Rocks, The

by Peter Nichols

  “Bueno,” said Señor Gómez. He declined François’s invitation to lunch. He had to look in at a job, he said, though François believed he was simply uncomfortable at the idea of any kind of convivial social intimacy. The builder rolled up the blueprints and tucked them under an arm. He would be in touch in a few days. They shook his horny hand again and watched him putter away down the drive on his Lambretta.

  “It’s a wonder he’s still alive,” said Fergus, as they climbed the steps from the drive. “Trundling around on that thing holding on to a set of blueprints at the same time. He’s a proper crank. Is he interested, do you think? And do we want him?”

  “Yes, we want him,” said François. “And at this moment, this is what he wants, I believe. He’s doing a very nice job down at Porto Colom, but this is something different. Quite a big job, but rather nice, you know. A little more cachet. A development of pretty houses in a beautiful setting, on a lovely hill, well made. A showpiece. Yes, he’s interested. Yes, we want Señor Gómez.”

  “Should we see that fellow Roig again?”

  Gerald went out onto the terrace. He stood in the shade and lit a Ducados. He pictured the village of tourists on the hill above his house, playing music late into the night, their screeching cars, screaming drunken laughter, barking dogs, rubbish thrown down the hill onto his property, the quiet of his olive groves gone forever.

  Fergus came out onto the terrace. “Gerald, I’m taking us all to lunch. Shall we go to the Fonda?”

  “What about the Marítimo?” said Gerald.

  Fergus loathed the Marítimo, with its greasy calamari and its plebeian clientele of fishermen and the horribly naff tourists from the blocks of flats above the harbor. “Yes, absolutely. Is that okay with you, François? The Marítimo?”

  “I shall be very happy at the Marítimo.”

  Gerald went into the larder and pulled two plastic HiperSol bags from the basket hanging on a nail. He filled them with lemons from the plastic tub on the floor.

  They drove to town in Fergus’s boxy Range Rover, which seemed to glide and sway like an alpine cable car down Gerald’s steep driveway. The leather interior cosseted one with an upholstered comfort Gerald could only recall from a first-class railway carriage of long ago, but he believed the car’s center of gravity was too high, capsizable, and it made him nervous on corners. He felt the same way about Fergus, and his massive, cheerful confidence. But his son-in-law was looking after Aegina undeniably well—in addition to what she was now making from her shop in Covent Garden—and Gerald was no longer anxious that she wouldn’t be provided for. “He’s amusing and he makes me feel safe,” Aegina had said of Fergus before they married. Gerald had not made his daughter feel safe, he had come to realize, a little bitterly. On the contrary, he knew she felt increasingly responsible for him in his impecunious fastness atop a hill in Mallorca, with a dwindling subsistence income, no provision for her beyond the dubious potential of his moldering property’s value, and the uncertainty of his own old age and inevitably advancing decrepitude. Fergus’s scheme was irresistible to Gerald as a father. Didn’t mean he had to like it, however.

  The Marítimo was a concrete two-story building at the head of the port. The restaurant sat on the upper level, above the road. From the terrace, diners could look over the breakwater at the sea.

  Gerald was embraced by the proprietor, a square-shaped man, pale skinned, with areas of white fuzz below his jaw that he had missed with his razor. Gerald handed him the two bags full of lemons, which the man received with solemn appreciation.

  “¡Gerald, viejo amigo!” he said warmly. “¿Cómo estás? Demasiado tiempo, hombre.” He was about Gerald’s age, but looked older and unwell. He moved with difficulty.

  “Bien, Rafael. Y tu?”

  Rafael Soler shrugged and emitted a series of fatalistic grunts. “El hígado. El reumatismo. ¿Qué se puede hacer?” He shook hands with Fergus and François, whom he had met before in Gerald’s company and therefore accorded a fulsome courtesy.

  Rafael’s pretty, dark-eyed teenage granddaughter, Rafaela, followed them out onto the terrace as her father sat them at his best table, under the awning, overlooking the port, asking them if the location was agreeable.

  “Estupendo,” said François.

  “Posseeblay sangria, por favor?” said Fergus, grinning at the girl.

  “Sí,” said Rafaela, promptly turning back into the bar.

  Rafael remained beside Gerald’s chair and put a hand on Gerald’s shoulder, as if to support himself, as they exchanged recent news. Fergus’s Spanish was a rudimentary holiday boilerplate, acquired over the last four years, but he caught a few words about boats and fish, couched in tones of fatalistic disappointment. Rafael gazed out at the port, wheezing and shaking his head. Here it comes, thought Fergus, the workingman’s inexorable disgruntlement with the improvement of his lot. This one, for instance, bloated from lack of exercise and overeating, whose father no doubt worked eighteen hours a day and dropped from disease. François was nodding in commiseration while Gerald politely translated for Fergus as Rafael told them of the small size and scarcity of the fish everywhere in the Mediterranean, the reduction of the local fishing fleet, their berths increasingly taken over by yachts that never left port.

  “Jolly sad, isn’t it,” said Fergus, sympathetically.

  “Homer called it the ‘fish-infested’ sea,” said Gerald. “No longer.”

  Rafael recommended the gazpacho, wished them “Buen provecho,” and shuffled off.

  “Ah, finally we have a little breeze,” said François.

  The salt- and moisture-laden air shimmered, refracting sunlight. Gerald looked out at the sea as if through a filmy membrane and saw himself in a little white boat beating into Cala Marsopa for the first time, rounding the old breakwater, coming alongside the quay below the old Bar Marítimo, when he knew nothing of this place and had no intention of staying beyond a change of wind.

  “It’s still an infested sea,” said Fergus.

  François looked at him. “How do you mean?”

  “Well,” Fergus said, throwing a hand out over the port. “Look at all these bloody boats. Like our good friend says, they didn’t use to be here, did they?”

  Nereid had been the only yacht in the harbor in May 1948. Then the tubby, flaring hulls of fishing boats, perhaps fifteen of them, some painted with an unblinking Egyptian eye in the bow, filled the tiny inner port. Black nets had lain across the stone quay; fishermen, faces creased like walnuts, sat on them in the sun, knitting with giant wooden fids.

  “All these yachts are full of people spending money,” said Fergus. “They come and eat at his restaurant, don’t they?”

  “Yes,” said Gerald. “But the Spain that they come here for, that’s disappearing.”

  “I’m not sure about that, Gerald,” said Fergus. “It’s always disappearing, and getting replaced by something else—usually better. I should think most people wouldn’t miss the old Spain—squatting toilets and no telephones. The tourists come here for sun and sand and paella and tapas. Tits and bums on the beach. They’re coming from Sheffield and Düsseldorf. They’ve never seen anything so fantastic, and it’s cheaper than staying at home. And the locals, they’re on an incredible roll, aren’t they? Look at the improvement in their lifestyle.”

  François laughed. “The Spaniards used to believe all non-Catholics still had vestigial tails under their clothes.”

  “What nonsense,” said Gerald.

  “Who knows,” said François. “But Gerald, here I must agree with your son-in-law, nuestro banquero. Eight years ago, before Franco died, all the women in Spain were dressed in black and riding around on donkeys. Now, glory of glories, they’re all topless on the beaches, wearing nothing but a thong, and driving SEATs and Renaults. It was more picturesque, but so was Europe before the industrial revolution, when everyone had bubonic pla
gue. The Spaniards don’t want the old postcard, the crumbling walls, the donkeys. Ask Señor Gómez. He wouldn’t want the old days. He’s getting rich.”

  Rafaela brought out a tray with a basket of bread, glasses, a large pitcher of wine, oranges, and lemons.

  Gerald said: “Rafaela, prefiero un vaso de agua con gas, por favor.”

  “Sí, Gerald,” she said, and went away.

  “This place,” said Fergus, “the Marítimo, how old is this structure, then? It looks brand-new. Where’d the money for that come from?”

  “They rebuilt this end of the port and extended the breakwater about ten years ago, after a winter storm damaged the original structure and the old fishermen’s buildings,” said Gerald. “I think insurance helped them.”

  “Right. And look at your mate in there, glued to the telly in the bar. He’s doing a lot better now with a business twice the size of the old one. He says he doesn’t like the yachts filling up his lovely old harbor, but he’s the first stop for every boat in Europe pulling into the dock right below us.”

  Rafaela came out with large bowls of gazpacho.

  “Estupendo,” said François.

  She asked what else they would eat.

  “Hamburguesa, por favor,” said Fergus, in execrable Spanish. François and Gerald ordered grilled sardines.

  “Shall we talk about what Gerald shall be paid for his beautiful hillside?” said François, persistently cheery. “I’ve gone over it with him, but you’re better with the numbers, Fergus.”

  “Yes, let’s,” said Fergus, pouring each of them a glass of sangria. Gerald pushed his away. “Right! Gerald! Rather than buying your land outright for what we could scrape together right now, which would not reflect a proper market value or potential, my group wants to make you a partner, and bring you along with us as we go into profit, and make you more money.”

  “That’s very good of you, Fergus,” said Gerald. “Why would you do that?”

  “I’ll be perfectly honest with you, Gerald. I’m doing it for love. You’re Aegina’s father, Charlie’s grandfather. I want what’s good for them, which happens, in this instance, to be what’s good for you. With this deal you’ll make enough to see yourself through what we all hope is a prolonged and graceful old age, in your own home. I know you’ve got Sanitas to pay the basic medical bills, but now you’ll have enough for extras, you know, whatever you might need. Then, in the fullness of time, you’ll have an inheritance to pass on to Aegina and Charlie. I mean, I’m not going to pretend the money isn’t a factor. Of course it is. We’d never get it off the ground otherwise. But what makes good financial sense here, is good for Aegina and Charlie, and you too, down the road. See?” Fergus quaffed half a glass of sangria. “Fantastico!”

  Gerald’s eyes flicked across the table to François, who smiled back at him confidently. “Alors, it is a win-win, non?” François said.

  Fergus poured more sangria, and went on. “We’ve drawn up a partnership. Down payment on the land to you, Gerald: twenty-five thousand pounds. Solid. In four payments spread out over the first year. Then we build as we sell. Build a few houses, sell them, build a few more, till we sell out phase one. Five properties. Then phase two. Another five, selling for more money. You’ll get fifteen percent of partnership profits on each house. That’s how you’re going to make real money. After ten houses—after phase one, the way you live—you’ll be set for life.”

  “Let me see,” said Gerald. “You get my land, bulldoze my olive grove, for six and a quarter thousand pounds, right?”

  “To begin with, yes. But look, my investors are putting in half a million. I’m investing myself—I’m going to buy one of the phase two houses for Aegina and Charlie. We’ll be forking out from the beginning, but you’re getting money up front, Gerald, and thereafter fifteen percent of everything we make.”

  “Of profit. You said the profit of each house. At what point do you declare profit? On the sale of each house, or after your investors have recouped their half a million, or whatever your overall expenses will have amounted to?”

  “Well, it’s structured, you see, so you can’t put it like that. We can do the numbers anytime you like, and you can see. But the principle is clear. Ten properties selling on a sliding scale starting at four hundred thousand pounds, the earlier sales going for the smaller price to get us rolling, the later properties going for more. Overall gross will be about six to eight million, minimum. Of which about half will be profit. Bit of tax, which we should be able to shelter most of for you, and your cut will be close to three quarters of a million pounds, Gerald. In about two years. In Switzerland, if you like. How’s that, then?”

  “Who are your investors?” asked Gerald.

  “A group I work with in London. They like the holiday market down here for exactly the reasons I’ve just said to you. They’re not interested in the Costa del Sol, with all those condo developments. Mallorca’s more villagey. We think Mallorca has prospects for the sort of mini estate developments we’re talking about here. Minimum impact on the landscape—you’ll hardly be able to see it from the road—you won’t see it at all from your place, Gerald. Twenty cars maximum, at full capacity, plus a few visitors going in and out. Each property has a pool. Elegant. Good neighbors for you. They’ll invite you to their parties.”

  “And this group of investors is quite solid?”

  “Safe as houses—actually, they’re safer than houses. Most of them are Lloyd’s Names. Mutually insured. They’re solider than acts of God. You can’t do better than that. And we’re ready to go. Today.”

  Gerald knew that, on paper, Fergus could prove any assertion, show him figures to assuage any doubts. Such assurances meant nothing to him. For himself, Gerald would eat olives, almonds, carobs, and drink well water laced with lemons. But Fergus made Aegina feel safe, she’d said. And now Gerald could do this for her.

  Rafaela brought out three plates.

  “Sauso tomato, por favor,” said Fergus. “So what do you say, Gerald? I’d like to tell my people as soon as possible. This is a go project, with Mr. Motor Scooter or the other bloke, the moment you sign.”

  Fergus and François both looked expectantly at Gerald. He was staring out over the breakwater.

  What’s his problem? thought Fergus. He always seems disappointed, haunted by something. Here he was doing Gerald the biggest favor of his miserable life, offering him security for himself and his family, and he seems put out. Joyless old bugger. Worse luck, he’d passed that on to Aegina, for whom nothing was ever quite right. Both of them, haunted and disappointed, never satisfied.

  “Do you need to think about it some more, old boy?” asked Fergus. He looked at François and rolled his eyes. Then back at Gerald. “Earth to Gerald.”

  Gerald pulled his gaze from the sea and looked back at them both. Fergus’s condescending “old boy,” from an arriviste property developer half his age, was offensive to him, but amusing too. Fergus was a buffoon. “No. I don’t need to think about it any further. I’ll sign whenever you like.”

  “Excellent!” said Fergus. “After lunch, then. I’ll write you a check at the same time. Six grand in your hand today, Gerald. How’s that then?”

  Gerald didn’t seem to hear. He was looking seaward again, quite focused.

  The other two turned their heads in the direction of his gaze.

  A large yacht, shaped and decorated like a sleek pirate galleon with an elevated poop deck, a square sail billowing from a yard on its foremast, was rolling in the light breeze, approaching the port.

  • • •

  The two men stood barefoot on the teak deck at the forwardmost point on the yacht Dolphin’s bow.

  “That’s my mother’s house, there,” said Luc, pointing at the house above the rocks. “The sage-colored shutters.”

  “Mais c’est fabuleux!” said Gábor Szabó. “Such an extraordinari
ly beautiful island. But why is it still so unknown?”

  “Well, it’s not, really. Robert Graves lives up on the north end of the island. You know”—Luc was never sure about movie people, what one could assume about their frame of reference, and this was particularly so with Szabó—“I, Claudius?”

  “But of course. Superb. He’s a TV writer?”

  “He wrote the book from which the BBC series was adapted.” Luc moved quickly on. “Joan Miró lives here—the painter—outside Palma. Then, of course, George Sand, the French writer—the nom de plume for a woman, as you know—spent a winter on the island with her consumptive lover, Frédéric Chopin. He hated it. She wrote a book about it. A Winter in Mallorca.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard of it. I thought it was a novel. Like The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne. Like Lilliput.”

  “No. Quite real.”

  “But no one talks about Mallorca. No one goes to Mallorca. And look—it’s incredibly beautiful. Formidable!”

  Szabó was entranced. He had voyaged by square-rigged ship from a distant place (Monte Carlo) to find this terra incognita: a discoverer of unknown lands, a Bougainville, a Cook, a da Gama. He wore a blue Tahitian sarong beneath a billowing, long-tailed white linen shirt from India. Across his back, a pointillist stippling of blood and wider broth-hued patches of plasma and pus had seeped and diffused into the fine weave.

  He clapped a heavy arm across Luc’s shoulder. “Mais c’est fabuleux! We have reached Ultima Thule! We will break new ground here, Luc.”

  Two

  The group lay on their mats beneath the pines at the far end of the Rocks’ walled garden, above the pool. Overhead the light breeze soughed the breath of multitudes through the needled branches. They were five, including Lulu: Sarah Bavister, a regular Rocks guest, down for two weeks without her husband, with the children and a nanny who were presently at the beach at Son Moll, which was more sheltered from the unusual waves; Dominick Cleland, enchanted by the novelty of Lulu’s sudden yoga enthusiasm and the contortions of the attendees; and two people off the yacht Dolphin that had come into port earlier in the afternoon: Gábor Szabó’s French wife, Véronique, and her sister, Mireille.