Rocks, The

by Peter Nichols

  “Yeah. Quiet and gentle, Noël Coward, Al Bowlly, Charles Trenet, Sinatra for dinner—”

  “Not only.”

  “No, no, I know, mix it up. And then Beatles and sixties stuff, Tijuana Brass, Motown afterward.”

  “That’s it,” said Lulu, looking very happy. “You know, I’m so pleased it’s you here to do this for me, Charlie. It’s so very sweet of you. Thank you.” She smiled at him.

  “I’m happy to do it, Lulu. It’s fun.”

  She leaned forward and kissed his cheek. “See you later.”

  Four

  Are you ready, Papa?” Aegina called. “We’ll leave in five minutes.”

  It was so odd to have her father here and Charlie far away at C’an Cabrer in Mallorca. Even when Charlie spent a night or two at his father Fergus’s flat in Chelsea, he was nearby. He always spent the summer holidays with her in Mallorca. Now he was there—she knew he’d be all right with Penny and François—and it was a strange, sweet comfort to have her father here with her at home in London. He seemed almost like a son, downstairs in Charlie’s room, getting ready for his big night out. He was far more helpless than Charlie, at sea in the world beyond Mallorca and the Mediterranean.

  He would never come to London again after this trip. She had to make it fun for both of them. She had to remember it.

  “I’m ready now,” Gerald called up.

  He was sitting on the bed in Charlie’s room, looking through The Way to Ithaca. He didn’t want to read aloud—it would feel too pompous. He wanted simply to talk, briefly, about how he had come to write the book, but he feared drying up if he tried to waffle along without preparation. He’d decided he would abbreviate and paraphrase the first part of the introduction, which he had rewritten for this new edition. He’d made pencil marks against the paragraphs he thought might sound sufficiently logical in thrust yet conversational if run together. He could glance down at these and tell a brief story.

  He closed the book, got up, and left the room. He walked through the kitchen into the large studio living room.

  “I’m ready,” he said again, in case she hadn’t heard him.

  “I’ll be down in a minute,” Aegina called from her bathroom upstairs.

  The large room was full of paintings. Several big ones by an artist who painted people in the vivid colors that might have lain beneath the covering of their skin: organ purples, blood reds, veiny blues, bone whites, pus yellows, slashed across their bodies to delineate light and shadow—and possibly, it occurred to Gerald, character. Were they supposed to be bilious, bloody people? Otherwise, what was the point? They were quite valuable, Aegina had told him. Another artist’s landscapes—or that was what they suggested to Gerald: layers of topography perhaps, in a narrow range of bog hues—filled in most of the other wall spaces. Hardly any of Aegina’s own work, except the portraits of himself and Charlie for which they’d sat impatiently in the living room and on the terrace in Mallorca. And her painting of her mother, his wife, Paloma, from an old photograph.

  Sunlight poured through high northern windows. “I’ll wait outside,” Gerald called upstairs.

  He walked out to the courtyard where Aegina’s little Renault was parked, and smoked a Ducados—his hand shaking, he noticed, as he lit it. It was six o’clock but as sunny and warm as midafternoon. After so many years in the Mediterranean, he’d forgotten the long, light summer evenings at the northern latitude of London. He remembered a perpetual twilight along the Thames Embankment on so many evenings early in the war.

  He looked at the other studios surrounding the courtyard, the glass atriums, the spiral staircases. She’d been awfully clever, Aegina. With several other artists, she’d purchased a former women’s prison, a quadrangle of brick buildings with courtyard and garden space between two streets in Fulham, not far from Bishop’s Park on the Thames. The core purchasers had sold off sections of the prison, now called Burlington Lodge, as artist’s studios, at considerable profit. Odyssey, Aegina’s shops of imported clothes and fabrics—now with branches in Manchester, York, Birmingham, Bath, Norwich, Falmouth, Plymouth, Southampton, as well as the original in Covent Garden and elsewhere in London—had made her rich (or so it seemed to Gerald); but she’d done as well buying and selling property. Yet she wasn’t painting much anymore, which made Gerald sad. She’d taken him to lunch at the Chelsea Arts Club, small rooms crammed with paintings where all the arty-looking members knew her. “No, he’s a writer,” she said, beaming, when she introduced her father and they asked if he too was a painter. “He’s got a book coming out tomorrow. The publishing party’s at the British Museum.” Gerald had smiled wanly in embarrassment.

  “Papa, you look fantastic!” Aegina said, as she came out of her studio into the courtyard. She’d also taken her father to Harrods to look for clothes suitable for an author at his book launch party. They chose a navy blue linen blazer, pale khaki trousers, dark blue socks, brown loafers. Gerald had bought some cotton briefs too, which looked better than those he usually found in Mallorca. Aegina tried to pay for everything but Gerald wouldn’t hear of it with his thousands of pounds idling in the bank. The bill was £435, more, he was certain, than he had cumulatively spent on clothes in his entire life. It made him feel absurdly grand, but Aegina saw that he enjoyed it. He’d brought his Tonbridge School tie to London, which she’d sponged clean.

  “I mean, look at you,” she said. “You’re slim and tan. Very well dressed. Totally dishy!”

  “Anybody would look good alongside you,” he said. “Well, no one would notice anyone else, for a start.”

  She was wearing a sleeveless, brick-red, long narrow cotton dress that showed off her dark hair and eyes, her Mediterranean complexion, lithe brown arms and calves.

  Gerald’s face softened. “Of course, you always remind me of your mother.”

  Aegina smiled. “That’s a compliment, thank you.” She took a small disposable Kodak camera from her bag. “Now, stand there by my front door.”

  “Oh, come on,” pleaded Gerald.

  “No, this is a treat for me, having you here. Please. Don’t look so grim!”

  Gerald moved to her door and tried various squinting smiles. Aegina clicked. “Nineteen ninety-five,” she said, looking through the lens, “Papa came to London for his publishing party.”

  In the car, Aegina swung them quickly out of the courtyard into the street and they tore away.

  Gerald had once known London well—up in the holidays from school and again with friends from university, leave during the war; the thrilling sense of limitless possibility awaiting one in the greatest of all cites, even (especially) as it was being bombed . . . and then he’d gone away and spent his life on a small island and never come back. He recognized most of the route up Fulham Road, through the edges of Knightsbridge and Belgravia, but then he became disoriented by new buildings and the one-way system, and finally, though he knew approximately where they must be on the map of London in his head, he was lost. But Aegina was marvelously sure and wove through traffic with what seemed a rally driver’s expertise. She was so astonishingly accomplished, he thought. All from her mother, of course.

  “Do you see much of Fergus?” he asked her.

  “Sometimes. When he comes to pick up Charlie, or I drop him off. School events.”

  “And do you get on?”

  “Oh, sure. I mean, as far as we need to. We agree pretty much about all things Charlie.”

  “And how is Charlie with you both? Does he get on with Fergus?”

  “Oh yes,” said Aegina, flicking glances right and left, into the mirror, shifting down, shifting lanes. “He’s navigated between us and through the divorce with some kind of fish instinct. Always swimming smoothly around anything that might catch him up. He doesn’t talk about it much, or about either of us to the other. I think he’s all right. He’s happy.”

  “Good,” said Gerald.
He was silent for a minute. “And are you happy?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Good,” said Gerald. “Do you have . . . you know . . . anybody?”

  “Not right now.”

  “Not ever, then?”

  “Well, Papa, of course.” She shot him a quick look between checking three mirrors and hurtling around a double-parked car. “What do you want me to tell you?”

  Well, not too much. But he wanted Aegina to be happy. She was certainly successful. Pity his sister Billie was dead, he thought. She could have told him more. Aegina had gone to school in England after her mother died, and she’d stayed with Billie at half-terms and other times during the school year. They’d become close—Billie not quite a surrogate mother, but more than an aunt—and she’d come to know details of Aegina’s life that Gerald had missed.

  He still had a great sense of having failed Aegina. She’d run wild in Mallorca and he’d shipped her off to Billie. And look at her. She had turned out unarguably well—the divorce from Fergus was surely not a bad thing—but he still asked himself if he should have kept her at home, or, God forbid, moved back with her to England somehow himself . . .

  “Just that you’re happy,” said Gerald.

  “I’m happy,” she said firmly. She looked at him quickly again, smiling beautifully. “I’m very happy about you and your brilliant book.”

  • • •

  Gerald!” A thin, broadly grinning, frizzy-haired woman with round steel-rim glasses, black tube dress, bore toward him from a group standing before an enormous marbled statue of an ancient Greek the size of King Kong who appeared to be lying in a deck chair. “I’m Kate! Gosh, you’re handsome! Damn, we should have had you properly photographed! May I kiss you?”

  She’d already done so as Gerald said, “Certainly.” Over her shoulder, he saw a group of smiling people opening toward them.

  “You must be Aegina!” said Kate Smythe. “How wonderful to finally meet you both! We’re so pleased with the book—it’s getting the most fantastic buzz! Don’t fill up on the hors d’oeuvres, we’re taking you out to dinner after the party. Gerald, come and meet everybody.”

  Nicky, Ruth, Claire, William—Gerald had spoken with them all on the telephone while gazing at his olive oil in the larder. He’d forgotten now who did what, but Kate was tagging them again, “publicity . . . foreign rights . . . art direction . . . editorial.” Their fulsome display of affection for him, a total stranger, was unnerving.

  Then Kate took his arm and steered him to other people: Doughty authors, editors of the Guardian Review, The Sunday Times, the London Review of Books, buyers from Waterstones, Foyles.

  “I love your book!” everyone said. “Adore your book!”

  They chattered and milled in clusters that broke and regrouped beneath the giant friezes and marble figures of mostly reclining, glaze-eyed, superbly muscled figures looted from the Parthenon and lining the long, austere, Zen space of the Duveen Gallery. Gerald held tightly on to a glass of Champagne as people spoke to him. He barely drank.

  They didn’t, in fact, want to talk about his book. Apart from the Doughties, as they called themselves, no one appeared to have actually read it. They wanted to tell Gerald what they were doing and how his book somehow related to that and how timely and amazing that was. Gerald smiled as if he understood, or could hear, and looked at their hair and spectacles and skin and wondered how old they were and how they lived. It didn’t seem to matter what he said.

  “—thinking of doing an article about how much things have changed in the Greek islands since you were there on your little boat—well, indeed, since Homer’s time—”

  “—a rapidly expanding niche—”

  “—on the front page next Sunday—”

  “—we’re doing a little sidebar about what books people have on their bedside tables, if you’d—”

  “—might do some reviewing for us?”

  “—spend any time in the Solent? We’ve got a Nicholson thirty-two we keep in Lymington—”

  “—my card—”

  “—brilliant!”

  “—aren’t there a lot of Germans there?”

  As Aegina stood beneath the great Selene horse, watching her father in his moment of success, a man slipped toward her around the horse’s flank; she was not aware of him until he stood at her side. Tony Watkins had written a series of best-selling and serialized memoirs exposing himself as a corrupt rake who’d done appalling things while holding a midlevel appointment in the Heath and Thatcher governments. He was grinning at her as if they shared some intimate understanding.

  “Aegina. And here I thought your father was some goatherd in Spain. You’ve been hiding him under a bushel. How clever of you. I’d love to meet him properly.”

  “Well, there he is, go say hello to him,” said Aegina.

  “No, I was thinking why don’t you both come round for dinner tomorrow night? I’ll invite someone for your father. How about Edwina Porboys? She’d certainly like him. Just the four of us. Edwina will bring some Ecstasy. Has your father tried it?”

  “You’re repellent. Go away.”

  Over his shoulder she saw her father. He looked happy.

  “That’s what I love about you, you see,” said Watkins. “Something in you knows me so well.”

  “Fuck off,” said Aegina.

  As she walked toward her father, Kate began tapping a glass and the party grew quiet. She spoke of the fortuitous rediscovery of Gerald’s “small, understated masterpiece of vernacular history and travel,” of its distinction and authority in an age of navel-gazing memoirs of house-building and eating in foreign places, and how thrilled she and everyone at Doughty were to be able to launch a new edition of what would undoubtedly prove an enduring classic.

  “—so I give you Doughty Books’ thrilling new publication The Way to Ithaca and its author, Gerald Rutledge.”

  Gerald saw them all grouped around him, smiling, clapping, vividly recalling his nightmare of an intellectual Scylla. He opened his mouth, waiting for a moment when he could start.

  Aegina was aware of her racing heart and a roaring in her ears.

  “Thank you so much, Kate,” Gerald began. “And all of you at Doughty Books. And the rest of you, who apparently have nothing better to do with yourselves.” This brought a generous laugh, under the cover of which Gerald cleared his throat at extensive length.

  “I too am thrilled, as you can imagine, to see my foundling book plucked from obscurity and given new life again in so fine an edition. Perhaps it’s not unlike getting a really good face-lift: you begin to feel your old self again.”

  Everyone laughed again—Aegina with them, astonished; where had he come up with that one? She began, almost, to feel relieved.

  The noise of their laughter affected Gerald like the sudden infusion of a drug. He looked down at his book in his hands. He saw the pencil-marked paragraphs in his mind’s eye and realized that he knew it all by heart, he’d known the story for most of his life, and wouldn’t need to open the book at all.

  “I won’t bore you for long, but I thought I’d tell you something of how I came to write the book. I spent most of World War Two aboard British Navy vessels in the Mediterranean. At one point, we were anchored on Skerki Bank west of Sicily. This is a remote reef between Sicily and Tunisia that rises from the sea floor to only a foot or so beneath the surface. Four thousand years of shipping has navigated, successfully and otherwise, around this unmarked reef. It was hot and, along with some of the crew, I went swimming. There was no land in sight, but we discovered that we could wade calf-deep in the water. We had no swimming masks as everyone has today, but we could see that the reef was littered with ancient amphorae, the two-handled pots in which Greeks like King Agamemnon and his armies that fought the Trojan War carried wine, olive oil, almonds, dates, honey, and, of course, gold and valuables,
aboard their ships. We had no breathing apparatus either, of course, yet simply by shallow diving, we brought eight or ten of these barnacle-encrusted amphorae to the surface—archaeological looting it would probably be called today. Some of the amphorae were almost intact after who knew how many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years they’d spent underwater. What, we wondered, was inside them?”

  Gerald’s audience had become as still as the surrounding ancient Greeks. Kate looked enthralled, as if she hadn’t yet read what he was going to say and couldn’t wait to hear it.

  Gerald smiled. “Thick, ageless sludge. No gold. No honey or almonds either, to augment His Majesty’s naval rations.”

  Titters, happy smiles.

  “But seeing these old jars coming up out of the sea, breaking the surface into the light of present day—breaking through the membrane of history, as it were—gripped me quite powerfully. During that one afternoon on Skerki Bank, all the tales of ancient Greece became real for me. Here was proof.”

  Aegina stared at her father. Before her eyes, he had transformed into an instinctual storyteller—or, he was living it all again: he was back there now, on that reef.

  Gerald went on. “Throughout the war, and afterward, during the years I spent cruising the Mediterranean in an old, twenty-four-foot gaff cutter, I read again and again passages in my old green, tattered, salt-stained edition of A. T. Murray’s prose translation of The Odyssey. Two volumes, published by the Loeb Classical Library. I also read many volumes of British Admiralty sailing directions for the Mediterranean Sea. These were not literature, usually written in very dry prose, but occasionally the men who penned the descriptions of harbors and coastlines—not scholars, but one could detect a certain level of education in their idiom and references—managed to get past their editors”—more, knowing laughs—“the suggestion that many of the islands, harbors, headlands I was seeing might well stand as the factual locations of various episodes from The Odyssey. Some of this was obvious. If there were a factual geography to The Odyssey, the whirlpool of Charybdis could hardly have been anywhere but the Strait of Messina, which, at the wrong state of the tide, could spin a corvette in circles. The cliffs where Odysseus was ambushed by the boulder-throwing Laestrygonians might well have been—I can’t think of any other location—the entrance to the Corsican harbor of Bonifacio. And there is a cave . . .” Gerald’s attention, and then his voice, momentarily faltered “. . . where I believe Odysseus found the cunning to outwit Polyphemus, the Cyclops. . . .” He fell silent, gazing at the marble frieze on the opposite wall.