second syllable, with its prominent American r—Ber-nard—which people had called him all his life, at school, college, the army, until they got to know him as Bernie. Even in Paris, where he now lived, the French—Bair-narrrhh—was more familiar-sounding, and certainly more charming, than Buhnud. Good morning, Buhnud. Ah, there you are, Buhnud. They seemed to be talking about someone else.

  “Luc asleep?” asked Bernie.

  “Yes, darling,” said Lulu. She poured coffee from the Moka pot into a cup and handed it to him.

  “Did you see Schooner out on the terrace?” asked Milly.

  “No.”

  “Good,” said Milly. “He needs his sleep. Well, if you go join Tom, Lulu and I’ll bring you your breakfast.”

  Obediently, Bernie went out to the terrace. He sat in the shade and wished he had a newspaper.

  “Poor old Schooner, eh?” said Tom, squinting at him.

  “He seemed very glad to be here.”

  “I should think so, after his epic peregrination around the Mediterranean. And the other business. Poor old fellow,” he said feelingly.

  Schooner Trelawney had left England under a cloud four days earlier, intent on joining Tom and Milly and licking his wounds among loyal friends. He knew, of course, that for years they’d been going down to the same villa called the Rocks beside the sea—they’d often invited him. He’d gone directly to Monaco by train but it looked nothing like T & M’s holiday snapshots. He’d been unable to find them anywhere. A man had suggested the Eden Roc Hotel, so, despite not being in Monaco at all, he’d gone there. The houses along the French coast here looked more like it, but no sign of Tom and Milly, nor any villa of that name. After several days in a wretched pension in Nice, Schooner was reluctantly persuaded by cables sent to and from England to make his way to Barcelona, where he got on the ferry—to Mallorca (he’d never heard of the place) not Monaco—and then endured a frightening bus ride across the island, his heart sinking the whole time with the mounting conviction that he was now closer to Africa than to his friends, to a tiny little village by the sea that couldn’t possibly be the place they’d been banging on about for years, and then, at last, long after dark, he was directed to a house on a dirt road beside the sucking sea where he stumbled in and quite miraculously found Tom and Milly, et al. Schooner had collapsed, weeping, managed to get out a few shreds of his awful news over soup and whiskey, before Milly and Lulu packed him off to bed.

  “Well, you can’t shit where you eat,” said Milly quietly as they ate breakfast on the patio.

  “I know,” said Tom, “but jolly bad luck, all the same. And what about poor Teddy? What’s going to happen to him now? He’s just a little boy. It’s going to be tough on him if Vivian decides to take it further. Do you think she will?”

  “It’s not bad luck—it’s very naughty, and bloody wanton, if you ask me,” said Milly. “But yes, there is Teddy, so I don’t think she’ll shop him to the police.”

  “Let’s hope not,” said Tom. “But under threat of that, she can call the shots, can’t she. Shut him right out if she’s a mind to.”

  “What happened?” asked Bernie. He had been typing a piece in his room much of the evening and had caught a sense of the thing—an infidelity of some sort—the night before, but now he was lost. “He was having an affair, right?”

  “Not exactly,” said Milly. “Vivian, Schooner’s wife, caught him in his study at home with one of his pupils he was tutoring, in flagrante delicto. It was a boy, of course, which perfectly suited Vivian, because she’s kicked him out and threatened to go to the police. Now she’ll try to keep him away from their son, Teddy. In England, he can be prosecuted for (a) buggery, and (b) doing it with a child. So he’s out.” Milly began pouring the tea.

  “Poor old chap,” said Tom. He turned and looked at Bernie appealingly.

  “Sounds tough,” agreed Bernie. Without the gauze of love and sympathy through which the others saw Schooner, Bernie understood only that Schooner was a pedophile on the run, harbored by his wife’s friends in a house containing his sleeping infant son.

  He looked at Lulu. She was quiet. Her thoughts seemed elsewhere. She looked up at him and smiled. “I’ll get you some more coffee, darling,” she said, then rose and disappeared into the house.

  Cassian joined them on the terrace. So obviously Milly’s son in every way, with his thatch of her red hair, wearing Aertex shirt, shorts, sandals—a schoolboy’s holiday outfit—he looked younger than fifteen. He sat down and spread marmalade thickly across a piece of grilled bread while Milly po
ured him a cup of tea.

  “You missed all the excitement last night,” said Tom. “Schooner’s here.”

  “I know, Mummy told me,” said Cassian. His broad pale freckled face showed no emotion.

  “Did you?” Tom said, looking at his wife.

  “Yes,” said Milly.

  “You told him what, exactly?” asked Tom.

  “That he’d been buggering a little boy and been chucked out,” said Cassian.

  “Really?” said Tom. “You told him that—”

  “Of course I didn’t, darling.”

  “I know, Daddy,” said Cassian, witheringly. “Everyone knows.”

  “Well, it’s an unhappy situation,” said Tom.

  “I’m sure he’ll live,” said Cassian, raising his teacup.

  “Darling boy,” said Tom, with gentle censure, “what a heartless thing to say. I don’t think you quite understand what’s happened. There’s a little boy, Schooner’s son, Teddy, to consider.”

  “There was another little boy, as well, wasn’t there?” said Cassian.

  Milly broke in. “What are you doing today, darling?”

  “Go bathing as usual, I expect,” said Cassian without enthusiasm. He took a bite of toast, and even with his mouth closed the sound of the crust being crushed between his teeth was extraordinarily loud.

  “I’m going to look in on Luc,” said Bernie, rising and leaving the table.

  Luc was sleeping in a tiny room beside his parents’ bedroom. Its window looked out at the sea. Bernie had made paper airplanes and colored them with artist’s pastels he’d found in the house and taped them to the white walls. Luc, at fifteen months old, was sleeping in a small normal bed with no protection around it, but he’d always been good about not falling out of bed. He lay awake, sprawled on his back, his eyes and whole attention on Bernie the moment he came in the door, as if he’d been waiting for him. A beautiful smile spread across Luc’s face as he saw his father. “Papa!”