The Rocks

by Peter Nichols

  “Oh, darling! That’s all I want.” Lulu hugged and kissed him fiercely. “We will have an odyssey, won’t we!”

  And they sailed away.

  • • •

  She was a strong swimmer; unable to catch her up, he followed her all the way in to the shore. They could see rocks beneath them against the pale sand in the moonlight. Lulu walked out of the water and lay flat on the sand, faceup, legs and arms spread.

  “Come and lie beside me,” she said. “Nobody’s here to see you now,” she said.

  Gerald was not yet a blithe naturist. He’d learned to enjoy swimming naked in the sea with Lulu, but not where anybody might see them. She was completely indifferent to such a concern, and he’d had to caution her when she wanted to leap overboard in anchorages where other craft were anchored or might appear.

  He sat down beside her. He heard a bell somewhere above them—sheep or goats.

  “Is that your cave up there, then?” she asked.

  “That black hole we saw coming in? I think so. We’ll see.”

  “So this is where the Cyclops lived?”

  “Perhaps—if he lived.”

  “Tell me again,” she said, “it’s to do with some fog, right?”

  Gerald’s heart swelled every time she asked him questions about his investigation of The Odyssey; how she wanted to understand what he was doing. No one else had. “That’s right.” He told her how Odysseus and his men had sailed from the land of the Lotus-eaters and landed in the morning at an island in fog, where they’d found a spring coming down to the port. There wasn’t much fog in the Mediterranean, especially in the south, but it could occur here off the west coast of Sicily. The island of Favignana—“where we were yesterday, you remember the spring”—was where Gerald believed Odysseus encountered fog and then sailed on a short distance, exactly as they had in Nereid, to the mainland of Sicily, where both Odysseus and now Gerald and Lulu had found a cave.

  “How do you know it happened?” Lulu asked.

  “Well, no one knows for sure. But I think it’s like any faith. You could say the same about the Bible. You believe in it, or not, depending on whether you have faith, regardless of reason or lack of absolute proof, because it makes—”

  “Look,” said Lulu, rising on her elbow, “another boat’s come in.”

  Gerald turned his head from Lulu and the shore. The navigation lights were dim, but against the moon-splashed water he could make out a sagging, neglected-looking fishing boat, forty feet or so long, coming around the headland to the north, moving sluggishly into the slight scalloped bay off the beach.

  “Guardia Costiera,” Gerald said, quietly, as if to himself.

  “What’s that, darling?”

  “Italian coast guard.”

  “It looks like a decrepit fishing boat.”

  “It probably was. Beggars can’t be choosers. But even in this light you can see by their ensign. The little flag on the stern.”

  The boat was still moving slowly forward and the loud rattle of chain running through a hawsepipe came across the water.

  “They’re not the best seamen either.” Gerald could never have brought himself to let go chain while a boat was moving forward and have it scrape down the side of the hull, a most slovenly bit of mismanagement. It bespoke slovenliness in other things, an entire attitude to life. “I think we should get back to the yacht.”

  “Oh, do let’s lie here, darling. They’re not going to see us.”

  “They’ll see the boat and the anchor light. They can be officious little men. They’ll be very bored, and we’re a foreign yacht. Almost certainly they’ll come alongside to see our papers.”

  “Not tonight, surely?”

  “They may. And if we’re not aboard, they may board the yacht. Come on.”

  Gerald stood, crouching, as if to remain unseen, for in the pale light he thought they might be visible on the beach from the Guardia vessel. He moved quickly into the water. “Lulu, darling, do come now. We must get back to the boat.”

  They were not far off the beach when Gerald saw the rubber tender coming away from the Guardia boat, making toward Nereid. Several figures ineptly deploying short oars like paddles; voices across the water. The rubber boat had no directional stability and crabbed along, half spinning with each of the paddlers’ efforts counteracting the others. But slowly it drew closer to the yacht. It would be awkward without clothing; their nakedness would be visible. “Quick as you can, darling,” he said.

  The voices in the rubber boat quietened, then grew more animated, and Gerald realized that they’d been spotted. The boat’s zigzag course altered, grew jerkier as it moved faster, and he saw they would be intercepted before they reached Nereid.

  “Buonasera,” called Gerald, with the cheerfulness of an English holidaymaker.

  “Buonasera,” came the reply, with a measured vacancy.

  The men in the boat—there were three of them, Gerald now saw—continued talking in a more subdued tone. He could understand nothing. He spoke a modicum of Italian, what he needed to obtain food, drink, supplies in Italy, but they were speaking Neapolitan, the dialect he’d heard in southern Tyrrhenian ports. As they drew to within a few feet of them, the men ceased paddling and drifted. Their eyes were shadowed but he could tell they were looking at the swimmers. The rubber boat was some sort of ex-military life raft, oblong, with no discernible bow or stern; the air chambers sagged under the weight of the three occupants, indicating a leak in the rubberized canvas or at a valve.

  “Inglese?”

  “Sì,” said Gerald. He and Lulu continued swimming toward Nereid.

  More talk in the boat, a real conversation now. Gerald could now make out the paddlers: not officious little men, but youths in filthy, ill-fitting uniforms. Not seamen or sons of fishermen but city boys ignorant of boats and the water beyond basic training—perhaps one of them knew something about engines. Gerald had seen them in every poor Italian port he had visited since the war, singly and in groups, unemployed, staring incomprehensibly at his small boat, and at him as he moved about and came and went. In these ports he had paid a small fee to the designated unofficial watchman who, somehow, kept such boys from pilfering anything stowed on a boat’s deck or looting its contents below. These three were the lucky ones: employed and given uniforms and authority and let loose in a leaking tub with a vague mandate of enforcing maritime—

  The jabbing oar caught Lulu’s shoulder. “Ow!” she said, with unconcealed annoyance. A young man in the rubber boat giggled and the others commented in tones as if critiquing a bocce toss. All three began using their oars to pull Lulu closer to their boat, as if she were a tortoise. Gerald shouted something and pushed an oar away. An oar hit the back of his head with force, making a crunching noise that he heard in the middle of his brain. Another oar hit his face with a blinding, stunning smack.

  He was rolling underwater. For a moment he couldn’t determine which way was up, but he understood everything very matter-of-factly.

  He surfaced to an empty view of water and coast, heard noise, turned in the water, and saw Lulu, clearly naked in the moonlight, wriggling, emitting hoarse grunts, fighting as she was pulled aboard the rubber dinghy by the three men as if she were a large struggling fish. The men were laughing, one of them barking excitedly like a man baiting a dog. They were thirty feet away. Once they had her flopping in the bottom of the boat, they sat on her and began paddling back toward the Guardia Costiera vessel. Gerald heard noises from Lulu, he saw the men struggling, and heard slapping sounds, then angry shouts from Lulu.

  He swam as fast as he could after the rubber boat. It moved jerkily, rocked by tremors, but the men were now paddling with urgency, heading toward the Guardia boat. Then he heard a splash—Lulu had managed to jump overboard. He could make her out, swimming strongly, pulling ahead of the dinghy. A minute later he saw her climbing out of
the water just before the dinghy reached the beach. Her white form in the dark moving up the steep rocky bank, and the three men jumping out of the dinghy in the shallows, climbing after her.

  Now Gerald turned toward the beach—the sooner the better, for he would be faster on his feet than swimming. He came ashore some distance from the rubber boat, lurched in the shallows, lost his footing on a rock and fell. He rose gasping from the sand. He could hear them somewhere above.

  They were in the cave.

  Gerald scrambled up the rocks. He made out a path through the vegetation above the beach and ran along it until it widened below a rising escarpment of limestone arching over a dark hole—the cave—in the rock face ahead. The path led into the cave. Out of it came the sound of men, and noises from Lulu. She was moaning, or grunting: short hoarse harrowing exhalations.

  Gerald sprinted toward the black hole in the rocks. He was unaware of anything, only that he must get to Lulu, and a sense of murderous power—

  He didn’t see the sheep and ran headlong into the huddled group. He fell hard across the shaggy backs onto the dirt among them. As he scrambled up, the sheep bolted, leaping over him, stampeding into the cave. Gerald ran after them.

  “Ma che cazzo?” The city boys, spooked, interrupted, alarmed by the inrushing animal shapes, swore in fear. “Cazzo! Merda!” The sheep collided with the Italians, leapt and bleated, terrified. Baaa! Baa! Baaaaaaaa! Gerald ran into an upright figure and drove his fist at head height into some bony extremity and heard a yelp of pain. He saw a shape, taller then himself, and rushed at it, hands forward, pushing a man who cried with fear as he fell under the legs of the whinnying sheep, now a writhing, leaping mass of shapes in the cave.

  “Lulu!” Gerald called. “Lulu, run!”

  And he saw her, he thought—outlined against the light at the far side of the cave, a slight figure among the bounding woolly shapes bunching and leaping toward the light, bleating and crying, escaping onto the path beyond—then he didn’t see her.

  The Italians were getting to their feet, yelling angrily, and coming forward from the walls of the cave. Gerald turned and ran out of the cave—away from the bolting sheep, to draw the men toward him—along the path the way he had come in.

  It was darker: cloud had obscured the moon. He almost shouted for Lulu, to see if she had come this way and not out the other side of the cave, but he caught himself. Behind him, shouting, the Italians emerged from the cave mouth. If he found Lulu here, they would catch both of them. Gerald turned and scrambled down the rocky slope to the beach. Would they see that he was alone? He called urgently, as if hurrying Lulu on with him, “Come on, darling!”

  As Odysseus escaped the Cyclops’s cave by riding beneath a ram, then drove his sheep down to the shore, so Gerald ran beside the waves in the dark. He heard the Italians on the path behind him, calling to one another. He couldn’t see them, but he distinctly heard three voices shouting angrily, and he could tell they were moving fast. She was not with them, then.

  He ran through the waves making splashing noises, varying his stride, trying to sound like four feet. “Come on, darling!” he yelled. “Swim, darling! Make for the yacht!” Then he dove in and swam as fast as he could, urging Lulu on, talking for both of them.

  He heard them on the beach launching the rubber boat, splashing in the shallows. They wouldn’t be able to see that Lulu was not with him. “Come on, darling! Almost there!”

  Gerald swam in sustained panic, a tremendous amount of splashing. When he reached the boat, he climbed the rope ladder. “Get below, darling! I’ll get us under way!” he shouted. No time to lower the anchor light—good, they would see him moving away, and hopefully come after him. He hauled the mainsail and gaff aloft—they would see that too, the shape against the sky. No time to haul the anchor in, either: on the foredeck, he let the chain go, clattering noisily to let them know exactly what was happening, until it had all run out of the chain locker and he untied the knot that held the last link of the bitter end to the bitts below and it slipped overboard. He raised the jib and held it out to catch the faint breeze, the evening wind coming off the land, until the bow fell away and the long bowsprit pointed out to sea. Back in the cockpit he tightened sheets as the yacht gathered way. It had been no more than four minutes since he’d crawled aboard.

  From the cockpit he looked astern: he could only make out the darker shape of the rubber boat against the satin dark water as it beetled toward the Guardia Costiera vessel. Nereid was moving well, her lines and spars creaking quietly, the water burbling along the hull into the wake. He’d be several miles offshore before they caught up with him—ample time for Lulu to get far away from the cave and go to ground—

  Had she got away? He thought over what he had seen and heard: the slight figure running out of the cave with the sheep. The three men—he was sure—coming out of the cave behind him, shouting. They could not have come after him so fast dragging an unwilling Lulu—he’d have heard her too—or even an unconscious Lulu. Or was she lying bleeding on the floor of the cave? Lulled by the familiar sounds of the yacht under way, safe for the moment, he tried to clear his mind of fear and think clearly. He had seen her. She had got away, he was sure of it now, running out of the cave on the far side with the sheep. She had got away, that was all that mattered.

  Gerald began to sob, a dry reflexive heaving that stopped the moment he looked back and saw the shape of the Guardia boat moving away from the shore.

  Was he moving too fast? He didn’t want to lose them before he’d drawn them away—they weren’t sailors, but street thugs in a slow tub. He looked up and saw the anchor light swaying in the shrouds, the sails against the night sky. They could see that. They would follow him . . .

  Then, of course, he wouldn’t be able to lose them. They’d catch him, and probably kill him, unless he could reach some sort of safety first. But the wind was off the land, blowing off the cooling shore beside the warmer sea, and it would blow like that until after dawn. He couldn’t make Trapani, which lay to windward. He would have to lure them out to sea. How far would they come, the lumpen city boys, before they grew afraid and turned back toward land?

  Could he get them far enough?

  • • •

  An hour later—two?—dawn filtered slowly through a humid haze, and Gerald found he’d lost them. Had they turned around? He hove to. He threw the lead and found hard bottom at six fathoms.

  Long minutes later, the haze was burning off and he saw the pale shape of the Guardia boat less than a mile away on the beam. They saw him too: the vessel’s shape narrowed as it turned toward him. Gerald let the sails draw and the yacht moved ahead, steering itself, while he threw the lead line again and again. The soundings gave him a picture of the bottom contour in his head, shoaling irregularly but growing shallower as he advanced: six fathoms . . . four and a bit . . . five . . . three . . . seven . . . three—all of a sudden he saw the bottom: lighter, browner patches against the darker blue. He looked to the north and saw that the Guardia Costiera vessel was gaining on him—the wind that had blown lightly but steadily all night was dropping, his speed slowing, while their engine chugged on.

  Three fathoms . . . four . . . three . . . three—a very light patch ahead, the sun picking out the weedy rock beneath the surface.

  The distance between the two boats was closing fast. Gerald could see a man in the bow, peering intently toward him. Three hundred yards . . . two hundred . . . Another man joined the first on the bow—with a man at the helm, all three were aboard.

  He heard them calling. The words undecipherable but the threat, the intent in the voice, clear. The boat was coming on at its full speed, barely five knots, but Nereid had slowed to no more than two. Gerald barely had maneuverability. Now the Guardia vessel angled away from him, then curved back until it was heading toward him once more, but on his beam: it was lining up to ram him amidships—to sink him. Its commerci
al build and displacement left no doubt about the result of such a collision. Gerald hardened the sheets and headed closer to windward, giving them more of a target but at the same time gaining a knot of speed, a little more maneuverability for the only move that could save him.

  The Guardia boat was ten yards off, aiming straight for the midpoint in dainty Nereid’s hull, when Gerald pushed the tiller down. The light, swift little boat’s bow veered off sharply, suddenly, leaving him end on to the slowly charging boat. They would still collide, but it would be more of a glancing blow, he hoped. The Guardia’s curling bow wave pushed Nereid off just before the two hulls met. . . .

  It was a solid sideswipe that Gerald felt all through his body—he heard a crack of the thin frames in Nereid’s hull beneath him.

  “Pezzo di merda succhiacazzi!” shouted from immediately above him. Other shouts. One of the men—they were close enough to touch hands—locking his eyes on Gerald’s, swung at him with a length of chain. Gerald stepped nimbly back and the chain wrapped around Nereid’s shrouds, shaking the whole rig, and was torn from the Italian’s hand as the Guardia boat swept on. The other man on deck was pointing at Gerald, jabbing his finger in his direction, staring at him like a madman. He shouted an incomprehensible insult. The boat turned away and arced across the water in a long, lazy, confident loop that would bring it back on a course toward Nereid—

  Abruptly, the two men on deck were thrown to their knees and fell sprawling as the Guardia vessel bucked once, rose, slewed sideways, came to a shuddering stop. Its own stern wave overtook it, lifting the boat and settling it down again, rocking slightly, but otherwise immobile on the surface of the clear undisturbed sea around it. . . .

  • • •

  Seven years earlier, in July 1941, Gerald had been aboard HMS Furious as it approached the Strait of Sicily on Operation Substance, a supply convoy from Gibraltar to Malta. Reports had been received of U-boat sightings off the Gulf of Tunis. The convoy hove to for thirty hours in the vicinity of Skerki Bank, whose shallow reefs were thought to bar the approach of submarines.