Rocks, The
ALSO BY PETER NICHOLS
FICTION
Voyage to the North Star
NONFICTION
Oil and Ice
Evolution’s Captain
A Voyage for Madmen
Sea Change: Alone Across the Atlantic in a Wooden Boat
(memoir)
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Copyright © 2015 by Peter Nichols
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The author gratefully acknowledges permission to quote from “Ithaka” by C. P. Cavafy, from
C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems
, edited by George Savidis, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. © 1975 Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nichols, Peter, date.
The rocks / Peter Nichols.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-698-16799-5
1. Secrets—Fiction. 2. Majorca (Spain)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3564.I19844R63 2015 2014022801
813'.54—dc23
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
For my son, Gus
And for David, Lizzie, Cynthia, Matt, Annie, and Roberta
As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them . . .
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out . . .
—C. P. Cavafy, “Ithaka” (1911)
H
er guests had always
marveled at how young she looked.
“Lulu, don’t be ridiculous, darling—you can’t be
eighty
?”
In her ninth decade, Lulu Davenport still had the slim, supple body of a much younger woman. Her thick, straight hair, which she still kept long, usually braided or coiled into a loose bun with fetching whorls escaping at the nape of her neck, had gone completely white in her thirties and had always seemed part of her abundant natural gifts. Lulu had never been concerned with health or beauty. These were accidents of nature and one had simply been lucky. She walked everywhere, she gardened, and she ran Villa Los Roques—“the Rocks,” as everyone called her little seaside hotel at the eastern end of the island of Mallorca—and charmed her guests as she had for more than fifty years. That had kept her vigorous and happy, until one December afternoon when she was found sprawled in the Mediterranean sun among her yellow rosebushes by Vicente the handyman.
She looked no different after her stroke. She soon recovered her marvelous strength. In almost all respects, she appeared unchanged. But with the sudden tiny dam-burst of blood a tumbler had turned in Lulu’s brain, and she began to swear. Her new vocabulary was Lawrentian:
fuck
,
cunt
,
shit
,
piss
. She talked of the same things as always, with appropriate logic and context, but with her arresting new expressions filling and punctuating her speech. At first, her friends were hugely amused to sit and chat with someone they knew so well who spoke in a new, rather cinematic language. Yet after a while it was strangely alienating—it was, after all, a neurological disorder. Was this still really Lulu?
The other change was to her schedule. Its former rigidity eased—nothing extreme, no getting up in the middle of the night to trim the roses or take a walk—but after her stroke it was erratic. She set off to the market with her straw bag over her shoulder as ever, but at random hours. In this way she encountered her first husband, Gerald Rutledge, one afternoon late in March. They had both remained in the small town of Cala Marsopa after their divorce in 1949, yet by evolving antipodal routines they had managed to avoid each other almost entirely for half a century.
Though they were the same age, Gerald had not been as blessed by nature. He’d been a smoker all his life and now had emphysema. He’d suffered from arthritis for years. His hips needed replacing but he had a horror of hospitals and had resisted such a dramatic procedure. He walked slowly with a stick.
He was stooped, puffing a Ducados, gripping a small four-pack of yogurt in a tremulous hand when they ran into each other at the local
comestibles
. His brown legs and arms were wrinkled and emaciated in his baggy khaki shorts and short-sleeved pale blue shirt, cheap polyester garments bought at the HiperSol in Manacor. There were scabs of sun cancer on his scalp beneath the thin, lank gray hair.
“God, Gerald, you look fucking grim,” said Lulu. “Why are you here anyway, you cunt?”
Gerald’s mouth opened to form an answer, but his mind skittered off into confusion. Its tracking mechanism, unsteady these days anyway, was thrown further off balance by the coarseness of Lulu’s greeting. His memories of her—almost all of them stemming from the few happy weeks of their marriage almost sixty years before—could not reconcile such stark filth and venom. As his jaw moved, trying to form words, his eyes sought and found the small white scar, still visible, on her chin.
Lulu’s eye was caught by a heap of splendid blue-black aubergines. She began to move away and Gerald’s hand shot out and grasped her upper arm.
She turned toward him again. “Piss off, you wretched shit.” Lulu pulled her arm free. She walked away, toward the aubergines, pleased at the opportunity to cut Gerald, and at how decrepit he looked. She’d been mortified by her stroke; it wasn’t like her. And while adjusting to the unsettling intimations of mortality, it had occurred to her that Gerald might outlast her. She wanted him to die first, with urgency now.
She picked up an aubergine, rubbing her thumb across its firm squeaky skin. She finished her shopping with brisk efficiency and was soon outside.
Gerald stared after her. Some moments later, he became aware of a sensation in his hand. He looked down and saw that he had squeezed the yogurt containers too hard. Creamy curds of
frutas del bosque
were dripping from his trembling fingers.
• • •
A
fter a day
of cloudbursts, the clouds departed, as if they’d been waiting for an improvement in the weather themselves, moving away eastward across the sea like pink and purple galleons. Lulu walked home along the sandy, unpaved, still-puddled road between the white villas and their gardens of fruit trees and bougainvillea and the limestone shore stretching beyond the harbor. The road carried mostly foot traffic and mopeds, a popular, out-of-the-way walk in the summer but deserted the rest of the year. In places, the rough spongiform beige rocks between the road and the sea offered flat spots near their edges where for years Lulu and the Rocks’ guests who didn’t want to walk as far as the beach had spread their towels to lie in the sun, launched themselves into the cool water, and climbed back up again.
Lulu walked happily and slowly, enjoying the warmth of the sun—it had been an unusually cool and rainy winter in Mallorca. She was comforted by the familiar nubs and contours of the rocks and the gentle sound of the sea that rose and sucked at them.
She didn’t notice Gerald following her. He was walking at a speed that had become unusually fast for him, though no more than a normal walking pace. His legs weren’t working properly. Everything in them was worn, and the regular mechanisms had grown so sloppy that they were threatening to fold the wrong way and collapse. His hips were killing him. Sweat beaded his forehead, his neck and upper lip. His face had grown pale as the depleted oxygen in his blood chugged toward his heart and lungs, leaving him panting, wheezing heavily. He was dying to stop and light a cigarette but then he would lose her. He pushed furiously on, like a man walking underwater.
He caught up with Lulu just outside the Rocks. He grabbed her arm again with strength fueled by rage, and spun her round.
“You never—” he started, with a smoker’s bubbling growl, but his chest was empty of air, heaving spasmodically.
Again, Lulu shook off his grip. But she was surprised and immensely pleased to see the effort Gerald had made, how overwrought, breathless, and unwell he was. It occurred to her that with just a nudge he might easily die of a heart attack right in front of her. “You’re
pathetic
, Gerald. An empty, hobbling husk of a man.” A flame of old anger rose in her. “You’re a bolter! A miserable, wretched shit of a fucking—”
“You never developed the film! Did you!”
The furious, strangled words erupted wetly out of Gerald’s chest, his body pitching forward.
“I lured them away!
Do you understand? I got them away! I—”
His blue-and-gray glistening face thrust into hers, but he had no more breath.
Lulu involuntarily snapped backward from the waist, repelled. But she recovered—or was recovering, as her shoulder bag, laden with aubergines, lemons, cheese, and wine, still swinging backward, tugged at her, and she began to lose her balance.
Gerald grabbed her arm again, this time—his instinct sure—to steady her, and Lulu clutched at his shirt, but they both leaned well past recovery and began to fall. As they fell, the sight of Gerald’s face so close to hers, spittle gathered in the corners of his thin rubbery lips, was so repugnant to Lulu that she whipped her head sharply aside with disgust. When they landed, her right temple hit a jagged spur of rock.
Gerald’s knees smashed into sharp, serrated limestone. He screamed—a brief empty wheeze—and writhed, pushing with his torso, his excruciating hips.
They rolled together, not toward one of the flat spots where guests spread towels. They tumbled off a ledge into the sea.