Rocks, The

by Peter Nichols

  “Good morning, my little boy,” said Bernie. He scooped Luc up and hugged and kissed him and then held him so they could see each other’s faces. “How are you?”

  “Papa, beach?” said Luc.

  “Papa has to go into the town to mail a letter,” said Bernie. “But this afternoon I’ll come back and we’ll go to the beach.”

  “Go beach!” shouted Luc.

  Cassian was outside the door of Luc’s room. “Bernard, I hear you’re driving into Palma this morning.”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I come with you?”

  “Yes, but I won’t be staying long.”

  “Long enough for a coffee?”

  “Sure. I usually stop for coffee anyway.”

  “Are you leaving soon?”

  “I was planning on going as soon as I’m dressed.”

  “I’ll meet you by the car,” said Cassian.

  • • •

  Bernie ran up the wide steps into the cool, cavernous, marbled interior of the Correos building on carrer de la Constitució and mailed off his neatly typed pages to the Herald Tribune office in Paris. Days earlier, after attending the coronation of King Baudouin, he’d flown straight from Brussels to Palma rather than returning to Paris and writing up the story there. Others were reporting on the abdication of King Léopold III and the succession of his son; Bernie’s piece was a more thoughtful assessment of the quaintness versus the value of any monarchy in postwar Europe. It wasn’t urgent and he’d wanted to resume his vacation with Lulu and Luc as soon as possible, so he wrote it in the not entirely peaceful holiday atmosphere of Villa Los Roques.

  Cassian had followed him into the building to make a phone call and was waiting outside. He was wearing stylish sunglasses, in rakish counterpoint to his shirt, shorts, sandals with socks.

  Bernie drove the little SEAT to the Bar Formentor, where, he’d told Cassian when the boy asked him, they would stop for coffee. Bernie liked the place for its view at the head of a tree-lined plaza, for its retention of the feel of an older world, and for the people-watching. Errol Flynn, who came to the Bar Formentor daily for coffee and nonserious shoreside drinking when his yacht Zaca was in port (currently it wasn’t), was said to have put the place on the map, but Porfirio Rubirosa had come to Mallorca with his third wife, Doris Duke, in the late forties to attend parties thrown by Juan Llobet and was photographed quaffing beer at the Formentor. Other British, French, American travelers—people who came off yachts or wrote books or made films—had migrated to the Bar Formentor with the same sort of flocking and homing devices that send birds on the North American flyway to Central Park: somehow they simply knew.

  Bernie had first come to Mallorca and the Bar Formentor in 1949 with French film director Julien Duvivier and the actors George Sanders and Herbert Marshall during the shooting of Duvivier’s Black Jack, a film about an expatriate American smuggler who cruised from port to port around the Mediterranean aboard his capacious mahogany motor yacht and got into ceaseless trouble. Life magazine, under the impression that another Casablanca was in the works, had borrowed Bernie from the Trib and dispatched him to Palma for a story on the film to coincide with its release the following year. Bernie and a Life photographer spent time with the director and his stars on locations around the island, one of which had been the waters off Cala Marsopa. They met an amusing group of English people at a house party in a villa above the rocks near the harbor. Bernie went back to Cala Marsopa after he’d finished his assignment. Lulu was one of the most beautiful women he’d ever met. She and her friends Tom and Milly Ollorenshaw were funny in an acerbic British way he liked. Bernie made them laugh too, in some American way that they seemed to like. He invited Lulu to visit him in Paris. She’d only passed through the city once. It couldn’t have been more romantic: she loved the food, she loved his apartment on rue Jacob; they walked, drank, ate everywhere. She loved the fact that Bernie traveled, met politicians, movie people, most of all that he lived in Paris. “A writer living in Paris, it’s ridiculously romantic, you know,” Lulu told him. It was as if he’d given her an elixir. They were married at the American embassy. In the beginning, she accompanied him on his assignments, enjoying the trains to Rome, Prague, Bucharest, but then she grew tired of traveling. Bernie had stories to cover all over Europe every week. She didn’t like his being away. She felt unsafe when he was away, she said. Bernie told her she couldn’t be safer in Paris; she was probably safer in Paris than anywhere. She felt unsafe alone, she told him. Bernie didn’t know what to say to that: traveling for his stories, researching his books, it was what he did—it was what she’d said she liked about him.

  He’d never seen Black Jack, or even heard of its release. Life hadn’t published his story.

  • • •

  Ready to go?” he asked Cassian. He’d finished his café con leche, and read a three-day-old London Daily Express, the only English newspaper he’d been able to find at the newsstand near the bar. Cassian, not a spirited conversationalist, had taken half an hour to empty his bottle of Coca-Cola with increasingly small sips while looking around the plaza with a mounting anxiousness that was palpable despite his sunglasses and habitual inscrutability.

  “Do you mind if we wait another few minutes?” Cassian said flatly. “I’m expecting a friend. He’s late. So he should be here soon.”

  “Sure,” said Bernie, masking the gratification of his curiosity with a flick of his wrists to snap the paper open again. He had the opportunity to read in depth the stories he’d glanced over too briefly: a man who had amassed a horde of stolen empty milk bottles belonging to the Putney Dairy in southwest London was helping police with their inquiries; the BBC Television Service transmission from Alexandra Palace had suffered an inexplicable thirteen-minute blackout during the Saturday evening broadcast of the football pools results—

  Cassian rose abruptly, skidding his chair back, to greet a tall man who approached their table. The man motioned with a quick hand held at his waist for Cassian to sit back down, and he sat down himself beside him at their table. He was in his thirties, dark—more Arab- or Turkish-, Bernie thought, than Spanish-looking—dressed like a waiter: white open-necked shirt, black pants and shoes. He was immediately uneasy at the sight of Bernie, his eyes flickering questioningly between him and Cassian.

  “It’s all right, he’s a friend of my parents’.”

  “You should tell me,” the man said with an accent Bernie thought was eastern European, or Levantine. “When I see him, almost I don’t come. It’s okay, the rest? You will see your friend?”

  “Oh, yes, that’s all in hand,” said Cassian suavely.

  The man was carrying a straw bag of the sort people carried to market. He pulled from it a small parcel wrapped in brown paper tied tightly with string and passed it to Cassian beneath the table. He shot another glance at Bernie, and looked again at Cassian uncertainly, his eyes flickering over the boy’s shirt and shorts. “Okay,” he said. He stood and walked across the plaza.

  “I liked your friend very much,” said Bernie.

  “Actually, he’s more of an acquaintance. I’ve only met him a few times. He’s a friend of a friend.”

  “Ready to go?” Bernie put some peseta notes under his saucer.

  “Yes,” said Cassian. He stood, holding the brown parcel to his chest.

  In the car, Cassian said, “Can we just swing by the Club Náutico on our way?”

  “Sure,” said Bernie. “Got a friend there?”

  “Yes, actually, a friend from London.”

  “So, what’s in the package? Drugs?”

  “Good God, no. Just money.”

  Bernie swung the car into the entrance to the Real Club Náutico and parked near the head of the main quay.

  “I won’t be a minute,” said Cassian, opening the door. He walked down a quay at which a number of foreign motor yachts were moored:
British blue and red ensigns, French Tricolors, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian flags fluttering lightly at their sterns.

  Bernie had to smile. For the role of Mike Alexander, the nefarious smuggler and lead character in Black Jack, George Sanders had been kitted out by wardrobe with the white, black-visored captain’s hat bearing the insignia of an anchor, traditionally worn by actors when their character stepped aboard a vessel of any sort, a striped French fisherman’s jersey with a red kerchief tied at the neck, voluminous white trousers held up by a wide belt that carried a sheath knife, and sneakers; a costume that, together with the naturally louche and dissolute cast of George Sanders’s features, was no less indicative of his character’s business than if he’d worn a sandwich board with the word smuggler painted on it. Whereas Cassian appeared for all the world what he was: a schoolboy in shorts, with a slight side-to-side wavering of his still-growing lope as he made his way down the quay. He turned right where the dock reached a T, and Bernie lost sight of him.

  He returned, empty-handed, eight minutes later.

  “What sort of money, if you don’t mind my asking?” asked Bernie as he drove out of Palma.

  “Czechoslovak korunas—the old ones, pre-1939,” said Cassian.

  “Who wants them?”

  “I’ve no idea. People took them out before the war and now people want them back to get the new currency. At the moment they can be exchanged for the new korunas at par, I think. Otherwise, they’re useless.”

  “So, when you’re on holiday, you’re a currency smuggler?”

  “Not always. I’m just helping out some friends. I mean, everybody does it, don’t they? Mummy and Daddy do it every time they leave England. You can’t have a decent holiday on fifty pounds, can you? Fifty pounds is all you’re allowed to take out of England, you know.”

  “Yes, I know. So what do you all do, stuff it in your pants when you get onto the cross-Channel ferry?”

  “Crikey, no. Yachts mostly. At least, everyone I know uses yachts. That’s what Mummy and Daddy do. How do you think they’re getting the money into Spain for Lulu to buy the house?”

  “What?”

  “The money for the villa. You can’t do a bank draft for that sort of money.”

  Some minutes later, Bernie said, “No, of course not.”

  Cassian was looking out the window. He swung his head back to Bernie. “Sorry?” he said.

  Three

  Early in the year, an editor at John Murray, Ltd—publisher of Byron, Darwin, Livingstone, Conan Doyle, Jane Austen, and Herman Melville, and still publishing sturdy, literate travel narratives—had sent Gerald a letter, forwarded to him by Griffiths at Yachting Monthly:

  22 February 1951

  Dear Mr. Rutledge,

  For the past several years, I’ve read your articles in Yachting Monthly, Cornhill, The Listener, about Odysseus’s route home from the Trojan War with the greatest of pleasure. It has occurred to me, now in agreement with others in the house, that these pieces could be advantageously collected into a small but exceptional book.

  I am a keen coastal yachtsman myself, and consequently have read the run of our contemporary sailing literature. Most of it is abysmal: turgid accounts of anchoring replete with gauges of chain and details of muddy bottoms. Your pieces stand distinctly apart. The mix of gentle erudition with travelogue and your sailorly insights into the geography of The Odyssey would make, we believe, a unique narrative. Such a book would prove attractive to a general reader whose interests go beyond the classical or nautical, yet draw back at the stolidly academic. Indeed, we see in your seamanlike deduction and navigation of the possible route of The Odyssey the makings of a small classic of travel literature.

  This may have occurred to you too—perhaps you already have plans with another publisher? But if not, we are prepared to offer you an advance of £750 against royalties, with every expectation that this advance will be earned back in a short time and see us all with a modest profit. If this interests you, please let me know your thoughts by return, with, if possible, a detailed list of your Odyssey articles—are there any that remain unpublished?—and to what extent they cover the entire route from Troy to Ithaca.

  I look forward to hearing from you at your earliest opportunity.

  By the way, where are you? If you are in or near London, I should be very happy to discuss all this with you over a drink at the RTYC.

  Yours sincerely,

  Eric Pocock

  During respites in action—lying in his bunk in the bilgy bowels of, first, the aircraft carrier HMS Furious, and then the destroyer HMS Avon Vale—Gerald had read a Cambridge University translation of Heinrich Schliemann’s account of the discovery of Troy. On August 14, 1868, after picking his way on horseback across a rubble-strewn plateau in northwest Turkey, Schliemann found traces of a circular wall at a place called Hisarlik. “The site fully agrees with the description given by Homer. . . . As soon as one sets foot on the Trojan plain, the view of the beautiful hill of Hisarlik grips one with astonishment.” Later that day, Schliemann climbed to the roof of a house at the northern edge of the plain:

  With the Iliad in hand, I sat on the roof and looked around me. I imagined seeing below me the fleet, camp, and assemblies of the Greeks; Troy and its fortress on the plateau of Hisarlik; troops marching to and fro and battling each other . . . For two hours the main events of the Iliad passed before my eyes until darkness and violent hunger forced me to leave the roof. I had become fully convinced that it was here that ancient Troy had stood.

  Schliemann dug and unearthed an ancient city that had been sacked by war.

  Immediately after being demobbed in Alexandria at the end of the war, Gerald had traveled to Istanbul. He reached Hisarlik and the gouged mounds of Troy by ferry, charabanc, and foot. Afterward, Odyssey in hand, he visited the surrounding coasts in a number of craft, large and small. What he saw, he concluded, was what Odysseus (whether a real man or not seemed moot) had seen. Since here was Troy, and to the southwest at a known coordinate lay Ithaca, and between them the mysteries of that ten-year voyage home, Gerald determined then to return in his own small yacht and find his way, navigating by Homer’s cloaked directions, from Troy to Ithaca. He’d done exactly that, purchasing and sailing the nimble Nereid from Sussex, all the way to the Aegean in 1946–1947, and west back around Italy’s boot into the Tyrrhenian Sea in 1948 to explore Corsica and Sardinia as possible sites for the home of the Laestrygonians, and the cave of the Cyclops, Polyphemus. The Strait of Messina, he had always known, must be the location of Scylla and Charybdis, and he had been sure he would find the cave somewhere on the west coast of Sicily. His undoing, like Odysseus’s, had been straying too far to the west and becoming enmeshed with a nymph on an island.

  With what he had already published, Gerald had most of his propounded route of The Odyssey written, with photographs, including the Nereid lying to her anchor in the same spots where he believed Homer had placed his hero. Only the most eastern early locations of The Odyssey, Troy itself and Ismarus, he had not sailed to himself—the cruise abandoned after the aborted honeymoon voyage with Lulu—but these were known, unequivocal, and he had already visited them in one vessel or another.

  He and Pocock corresponded. He sent him all his articles, including several that had not yet been published; he sent his photos and his own rough maps. Pocock sent him a contract to sign, and just a few weeks later, at the dusty Correos in Cala Marsopa, Gerald opened a brown envelope containing a check for £750. A life-altering sum. More money than he’d ever seen, or perhaps would ever see again. What to do with it?

  He could buy another boat and, at last, sail back to the Aegean. It was where he had aimed himself and his fascination with Ancient Greece since he’d been a schoolboy in shorts. He had sailed, in one boat or another, to most places he believed were contenders for locations in The Odyssey, but he had always believed he could spend a lifetime ex
ploring the waters of Greece and Turkey, or, as he thought of the place in classical terms, Asia Minor, the supposed birthplace of Homer. Mallorca had proved a catastrophic interruption to this grand plan. Something like a terrible automobile crash.

  The morning after he received Pocock’s letter, Gerald took his habitual morning walk through the olive groves along the ridge above C’an Cabrer, to gaze down the hill, over the town, out to sea.

  I could buy a boat, he thought.

  Then he turned and looked at the olive trees.

  Four

  They were sitting under the shaded arbor on the patio overlooking the rocks and the sea, ready for a late lunch, when Bernie and Cassian returned from Palma.

  Rested and safe at last among friends, Schooner Trelawney was back in top form. Over lunch, he related the difficulties he’d experienced trying to locate his friends in Monaco.

  “Well, you’d said the place was small and that you knew absolutely everybody, so when I stepped out of the train station and beheld the entire, sparkling Fabergé principality spread out beneath me, I was impressed.” Schooner looked at Tom. “I must say, m’dear, you rose instantly in my estimation. I thought, Golly, Tom is doing well. And if, indeed, you knew everybody, then it was a simple deduction that I should start inquiring after you at the palace.”

  Tom and Milly were weaving in their chairs and hooting. Cassian giggled, more at seeing his parents reduced to helplessness than for Schooner’s story.

  “You can imagine my disappointment—after such a journey—when nobody at the palace had heard of you. Well, that was the guards, and what would they know? They couldn’t care less. Deaf to any logic or appeal. They wouldn’t even let me in to ask the prince or somebody who might have been expected to know you. The Ollorenshaws! I began shouting it past the guards up at the windows—for all I knew, you were inside, at some do.” Schooner looked around the table, his eyebrows raised, happy.