Rocks, The (33 page)

“Do you mind if we wait another few minutes?” Cassian said flatly. “I’m expecting a friend. He’s late. So he should be here soon.”

“Sure,” said Bernie, masking the gratification of his curiosity with a flick of his wrists to snap the paper open again. He had the opportunity to read in depth the stories he’d glanced over too briefly: a man who had amassed a horde of stolen empty milk bottles belonging to the Putney Dairy in southwest London was helping police with their inquiries; the BBC Television Service transmission from Alexandra Palace had suffered an inexplicable thirteen-minute blackout during the Saturday evening broadcast of the football pools results—

Cassian rose abruptly, skidding his chair back, to greet a tall man who approached their table. The man motioned with a quick hand held at his waist for Cassian to sit back down, and he sat down himself beside him at their table. He was in his thirties, dark—more Arab- or Turkish-, Bernie thought, than Spanish-looking—dressed like a waiter: white open-necked shirt, black pants and shoes. He was immediately uneasy at the sight of Bernie, his eyes flickering questioningly between him and Cassian.

“It’s all right, he’s a friend of my parents’.”

“You should tell me,” the man said with an accent Bernie thought was eastern European, or Levantine. “When I see him, almost I don’t come. It’s okay, the rest? You will see your friend?”

“Oh, yes, that’s all in hand,” said Cassian suavely.

The man was carrying a straw bag of the sort people carried to market. He pulled from it a small parcel wrapped in brown paper tied tightly with string and passed it to Cassian beneath the table. He shot another glance at Bernie, and looked again at Cassian uncertainly, his eyes flickering over the boy’s shirt and shorts. “Okay,” he said. He stood and walked across the plaza.

“I liked your friend very much,” said Bernie.

“Actually, he’s more of an acquaintance. I’ve only met him a few times. He’s a friend of a friend.”

“Ready to go?” Bernie put some peseta notes under his saucer.

“Yes,” said Cassian. He stood, holding the brown parcel to his chest.

In the car, Cassian said, “Can we just swing by the Club Náutico on our way?”

“Sure,” said Bernie. “Got a friend there?”

“Yes, actually, a friend from London.”

“So, what’s in the package? Drugs?”

“Good God, no. Just money.”

Bernie swung the car into the entrance to the Real Club Náutico and parked near the head of the main quay.

“I won’t be a minute,” said Cassian, opening the door. He walked down a quay at which a number of foreign motor yachts were moored: British blue and red ensigns, French Tricolors, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian flags fluttering lightly at their sterns.

Bernie had to smile. For the role of Mike Alexander, the nefarious smuggler and lead character in
Black Jack
, George Sanders had been kitted out by wardrobe with the white, black-visored captain’s hat bearing the insignia of an anchor, traditionally worn by actors when their character stepped aboard a vessel of any sort, a striped French fisherman’s jersey with a red kerchief tied at the neck, voluminous white trousers held up by a wide belt that carried a sheath knife, and sneakers; a costume that, together with the naturally louche and dissolute cast of George Sanders’s features, was no less indicative of his character’s business than if he’d worn a sandwich board with the word
smuggler
painted on it. Whereas Cassian appeared for all the world what he was: a schoolboy in shorts, with a slight side-to-side wavering of his still-growing lope as he made his way down the quay. He turned right where the dock reached a T, and Bernie lost sight of him.

He returned, empty-handed, eight minutes later.

“What sort of money, if you don’t mind my asking?” asked Bernie as he drove out of Palma.

“Czechoslovak korunas—the old ones, pre-1939,” said Cassian.

“Who wants them?”

“I’ve no idea. People took them out before the war and now people want them back to get the new currency. At the moment they can be exchanged for the new korunas at par, I think. Otherwise, they’re useless.”

“So, when you’re on holiday, you’re a currency smuggler?”

“Not always. I’m just helping out some friends. I mean, everybody does it, don’t they? Mummy and Daddy do it every time they leave England. You can’t have a decent holiday on fifty pounds, can you? Fifty pounds is all you’re allowed to take out of England, you know.”

“Yes, I know. So what do you all do, stuff it in your pants when you get onto the cross-Channel ferry?”

“Crikey, no. Yachts mostly. At least, everyone I know uses yachts. That’s what Mummy and Daddy do. How do you think they’re getting the money into Spain for Lulu to buy the house?”

“What?”

“The money for the villa. You can’t do a bank draft for that sort of money.”

Some minutes later, Bernie said, “No, of course not.”

Cassian was looking out the window. He swung his head back to Bernie. “Sorry?” he said.

E
arly in the year,
an editor at John Murray, Ltd—publisher of Byron, Darwin, Livingstone, Conan Doyle, Jane Austen, and Herman Melville, and still publishing sturdy, literate travel narratives—had sent Gerald a letter, forwarded to him by Griffiths at
Yachting Monthly
:

22 February 1951

Dear Mr. Rutledge,

For the past several years, I’ve read your articles in
Yachting
Monthly, Cornhill, The Listener,
about Odysseus’s route home from the Trojan War with the greatest of pleasure. It has occurred to me, now in agreement with others in the house, that these pieces could be advantageously collected into a small but exceptional book.

I am a keen coastal yachtsman myself, and consequently have read the run of our contemporary sailing literature. Most of it is abysmal: turgid accounts of anchoring replete with gauges of chain and details of muddy bottoms. Your pieces stand distinctly apart. The mix of gentle erudition with travelogue and your sailorly insights into the geography of
The Odyssey
would make, we believe, a unique narrative. Such a book would prove attractive to a general reader whose interests go beyond the classical or nautical, yet draw back at the stolidly academic. Indeed, we see in your seamanlike deduction and navigation of the possible route of
The Odyssey
the makings of a small classic of travel literature.

This may have occurred to you too—perhaps you already have plans with another publisher? But if not, we are prepared to offer you an advance of £750 against royalties, with every expectation that this advance will be earned back in a short time and see us all with a modest profit. If this interests you, please let me know your thoughts by return, with, if possible, a detailed list of your
Odyssey
articles—are there any that remain unpublished?—and to what extent they cover the entire route from Troy to Ithaca.

I look forward to hearing from you at your earliest opportunity.

By the way, where are you? If you are in or near London, I should be very happy to discuss all this with you over a drink at the RTYC.

Yours sincerely,

Eric Pocock

During respites in action—lying in his bunk in the bilgy bowels of, first, the aircraft carrier HMS
Furious
, and then the destroyer HMS
Avon Vale
—Gerald had read a Cambridge University translation of Heinrich Schliemann’s account of the discovery of Troy. On August 14, 1868, after picking his way on horseback across a rubble-strewn plateau in northwest Turkey, Schliemann found traces of a circular wall at a place called Hisarlik. “The site fully agrees with the description given by Homer. . . . As soon as one sets foot on the Trojan plain, the view of the beautiful hill of Hisarlik grips one with astonishment.” Later that day, Schliemann climbed to the roof of a house at the northern edge of the plain:

With the
Iliad
in hand, I sat on the roof and looked around me. I imagined seeing below me the fleet, camp, and assemblies of the Greeks; Troy and its fortress on the plateau of Hisarlik; troops marching to and fro and battling each other . . . For two hours the main events of the
Iliad
passed before my eyes until darkness and violent hunger forced me to leave the roof. I had become fully convinced that it was here that ancient Troy had stood.

Schliemann dug and unearthed an ancient city that had been sacked by war.

Immediately after being demobbed in Alexandria at the end of the war, Gerald had traveled to Istanbul. He reached Hisarlik and the gouged mounds of Troy by ferry, charabanc, and foot. Afterward,
Odyssey
in hand, he visited the surrounding coasts in a number of craft, large and small. What he saw, he concluded, was what Odysseus (whether a real man or not seemed moot) had seen. Since here was Troy, and to the southwest at a known coordinate lay Ithaca, and between them the mysteries of that ten-year voyage home, Gerald determined then to return in his own small yacht and find his way, navigating by Homer’s cloaked directions, from Troy to Ithaca. He’d done exactly that, purchasing and sailing the nimble
Nereid
from Sussex, all the way to the Aegean in 1946–1947, and west back around Italy’s boot into the Tyrrhenian Sea in 1948 to explore Corsica and Sardinia as possible sites for the home of the Laestrygonians, and the cave of the Cyclops, Polyphemus. The Strait of Messina, he had always known, must be the location of Scylla and Charybdis, and he had been sure he would find the cave somewhere on the west coast of Sicily. His undoing, like Odysseus’s, had been straying too far to the west and becoming enmeshed with a nymph on an island.

With what he had already published, Gerald had most of his propounded route of
The
Odyssey
written, with photographs, including the
Nereid
lying to her anchor in the same spots where he believed Homer had placed his hero. Only the most eastern early locations of
The
Odyssey
, Troy itself and Ismarus, he had not sailed to himself—the cruise abandoned after the aborted honeymoon voyage with Lulu—but these were known, unequivocal, and he had already visited them in one vessel or another.

He and Pocock corresponded. He sent him all his articles, including several that had not yet been published; he sent his photos and his own rough maps. Pocock sent him a contract to sign, and just a few weeks later, at the dusty Correos in Cala Marsopa, Gerald opened a brown envelope containing a check for £750. A life-altering sum. More money than he’d ever seen, or perhaps would ever see again. What to do with it?

He could buy another boat and, at last, sail back to the Aegean. It was where he had aimed himself and his fascination with Ancient Greece since he’d been a schoolboy in shorts. He had sailed, in one boat or another, to most places he believed were contenders for locations in
The
Odyssey
, but he had always believed he could spend a lifetime exploring the waters of Greece and Turkey, or, as he thought of the place in classical terms, Asia Minor, the supposed birthplace of Homer. Mallorca had proved a catastrophic interruption to this grand plan. Something like a terrible automobile crash.

The morning after he received Pocock’s letter, Gerald took his habitual morning walk through the olive groves along the ridge above C’an Cabrer, to gaze down the hill, over the town, out to sea.

I could buy a boat,
he thought.

Then he turned and looked at the olive trees.

T
hey were sitting
under the shaded arbor on the patio overlooking the rocks and the sea, ready for a late lunch, when Bernie and Cassian returned from Palma.

Rested and safe at last among friends, Schooner Trelawney was back in top form. Over lunch, he related the difficulties he’d experienced trying to locate his friends in Monaco.

“Well, you’d said the place was small and that you knew absolutely everybody, so when I stepped out of the train station and beheld the entire, sparkling Fabergé principality spread out beneath me, I was impressed.” Schooner looked at Tom. “I must say, m’dear,
you
rose instantly in my estimation. I thought, Golly, Tom
is
doing well. And if, indeed, you knew everybody, then it was a simple deduction that I should start inquiring after you at the palace.”

Tom and Milly were weaving in their chairs and hooting. Cassian giggled, more at seeing his parents reduced to helplessness than for Schooner’s story.

“You can imagine my disappointment—after such a journey—when nobody at the palace had heard of you. Well, that was the guards, and what would they know? They couldn’t care less. Deaf to any logic or appeal. They wouldn’t even let me in to ask the prince or somebody who might have been expected to know you.
The Ollorenshaws!
I began shouting it past the guards up at the windows—for all I knew, you were
inside
, at some do.” Schooner looked around the table, his eyebrows raised, happy.

Lulu looked sideways at Bernie. Luc sat at his chair between them, impervious to the hysterics and noise of the adults, and Bernie seemed wholly intent on watching his son gather spoonfuls of his lunch of rice and mashed sardines.

•   •   •

A
fter she’d put Luc down
for his nap, Lulu found Bernie in a chair beneath the pines behind the house. She sat down nearby.

“You were positively funereal at lunch. I’m sure you’re repelled by Schooner, but you might make an effort not to be so boorishly disapproving among my friends.”

“I wasn’t disapproving. I simply wasn’t amused.”

“No, of course not. Your sense of humor doesn’t extend beyond Laurel and Hardy. What’s going on with you, then?”

“When were you going to tell me that you’re buying this place with Tom’s money?”

“Actually, it’s Milly’s money.”

“Oh, Milly’s money. I was misinformed. I got what little I know from Cassian, who was able to give me the broad details about the financial transfer. Bright kid. So when were you going to tell me?”

“Not until I bloody well had to,” she said. She pulled from her shorts a pack of cigarettes and the gold Ronson lighter Bernie had given her, and busily lit a cigarette, blowing a spout of smoke upward toward the overarching pine boughs.

“I might have helped you,” Bernie said, “if you’d asked. But you spend your summers here anyway, so why do you want to buy the place?” In the nearly three years he’d known her, even after they were married, Lulu spent all summer in Cala Marsopa with Tom and Milly, who had rented Villa Los Roques every summer since the war. Lulu had come down with them from England, initially to cook, later as an inseparable part of their summer group, which included rotating rooms of friends. After she’d married Bernie and moved into his apartment in Paris, she and Luc would leave the city early in June and not return until after
la rentrée
in early September. Bernie made trips down to see them when he could.

“Because I’m going to make it into a business. I’m going to have people come and stay and eat here for their holidays and pay me money for it. It was Milly’s idea. They want to do other things, they want to travel more, but they still want this place to come to.”

“Oh,” said Bernie. The ramifications spread outward slowly, the way following a moving object will raise the head to broader, unsuspected views. “That’ll take a lot of work.”

“Yes, it will. It means a big change. I’m going to stay here. I’m not coming back to Paris.”

“But you know I can’t live here,” said Bernie. “I have to be based in Paris—that’s my work.”

“Of course I know it. You love France and the French. Well, I’m sorry, I hate it there.”

“I thought you were feeling better about it. You’ve seemed happier the last few months.”

“That’s because I’ve been planning this for months,” said Lulu.

“Let me have one of your cigarettes,” said Bernie. After he’d lit a cigarette, he said, “And you want Luc to grow up here? To go to school here?”

“Of course not. I don’t want him growing up to be some Spanish oick any more than you do.”

“So what are you suggesting?”

“Well, obviously he has to stay here with me until school becomes important—I mean beyond counting and reading and all that, when he’s eight or nine or ten, whenever it is they start learning things properly—then he should go to school in Paris and stay with you during term time. He’ll come down here in the holidays.”

Bernie didn’t know what to say. Or, rather, he quelled and swallowed all the thoughtful objections, savage rebuttals, angry recriminations, legal threats, and reasonable entreaties that boiled in his mind and mouth.

He understood that he didn’t know Lulu at all. The longer he’d known her, the more of a mystery she had become to him. Over the past year, he’d come to realize that he had almost entirely invented the person he’d fallen in love with. He realized too that she had no idea who he was. They were complete strangers to each other, and they’d been growing more mystified and estranged. Since Luc’s birth, the enigma that each was to the other had enlarged into a yawning space between them. Now he was stunned, perhaps, but not surprised.

He smoked. Beyond the abundant, cosseting, superior health and educational services vouchsafed all mothers and children in France, Paris had always seemed to him the unsurpassable ideal garden in which to plant and grow a child. A few days after his birth, Bernie had taken Luc into the Jardin du Luxembourg. Thereafter they wandered regularly into the Lux—a short walk from Bernie’s apartment—following their ears and eyes, discovering together more than Bernie had known existed there: the model Breton fishing smacks sailing across the octagonal basin before the palace, the
théâtre des marionnettes
, the gently galloping horses of the carousel. Together, they watched the chess players, and the even more serious boules players, and gazed without shyness at the serene, spectral stone and bronze people frozen mid-
pensée
while the seasons and the centuries drifted over them.

There was the wider Paris he had planned to explore with Luc: the
bouquinistes
, the coal-roasted
châtaignes
, the bric-a-brac of
les puces
, the jungle-rich parade of humankind and the wonder of who all these people were and where they came from, these artists and musicians, filmmakers, writers, academics, White Russian émigrés, Roma gypsies, the Walter Benjamins, the Ben Franklins, the serious wanderers of the Earth, all of whom ineluctably pass through Paris at one time or another. No roiling mobs, or stunting urban canyonscapes, but a world passing by on a human, absorbable scale, like a puttering Mobylette; the entire human story, touchable, instructive, charming, reeking agreeably, inexhaustible but not exhausting—all this he had planned to show his son, Luc.

In his mind now, Bernie saw the life he had fully imagined for Luc in Paris go
pfftt
.

“You think he’ll be happy here?”

“Of course he’ll be happy,” said Lulu. “The weather’s pleasant. It’s quiet and peaceful. He’s already familiar with Preciosa. She’ll look after him. There are other children about, not just Spaniards.”

“You don’t think he’ll miss me?”

“I’m sure he’ll miss you, though children need their mothers more than their fathers. You’re off half the time anyway. You’re welcome to come and stay at a hotel and see him on a reasonable basis.”

“You’d like me to be reasonable?”

“Yes. Why not? That’s what’s best for Luc, isn’t it? We must put his needs first. Besides, I’m going to be reasonable with you. I won’t take any money from you. You need to support Luc, but I’ve got my own money and I’ll make what I need. You needn’t worry about me.”

“I can see that. You’ve thought of everything.”

“Oh, believe me, Bernard”—how brutal it sounded, to hear her use his name, for once—“I have.”