Rocks, The (12 page)

He was looking for Maugham’s Villa Mauresque. He’d read Maugham’s novel
The Razor’s Edge
, the story of a young man seeking truth amid the trappings of European luxury, many times. Just as many times he’d seen the glossy black-and-white 1946 Oscar-nominated movie adaptation, starring Tyrone Power and Gene Tierney—whose nipples visibly harden beneath her gossamer-sheer silk blouse in the final climactic scene as she parts from her lost love, played by Tyrone Power, for the last time—in a villa on the French Riviera.

With his millions made from writing, Somerset Maugham bought the Villa Mauresque, and lived out his days there in luxury, writing in the mornings, playing bridge through the afternoons, entertaining some very fortunate guests. One of them, Luc read in some biography of the writer, had walked through the house and gardens, marveling: “All of it from writing!”

He finally found the entrance to the Villa Mauresque. Maugham had been dead for almost twenty years, but the Moorish symbol he had adopted to ward off the evil eye, monogrammed into the cover of all his hardcover books, was still engraved in stone at the entrance to the villa’s driveway.

•   •   •

T
hey worked mornings
in a quiet spot on the forward deck of the yacht, sitting in folding teak director’s chairs with their coffee, while the crew prepared breakfast, and Mireille, Véronique’s sister, slept late in the aft cabin. As they talked, Véronique stood behind Szabó, a tray beside her, squeezing and lancing and wiping with alcohol and cotton balls the dense new crop of acne cysts that had boiled up through the skin across Szabó’s back and shoulders during the night. It took her at least half an hour every morning. Szabó ignored her as he would a manicurist and concentrated on their story. Luc tried not to look at the pile of blood-and-pus-soaked cotton balls mounting on the tray.

Since fleeing Hungary as a documentary filmmaker after the 1956 uprising, Szabó’s attenuated commercial instincts had been honed by producing soft-core pornography for the German and Scandinavian markets, before moving successfully into increasingly less lurid mainstream features. As they pulled apart and reconstructed Luc’s story to reflect the requirements of his distributors, Szabó’s tone, his approach to the project, shifted. Before, he had been confident, amused by Luc’s naiveté, but respectful of his ideas, his story. Now, he became visibly less happy. “I don’t know,” he began to say, clicking his tongue in his mouth as he worried a gap in his molars, “we’re losing focus.” Their morning work sessions grew irregular. Szabó, a chronic insomniac, always up early to work and chase away nocturnal demons, began to appear late. Or to sit in the yacht’s teak-paneled saloon, sipping coffee and looking distractedly at the charts of the nearby coasts. He grew bored.

The wide square sail, emblazoned with a coat of arms that incorporated a leaping
delphinus
, was rarely used. The engine propelled the yacht, and the generator ran all day and most of the night. They motored to Antibes and ate dinner at Chez Félix in the old town. Szabó had heard that Graham Greene dined there every night and he hoped to meet him. He had greatly admired Greene’s brief performance as a film distributor in Truffaut’s film
La Nuit Américaine
, but they failed to spot the elusive author on two consecutive nights.

“I want to sail in the sea,” Szabó told the yacht’s captain, Tony Clement, a weathered, laconic Englishman with a good accent, dressed in white shirt and shorts. “Not this back-and-forth between boat parking lots. I want to sail across the sea to another country. I want a
voyage
.”

“Quite right too,” said Tony agreeably.

“Where can we go?”

Tony spread a chart of the western Mediterranean across the saloon table. “Well, Corsica—”

“How long?” cut in Szabó.

“Calvi in a day—”

“Farther,” said Szabó. “A
voyage
. Out of sight of land. Sailing all night. Across the sea.”

“How about the Balearics?” said Luc to no one in particular.

“Where?” asked Szabó.

Luc touched the chart, more than a foot across the paper below the French coast.

“What is there?”

“Islands belonging to Spain,” said Tony. “A day and a night and a day perhaps to get there.”

“Do they have charm?”

“Well, it’s not the Côte d’Azur.”

“Actually,” said Luc, “I more or less grew up there.”

Szabó looked at him in surprise. “Where?”

Luc placed his finger on the chart again. “Right there. The east end of Mallorca. My mother has a small hotel there.”

“Really? Is it charming?” said Szabó.

Luc was suddenly full of inspiration again. “It’s beautiful,” he said.

L
uc slept aboard
the yacht, but rode his motorcycle early to the Rocks to catch his mother at breakfast.

“Darling, I don’t go aboard boats,” said Lulu, “except ferries. You know that.”

Yes, yes, he knew. So she always said, and he couldn’t recall her aboard a boat in all the years they’d lived beside the sea and a port full of yachts and friends who came and went in them. But Szabó was taken with her. She had impressed him, and Szabó wanted to impress her back in his own arena aboard his fancy rented ship. People had been impressed by Luc’s mother all his life and he knew the power of her reflected glory.

“Mother, the boat’s not leaving port. It’s the size of a building. You won’t feel any movement—”

“I don’t get seasick. I just don’t go aboard yachts,” said Lulu emphatically. “You know that.”

“I know,” said Luc. “But Gábor keeps going on about you. I think he’s arranged the whole lunch just to see you again.”

“I can’t help that. He can come here if he wants to see me.”

“It’s just a lunch.”

“It’s a boat.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” said Luc. “Just because you had a rotten time with your first husband on some little boat a hundred years ago, what’s that got to do with life now?”

“That won’t help, darling.”

“I know. You don’t do what you don’t want to do. I know that. What an idiot I am to think you’d make an exception for me.”

Abruptly, he left and zoomed off on his motorcycle.

She was immune too to the cajoling of Sarah Bavister. “Oh, Lulu, you’ve
got
to! Look at that bloody boat! Come on, we’ve
got
to go see it. Really, don’t you want to?”

“No, I don’t.”

After breakfast Lulu pulled on gloves and picked up secateurs and climbed the steps to the garden above the pool. Yesterday’s light breeze was gone. What remained, barely felt on the skin, produced a sound like gentle exhalation overhead in the canopy of the pines that shaded much of the garden. She snipped at the rosebushes planted along the back wall. They were doing awfully well. She’d sprinkled Tom’s and Milly’s ashes in the rose beds in May. They had died in a small plane crash on the way to a fishing holiday in Scotland—just when they’d become wonderfully rich from all those strawberry punnets. Cassian had brought them down from London in two large Horlicks bottles. Tom and Milly had rented Villa Los Roques during the summers after the war. They’d invited Lulu down, and then loaned her the money to buy the place. “We’ll keep it in the family!” they said.

Dear
Milly. Was she was being fanciful to imagine that the roses had never looked better? Snip . . . snip . . .

Luc was intelligent, of course, but she was no longer sure of his talent. She had read his prose—the beginnings of abandoned novels, the one he had finished which she thought poor and which had been roundly rejected by publishers. He’d talked about another novel, a story of a journalist in Paris during the occupation. That at least sounded commercial because it had Nazis in it. Then he had started writing screenplays instead. Snip . . . snip. She had to admit he had some sort of facility for film writing. She saw the scenes he wrote clearly, but she wondered why anyone would go to see such films, full of aimless people with a knack for self-destruction. She disliked recognizing Luc in these characters—they all seemed pathetic, and therefore quite believable. Snip . . . At least he was making a little money. She’d helped him out a number of times, but it was always disappointing to give money to a grown man.

Snip . . . snip . . .

This ludicrous film producer obviously liked him. He’d invited Luc on holiday. He had money. He was full of praise for Luc’s work. He might actually make the film.

Snip. Miss you so, Milly, darling. What do you think?

Later, as she came down the steps from the garden, she found Sarah beside the pool.

“I will come to lunch with you,” announced Lulu.

“Oh, darling Lulu, how wonderful!” said Sarah.

“What time do we have to be there?”

“One, I think.”

“We’ll go in my car.”

She went into the house to change.

“I’m so glad Lulu’s coming!” Sarah said.

“I’m surprised,” said Dominick, who lay nearby, eyes closed, glistening with oil in the noonday sun. “Lulu doesn’t do boats, you know.”

“You’re coming, aren’t you?” asked Sarah.

“Oh yes,” said Dominick. “I want to see inside that boat. I bet it’s got a fuck nest the size of the Great Bed of Ware.”

•   •   •

F
ergus’s Range Rover
purred along the quay just before ten. He parked beside the yacht.
Dolphin
’s deck was five or six feet above him and he could see no one aboard. Gingerly, holding its rope rail, he mounted the narrow, unsteady, aluminum gangplank thingy.

“Hello,” he said when a crewman, polishing a brass thingy, came into view. Then he saw the film producer farther away on the foredeck, his shirt off, his wife doing something to his back. He could tell the man had forgotten.

“Hallo!” said Fergus again. “Did you still want to see our property?”

“Of course! I am coming.”

Five minutes later, Fergus was driving him through town. “Are you in fact looking for property?”

“Always,” said Szabó. “The Côte d’Azur, the Cinque Terre, all too crowded now. Not peaceful. So I look around anywhere. I would like a villa in a quiet place near the sea in the sun. Not a long flight from Paris. There is an airport here, yes?”

“Oh, absolutely,” said Fergus. “Palma, an hour and a half away. Flights all over Europe. Probably two hours to Paris. Four hours door to door. That wouldn’t be bad, eh?”

•   •   •

G
erald was pruning
the olive trees—trees that were no longer his, technically, though he was unsure of the exact demarcation between his land and the lot he had now officially sold to Fergus and his cabal of developers. Hopefully they wouldn’t chop them all down, even those on their parcel, but build their villas to blend into the landscape and preserve as much of it as possible—as Fergus had assured him was their intention. It had even occurred to Gerald that they might not be able to sell their lots and the development might come to nothing in the end. So until some villa-owning holidaymaker told him to clear off out of his front garden, Gerald would continue to prune and look after as many trees as were left standing.

Now he heard Fergus’s voice in the nearly still morning air. That breezy, chummy, confident waffle, though he couldn’t make out the words. Gerald immediately grabbed his small pruning saw and the large, worn straw basket he’d brought with him, and scuttled away, his espadrilles making no sound in the brush. He moved upslope out of the line of sight that Fergus, and whoever was with him, would have across the property toward the town and the sea view. He was well up the hill among the prickly pear and the cork oak when he saw them below: Fergus, in Panama hat, and a large man wearing a blue shirt the size of a bedspread. Gerald crouched and watched. They continued a short distance and stopped. Fergus pointed and gestured around him with expansive enthusiasm. Gerald could see from his stolid posture and cursory glances around him that the man in the shirt was unimpressed. Good. He made only a few comments before turning away, leaving Fergus to follow him back the way they’d come, still chattering.

Gerald moved along the hill above them, keeping them in view until they disappeared below the house. He waited until he heard the Range Rover moving down the drive.

He found Aegina painting in her studio off the kitchen.

“Who was Fergus with?” Gerald asked. Rivulets of sweat marked the dust along his temples and neck.

“Some film producer off a yacht in the port. He was showing him the land. Did you talk to them?”

“No. I went to ground.”

Aegina laughed. “Of course you did.”

Gerald looked at the canvas on her easel. It was a view of where he had just come from: the olive trees, the land falling away to the sea, the distant ridgeline to the north. Aegina had taped a color photograph of the scene to the easel above the canvas. “It’s beautiful,” he said.

Aegina turned to him. “You’ll always have it to look at.”

Gerald leaned over and kissed his daughter. Then he said, “Where’s Charlie?”

“Penny came and took him to the beach with Bianca. I have a free morning.”

Gerald went back outside. He picked up his basket and pruning saw and walked back around the hill to the olive grove. He continued pruning, shaping the trees for how he would want to see them and pick their fruit in fifty years’ time. He knelt and held the small trimmed branches against his thighs and cut them into shorter lengths for the basket. He would burn them in the fireplace over the winter.

•   •   •

A
s she painted
her picture of her father’s olive grove, Aegina listened to her father’s records. He liked the pastoral music of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century English composers: Vaughan Williams, Elgar, Butterworth, Holst, Finzi, Alwyn, Bantock, Parry, Bridge, Delius, Moeran. Gerald liked to read the novels of Thomas Hardy, Arnold Bennett, Anthony Powell, while listening to a stack of his LPs on the old HMV record player. He imagined, Aegina knew, the landscapes of Dorset, the Lake District, and the fen country, London, and the Five Towns in Victorian gaslight, as he read. To Aegina, however, it was all indigenous Mallorcan music—the music she’d listened to growing up. When she heard it she saw the landscape around C’an Cabrer, all the pictures that rose up from her life in Mallorca.

Seeing Luc in town had disassembled her. They had imprinted themselves upon each other in the way babies and animals do with life’s earliest emotional and olfactory associations. It would always be Luc, and then everyone else. Would Charlie and Bianca also grow up with a sense of fated inevitability about each other? Naked together at the beach with fat little hands sharing clumps of sand, naked later with hands exploring each other’s bodies? Would their whole hermetic world, built of the idea of each other, also rupture and be lost?

In some now unrecallable way, Fergus had seemed the correct antidote to Luc. Stable, cheerful, amusing, massively self-confident, unneurotic, presentable, tall, clean, wearer of suits. A property developer, not an artist or a dreamer. Not her type at all. An odd, incongruent presence at a party seven years earlier at the Sydney Close studio of one of her Chelsea School of Art instructors, Jonquil Thorn, R.A. Half a head taller than everyone else at the party, his pinstripe weaving through a sea of denim and leather.

Fergus had chatted her up as soon as she’d arrived.

“Are you one of Jonquil’s students?”

“I was,” said Aegina. “I work now.”

“Ah. But you’re an artist?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know a thing about art,” he said blissfully.

“Why are you here?”

“Jonquil tells me what to buy. I’ve bought some of her big abstract thingies. What sort of stuff do you do?”

“Not abstract.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, landscapes, drawings, portraits. Very boring.”

“Actually, I need some landscapes.”

The next evening he appeared at the door to Aegina’s small basement flat off Gloucester Road.

“How did you know where I live?” she asked.

“I found your address in Jonquil’s Filofax. Can I come in and see your stuff?”

She was offended and flattered. “Does she know?”

“Doubt it.”

“Well, since you’re here.”

He had to stoop through the doorway.

“I like this one,” Fergus said, picking up a dark, smudged-looking riverscape, one of Aegina’s attempts at a Whistler “nocturne” of the Thames. “It’s awfully good—isn’t it?”

She was involuntarily charmed that he admitted he didn’t know (or affected that he didn’t) and asked her, the artist. “Well, it’s never as good as one wants it to be—”

“Do you want to sell it? How much do you want for it?”

That was the other thing about Fergus: money.

“I have no idea,” she said. He was interested for the wrong reasons. It was embarrassing.

“Two hundred pounds?”

“It’s certainly not worth that. You can get a decent nineteenth-century landscape at Christie’s for two hundred pounds.”

“Well, I like it.”

“You don’t know a thing about art. You said so yourself.” She nodded at her painting in his hand. “QED.”

“What’s not good about it, then?” Fergus persisted. “What would Jonquil say about it?”

“You’d better ask her—”

“I did. Not about this, obviously, but about you—as an artist. She thinks you’re good. Two hundred sounds reasonable, then. You’ve seen the rubbish out there for ten times that. Right?”

He made her nervous and she wanted him to go away. But she was broke too—always—it infected the way you thought about everything; it weakened resolve. “If you insist.”

“I do. Have you eaten?”

It seemed churlish to refuse him. She was even more uncomfortable now. But also hungry.

On the Fulham Road, they were engulfed by a flock of pigeons taking to the air, and Fergus quickly threw his arm around her. He placed himself between her and the pigeons.

He took her to San Frediano. The food and wine were good. Fergus told her about a pigeon he had found and kept for a few days in his dormitory at boarding school. “It shat all over Matron, in her starched white uniform, when she discovered it. I got into terrible trouble.”

Aegina laughed. “What happened?”

“Six of the best!”

“What do you mean?”

“A jolly good caning! Six strokes, well laid on.”

“You mean they beat you for that?” She saw him as a little boy, hit repeatedly with a bamboo cane.

He asked her out again. She was flattered but not interested. He was ten years older. He was the sort of businessman type she felt she had nothing in common with. He was almost too tall. She put him off, several times.

In late spring, Fergus knocked at the door to her flat.

“You’ve been gone,” he said.

“I was in Morocco.” She explained that she’d flown to Morocco and bought some shirts and other clothing and brought them back to sell at various shops, a small but profitable excursion she’d made several years in a row that had helped put her through art school.