Rocks, The (18 page)

A
fter dropping Szabó and Tony
back at the port, Fergus drove out of town to C’an Cabrer. Naturally, with Gerald’s resistance to installing a phone—ridiculous—he hadn’t been able to call Aegina yet to tell her he was all right. Though, from the terrace, she or Gerald might have seen the yacht heading toward port earlier in the morning. She must have been awfully worried about him. Presumably they’d told little Charlie some story so he wouldn’t fret. Poor little fellow.

Apart from the fuck on the foredeck engineered entirely by that randy little tart Mireille, it had been excruciatingly tedious. Absolutely the worst thing about it was simply not being able to get off when one wanted to. Fergus couldn’t think of another situation where one couldn’t say at some point, Thanks, I’m off now. An airplane flight, that was the only other experience he could think of where you couldn’t get out of it, get a taxi, a train, plane, whatever was necessary at whatever price, and go home. Now he thoroughly understood Lulu’s aversion to going out on boats. They might have been out there for fucking days.

He turned into the drive and engaged the Range Rover’s four-wheel drive and shot up the hill fast—they’d hear him.

As the house came into view through the lemon trees, it occurred to him that Aegina might possibly be upset about Luc. They’d had some sort of a thing at some point. As far as he knew, they never saw each other now. Obviously they weren’t close. A little shock perhaps, offset by the great relief of knowing that he, Fergus, was all right.

Yes, there they all were on the terrace, little Charlie too, waving at him as he powered up the last few yards. He tooted the horn, and turned into the flat parking area below the house and stopped.

“Hal-lo!” Fergus said breezily as he got out.

“Daddyyyyyyy!” shouted Charlie.

“Hallo, little man! How are you?”

“Good!”

Up inside the house, Fergus lifted Charlie into the air as the boy raced to him.

“We were looking for you all night, Daddy!” Charlie was still full of the sense of freaky misadventure.

“I’m so
sorry
, my darling. The silly old boat broke down. We had to just sit there for hours. Jolly boring!”

“Thank God you’re all right,” Aegina said in a low emphatic voice. “We were worried.”

“I’m sure you were.”

“I went down to Rocks last night but no one knew anything. What happened?”

“Engine broke. Took them all night to fix it. Bloody boat can’t sail a foot without it, apparently, at least not in the right direction.”

“And everybody’s okay?” asked Aegina.

“Luc went missing, somehow.”

“What do you mean? Is he all right?”

“We don’t know. He may not be all right, actually. He wasn’t aboard when we got back.”

Fergus was still holding Charlie. Aegina took him and lowered him until he stood on the floor. She looked at her father and said, “Charlie, take Grandpa into your room and show him some of your Legos.”

“But I—”

“Charlie, I’ve got to do some pruning in the orchard,” said Gerald. “Can you come and help me?”

“Yes, Grandpa.”

Gerald took Charlie’s hand and they left the house.

Aegina said, “Where is he, then?”

“Well, he went overboard, we think, at some point. We don’t know when. We only know that he wasn’t on board the boat this morning.”

Yes, there it was: quite a shock, evidently. Her face suddenly very pale.

“You didn’t find him?”

“Well, we looked for an hour or two, but the thing was, we’d no idea when he’d gone missing, so he could have been anywhere. The captain called the coast guard or somebody and—”

“Do you mean you
left
Luc
out there
?”

“Well,
I
didn’t. It wasn’t my call, darling. The captain thought—”

Aegina abruptly turned away from him and ran down the steps to her car. In a moment, she was hurtling down the drive at breakneck speed.

Obviously, quite a bit of a shock. He turned and went into the kitchen to see if there was anything to eat. He was famished.

•   •   •

L
ater, when she returned from town,
Aegina found Gerald in his toolshed. He was spraying an ancient pair of steel secateurs with WD-40.

Aegina stood in the doorway. Her eyes were shiny.

Gerald looked at her. “Were you able to find out anything?”

She shook her head. “There was a Guardia car at the yacht. The Salvamentos are looking for him. Nobody knows anything. What do you think, Papa? How long could someone stay afloat out there?”

“Well . . .” He wouldn’t say what he knew. “It depends on things . . . the sea state—it’s pretty calm now, and was last night—how strong the person is. A lot of chaps in the war floated about for quite a long time after their ships were torpedoed”—when they had something to hang on to—“anything’s possible.”

Gerald had known few such lucky men. He’d known many more who had drowned. Into his head now popped the long-ago page from
The
Oxford Book of English Verse
that always floated up before him when he heard of people drowning, or not drowning:

Obscurest night involved the sky,

The Atlantic billows roared,

When such a destined wretch as I,

Washed headlong from on board,

Of friends, of hope, of all bereft,

His floating home for ever left.

Cowper’s “The Castaway.” He didn’t remember much of it—just the few lines he knew were the truest, if you were in the water:

He long survives, who lives an hour

In ocean, self-upheld . . .

Gerald put down his tools, wiped his hands, and hugged Aegina. He ran a callused hand over her head, down the thick hair. “Just have to wait and see.”

She remained stiff and tight in his arms. They both knew there were no soothing words about untimely death.

I
can’t say . . . exactly,”
Dominick
said anxiously. He was looking at the distant land on the horizon, and then at the sea around him. It was all much of a muchness, the fucking sea, wasn’t it? One bit of blue water just like the next—and then too it looked completely different in daylight. The green hills behind the coast that they couldn’t have seen at night were now clearly visible. Unseen in the dark, with just the loom of coastal lights, the island had seemed farther away. “We were hereabouts . . . I think.”

They’d been out on the cigarette boat for hours. They were sunburned. Their eyes hurt. The sea surface was still almost calm. The sun was high and dazzling and sprang harshly off the water in tiny broken facets. The boat was moving slowly, almost idling, its loud rumble no longer an exciting adrenaline rush but an excruciating, head-throbbing invitation to jump overboard, or scream, or go below into the tiny cabin and plunge one’s head into a foam cushion but, of course, no one could do that.

“You were here,” said Lulu with certainty. “I watched you floating off this way and kept seeing you all afternoon getting smaller and smaller. I couldn’t understand why you weren’t going anywhere or coming back.”

The boat’s track was meandering. Lulu turned and looked aft to Jorge at the wheel. He was dazed; he was losing the back-and-forth vectoring pattern Lulu had explained and insisted on.
“Oye!”
she called to him.
“Vamos a continuar lentamente adelante y atrás por aquí.”

“Sí, señora,”
answered Jorge. He turned the wheel, and the bow of the long boat swung away forty-five degrees.

“How are you doing, Lulu?” asked Cassian. He put a hand on Lulu’s arm.

“I’m very angry at those people, that Hungarian and his stupid crew, for not being more careful. For leaving him here. What if they’d been halfway to Italy or somewhere? Who would have come out to look then? Of course, there’s not a sign of the Salvamentos. No helicopters or airplanes. It’s entirely up to us.”

Cassian said gently, “Well, we’ll do our best, Lulu. That’s all we can do.”

Dominick said: “It’s been quite a while since he went into the water—”

“I know that!” Lulu said. “Don’t you think I know that? Don’t tell me what’s obvious.”

She looked over the wide, blue, relentlessly dull sea. No corners, no dips or holes or hills or different colors or identifying marks of any kind. Nowhere to stop and rest. Only a limitless blue opportunity to sink and die an unnatural, struggling death. She could hear the gentle, realistic entreaties in the tones of their voices, behind their words, to give up hope. She would not. Nobody else would find him. Nobody else would care. It was up to her. It was all up to her. It was the only way anything ever worked. You couldn’t depend on anybody else. But she knew herself, so she knew what to do. Most people had no clue. They waited to see what would happen to them, and then they complained when it did.

“Luc will know that I’ll come and look for him. So he’ll hang on. So we’re going to keep looking.”

Dominick stopped himself from saying, Lulu, why would Luc think for a moment that you—you, mind you, darling, after diving off that fucking ship—would get into another boat and come out and look for him yourself?

She said, “Of course he’ll know it!” so sharply that Dominick thought he must have spoken out loud.

Jorge and Dominick swapped looks. Jorge’s said,
Pues, how much longer? I hate to say it, hombre, but it’s . . .
and Dominick’s said,
Never mind, just keep doing what she says.

Sometime later, Lulu said, “Look, there he is.” She pointed.

Two hundred yards away, they could all see a hand waving at them. They could even see right away that it was Luc.

“Dios mío,”
said Jorge. He spun the wheel, and the boat grumbled toward Luc like a suddenly energized mastiff. When it was close, Jorge turned it around and backed toward Luc as if into a parking space. Then he pushed the throttles ahead for a moment to all but stop the boat’s drift, and pulled them back into neutral. He leapt onto the stern and lowered the hinged chromium ladder from the narrow diving platform close to the waterline. The stern drifted slowly to Luc. They all gathered on the platform. Jorge climbed down the ladder into the water. He reached out and took Luc’s hand. He pulled him to the ladder.

“Hallo, Mum,” said Luc. It came out as a croak. “Fancy seeing you here.”

“Tire, tire!”
Jorge said to those on the boat.

Cassian and Dominick took Luc’s arms. Jorge put an arm around his waist. Luc’s arms and legs still worked a bit. They pulled him up the ladder.

Lulu embraced him. Then she let him go. “You’re all right now,” she said.

They got him up across the rear deck into the cockpit, where he sat down on a molded, cushioned seat. His lips were cracked, his eyes were red.

“Got any water?” he croaked.

“Sí, sí, sí,”
hissed Jorge. He hurried below into the boat’s cabin.

“I don’t believe it,” said Dominick. He looked at all of them in amazement.

“How long have you been in the water?” Cassian asked him.

“I went in about midnight. What time is it?”

“Almost two. Fourteen hours.”

Jorge reappeared with small bottles of Evian water. He pulled the top off one and handed it to Luc. Luc took it and drank slowly. He dribbled it onto his lips and licked them off. He poured it over his face.

“Fantastic,” he said.

“It’s just incredible. Luc, how did you stay afloat?” asked Dominick.

“Dunno,” between dribbles of water. “Just hung about. I was on my back for a bit.” More water, hardly seeming to swallow it, but letting it flow in and out of his mouth. “At first I was sure that was it. I knew they weren’t coming back because they didn’t see me go. But after a while, I knew you’d come out and look for me, Mum.”

“Of course I did,” said Lulu, almost indignantly. “What else would you expect?”

“Nothing.” He smiled, then registered pain and put a hand to his cracked lips. “I realized that. So then, I just kind of hung around.”

They took him below and wrapped him in towels.

At the wheel, Jorge turned the boat in a wide, slow sweep, pushed the throttles forward, and sped back toward the land at a gentle cruising speed. Now and then, he shook his head and looked around at the empty sea and mumbled:
“Increíble. Increíble.”

A
t the end
of August,
Aegina and Charlie and Fergus drove away in the Range Rover, back to London. Tourists and summer residents left the island. Villas were shuttered. Boats sailed away. Streets were quiet. Only the momentary insect whine of a moped interrupted the wind moving through the canopies of the pines that grew around houses all over Cala Marsopa.

There followed days in September that were just as hot and sunny as any day in August, the sea as blue and seductive as midsummer, the air as full of the electric tinnitus of cicadas in the noonday heat, but they were interspersed with brand-new days when cool winds blowing across the island from the Serra de Tramuntana along the north coast carried the trace of woodsmoke and the cool humidity of mountain clouds. The perceptible creep of autumn, the different air, and the aspect of the sea from C’an Cabrer, one day royal blue and faceted with sun, the next battleship gray and rolling like molten pewter, all these signs excited Gerald. Toward the end of September came cold, heavy drops of real rain, augurs of the equinoctial gales that would soon complete the change of season.

This was when Gerald most loved the island, when it resembled again the lush and peaceful backwater he had first come to know. He had lived in this same spot for thirty-five years, but much had altered around him; Aegina had grown up and gone away and brought Charlie back to the island. C’an Cabrer had metamorphosed (most noticeably in recent years with Aegina’s money and ideas) from bare buildings that had housed goats and sheep into a rather nice Mediterranean home. And the seasons, as now, reliably made everything new again. He liked to remember Goethe’s line: “A man can stand anything but a succession of ordinary days.”

Once Aegina & co. had left and the house was quiet, Gerald attended to his tools. He laid his knives and scythes and saws and pruning gear out on the bench in his toolshed and set about sharpening and cleaning everything. He brought the Grundig shortwave radio from the house and listened to the BBC World Service as he worked. The eternally comforting rendition of “Lillibullero”—the recording by the Royal Marines band that he’d heard all through the war and almost daily through the years since—signaling the top of the hour followed by the GMT time tick, and the chimes of Big Ben. On Sunday mornings he listened to Alistair Cooke’s
Letter from America
. On the third Sunday in September, Cooke spoke of the oak and maple leaves changing into their characteristic fall colors along the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut and how the parkway had been pushed into creation by the formidable Robert Moses, a city planner who had altered and stamped New York City as indelibly as Hausmann had made his mark on Paris. Then Cooke spoke of the current difficulty between the Reagan administration and the houses of Congress to instigate new public works on a scale vastly less ambitious than anything Moses had accomplished, and how such discussions were already contaminated by the Democrats’ early jockeying to field an opponent to Ronald Reagan in the presidential election at the next turn of the leaves, just one year away. Gerald always enjoyed
Letter from America
; it might as well have been
Letter from Mars
, conjured up and dispatched by the urbanest of Englishmen, in the space of fifteen minutes. Then “Lillibullero” and Big Ben again.

On some days, Gerald could still be surprised to find himself living out the greater part of his life here. Not a location of classical antiquity—he’d never heard of Mallorca before finding it on his chart—though it did contain the same plants Homer put in the garden of Alcinous: the olive, the grapevine, pear, pomegranate, apple, and fig. Yet everything, including two wives and his daughter, had followed the chance putting into a convenient port—an accident of the wind—just as so much had been determined by capricious winds, or gods, in
The
Odyssey
. But now he’d lived here for decades, most of that time alone, a kilometer from the woman who had kept him here, and hardly seen her in all that time. Twice, perhaps, in thirty-five years. Once on the street, sudden and electric; and again, a freak episode (though wasn’t everything?) for a morning in a distant part of Spain. Gerald had been hollowed out by what had happened between them, but tissue had grown around the hollow and life had evolved out of that crook of accident. Not the one he’d imagined when he had first come here. But now . . . C’an Cabrer had become home, the genesis of his child. What he had made of his life.

On the last Monday in September, before Big Ben had chimed eight in the morning, Gerald heard heavy equipment through the lemon trees—not Gómez again, surely? The work had ceased after that first day, and Gómez had never reappeared. Fergus’s visionary development had come a cropper, just as Gerald had hoped it might, notwithstanding his pecuniary need for its success. “Don’t worry, no question of you returning the six grand,” Fergus had assured him, “the deal’s done, the money’s absolutely yours to keep, old boy.” “Who owns the land, then?” Gerald had asked him. “Well, my group right now. They’ll probably offer it back to you for half price, then you can sell it again.” Gerald knew he would never sell it again, he’d simply get by, with, for now, his windfall six thousand.

He didn’t stop to turn off the radio. He loped downhill through the trees. He could hear more than one heavy-duty diesel revving in tandem with the dry snapping of tree limbs and the deeper muffled groaning of earth-moving efforts. Behind that, as Gerald got closer, rose the unsynchronous whine of many chain saws.

Gómez’s work—fifty yards of bushwhacked trail cleared by the bulldozer and his man with a chain saw—had already been obliterated by the orange Komatsu backhoe and the Caterpillar wheel loader, each twice the size of Gómez’s machine. Scattered across the hill above them were more men than Gerald could quickly count, clearing a highway-wide swath with chain saws, shovels, pickaxes. Gómez was not driving either machine.

“Oiga!”
Gerald called up to the operator in the enclosed cab of the backhoe. The man couldn’t hear him. He only noticed him when Gerald ran forward into his line of vision beside the plunging bucket. Then he burst out of the cab, yelled angrily at Gerald, waving him away. Gerald approached him.

“What are you doing?” he asked the operator.

“I’m doing my work! What are you doing? You crazy?”

“Do you work for Gómez?”

“Who? No. Jaime Serra. Now, keep away!” The backhoe operator climbed into his cab. Before he shut the door, Gerald yelled:

“Who is he? This Serra?”

The operator shouted, “Is a builder.” Then he shut the door. He grabbed at the levers arrayed before his seat. The backhoe’s bucket reared into the air and then plunged downward, its teeth burying in the earth beside the raw stump of a cedar. The bucket dug down, worrying at the root structure as if maddened. As Gerald watched, the stump trembled, then rose, torn out of the ground by the bucket. In quick, jerky movements, the bucket uprooted the stump and pushed it aside. Two men set upon it with chain saws, swiftly amputating the root tendrils. The backhoe’s track jerked and the whole machine lunged forward.

Gerald watched the activity for a moment, the two great machines tearing at the earth, the men like ants carrying pieces away. They moved efficiently on up the hill.

He turned and hurried toward the house, already framing the irate letter to Fergus. It was clear they had sold the land. They were supposed to offer it back to him first.

Sold it to whom? And would they, whoever they were, build the same houses?

For once, Gerald wished he owned a telephone.