Rocks, The

by Peter Nichols

  “My God, where did you find all that?” asked Aegina. “I haven’t seen this since I was your age.”

  “Downstairs.”

  She sat down beside him and looked through the album covers. Charlie, she noticed, was staring at the 45 rpm record revolving on the turntable. When the song came to an end, he lifted the stylus and turned the record player off.

  “I loved that song—I still do,” Aegina said.

  “Yeah. Me too,” said Charlie.

  Aegina looked at him. “Aren’t you going into town tonight?”

  “No. I think I’ll stay here.”

  “Charlie, are you all right?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “You’ve hardly left your room since we got back. Has anything happened between you and Bianca?”

  Big pause. “Not really.”

  “Do you want to tell me?”

  Charlie was quiet.

  “Did something happen at Lulu’s party?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Can you tell me?”

  She waited. She knew when to wait.

  “The party was good. I did the music. Bianca left around midnight, but it was still going a bit.” Charlie stopped, picked up a record and put it down again. “I did it . . . sex . . . with a woman there.”

  “Oh,” said Aegina, as evenly as she could. “Oh,” she said again, as she thought of what to say, discarding most of it. “Well . . . was it . . . all right? Was she nice to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you use a condom?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, Charlie. If you’re going to have sex, you must. It can be dangerous, you know. You know that, you’ve read about AIDS—”

  “I know.”

  “Have you and Bianca—”

  “No.”

  “So this was your first time?”

  “Yes.”

  Aegina picked up Charlie’s hand and squeezed it. She looked at it, his beautiful, now almost fully grown hand, and felt sad. Of course, everyone always said it goes by fast, the days long but the years like blinks, yet still . . . it was too fast. “Does Bianca know about this woman?”

  “No.”

  “Are you going to tell her?”

  “I don’t know. What do you think?”

  Now he looked at her. And she was supposed to be wise.

  Aegina took a moment. “Well, that’s difficult. I mean, you don’t want to lie to her—right? That’s not good,” she said emphatically. “But it would hurt her. You can tell her, if you feel you should . . . I guess you have to think about what your relationship with Bianca is, where it’s going—and whether you’re going to do this again, with this woman. Are you?”

  “No. She doesn’t want to.”

  “She was probably using you. I mean, I’m sure she liked you—you’re beautiful—but it wasn’t very thoughtful, or nice, of her. Do you have feelings for her?”

  “I think I love her, but I know she doesn’t love me. She’s a bit older.”

  “Oh, Charlie.” Aegina reached out and gently pushed some of Charlie’s hair aside and left her hand on his forehead. “I know how you feel. I remember feeling like you do now. I know what you feel.”

  He looked at her with sudden interest. “Really? And did he then not want to be with you again? What an idiot.”

  “Well, it was sort of different. But I had the same feelings. All of them, I promise you.”

  Charlie pushed idly at the records on the floor. He looked up at his mother. “Are you upset with me?”

  “No, darling!” Aegina hugged him. “Oh, sweet Charlie boy, you’ve done nothing wrong.” They hugged for a minute. “But Charlie. Please. Use a condom next time.” She released him and looked at him. “Do you have any?”

  He smiled thinly. “No.”

  “Right. Well, we’ll get you some. And if you do have—if you make love with Bianca, you must use them. With anybody. Do you promise me?”

  Charlie nodded.

  She released him. “Thank you for telling me. You can always tell me anything. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes, Mum. Thanks.”

  “Are you coming down for dinner?”

  “Yes.”

  Aegina stood. “Ten minutes, okay?”

  Charlie nodded.

  Aegina turned to leave. She stopped. She walked across the room and picked up the shirt that lay on a chair. Aegina held it up, looked closely at the embroidering, the stitching . . . she rubbed her fingers against the cloth.

  “Where did you get this?”

  Charlie looked at the shirt and at his mother. “She gave it to me.”

  Aegina stared at the shirt, and then at Charlie. “Who gave it to you?”

  “The woman.” said Charlie. “It’s from Morocco. It’s old.”

  Aegina looked down at the shirt for a moment, then placed it—as if it were an exhibit—carefully back on the chair.

  She left the room.

  Charlie turned the knob on the record player and the 45 began spinning around again. He lifted the stylus and placed it on the record, “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon.”

  One

  The steady hornet sound grew louder, angrier.

  “Voilà!” said François Duhamel. He smiled around the kitchen at C’an Cabrer, sweeping an arm with a grandiloquent air toward the noise coming from the open door to the terrace. “Je vous présente Señor Gómez, and his fearful Lambretta. Are you ready for our ramble through the campo, gentlemen?”

  “Absolutely,” said Fergus Maitland. He was tall, incipiently flabby, his curly hair wet but drying, still partly plastered down in long waves; small but cheerfully expressive features in a fleshy face. He was dressed not for a walk in the Mediterranean landscape but in his all-purpose summer holiday wear: Lacoste swimming briefs, a short-sleeved rose-colored shirt, black loafers, black socks, Panama hat by Herbert Johnson of Bond Street. “Aegina, my love, Charlie me darling,” he said, “have fun at the beach.” He walked to the kitchen table, where Aegina was giving three-year-old Charlie his breakfast, and kissed his wife and son.

  Gerald looked moodily out a kitchen window, opposite the terrace door, at the sloping hillside of lemon trees.

  “Be careful at the playa,” said François. He was a skinny, floppy-haired man in his early thirties. His wife, Penny, and their daughter, Bianca, were also seated at the kitchen table. “The wind is calm, but the sea is still agitated today. There will be waves out at Cala Espasa, soyez prudent avec les enfants, okay?”

  “Of course we will,” said Penny.

  François walked outside onto the terrace that overlooked the long uphill driveway. Fergus and Gerald—Gerald last, slowly, reluctantly—followed him. They looked down at Señor Gómez coming up the hill ahead of a large plume of greasy blue smoke.

  “Christ,” said Fergus, “he really is on a fucking motor scooter. What’s wrong with a car? Wouldn’t a builder want to give some sense of solidity?”

  François smiled. “Oh, he does. You’ll see.”

  The muffler on the Lambretta was unavailing. The 150 cc engine’s whine reached a nostalgic authenticity as it crested the top of the drive and suddenly subsided to a relatively quiet purr. Señor Gómez killed the engine and looked up at the three men looking down at him.

  “Buenos días,” he said with grave formality. He stepped off his machine and pulled it back on its stand.

  “Salud, amigo,” said François. “Venimos abajo.”

  They descended the steps to the driveway. Señor Gómez was dressed like a peasant: blue cotton shirt faded from many launderings, threadbare darker blue trousers, old tennis shoes. He removed a small, battered, narrow-brimmed coarsely woven straw trilby, revealing a forehead so pale and gray above his sunburned face that the skin looked corpselike. The deep creases on
either side of his mouth and around his eyes, and the lattice of lines along the back of his neck, were engrained in black, like the ineradicable soiling of a miner’s skin. Señor Gómez was short, about five-foot-five. He had a Buddha-like composure.

  François made the introductions with some flourish. “Señor Rutledge, el propietario. Señor Maitland, nuestro banquero. Señor Gómez, constructor.” Gómez shook hands with the three men. Gerald felt the keratinous calluses of the builder’s hand.

  “Very old!” said Fergus, smiling jovially, pointing to the ancient Lambretta. It had two separate saddle seats and a crazed, yellowed acrylic windshield. “Antiquo!”

  “Ah, sí,” said Gómez, impassive yet betraying a scintilla of pride. “Modelo cincuenta y ocho. Veinticinco años.”

  “Bueno,” said François. “Pues, vámonos?”

  “Sí,” said Señor Gómez.

  François led them around the house to the hillside Gerald had gazed at so glumly through his kitchen window. They climbed a short distance through groves of lemon and almond trees. Tinder-dry leaves, almond shells, twigs crackled underfoot. François lunged ahead with long strides, bobbing over his thighs. Fergus moved awkwardly, picking his way, and was soon out of breath. Gómez walked with short, sure, deliberate steps, like a donkey. Gerald seemed to amble, even uphill, familiar with the ground; but he dawdled in the rear, picking up fallen branches, fruit, dropping them thoughtfully to one side as if grooming a fairway. They reached a path and followed it horizontally around the slope. Soon the house behind them was obscured by the contour of the hill. The land in front of them now fell away and the lemon and almond groves gave way to neat rows of olive trees. Through the trees they could see the town, the lighthouse, the sea.

  François stopped. “Bueno, here we are,” he said. He turned toward Señor Gómez and Fergus, and spoke to both of them. “Aquí está la parcela. Here’s the parcel. From here, desde aquí—” He raised his arms, gesturing downhill, then at right angles across the slope, back toward the town. Then, his hands and arms aiding him more figuratively, François spoke in Spanish of hectares, numbers of units, an access road, the running of power, telephone, water, and sewer lines.

  “Fantastico!” Fergus interjected at moments when he thought he caught the gist of a vision of the completed project. In his four years of visiting Mallorca as Aegina’s husband, he’d discovered the convenient fact that with the simple addition of an o, many English words became their Spanish counterpart. Others did not, but the continental effect usually carried the day.

  Señor Gómez’s face, beneath the straw hat, remained inscrutable. His narrowed eyes flicked across the land as François spoke.

  Gerald looked in the same direction, at the peaceful, sloping olive grove. Olive trees could live for two thousand years. They showed their age: the twisted, misshapen boles had erupted—over centuries—with lumps like the warts on a cartoon crone’s nose, limbs were deformed and articulated as if ravaged by rickets—but these were all the healthy survivors, older than most European states, and they were still producing. Gerald had never thought of himself as owning these trees. He had husbanded, pruned, ministered to them for thirty years, mindful always that he was only a caretaker for a brief duration. And they had fed him in return.

  He’d never imagined cutting them down.

  • • •

  Well, he has to,” said Aegina, her eyes on Charlie as he shrieked, turned, and ran screaming up the sand toward his mother. A wave rose, curled, and broke with a roar behind him. He wasn’t going to make it, Aegina saw, but that was Charlie’s game. His eyes locked on to hers and she laughed and made a face of mock terror. The sweeping cataract overtook him, reaching as high as his upper thighs, splashing his chest, and Charlie ran on, squealing, eyes popping at the water snatching at his legs like maddened puppies.

  It was sunny and almost windless on Mallorca, but somewhere across the Mediterranean, inclement weather, perhaps a mistral in the Golfe du Lion, had produced waves that now swept around the eastern end of the island to provide Charlie and everyone else with a rare day of real surf at Cala Espasa, the normally sheltered cove north of town. He ran ceaselessly in and out of the water, fleeing the waves that unfailingly caught him. The first few times he fell and was completely submerged, and rose gasping for breath, Aegina had rushed for him, her hands playing across his face and head, smoothing the salty water away from his eyes. But Charlie was only thrilled and turned and staggered seaward toward the retreating water. Again and again, untiringly, like a dog after a bone.

  Bianca was less enthralled. “Uh-oh,” said Penny, seeing what was going to happen a second before Bianca tripped in the surf and the water buried her. She jumped up and ran, reaching her daughter as she rose spluttering out of the subsiding froth. Bianca was trying to keep up with Charlie but she’d fallen too much and now she started crying. “Oh, sweetheart,” said Penny, scooping her up. She brought her back to their spot on the dry sand beneath the umbrella, wrapped Bianca in a towel, and hugged her. Then she said, “Is he really broke?”

  “Practically. He used to have a very small income from an aunt—you know, like people in old novels: three hundred pounds a year, on which they’d live genteelly in Dorset or something. But he spent that capital once he bought C’an Cabrer, and since then he’s lived off what he’s been able to produce and sell. But you can’t make a living now from selling olives and lemons and almonds. Not the way he did. It’s all big supermarkets now, HiperSol and SuperSol, and they buy from large-scale suppliers. The little comestibles, like Calix, and restaurants, that wanted thirty liters of olive oil and a few tubs of lemons—well, you know, you’ve seen it—they’re all gone, or going, or buying from the same big suppliers. They’re paying a lot less per kilo, and they only want to buy by the ton. And now the town’s put the property taxes up.”

  “It’s so sad,” said Penny. Bianca heard her and looked up at her mother and made a sad face. “It’s all changed now, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. It is sad,” said Aegina, her eyes following Charlie in the water. “It’s breaking his heart—it breaks mine too—but he’s got to sell something. He sold two parcels of land down at the bottom of the drive years ago, but they didn’t pay much, not what they’d fetch now. I’ve suggested he sell the whole place and move into a smaller house in town, but he says he’d hate that and I probably would too. He’s lucky he’s got François to do it with.”

  “François thinks they’ll do very well. And it should be nice. I mean, they’re really nice houses, and not too many of them. François says you won’t see them from your house.”

  “Well, it’s the trees, Penny, that he’s really upset about. He’s been looking after them ever since he’s lived here, they’re like his friends. But there’s nothing else for it. He can either do this, with François, and have some say in it, or sell the whole place to someone else and then it would be a lot worse. I mean, look what’s happened to Mallorca, just since you’ve been here.”

  “I know. Though of course, it’s not been bad for François. He’s done awfully well with his developments. It’s great that he and Fergus can make this happen together, for Gerald.”

  “Yes, it’s great,” said Aegina.

  Charlie ran screaming with laughter up to them, dripping salt water, to get Bianca, but she was alarmed and burrowed into her mother. He ran off into the waves.

  “Fergus goes to the Rocks quite a bit, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t mind?”

  “No, of course not,” said Aegina. “The guests are all English. He’s comfortable there. Really, I’m glad he’s found a place he likes here, somewhere to go and have a drink. I don’t have to go there, and he doesn’t mind that either. I think he enjoys getting away from us for a few hours. And now he’s got this project, it’ll keep him busy. It works out well.”

  “Gerald never goes there?”

>   “No. He used to walk or drive by when he thought no one would notice. I remember driving past the Rocks in the car when I was a child—when it was the long way home—and he would slow down.”

  “What do you think he feels about Lulu?”

  Aegina shook her head slowly. “I’m not sure. He was obsessed at one point—my mother had to give him a proper bollocking about it.”

  “And you still don’t know what happened between them? Luc never told you?”

  “No.”

  Charlie came running up again. “I’m hungry!” he said.

  “Bueno,” said Aegina. “Bocadillos.”

  She and Penny opened baskets and laid a lunch out on their towels. The children nibbled on giant sandwiches.

  • • •

  When they returned to the house from the olive groves, François spread blueprints on the dining room table before Señor Gómez. They showed elevations and construction details for four different designs of two-story villas of approximately the same size and footprint. Each had four bedrooms (or three bedrooms and a study), three bathrooms, an open-plan ground floor with a kitchen and living room flowing toward a terrace. Each house had its own pool. Each design showed slight variations in exterior details and use of interior space. The villas would be oriented toward a view of the sea while not conforming to a uniform relation to each other or the access road. They were similar to but larger than the houses at Los Piños, the small development François had built along the road to Cala Espasa. That project had been a success, all houses sold, but François had found his builder, who lived half an hour away in Artà, merely adequate and was unwilling to expand into a larger project with him. He wanted someone now who could produce a finer finish, with experience of a greater number of units and more difficult terrain, who lived near enough to guarantee a consistent presence. Gómez and another Cala Marsopa builder, Roig, were the only contenders. François wanted Gómez.