The Rocks

by Peter Nichols

  When he woke in the mornings, he read beneath the pines from the small Cambridge editions of Marcus Aurelius (always immediately useful) and scraps of Hesiod. Not a compulsive adventurer—Hesiod’s only sea voyage was from the city of Aulis, on the Strait of Euripus, to the island of Euboea, a crossing of just under two hundred feet. Yet Gerald admired the Greek poet’s seamanlike instincts about when came “the timely season for men to voyage” and when they should remain in port.

  What, he wondered, would Hesiod make of this season?

  Gerald could never have imagined such . . . flights of lovemaking. Édith, the French widow in Alexandria during the war, had been appreciative, instructive, and very kind to him. Six-foot-two-inch Felicity at Oxford, keen and sweaty, solid as a pony, great pale shanks revealed in the fumbling of damp tweed beside the gas fire, had been like weekend rides at a gymkhana.

  Beside these, Lulu was a kinetic wild child. She made love to him with a feral hunger. She showed him everything: first, what he wanted, then what she wanted. Their lovemaking became an obsessive preoccupation, anticipated, ritualized, deliberated over. A fascination. A drowning in sensation that was new to him.

  The mesmerizing animal sight of her as she sat astride him now in the moonlit cabin, panting like a runner, slim muscled arms raised with hands gripping, pushing, at the cabin beams overhead, sweat streaming from her face and neck, soaking her hair, rilling down her small breasts and torso, pooling between her thighs at the junction of their sucking groins. Her hips drove forward and backward with the insistent motion of piston arms. Gerald watched her—an almost fiendish sight in the bars of moonlight coming through the portholes—amazed as always that such a thing could take place anywhere near, let alone on top of, him. It happened almost every night: at some point they came out of sleep together, shedding sleep for this feverish embrace.

  Then he lost all thought, as a locus of sensation seized the base of his spine and he stiffened, broke with her rhythm, and Lulu quickly slipped off him, moved down and lowered her face and hands over him as if in prayer and deftly midwived his shuddering contractions. He felt the vibration of her vocal cords driving back into him as she hummed a long note and then he heard her take a breath, and she said, “You taste of the sea.”

  An inchoate emotion flooded through Gerald and he began to weep. It only lasted a few seconds, no more than an involuntary spasm in the chest as he squeezed his eyes shut against the tears. It happened often when they were finished—fortunately Lulu never seemed to notice, for he wouldn’t have been able to explain the sudden loss of his composure. Except to say that she made him happy.

  She got off the narrow settee and stood upright (almost, at five-three, beneath the cabin roof) and rubbed the slick wetness across her face and body like lotion. “Come on.” She disappeared up the companionway steps and Gerald heard a splash. He followed her up, with admiration, but always a kernel of anxiety at her readiness to leap off the boat in the dark. It was something he had never done before knowing Lulu.

  On deck he saw her wriggling in the water beside the boat like a small porpoise. He looked around, uneasy at her exposed nakedness, but the little bay four miles south of Trapani was deserted. They had ghosted in at dusk, eaten a simple meal, and fallen asleep, both tired after the slow crossing in light air and hot sun from their last anchorage on the small island of Favignana.

  “Come on, darling!” Lulu called from the sea. “Come in! It’s unbelievably warm, like a bath!”

  It would be, long into the night after the heat of a Sicilian summer’s day. Gerald looked around: now bathed in moonlight, there was no sign of a dwelling of any kind on this rocky stretch of the coast. “I’m coming, my darling.”

  He rigged the small rope boarding ladder to the cleat at the stern and hung it over the side—he was always careful about the ladder and it had proved worthwhile. Then, naked himself, he dove in.

  He swam toward Lulu but she vanished beneath the surface. He couldn’t see beneath the mercury-seeming liquid surrounding him. In the salty water, he ran his hands over the human film that still clung to his skin, instinctively touching his genitals, faintly surprised to find things there as they had always been. Lulu’s head quietly broke the surface thirty feet away like a water bird’s. It began to move toward the shore.

  “Lulu, darling, do come back,” called Gerald. “It’s the middle of the night.”

  “No! We’re going into the beach—come on!”

  Gerald felt uncomfortable going far from the yacht without a stitch on him—and in the dead of night—but they were quite alone. Before they’d gone to bed, he’d hung the paraffin anchor light in Nereid’s rigging, the lone sign of Man anywhere around them. The coast here in the pale moonlight appeared unchanged since Homer’s time—that is, it bore the ancient, worn-to-nub appearance of countless Mediterranean shores: torturously indented limestone crowned with a scrub of stunted, goat-nibbled vegetation; whereas, of course, in Homer’s time, twenty-eight or so centuries earlier, the shores had been densely forested—younger-looking lands, barely peopled, with so much history yet to play out. Gerald had sailed these waters in HMS Furious six years earlier during the obliterating tumult of war—history was always war—but now the land and sea appeared quiet and peaceful.

  He struck out after his wife.

  • • •

  They had sailed from Cala Marsopa a week earlier, crossing the emptiest stretch of the western Mediterranean in light winds; a gentle and pleasurable introduction to travel under sail for Gerald’s new wife. By now, August, the season was half over. He’d once hoped to be finished with Sicily and be across the Ionian Sea, exploring the Ionian islands—Ithaca itself—but he’d never expected to spend two months in Mallorca. He had long discounted Spain or the Balearics as a location for any part of The Odyssey. There was little in Homer to account for a passage so far west in the big, black, slow ships of Odysseus and his men—unless one considered the wild card of the “floating” island of Aeolia, whose “cliffs rise sheer from the sea,” a six-day, six-night row—westward? southward?—from the land of the Laestrygonians. Homer himself was no seaman, Lawrence had decided during the four years he’d worked on his translation, but the poet had listened to navigators and stitched their stories together, situating lands and peoples in relation to one another in the seascape of his mind’s eye. So, for a firsthand view, a definitive rejection of the western Mediterranean for the geography of The Odyssey, Gerald had sailed southwestward to the Spanish islands, a two-day reach from the Strait of Bonifacio.

  Tom and Milly Ollorenshaw had espied his red ensign in the port and brought him up to the villa for dinner with their cook-houseguest. They asked him where he was headed in his little boat and he told them about his effort to decode and explore the geography of The Odyssey. What a clever idea, they all said.

  “But I recognize this,” Lulu, Tom and Milly’s friend, said, with genuine amazement, when she ducked her head and came down the companionway steps the first time and saw the interior of Nereid’s tiny cabin: the tongue-and-groove pine trimmed in teak, the small gunmetal stove with its aluminum kettle, the shelves of books, the cushioned settee berths, the paraffin lamps, the beams, the portholes. “It’s Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle’s cottage! I want to live here!” She turned to him, their heads close enough under the hatch for him to feel her breath in his face while she said seriously, “You have to take me with you, now.”

  “All right,” Gerald said easily.

  But from that moment on, he imagined it.

  He took them all sailing. It was amazing to Gerald how clumsy Tom and Milly were, unable to find the natural locations on deck or in the cockpit where one could sit comfortably while the yacht heeled or pitched gently, how often they got in the way of the tiller, sheets, or the swinging boom, grabbed the wrong things, almost fell overboard. “Well, that was exciting!” said Milly when she stepped carefully onto the stone quay afterward, “An
d I’m jolly glad it’s over!”

  Lulu, on the other hand, asked him to take her out again. She was like a cat aboard the boat, small and quick and balanced. Right away she got the hang of pulling the sheets when Gerald tacked. Under way, she liked to sit on the bowsprit over the creaming bow wave. At other times, Gerald would find her below, sitting on a settee, looking around the cabin. She lay down experimentally on the settee berths and looked up at him. “I love this little boat.”

  She asked him to show her how to work the Primus stove, and she quickly learned to preheat the burner with alcohol, pump the tank, and ignite the pressurized paraffin as it vaporized in the burner. She made them tea. “So exciting,” she said.

  “But why don’t you have an engine?” she asked him. Gerald explained that in a boat as small as Nereid, there was little room for fuel tanks, so that an engine could not be run for long, only a few hours, which would hardly help much on a long passage. Engines were useful for getting a yacht in and out of harbors, but again, such a small boat sailed almost as well as a dinghy and he could maneuver it handily in the lightest of airs. Without an engine, he had more room, no noise, no engine breakdowns, no smell of oily fumes.

  “So you can just go,” she said, marveling, “by untying your ropes and pushing off. Anywhere that’s touched by water, can’t you?”

  “Yes, that’s the idea.”

  “You could sail from here—from Cala Marsopa—to the Caribbean, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “What would you do for food? And water?”

  “Well, you stop here and there. Like here. The world’s not a desert.”

  “And you’re going from here to Greece?”

  “Yes.”

  One afternoon they sailed to Cala Gat, the small cove with a tiny beach smaller than a tennis court below the lighthouse on the very eastern tip of Mallorca. Gerald anchored and Lulu made them lunch: bread, sardines, cheese, wine, olives, peaches. Then she took off her clothes and dove overboard. “Come in!” she insisted. Gerald put on his swimming trunks, hung the rope boarding ladder, and joined her in the water. They swam and then they climbed back aboard up the rope ladder. She went up first; Gerald’s eyes involuntarily followed her lean hindquarters swaying above him until he forced himself to look away. He was amazed and touched by her unself-consciousness, by her trust. “Come and lie down,” she said as she stretched herself out in the sun on deck.

  As he lay beside her, he had a view of the beading seawater drying on her stomach, and much else.

  Then she sat up and looked at him, pushing her hair out of her face. “God, Gerald, look at how you live. This is glorious.”

  “It’s not for everyone.”

  “More fool they. Then everybody would live like this.”

  She grinned.

  “What?” he said.

  She kissed him. Then she took his hand and led him below and made love to him. Even that first time, it was beyond anything Gerald could have imagined.

  Later she said, “Can we spend the night here? Do we have to go back to the port?”

  “Tom and Milly will be worried about you.”

  She laughed softly at him. “No they won’t, darling.”

  She made them dinner: bully beef and asparagus from Gerald’s tins, bread, wine, cheese, the rest of the peaches. Gerald watched her, surprised by her ease and enjoyment of what she was doing.

  As they ate, she asked him to show her where he was going.

  He cleared the tiny saloon table, put their plates on the settees beside them, and spread out beneath the light of the paraffin lamp his creased small-scale chart of the Mediterranean. Look, here’s Troy, he said. What, the real Troy? she asked. Yes, right here below Istanbul; it was discovered by a German about seventy years ago. And here’s Ithaca, the home of Odysseus; about six hundred sea miles between them. Two weeks’ easy sail, depending on conditions, but it took Odysseus ten years of unintended detours. A lot of famous trouble. This island, here, Jerba in Tunisia, I think, is the Land of the Lotus-eaters—”

  “Shall we be Lotus-eaters?” she said, pulling him toward her.

  The next afternoon, when they sailed back to Cala Marsopa, Lulu asked Gerald if they could anchor off Villa los Roques. She wanted to swim from the boat to the rocks on the shore and climb up them to the villa. The sea was almost calm, there was little swell. Of course, said Gerald.

  “Come on,” said Lulu, when he’d let go the anchor, and she dove overboard.

  Gerald lowered the ladder before following her.

  When he reached the rocks, Lulu was already climbing.

  “Careful,” he said.

  Lulu turned to look down at him, paddling below, and smiled. “Darling, I do this every day.” Perhaps she didn’t turn away and look down every day, or for whatever reason, she slipped. Her arm shot out for a handhold but she missed it. Gerald watched her fall: she arched forward and he clearly saw her chin strike a projecting nub of sharp limestone. Her head snapped back as she came away from the rock face and fell backward into the water beside him.

  When he pulled her up, she was facedown. He rolled her over, got an arm under her head, and lifted her face clear of the water. Her eyes were closed, but she was breathing easily. Blood streamed from a gash on her chin, swirling in the water around her face like red ink. Otherwise, she looked peaceful: asleep; as if she might open her eyes at any moment. Kicking to support them, Gerald used his other hand to smooth away the hair from Lulu’s face. He could see that it was already shot through with premature gray. He had never seen anything more beautiful.

  But she was quite unconscious. He looked up: no way to climb up that lot with her. He adjusted his arm, wrapping it around her and keeping her head on his chest, and struck out with the other arm toward the boat.

  When she awoke, Lulu looked up and saw Gerald’s face.

  “What happened?”

  “You fell. You’ve cut your chin—no, don’t touch—” He stopped her hand and wrapped it in his own. “I’ve got a bandage on it. It’s all right, though you might need a stitch or two. It threw your head back quite sharply. How do you feel?”

  “Bit of a headache. I can feel the chin, now that you mention it.” She looked beyond him, her eyes ranging over the interior of the little boat, then back to Gerald’s face. “How on earth did you get me aboard?”

  “Put you over my shoulder. I had the ladder down. Wasn’t difficult. No getting you up those rocks, though. We’ll go ashore in the dinghy when you feel up to it.”

  Her eyes looking at him grew large and still. “You saved me.”

  “Yes. Well, I wasn’t going to go off and leave you.” He grinned at her.

  Lulu lifted her arm and placed a cool hand against Gerald’s cheek. She moved her thumb across his mouth, looking at her hand, her thumb, his face. “Gerald,” she said, “take me with you.”

  “Where?”

  “Wherever you’re going. To Greece.”

  He imagined it again. “I’m not sure how long I’ll be. I mean, I won’t return soon.”

  “Marry me. Then we won’t be in a rush.”

  He stared at her, all thought falling away except the phrase: Why not?

  “I’ll make you happy, Gerald. I’ll make you as happy as I feel right now.”

  He knew he should think for a moment, but what was there to think about? What if all the years ahead could go on as the last two days had been?

  “Gerald,” she said, very quietly, as if she were about to point out a hummingbird nearby and didn’t want to scare it away, “I love you.”

  “I love you too.”

  “Then it’s simple. Take me with you.”

  “All right,” he said.

  She pulled his face down. “Watch out for your—” he said as she kissed him.

  Tom and Milly thought it a splendid idea. Well, why no
t? they said. Milly shrieked and hugged them both. Tom, in loco parentis, had a friendly chat with Gerald. He reported to Lulu and Milly that Gerald had little or no money, but he was intelligent, well educated, his idea about The Odyssey was really quite smart—but never mind all that: Lulu, you’re never going to marry some duffer in a bank. I’m sure it’ll be all right.

  While Lulu’s chin was being stitched in the doctor’s office, Milly told Gerald that although Lulu probably wouldn’t mention it, not right away, she’d had a beastly time of it growing up: neglectful parents, who at one point had actually lost her while traveling in Belgium, then died; a succession of indifferent relatives; boarding school in Scotland—well, it had all been jolly unpleasant for her until Milly and Tom had discovered her as a ward of friends in London and taken her on, initially as a cook. . . . Anyway, all she really needed was absolute trust and safety. If he gave her that, they’d have no problems.

  Go on, the both of you, Tom and Milly said, sail off in your little ark and please come back and stay with us next summer.

  It all happened very quickly. Lulu and Milly made a simple, summery white wedding dress. Gerald had a blazer, his old school tie, and presentable flannel trousers folded away on his boat. Tom made the arrangements and drove them into Palma where Gerald and Lulu were married at the British consulate. Tom stood them a wedding dinner of suckling pig at La Fonda in Cala Marsopa.

  For a wedding present, Gerald gave Lulu one of several copies of The Odyssey he carried aboard the yacht. “This is quite an interesting translation.” He opened it. “You see, it says it’s by T. E. Shaw—the pen name of T. E. Lawrence, of Arabia. He knows his way around a good story. He’s got some interesting things to say about Homer in his Introduction. I don’t have anything else to give you, but I can promise you an odyssey.”