Rocks, The

by Peter Nichols

  • • •

  Driving up the long, still-unpaved track to C’an Cabrer, her father’s farmhouse, Aegina couldn’t believe he wouldn’t be there. The drive from Palma, through the villages, or now more often than not on the new roads built around them, past the endless new developments of blocky little villas, finally the shimmering sea opening up ahead, and up the hill through the olive trees to the house—the whole headlong journey from London or anywhere else had always been filled with the anticipation and certainty of seeing him at the end of it. He had come up to London only twice in her life. Otherwise, whenever she had seen him, it had been here, in this one place. There had never been a time when she had been in the house and her father had not been there, or out and shortly expected back, as constant and fixed as the stones of its structure and the land around it.

  High on the hill, the drive turned sharply and ran level through a stand of lemon trees toward the old pigsty—her father’s workshop—at the side of the house. Aegina stopped the car and got out. It was hot now; the air buzzed with cicadas.

  She climbed the steps at the side of the house and entered the large kitchen. Aegina stood still. A teapot, its strainer and top, a chipped mug, a china plate, a large bone-handled dinner knife, lay clean and dry in the wooden dish drainer above the large, square, ceramic sink. He had cleaned these things and then gone out and died. Now she knew she would not find him, either here making tea, or in his study, or reading in the living room, or wandering through the gardens or the olive and lemon groves—what was left of them—on the hill surrounding the house.

  She walked through the book-filled rooms into her father’s bedroom. He had made the bed neatly too—shipshape as always—before going out to the market that last morning.

  She had been conceived here.

  Beside the bed stood the small, rough, old bookcase made of local pine that contained the original core of her father’s library, the books he had brought ashore from his boat—or saved when it sank, she was never sure which—in 1948: J. B. Bury’s A History of Ancient Greece; Seymour’s Life in the Homeric Age; various editions of The Odyssey; a book of photographs of the Aegean, the sea her father had named her for.

  She sat down on the bed and pulled out a faded blue Oxford University Press hardback. Its pages long ago rippled from damp, The Odyssey of Homer embossed on the spine. On the front cover, in faded gold on top of the blue cloth, was a circular indented depiction of a small fourteen-oar galley. The figure of a bearded man, Odysseus, was bound by ropes to the mast. In the water below the ship, looking up at him, singing, were the Sirens who bewitched anybody hapless enough to draw within hearing of their liquid song—wingèd harpies clutching bones in their talons, who captured and imprisoned sailors and turned them to skeletons as the skin withered upon their bones.

  Aegina opened the cover. The inscription, written in faded black ink on the first blank, yellowed, damp-spotted page:

  For Lulu. An odyssey.

  Love always, Gerald

  20 July 1948.

  One

  Why shouldn’t I go? It’s her seventieth birthday,” said Charlie. He was slouched in a chair at the large oak table in the center of the kitchen, picking from a small pile of raw almonds in front of him, one nut at a time. “Just because you and Grandpa loathe her guts—”

  “That’s not true, Charlie,” said Aegina. She was making dinner, chopping onions and garlic and pine nuts at the other end of the table. “I don’t loathe her. I don’t even think about her.”

  “Yes you do,” said the boy.

  “I don’t have the energy to loathe anybody. And I agree with you. Of course you should go if you want to. Have you been invited?”

  “Mum,” he said with pitying exasperation, “you don’t have to be invited to go to the Rocks. People just go. I’ve been going there all my life.”

  “I know, but isn’t it going to be a big to-do?”

  “Yeah, that’s the point: everyone’s going. But as a matter of fact, Lulu invited me.”

  “She what?” came the voice from the living room.

  A moment later Gerald appeared in the doorway. “Why did she invite you? How does she know you?” He looked over his reading glasses at his grandson, who was tall and lithe, with his mother’s dark Spanish coloring. The boy had leapt across some boundary from childhood into strapping youth since the previous summer when Gerald had last seen him. He was a foot taller, already shaving. He looked like a louche young matador, Gerald thought. God help him.

  “Grandpa, I’ve been going there for years,” said Charlie. “Of course she knows me. She’s asked me to be the DJ for her party. It’s a job. She’s paying me five thousand pesetas.”

  “That’s nice,” said Aegina evenly. “Why you, sweetheart?”

  “She likes the music I like. And I like what she likes.”

  “Like what?” asked Aegina.

  “Oh, old stuff, newer stuff. She’s got a turntable and all these classic old vinyl LPs. You really should come down and see sometime—if you don’t hate her guts.”

  “Now stop it, Charlie. I’ve just got plenty to do, and I like to spend my evenings here.”

  “I’m sure she likes your concentration camp music,” said Gerald.

  Charlie’s latest enthusiasms, played more than Gerald would have liked on the gramophone in the living room, were Henryk Górecki’s Third Symphony, Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, with Dawn Upshaw’s ululant soprano filling the house with waves of mournful music—lyrics, Charlie informed his grandfather, that had been scrawled on the wall of a Gestapo cell—and Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, composed in a German prisoner-of-war camp. Charlie’s music teacher at school was currently keen on Holocaust music.

  “She doesn’t have any of that.”

  “Lucky her,” said Gerald. He stood irresolutely in the doorway for a moment, and then said: “Does she know who you are? I mean, that you’re connected to . . . us?”

  “Of course she does, Grandpa. Lulu knows everyone.”

  Gerald glanced at his daughter. Aegina met his eyes before looking down at her chopping board.

  “Sounds like you two are terrific chums,” he said.

  “Well, Bianca and I go there a lot. She invited both of us to her birthday party.”

  “Ah,” said Gerald. Bianca, the daughter of Aegina’s best friends in Cala Marsopa, was Charlie’s age, fifteen. She had grown up noticeably the past year. She now looked at least twenty-five, he thought.

  “And people your age go to the Rocks?”

  “Sometimes,” said Charlie, nonchalantly munching almonds. “After dinner.”

  “They don’t serve you drinks, do they?”

  “No, Coke. Or TriNaranjus.”

  Coming from Charlie, this lolling, smoldering youth, it sounded like a joke. Gerald was unsure if his leg was being pulled. Perhaps they drank like fishes now at fifteen and he was the last to know. “Really?” He looked over at Aegina.

  “They drink Coke, Papa.”

  Gerald said, “Hmm,” in a way that he himself detested as soon as he heard it because it made him sound like a hopelessly reactionary dotard.

  “Will Tom and Milly be there?” he asked.

  Aegina looked up at him. “Papa, they’ve been dead for years.”

  “Oh, right.”

  He returned to the living room, sat on the old sagging leather couch, and picked up what he had put down before going into the kitchen: his book, The Way to Ithaca. Out of print for more than forty years, a new edition was being brought out by Doughty Books, Ltd, in London. Doughty had published a line of short works about ancient history, small, attractively designed hardback books written in lively, readable prose by experts who managed to avoid the pedantry of scholarship. They had proved popular and sold well. Founded only seven years earlier, Doughty had twice won The Sunday Times’ Small Publ
isher of the Year Award.

  Ten months ago, out of the blue, Gerald had found a letter from Kate Smythe, Doughty’s editor in chief, in his dusty letter box under the carob trees at the bottom of the drive. One of her authors had “discovered” The Way to Ithaca, the original John Murray edition, in a library sale and sent it to her. She thought the book “absolutely brilliant in its accessible and charming approach to the modern, nonnautical, reader, and still as relevant to the world of today as on the day it was first published.” Everybody at Doughty believed that with a “very little light editing,” it would stand neatly alongside their recent books on the Parthenon, the Greco-Persian Wars, the Elgin Marbles. They agreed that Gerald’s original black-and-white photographs were “essential to the book, classic in composition, and conveying a timeless sense of the Mediterranean that appeared to give the modern reader contemporary snapshots of the Homeric world.” (In other words, Gerald had remarked to Aegina, they think I’m three thousand years old.) Did Gerald have a literary agent to whom they could present their offer? If not, Kate Smythe would be happy to refer him to an agent with whom Doughty did frequent business and whose impartiality and commitment to Gerald’s best interests were guaranteed. And did he have a phone number?

  Skeptical, suspecting this offer would evaporate before anything came of it, Gerald had written back that he did not at present have a literary agent (he’d never had one) but that he would be pleased to consider their offer. Within days of dropping his return letter in the yellow Correos box in Cala Marsopa, he received a gushing phone call from Kate Smythe in London. She sounded sincerely enthusiastic. She told him again how much she loved his book, how excited Doughty would be to bring out a new edition, how well they thought it would do.

  “How very nice,” Gerald told her, still not convinced, looking abstractedly at bottles of his own honey-colored olive oil that sat on the shelf beside the phone. (When he’d finally allowed the installation of a phone in 1987, he’d wanted it out of the way and put it in the larder.)

  Less than an hour later, he was back in the larder, answering the phone again. The caller identified herself as Deborah Greene. She was a literary agent, authorized by Doughty Books to convey to Gerald their offer of an advance on royalties of fifteen thousand pounds.

  Gerald had left England many decades before decimalization had shrunk the pound to one hundred recessive pence from the glories of its twenty shillings and two hundred forty useful pennies that had formed notions of plenitude in his childhood; when a thrupenny bit had purchased sixteen lemon drops at a farthing apiece. Gerald still thought of wealth in terms more suited to living on a boat: a sufficiency of food, properly stored against weather and misadventure, to last a fixed period into the uncertain future. Fifteen thousand pounds was a sum he could associate only with train robberies or the wages of film stars.

  As the literary agent spoke, Gerald stood in the larder, staring again at his olive oil. For a long time afterward, whenever he thought of his new publisher and his fifteen-thousand-pound advance—and whenever he came into the larder for any reason—he envisioned a rich oil-like sap sliding over him to encase him like a golden amber.

  Deborah Greene was saying something about foreign rights, Doughty already having a strong response from an American publisher, the book going into profit quite quickly, Gerald might see additional royalties in the years following publication—he didn’t understand most of it.

  Gerald either did or didn’t say aloud, “Whatever you think best.”

  She asked if he had another book idea that might serve as a follow-up, for which she believed she could secure an additional healthy advance. He didn’t, offhand, but he would have a think, he told her.

  He had staggered out of the larder and finally made a pot of tea.

  A few weeks later, a check for £6,375 (half of his advance, after his new agent’s commission, the remaining half to follow on publication) arrived in his letter box beneath the carob trees. He deposited it in his account at the Banco Santander in Cala Marsopa and wondered what to do with it. Months later, he decided to have some roof tiles replaced. He sent a check for a thousand pounds to Aegina for her birthday—“Of course, it will all be yours someday,” he wrote grandly—and a hundred pounds to Charlie for his birthday.

  Now, almost a year after that first letter from Kate Smythe, his new book, this late-life miracle coming when he was seventy years old, lay open, pages down on the leather cushion, in front of Gerald. The publishers had added a subtitle: A Sailor’s Discovery of the Route of Homer’s Odyssey. The dust jacket showed a detail of an old wall mosaic of Odysseus surrounded by the six heads of Scylla, a vivid scene full of action, rather than the stilted two-dimensional Grecian-vase rendering one might expect. Here, inside this book—as Kate Smythe had put it to Gerald over the phone—the cover promised a big, action-packed story. He thought it very handsome, the mosaic surrounded by a Mediterranean blue that was somehow aged and watermarked—very clever.

  But the elation, and the pleasant if vertiginous sensation of having so much money in the bank, had given way to panic. The publishers had invited him—pressed and flattered him, with phone calls from Kate and her editors and production team, and even Aegina had joined them in urging him—to come to London for the book’s launch party. This was to take place in three days’ time, in the Duveen Gallery of the British Museum, which housed the Elgin-looted Parthenon Marbles, and Kate had, by some sleight of evolving phone calls, got Gerald to agree to read an extract from his book at the party. He’d spent the last few weeks in the grip of a virulent and mounting stage fright. He woke now in the predawn hours in a sweating panic, picturing himself surrounded by a Scylla-like throng of smiling, teeth-gnashing heads belonging to clever, literary academics, all of them vastly more knowledgeable about his subject than himself—a Cambridge don whose specialty was the Parthenon was among Doughty’s recent authors. He was sure he would stammer, splutter, find himself robbed of the power of speech, possibly even have an accident in his trousers, or be so inclined to do so that he would be unable to leave the museum’s toilet. Meanwhile, he had to prepare for this “impromptu” address. He had to find something in his book to read; something “fun,” Kate had suggested.

  As he picked up the book again, Gerald’s synapses snapped him back to what had made him put it down minutes before and go into the kitchen: hearing his grandson talk of that woman. He looked down at the beautiful cover and realized that, in any edition, the book itself would always carry an ineradicable taint.

  Charlie passed through the room. “See you later, Grandpa.”

  “Aren’t you staying for supper?”

  “No, thanks. I’m going to eat with friends in town.”

  Soon Gerald heard the strong torrent of Charlie’s urine stream crashing heedlessly into the toilet bowl in the adjoining bathroom. Such an enviably strong, vigorous contrast to his own sadly diminished and fitful effort.

  “You don’t mind him going to that party, then?” Gerald asked as he and Aegina were eating in the dining room.

  “No. They all go there. I don’t want to spoil it for him.”

  “And you feel all right about leaving him here? I’ve told you, I’m quite capable of getting myself to London and back.”

  “I’m not sure about that. He’ll be fine, Papa. Penny and François are very happy to have him—”

  “I’m sure Bianca will be too.”

  “Yes, she will. They’re wonderful friends.”

  “But are they . . .”

  “Are they having sex? I don’t think so. I expect they’re kissing. Maybe a bit more. But they’re close friends. I think it’s all right. Anyway, you’re mad if you think I’m not coming to your fabulous book bash. I mean, come on—the British Museum. And the relaunch of your book, which had basically disappeared before I was old enough to read it. I want to see you in your hour of glory.”

  “Humiliation, mo
re like.”

  “You’ll be great. They’re so impressed by your book. You don’t have to make a speech or anything. You just say, Thanks so much, read a few words, and they’ll do the rest. It’ll be fun.”

  “Hmmm,” Gerald said again. They ate silently for a minute. Aegina had made the tumbet she had learned from her mother: a Mallorcan dish full of aubergines, tomatoes, onion, garlic, goat cheese, and olives from Gerald’s trees. His eyes ranged over Aegina’s paintings that hung on the walls: landscapes around his property and eastern Mallorca in a range of burnt and raw umbers, lines and shadows as familiar to him now as the veins and splotches on the backs of his own brown, weathered hands. They’d hung there for many years.

  “Are you painting much these days?” he asked her.

  “No. Not at all, actually. I’d like to get back to it at some point, and I will. I don’t seem to have had the time—well, I guess that really means I haven’t had the interest.”

  “I hope you will. I love your paintings, you know that. You’re a very fine artist.”

  “Sweet of you, Papa.”

  “Does Charlie paint, or draw?”

  “No, just the music. Well, you’ve heard him play his keyboard in his room.”

  “I know, he’s amazing. But you were musical too. Always playing songs on your little record player that you took everywhere with you. I remember that one you liked about flying to the moon.”

  “‘Everyone’s Gone to the Moon.’”

  “That’s it. Rather a lonely song, I thought.”

  • • •

  Two days later they stood in a long line of sun-blistered British tourists—most of them dressed as if they’d just come off the beach—and their piles of luggage snaking toward the Iberia check-in counter at Palma airport.

  “These people can’t all be on our flight, surely?” said Gerald. He was neatly dressed in faded blue canvas trousers, tennis shoes, a white shirt so laundered that it had become almost transparent, and a threadbare but clean cream-colored linen jacket of a type popular with British schoolmasters in the 1930s.