During the heat of the day, in no breeze at all, the ships wallowed in the slight swell, engines idling, generators thrumming, their steel plating turning to hot plates, burning men’s hands and feet. In the afternoon, the men were permitted to swim. They were lowered overside in boats, and taken a safe distance away from the ship and its idling propellers. The Mediterranean was warm and clear and blue. They could see the reefs of the bank beneath them as they swam.
“Oy!” shouted one of the swimmers. They looked: one of the sailors was standing upright in the water, hand on hip, one leg crooked in front of the other, the pose of a model on a runway. No land in sight, the horizon all round vanishing between sea and sky, while he stood in calf-deep water. He looked around his feet theatrically. “Seen any fucking U-boats, tosh?”
They swam toward him and clustered around the barely submerged top of the reef, jockeying for standing room, pushing one another off, waving and shouting at the ship. Someone said, “You fink them bloody navigators ’ave any bloody idea ’ow fucking shallow it is?”
Gerald was sure they didn’t. He’d seen the charts, and it showed no soundings indicating such a hazard, although parts of the contour of Skerki Bank were drawn with a dotted line indicating that chart data was incomplete. The ship was fortunate not to have run aground and been holed.
Other swimmers found shallows close enough beneath the surface to stand on. The effect, on a sea that was empty in every direction except for the idling convoy ships, was dreamlike, unreal.
The all-clear came just before midnight and the convoy steamed off into the strait toward Malta.
That day, Gerald marked the spot, as near as he could, on the chart he carried with him in his kit, with his copy of The Odyssey, all through the war. Later, in an Admiralty pilot of the Tyrrhenian Sea, he read: “. . . in places, depths of less than six feet have been reported on Skerki Bank . . . the cause of the total loss in October 1804 of H.M.S. Athenian, sixty-four guns . . . Skerki Bank sits at the crossroad of three thousand years of east-west Mediterranean maritime commerce . . . countless vessels through the ages have also perished on these banks. . . .”
• • •
Keeping an eye on the color of the water ahead and beneath him, Gerald trimmed Nereid’s sheets and ghosted slowly toward the grounded Guardia Costiera vessel—not too close, they might have firearms aboard. The men were running up and down the deck at the rail like worried dogs, staring down into the water around their boat. Two of them were shouting at the third, the helmsman who had been steering. All three disappeared into the wheelhouse; the engine whined at an unnatural pitch; dense blue-black smoke rose from the exhaust stack behind the wheelhouse. Gerald could see froth at the stern. The vessel lurched, shuddered—would they get off?—but it did not break free. When the engine noise subsided, another shudder went through the boat—the bottom was grinding to pulp on the rocks—and it slid slowly backward, the stern settling deeper into the water until the rear deck was awash, the bow pointing unnaturally upward. The men on board, yelling frantically, converged on the rubber boat, which lay half deflated on the foredeck. One of them began pumping air into its collapsed chamber with a foot pump.
As Gerald sailed slowly round the Guardia vessel, about a hundred feet off, the men threw their rubber boat over the rail and jumped down into it. They began paddling toward Nereid. They glared at Gerald as they came closer.
He stepped down his companionway. When he reappeared on deck a moment later, the rubber boat was fifty feet away. He let them come on. At twenty-five feet he raised the large brass and wood Webley Very pistol and fired. The whooshing flare drove straight into the boat, the rocket propellant packed to carry it three hundred feet into the air continuing to throw flame around the bottom of the boat while the sulfur flare ignited, burning a large hole in the air chamber. The Italians leapt screaming into the water. At least two of them had been burned by propellant or sulfur. They abandoned the drooping remains of the rubber boat and swam back to the wrecked mother ship.
Gerald continued to sail slowly around the Guardia vessel as its three crewmen hauled themselves aboard by the swamped stern. As water filled it, and its frames and structure cracked and gave way with progressive breakage, the boat was perceptibly sliding off the reef. The men climbed to the foredeck, now the highest point above the water. They called to Gerald, pleading, demanding (he presumed, he didn’t understand them) his assistance. Slowly he sailed closer, pushing the conspicuous brass Very pistol into his belt, looking at the water—didn’t want to run aground himself and have the Italians board him.
When he was about forty feet away, he raised the Agfa Solinette and took several exposures.
Then he steered off. He went below to stow the camera, and when he returned to the deck, he steered east, eased sheets, and the yacht picked up speed. In a very short time, he could no longer hear the men’s screams. In half an hour he could see nothing astern but the lightly ruffled surface of the sea.
• • •
Lulu! Lulu!?”
It was just past noon. In daylight, the cave was littered with rubbish, old tins, the remains of fires, the droppings of sheep. Otherwise quite empty.
“Lulu? Lulu!” he called.
He ran along the path up and down the shore north and south of the cave, yelling her name frantically. He climbed the rocky slopes above the cave, looking for hiding places among ledges and in the vegetation.
“Lulooooo . . . !”
He trotted along the beach below the cave and explored the rocks at either end of the cove. He grew panicked and irresolute.
She was alive, obviously, and she had gone. Gone where—naked? Some dwelling along the coast . . . Trapani?
Gradually, another concern crowded into his brain. Although it had been night, there had been a moon. He knew that if anyone had seen Nereid at anchor off the beach at the same time as the Guardia vessel, they might remember. If anyone saw him anchored here now, they might remember. He couldn’t go ashore and ask questions, talk with the police. If the Italians had been rescued, they might appear at any moment. At some point, Italian maritime authorities might alert ports around the Mediterranean to report any sighting of a small white-hulled sailing yacht flying the British red ensign. That might ultimately be connected with the death or disappearance of three Italian coastguardsmen.
He must leave.
Naked, hurt or not, Lulu had gone. Somehow, he knew, she would return to Tom and Milly in Mallorca.
He sailed again before dark. He steered northwest for Mallorca. He would stop in Sardinia and find a phone.
One
You’re too late, I’m afraid,” said the woman outside the service hall.
People leaving the Crematorio de Cala Marsopa recognized people just arriving. For convenience, Pompas Fúnebres González, the town’s only undertakers, had scheduled the Davenport and Rutledge services back-to-back.
“Who are you?” the woman asked, her crepey, jellied wattle shaking as she inclined her head forward to hear better.
“Aegina Rutledge,” said Aegina.
“Oh, yes! So it was your father? Wait—I’m not sure I understand. Then you and Lukey are half brother and sister?”
“No, different parents, all round.”
“But your parents were married to each other at one point, surely? I mean—no, hang on—I remember you. You’re Lukey’s little friend, the sweet little Spanishy girl. Good lord, that was yonks! I bought pairs and pairs of those little slipper thingies you made—that was you, yes? I gave them to everybody. You probably don’t remember me. Arabella Squibb. Are you still making them?”
“No,” said Aegina.
“Well, you’ve missed the service at any rate—but it’s so nice of you to come.”
“Excuse me,” said a man, sixtyish, glancing briefly at Aegina. “The car’s over here, Mummy.” He steered the older woman away.
&n
bsp; “A-geee-nah!” A once tall, emaciated man, in his seventies but looking twenty years older, in blazer and black jeans with lank shards of white hair came, hip and knee sensitive, down the steps outside the service hall, moving stiffly toward her. “I know, Picture of Dorian Gray. But it’s been well earned, I can tell you. Perhaps you don’t remember—”
“I remember you, Dominick.”
He grinned. “And I remember you.” He was suddenly close enough for her to smell the miasmal breath that poured over the mushroom-hued National Health dentures. “You . . .” he said, drawing it out, “look—”
“Go away before I throw you down the steps,” said Aegina.
Dominick looked at her blankly. Another man appeared behind him.
“Dominick, stop pestering nice people,” said the man. “My condolences to you, Aegina.”
It had been a number of years, but Aegina recognized the gingery hue of skin beneath the flaking scabs and blotches. “Thank you, Cassian,” she said.
Coming out of the hall, Luc spotted Fergus and Charlie standing together, nodding and saying hello to people they knew. Charlie about thirty now, he guessed, with his mother’s Spanish hair, his father’s height. He was pleased to see that Fergus was bloated and balding, the little piggy features of his massive pudding face arranged in an expression of insincere commiseration that didn’t hide his piercing fascination with the crowd coming out of the crematorium. He was asking Charlie about the identity of this person and that, and Charlie nodded or gave him a name.
Luc looked elsewhere. A reflexive triangulation drew his attention to Dominick, leaning oilily toward Aegina, babbling as Cassian pulled him away.
She saw him as he came toward her, and her expression softened.
“How are you?” he said.
Aegina made a gesture, part shrug, half a head shake. “All right.” She looked at him closely. “How are you?”
“Okay . . . I don’t know. Strange. I miss her, in fact.”
“Of course you do.”
Luc made himself look away at the small crowd. He noticed the number of local Spaniards arriving for the Rutledge service. “I don’t know half of yours. Gerald was really more part of the local community, I guess, wasn’t he?”
“Yes,” said Aegina.
He looked back at her, into her face as if it were a map telling him where to go now, because he didn’t know when he’d see her again.
The Gerald crowd was growing around them. Aegina was greeting people. Her extended Puig family, the indigenous island side of her that he had observed but never known. Penny and François and the now utterly grown-up Bianca. Luc realized he had to rejoin his mother’s group.
Then he remembered. “I have something for you.”
“Oh, yes?” She was distracted by the other people.
“It’s from your father.”
Aegina looked at him, then a short, stout woman embraced her passionately.
“I’ll call you,” Luc said, moving away.
Aegina nodded at him over the woman’s shoulder.
• • •
Luc could hear the same braying of old from the bar, outside the window—all his life (he’d mostly been here during the summers) the ambient sound of his mother’s home. He was lying fully clothed on the bed, in the room at the far end of the barracks. Half of the rooms were occupied by those who had flown down for the funeral—
Oh, please. He could hear someone coming slowly up the tiled stairs. Along the hall . . . the inexorable knock at the door. Fuck offffff!
A woman’s head appeared around the door, sweetly peekabooey. “Luc, are you all right, sweetheart?” Sarah Bavister, his unwilling long-ago shipmate aboard the ill-fated luncheon cruise of the Dolphin. “Can I come in?”
“Sure.”
Sarah’s Pouter pigeon poitrine had swelled with the years until she now had the shape of a jug on a short-stemmed base. She sat down beside him.
“How are you doing, sweetie?” She was drunk.
“I’m all right, thanks. Tired. How are you?”
“Why don’t you stay in the house, sweetie? In your mum’s room? Or in the study? No one’s in the study. Wouldn’t you be more comfortable there? We could see more of you, instead of making this epic trek to the far end of the barracks—or is that the plan, sweetheart?”
“No, not really. I’m just more used to it here.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes. This is sort of my room, really.”
“I understand, darling.”
Sarah looked at him, wading through years of gooey memories. “Darling, darling, Lukey.” She picked up his hand and held it hard against her bosom, kneading his wrist painfully. “You will come and have dinner with us, though, won’t you? I don’t know what it is but it smells good. And you’ve got to eat, pet.”
“No, I know. Sure. I’ll be right down. Everyone else okay?”
“Oh, yes. You know this lot. But it is the saddest possible day for all of us. And we do want you to be with us, darling.”
“That’s very sweet of you, Sarah. I’ll be right down.”
“Good.”
She leaned forward, her chest pressing down forcibly on his, smothering him in a rancid admixture of booze, body odor, and Chanel No. 5, almost spraining his wrist. She kissed his cheek wetly. “Soon, then?”
“Yes. I’ll be right down. Thanks, Sarah.”
She rose and went to the door and looked back at him. “We all love you so, so much, darling Lukey, sweetheart darling. We’re not going to leave you alone.”
“Love you too. Thank you.”
He would never move into the house. His mother’s room was empty now, but someone would want it. Come summer, there would be a feeding frenzy for Lulu’s Room on the booking site. This far end room in the barracks, his room, was geographically closest to the only place where he had ever felt at home at the Rocks: the long-dismantled toolshed against the back wall of the property. The only room that had been exclusively his, unbookable for guests, undesired by anyone else; his boyhood home at the Rocks, the haven for his hormone-addled intrigues, the dank refuge of a thousand lonely wanks.
And the place where, long regretted, one night he could have done something more with Aegina than play the noble grown-up and take her home.
His mother was gone. Strange now: the house, the Rocks, without her. People wandering around as if looking for her. Something essential missing.
Was this grief, this weird non-Lulu atmosphere?
He didn’t doubt that she had loved him, in her efficient, streamlined way, and he had, of course, loved her, in a mute, nondeclarative, resentful way. He didn’t remember his mother ever saying, “I love you, darling.” Nor his saying anything along those lines to her. They hadn’t been like that with each other. They’d sort of simply taken the notion of each other for granted: someone crucial—if annoying or disappointing—but always there. Somebody who, however poorly she had expressed it, had loved him. Now there was nobody—except Sarah, and everybody down at the bar, his ersatz family, shuffling through the house, talking about his mother as if she’d been theirs.
None of them would have come and found him floating out at sea.
Two
It was warm, but still only spring, yet the Marítimo was almost full. Older people mostly—that was, Luc’s age, and beyond. The usual British, German, northern European retirees. The terrace was pleasant in the sun. Fishing boats and wintering yachts filled the enlarged marina, but there was little noise. The town was busy, though not the carnival of flesh and summer. Conversation on the terrace was muted and polite.
Luc stood as Aegina came out to his table. She was wearing jeans, a short cotton blazer over a T-shirt, espadrilles.
“You look very well,” he said. “Great, actually.” He knew her age, fifty-three, to the day, but she’d been luc
ky—or very disciplined—both, probably. Slimmer than she’d been when he’d last seen her . . . ten years ago? The hair still dark—not a single gray strand? Must color it, but well. The Latin skin wrinkle-free except for some warm weathering around the eyes. She still looked the way he always thought of her, no jarring adjustment. Luc knew he looked, at his best, like every other man in his mid-fifties: beginning to sag noticeably under the jaw, the spare tire no matter what one did, his father’s thinning hair—though his father had died before it got too bad.
“Thank you.” She looked at him closely. “How are you doing?”
“All right. Feels a bit strange. How about you?”
“Yes: strange. I can’t quite take it in. I suppose it will take time. I’m—” She was going to say: I’m glad I have Charlie. Instead she said: “Is it difficult for you with people at the Rocks now? Or is it a help? You know them all.”
“I don’t know what life down here is like without them. They’ve always been here. They’ll all be gone in a few days. Then maybe I’ll know.”
“I’m sure they all love you.”
“That’s what they say.”
“Well, it’s true, Luc. Why wouldn’t it be? You’re part of someone they love. And they love you too, of course they do.”
A waitress appeared. She was in her twenties, bristling with piercings. She asked them for their order in English with a characteristically sibilant Dutch accent.
“How did you know we spoke English?” Luc asked her.
“Her,” the waitress thrust her spiked lower lip at Aegina, “you can’t tell, but you, it’s easy.”
They ordered salads and agua con gas. Luc watched the waitress walk away and turned to look beyond her, into the bar inside. “I don’t know anybody in this place anymore.”
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