Rocks, The (32 page)

B
ernard! Good man,”
said Tom when Bernie came in through the gate carrying the straw shoulder bag. Tom appeared to have just woken up. He sat splayed in a deck chair wearing Milly’s threadbare yellow dressing gown with traces of a pattern of sprouted tufts. He was blinking in the sunlight, taking in his surroundings—the tiled patio, the open doors to the house, the glimpse of the blue sea beyond the white wall—as if a hood had just been removed from his head.

As usual, Bernie had been the first awake and he’d walked into town from Villa Los Roques along the unpaved shore road to the
panadería
.

“Morning, Tom,” he said.

Bernie went on into the house. Lulu and Milly, both dressed, were sitting at the kitchen table, the teapot between them. Milly, half a generation older than Lulu, wearing her usual sensible summer wear: a short-sleeved Aertex shirt, loose skirt to the knees, plimsolls: a schoolgirl’s outfit sized for a six-footer. Lulu, a schoolgirl in size against her, wore floral shorts and a sleeveless cotton shirt that displayed the lithe arms and legs that Bernie so admired. They were saying something about “guests” but stopped talking the moment he appeared. Lulu stood up. “I’ve just put your coffeepot on,” she said, going to the stove.

“Thanks,” he said. Bernie again was aware of the sense he’d had for a few days: that Lulu and Milly were conspiring about something. He set the straw bag on the table and took out its contents: several round loaves and a mounded paper parcel with its two ends twisted together.

“Ooh,
lovely
,” said Milly, reaching for the parcel, opening it, and pulling out a soft, round, spiral-shaped flaky pastry. “I must have my
ensaïmada
immediately, while they’re still hot. Thank you, Bernard. You’re a love.”

“Yes, you are,” said Lulu, as if confirming this after some consideration.

“You’re welcome,” said Bernie.

Nobody called him Bernie, his preferred name, here. After two years of marriage, Lulu still wouldn’t call him Bernie. “I can’t, darling,” she’d said early on. “I just can’t say it. You might as well be called Siegfried. I couldn’t manage it.” He’d thought that charming at first. She evidently couldn’t manage Bernard either. She called him darling, and referred to him by name only when mentioning him to third parties.
Ber
-nard, or
Buh
nud, the way it came out. This, then, was what Milly and Tom and Lulu’s friends called him. Bernie was accustomed to the American emphasis on the second syllable, with its prominent American
r
—Ber-
nard
—which people had called him all his life, at school, college, the army, until they got to know him as Bernie. Even in Paris, where he now lived, the French—
Bair-narrrhh
—was more familiar-sounding, and certainly more charming, than
Buh
nud. Good morning, Buhnud. Ah, there you are, Buhnud. They seemed to be talking about someone else.

“Luc asleep?” asked Bernie.

“Yes, darling,” said Lulu. She poured coffee from the Moka pot into a cup and handed it to him.

“Did you see Schooner out on the terrace?” asked Milly.

“No.”

“Good,” said Milly. “He needs his sleep. Well, if you go join Tom, Lulu and I’ll bring you your breakfast.”

Obediently, Bernie went out to the terrace. He sat in the shade and wished he had a newspaper.

“Poor old Schooner, eh?” said Tom, squinting at him.

“He seemed very glad to be here.”

“I should think so, after his epic peregrination around the Mediterranean. And the other business. Poor old fellow,” he said feelingly.

Schooner Trelawney had left England under a cloud four days earlier, intent on joining Tom and Milly and licking his wounds among loyal friends. He knew, of course, that for years they’d been going down to the same villa called the Rocks beside the sea—they’d often invited him. He’d gone directly to Monaco by train but it looked nothing like T & M’s holiday snapshots. He’d been unable to find them anywhere. A man had suggested the Eden Roc Hotel, so, despite not being in Monaco at all, he’d gone there. The houses along the French coast here looked more like it, but no sign of Tom and Milly, nor any villa of that name. After several days in a wretched pension in Nice, Schooner was reluctantly persuaded by cables sent to and from England to make his way to Barcelona, where he got on the ferry—to
Mallorca
(he’d never heard of the place) not Monaco—and then endured a frightening bus ride across the island, his heart sinking the whole time with the mounting conviction that he was now closer to Africa than to his friends, to a
tiny
little village by the sea that couldn’t
possibly
be the place they’d been banging on about for years, and then, at last, long after dark, he was directed to a house on a dirt road beside the sucking sea where he stumbled in and quite miraculously found Tom and Milly, et al. Schooner had collapsed, weeping, managed to get out a few shreds of his awful news over soup and whiskey, before Milly and Lulu packed him off to bed.

“Well, you can’t shit where you eat,” said Milly quietly as they ate breakfast on the patio.

“I know,” said Tom, “but jolly bad luck, all the same. And what about poor Teddy? What’s going to happen to him now? He’s just a little boy. It’s going to be tough on him if Vivian decides to take it further. Do you think she will?”

“It’s not bad luck—it’s very naughty, and bloody wanton, if you ask me,” said Milly. “But yes, there is Teddy, so I don’t think she’ll shop him to the police.”

“Let’s hope not,” said Tom. “But under threat of that, she can call the shots, can’t she. Shut him right out if she’s a mind to.”

“What happened?” asked Bernie. He had been typing a piece in his room much of the evening and had caught a sense of the thing—an infidelity of some sort—the night before, but now he was lost. “He was having an affair, right?”

“Not exactly,” said Milly. “Vivian, Schooner’s wife, caught him in his study at home with one of his pupils he was tutoring, in flagrante delicto. It was a boy, of course, which perfectly suited Vivian, because she’s kicked him out and threatened to go to the police. Now she’ll try to keep him away from their son, Teddy. In England, he can be prosecuted for (a) buggery, and (b) doing it with a child. So he’s out.” Milly began pouring the tea.

“Poor old chap,” said Tom. He turned and looked at Bernie appealingly.

“Sounds tough,” agreed Bernie. Without the gauze of love and sympathy through which the others saw Schooner, Bernie understood only that Schooner was a pedophile on the run, harbored by his wife’s friends in a house containing his sleeping infant son.

He looked at Lulu. She was quiet. Her thoughts seemed elsewhere. She looked up at him and smiled. “I’ll get you some more coffee, darling,” she said, then rose and disappeared into the house.

Cassian joined them on the terrace. So obviously Milly’s son in every way, with his thatch of her red hair, wearing Aertex shirt, shorts, sandals—a schoolboy’s holiday outfit—he looked younger than fifteen. He sat down and spread marmalade thickly across a piece of grilled bread while Milly poured him a cup of tea.

“You missed all the excitement last night,” said Tom. “Schooner’s here.”

“I know, Mummy told me,” said Cassian. His broad pale freckled face showed no emotion.

“Did you?” Tom said, looking at his wife.

“Yes,” said Milly.

“You told him what, exactly?” asked Tom.

“That he’d been buggering a little boy and been chucked out,” said Cassian.

“Really?” said Tom. “You told him that—”

“Of course I didn’t, darling.”

“I
know
, Daddy,” said Cassian, witheringly. “Everyone knows.”

“Well, it’s an unhappy situation,” said Tom.

“I’m sure he’ll live,” said Cassian, raising his teacup.

“Darling boy,” said Tom, with gentle censure, “what a heartless thing to say. I don’t think you quite understand what’s happened. There’s a little boy, Schooner’s son, Teddy, to consider.”

“There was another little boy, as well, wasn’t there?” said Cassian.

Milly broke in. “What are you doing today, darling?”

“Go bathing as usual, I expect,” said Cassian without enthusiasm. He took a bite of toast, and even with his mouth closed the sound of the crust being crushed between his teeth was extraordinarily loud.

“I’m going to look in on Luc,” said Bernie, rising and leaving the table.

Luc was sleeping in a tiny room beside his parents’ bedroom. Its window looked out at the sea. Bernie had made paper airplanes and colored them with artist’s pastels he’d found in the house and taped them to the white walls. Luc, at fifteen months old, was sleeping in a small normal bed with no protection around it, but he’d always been good about not falling out of bed. He lay awake, sprawled on his back, his eyes and whole attention on Bernie the moment he came in the door, as if he’d been waiting for him. A beautiful smile spread across Luc’s face as he saw his father. “Papa!”

“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.

•   •   •

B
ernie 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.

•   •   •

R
eady 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.