Rocks, The (37 page)

Her eyes looking at him grew large and still. “You saved me.”

“Yes. Well, I wasn’t going to go off and leave you.” He grinned at her.

Lulu lifted her arm and placed a cool hand against Gerald’s cheek. She moved her thumb across his mouth, looking at her hand, her thumb, his face. “Gerald,” she said, “take me with you.”

“Where?”

“Wherever you’re going. To Greece.”

He imagined it again. “I’m not sure how long I’ll be. I mean, I won’t return soon.”

“Marry me. Then we won’t be in a rush.”

He stared at her, all thought falling away except the phrase:
Why not?

“I’ll make you happy, Gerald. I’ll make you as happy as I feel right now.”

He knew he should think for a moment, but what was there to think about? What if all the years ahead could go on as the last two days had been?

“Gerald,” she said, very quietly, as if she were about to point out a hummingbird nearby and didn’t want to scare it away, “I love you.”

“I love you too.”

“Then it’s simple. Take me with you.”

“All right,” he said.

She pulled his face down. “Watch out for your—” he said as she kissed him.

Tom and Milly thought it a splendid idea. Well, why
not
? they said. Milly shrieked and hugged them both. Tom, in loco parentis, had a friendly chat with Gerald. He reported to Lulu and Milly that Gerald had little or no money, but he was intelligent, well educated, his idea about
The
Odyssey
was really quite smart—but never mind all that: Lulu, you’re never going to marry some duffer in a bank. I’m sure it’ll be all right.

While Lulu’s chin was being stitched in the doctor’s office, Milly told Gerald that although Lulu probably wouldn’t mention it, not right away, she’d had a beastly time of it growing up: neglectful parents, who at one point had actually lost her while traveling in Belgium, then died; a succession of indifferent relatives; boarding school in Scotland—well, it had all been jolly unpleasant for her until Milly and Tom had discovered her as a ward of friends in London and taken her on, initially as a cook. . . . Anyway, all she really needed was absolute trust and safety. If he gave her that, they’d have no problems.

Go on, the both of you, Tom and Milly said, sail off in your little ark and please come back and stay with us next summer.

It all happened very quickly. Lulu and Milly made a simple, summery white wedding dress. Gerald had a blazer, his old school tie, and presentable flannel trousers folded away on his boat. Tom made the arrangements and drove them into Palma where Gerald and Lulu were married at the British consulate. Tom stood them a wedding dinner of suckling pig at La Fonda in Cala Marsopa.

For a wedding present, Gerald gave Lulu one of several copies of
The Odyssey
he carried aboard the yacht. “This is quite an interesting translation.” He opened it. “You see, it says it’s by T. E. Shaw—the pen name of T. E. Lawrence, of Arabia. He knows his way around a good story. He’s got some interesting things to say about Homer in his Introduction. I don’t have anything else to give you, but I can promise you an odyssey.”

“Oh, darling! That’s all I want.” Lulu hugged and kissed him fiercely. “We
will
have an odyssey, won’t we!”

And they sailed away.

•   •   •

S
he was a strong
swimmer;
unable to catch her up, he followed her all the way in to the shore. They could see rocks beneath them against the pale sand in the moonlight. Lulu walked out of the water and lay flat on the sand, faceup, legs and arms spread.

“Come and lie beside me,” she said. “Nobody’s here to see you now,” she said.

Gerald was not yet a blithe naturist. He’d learned to enjoy swimming naked in the sea with Lulu, but not where anybody might see them. She was completely indifferent to such a concern, and he’d had to caution her when she wanted to leap overboard in anchorages where other craft were anchored or might appear.

He sat down beside her. He heard a bell somewhere above them—sheep or goats.

“Is that your cave up there, then?” she asked.

“That black hole we saw coming in? I think so. We’ll see.”

“So this is where the Cyclops lived?”

“Perhaps—if he lived.”

“Tell me again,” she said, “it’s to do with some fog, right?”

Gerald’s heart swelled every time she asked him questions about his investigation of
The
Odyssey
; how she wanted to understand what he was doing. No one else had. “That’s right.” He told her how Odysseus and his men had sailed from the land of the Lotus-eaters and landed in the morning at an island in fog, where they’d found a spring coming down to the port. There wasn’t much fog in the Mediterranean, especially in the south, but it could occur here off the west coast of Sicily. The island of Favignana—“where we were yesterday, you remember the spring”—was where Gerald believed Odysseus encountered fog and then sailed on a short distance, exactly as they had in
Nereid
, to the mainland of Sicily, where both Odysseus and now Gerald and Lulu had found a cave.

“How do you know it happened?” Lulu asked.

“Well, no one knows for sure. But I think it’s like any faith. You could say the same about the Bible. You believe in it, or not, depending on whether you have faith, regardless of reason or lack of absolute proof, because it makes—”

“Look,” said Lulu, rising on her elbow, “another boat’s come in.”

Gerald turned his head from Lulu and the shore. The navigation lights were dim, but against the moon-splashed water he could make out a sagging, neglected-looking fishing boat, forty feet or so long, coming around the headland to the north, moving sluggishly into the slight scalloped bay off the beach.

“Guardia Costiera,” Gerald said, quietly, as if to himself.

“What’s that, darling?”

“Italian coast guard.”

“It looks like a decrepit fishing boat.”

“It probably was. Beggars can’t be choosers. But even in this light you can see by their ensign. The little flag on the stern.”

The boat was still moving slowly forward and the loud rattle of chain running through a hawsepipe came across the water.

“They’re not the best seamen either.” Gerald could never have brought himself to let go chain while a boat was moving forward and have it scrape down the side of the hull, a most slovenly bit of mismanagement. It bespoke slovenliness in other things, an entire attitude to life. “I think we should get back to the yacht.”

“Oh, do let’s lie here, darling. They’re not going to see us.”

“They’ll see the boat and the anchor light. They can be officious little men. They’ll be very bored, and we’re a foreign yacht. Almost certainly they’ll come alongside to see our papers.”

“Not tonight, surely?”

“They may. And if we’re not aboard, they may board the yacht. Come on.”

Gerald stood, crouching, as if to remain unseen, for in the pale light he thought they might be visible on the beach from the Guardia vessel. He moved quickly into the water. “Lulu, darling, do come now. We must get back to the boat.”

They were not far off the beach when Gerald saw the rubber tender coming away from the Guardia boat, making toward
Nereid
. Several figures ineptly deploying short oars like paddles; voices across the water. The rubber boat had no directional stability and crabbed along, half spinning with each of the paddlers’ efforts counteracting the others. But slowly it drew closer to the yacht. It would be awkward without clothing; their nakedness would be visible. “Quick as you can, darling,” he said.

The voices in the rubber boat quietened, then grew more animated, and Gerald realized that they’d been spotted. The boat’s zigzag course altered, grew jerkier as it moved faster, and he saw they would be intercepted before they reached
Nereid
.

“Buonasera,”
called Gerald, with the cheerfulness of an English holidaymaker.

“Buonasera,”
came the reply, with a measured vacancy.

The men in the boat—there were three of them, Gerald now saw—continued talking in a more subdued tone. He could understand nothing. He spoke a modicum of Italian, what he needed to obtain food, drink, supplies in Italy, but they were speaking Neapolitan, the dialect he’d heard in southern Tyrrhenian ports. As they drew to within a few feet of them, the men ceased paddling and drifted. Their eyes were shadowed but he could tell they were looking at the swimmers. The rubber boat was some sort of ex-military life raft, oblong, with no discernible bow or stern; the air chambers sagged under the weight of the three occupants, indicating a leak in the rubberized canvas or at a valve.

“Inglese?”

“Sì,”
said Gerald. He and Lulu continued swimming toward
Nereid
.

More talk in the boat, a real conversation now. Gerald could now make out the paddlers: not officious little men, but youths in filthy, ill-fitting uniforms. Not seamen or sons of fishermen but city boys ignorant of boats and the water beyond basic training—perhaps one of them knew something about engines. Gerald had seen them in every poor Italian port he had visited since the war, singly and in groups, unemployed, staring incomprehensibly at his small boat, and at him as he moved about and came and went. In these ports he had paid a small fee to the designated unofficial watchman who, somehow, kept such boys from pilfering anything stowed on a boat’s deck or looting its contents below. These three were the lucky ones: employed and given uniforms and authority and let loose in a leaking tub with a vague mandate of enforcing maritime—

The jabbing oar caught Lulu’s shoulder. “Ow!” she said, with unconcealed annoyance. A young man in the rubber boat giggled and the others commented in tones as if critiquing a bocce toss. All three began using their oars to pull Lulu closer to their boat, as if she were a tortoise. Gerald shouted something and pushed an oar away. An oar hit the back of his head with force, making a crunching noise that he heard in the middle of his brain. Another oar hit his face with a blinding, stunning smack.

He was rolling underwater. For a moment he couldn’t determine which way was up, but he understood everything very matter-of-factly.

He surfaced to an empty view of water and coast, heard noise, turned in the water, and saw Lulu, clearly naked in the moonlight, wriggling, emitting hoarse grunts, fighting as she was pulled aboard the rubber dinghy by the three men as if she were a large struggling fish. The men were laughing, one of them barking excitedly like a man baiting a dog. They were thirty feet away. Once they had her flopping in the bottom of the boat, they sat on her and began paddling back toward the Guardia Costiera vessel. Gerald heard noises from Lulu, he saw the men struggling, and heard slapping sounds, then angry shouts from Lulu.

He swam as fast as he could after the rubber boat. It moved jerkily, rocked by tremors, but the men were now paddling with urgency, heading toward the Guardia boat. Then he heard a splash—Lulu had managed to jump overboard. He could make her out, swimming strongly, pulling ahead of the dinghy. A minute later he saw her climbing out of the water just before the dinghy reached the beach. Her white form in the dark moving up the steep rocky bank, and the three men jumping out of the dinghy in the shallows, climbing after her.

Now Gerald turned toward the beach—the sooner the better, for he would be faster on his feet than swimming. He came ashore some distance from the rubber boat, lurched in the shallows, lost his footing on a rock and fell. He rose gasping from the sand. He could hear them somewhere above.

They were in the cave.

Gerald scrambled up the rocks. He made out a path through the vegetation above the beach and ran along it until it widened below a rising escarpment of limestone arching over a dark hole—the cave—in the rock face ahead. The path led into the cave. Out of it came the sound of men, and noises from Lulu. She was moaning, or grunting: short hoarse harrowing exhalations.

Gerald sprinted toward the black hole in the rocks. He was unaware of anything, only that he must get to Lulu, and a sense of murderous power—

He didn’t see the sheep and ran headlong into the huddled group. He fell hard across the shaggy backs onto the dirt among them. As he scrambled up, the sheep bolted, leaping over him, stampeding into the cave. Gerald ran after them.

“Ma che cazzo?”
The city boys, spooked, interrupted, alarmed by the inrushing animal shapes, swore in fear.
“Cazzo! Merda!”
The sheep collided with the Italians, leapt and bleated, terrified.
Baaa! Baa! Baaaaaaaa!
Gerald ran into an upright figure and drove his fist at head height into some bony extremity and heard a yelp of pain. He saw a shape, taller then himself, and rushed at it, hands forward, pushing a man who cried with fear as he fell under the legs of the whinnying sheep, now a writhing, leaping mass of shapes in the cave.

“Lulu!” Gerald called.
“Lulu, run!”

And he saw her, he thought—outlined against the light at the far side of the cave, a slight figure among the bounding woolly shapes bunching and leaping toward the light, bleating and crying, escaping onto the path beyond—then he didn’t see her.

The Italians were getting to their feet, yelling angrily, and coming forward from the walls of the cave. Gerald turned and ran out of the cave—away from the bolting sheep, to draw the men toward him—along the path the way he had come in.

It was darker: cloud had obscured the moon. He almost shouted for Lulu, to see if she had come this way and not out the other side of the cave, but he caught himself. Behind him, shouting, the Italians emerged from the cave mouth. If he found Lulu here, they would catch both of them. Gerald turned and scrambled down the rocky slope to the beach. Would they see that he was alone? He called urgently, as if hurrying Lulu on with him,
“Come on, darling!”

As Odysseus escaped the Cyclops’s cave by riding beneath a ram, then drove his sheep down to the shore, so Gerald ran beside the waves in the dark. He heard the Italians on the path behind him, calling to one another. He couldn’t see them, but he distinctly heard three voices shouting angrily, and he could tell they were moving fast. She was not with them, then.