Rocks, The (39 page)

He sailed again before dark. He steered northwest for Mallorca. He would stop in Sardinia and find a phone.

Y
ou’re too late, I’m afraid,”
said the woman outside the service hall.

People leaving the Crematorio de Cala Marsopa recognized people just arriving. For convenience, Pompas Fúnebres González, the town’s only undertakers, had scheduled the Davenport and Rutledge services back-to-back.

“Who are you?” the woman asked, her crepey, jellied wattle shaking as she inclined her head forward to hear better.

“Aegina Rutledge,” said Aegina.

“Oh, yes! So it was your
father
? Wait—I’m not sure I understand. Then you and Lukey are half brother and sister?”

“No, different parents, all round.”

“But your parents were married to each other at one point, surely? I mean—no, hang on—I remember you. You’re Lukey’s little friend, the sweet little Spanishy girl. Good
lord
, that was yonks! I bought pairs and pairs of those little slipper thingies you made—that was you, yes? I gave them to everybody. You probably don’t remember me. Arabella Squibb. Are you still making them?”

“No,” said Aegina.

“Well, you’ve missed the service at any rate—but it’s so nice of you to come.”

“Excuse me,” said a man, sixtyish, glancing briefly at Aegina. “The car’s over here, Mummy.” He steered the older woman away.

“A-
geee-
nah!” A once tall, emaciated man, in his seventies but looking twenty years older, in blazer and black jeans with lank shards of white hair came, hip and knee sensitive, down the steps outside the service hall, moving stiffly toward her. “I know,
Picture of Dorian Gray
. But it’s been well earned, I can tell you. Perhaps you don’t remember—”

“I remember you, Dominick.”

He grinned. “And I remember you.” He was suddenly close enough for her to smell the miasmal breath that poured over the mushroom-hued National Health dentures. “You . . .” he said, drawing it out, “look—”

“Go away before I throw you down the steps,” said Aegina.

Dominick looked at her blankly. Another man appeared behind him.

“Dominick, stop pestering nice people,” said the man. “My condolences to you, Aegina.”

It had been a number of years, but Aegina recognized the gingery hue of skin beneath the flaking scabs and blotches. “Thank you, Cassian,” she said.

Coming out of the hall, Luc spotted Fergus and Charlie standing together, nodding and saying hello to people they knew. Charlie about thirty now, he guessed, with his mother’s Spanish hair, his father’s height. He was pleased to see that Fergus was bloated and balding, the little piggy features of his massive pudding face arranged in an expression of insincere commiseration that didn’t hide his piercing fascination with the crowd coming out of the crematorium. He was asking Charlie about the identity of this person and that, and Charlie nodded or gave him a name.

Luc looked elsewhere. A reflexive triangulation drew his attention to Dominick, leaning oilily toward Aegina, babbling as Cassian pulled him away.

She saw him as he came toward her, and her expression softened.

“How are you?” he said.

Aegina made a gesture, part shrug, half a head shake. “All right.” She looked at him closely. “How are you?”

“Okay . . . I don’t know. Strange. I miss her, in fact.”

“Of course you do.”

Luc made himself look away at the small crowd. He noticed the number of local Spaniards arriving for the Rutledge service. “I don’t know half of yours. Gerald was really more part of the local community, I guess, wasn’t he?”

“Yes,” said Aegina.

He looked back at her, into her face as if it were a map telling him where to go now, because he didn’t know when he’d see her again.

The Gerald crowd was growing around them. Aegina was greeting people. Her extended Puig family, the indigenous island side of her that he had observed but never known. Penny and François and the now utterly grown-up Bianca. Luc realized he had to rejoin his mother’s group.

Then he remembered. “I have something for you.”

“Oh, yes?” She was distracted by the other people.

“It’s from your father.”

Aegina looked at him, then a short, stout woman embraced her passionately.

“I’ll call you,” Luc said, moving away.

Aegina nodded at him over the woman’s shoulder.

•   •   •

L
uc could hear
the same braying of old from the bar, outside the window—all his life (he’d mostly been here during the summers) the ambient sound of his mother’s home. He was lying fully clothed on the bed, in the room at the far end of the barracks. Half of the rooms were occupied by those who had flown down for the funeral—

Oh, please. He could hear someone coming slowly up the tiled stairs. Along the hall . . . the inexorable knock at the door. Fuck offffff!

A woman’s head appeared around the door, sweetly peekabooey. “Luc, are you all right, sweetheart?” Sarah Bavister, his unwilling long-ago shipmate aboard the ill-fated luncheon cruise of the
Dolphin
. “Can I come in?”

“Sure.”

Sarah’s Pouter pigeon
poitrine
had swelled with the years until she now had the shape of a jug on a short-stemmed base. She sat down beside him.

“How are you doing, sweetie?” She was drunk.

“I’m all right, thanks. Tired. How are you?”

“Why don’t you stay in the house, sweetie? In your mum’s room? Or in the study? No one’s in the study. Wouldn’t you be more comfortable there? We could see more of you, instead of making this epic trek to the far end of the barracks—or is that the plan, sweetheart?”

“No, not really. I’m just more used to it here.”

“You’re
sure
?”

“Yes. This is sort of my room, really.”

“I understand, darling.”

Sarah looked at him, wading through years of gooey memories. “Darling, darling, Lukey.” She picked up his hand and held it hard against her bosom, kneading his wrist painfully. “You will come and have dinner with us, though, won’t you? I don’t know what it is but it smells good. And you’ve got to eat, pet.”

“No, I know. Sure. I’ll be right down. Everyone else okay?”

“Oh, yes. You know this lot. But it is the
saddest
possible day for all of us. And we do want you to be with us, darling.”

“That’s very sweet of you, Sarah. I’ll be right down.”

“Good.”

She leaned forward, her chest pressing down forcibly on his, smothering him in a rancid admixture of booze, body odor, and Chanel No. 5, almost spraining his wrist. She kissed his cheek wetly. “Soon, then?”

“Yes. I’ll be right down. Thanks, Sarah.”

She rose and went to the door and looked back at him. “We all love you so, so much, darling Lukey, sweetheart darling. We’re not going to leave you alone.”

“Love you too. Thank you.”

He would never move into the house. His mother’s room was empty now, but someone would want it. Come summer, there would be a feeding frenzy for
Lulu’s Room
on the booking site. This far end room in the barracks, his room, was geographically closest to the only place where he had ever felt at home at the Rocks: the long-dismantled toolshed against the back wall of the property. The only room that had been exclusively his, unbookable for guests, undesired by anyone else; his boyhood home at the Rocks, the haven for his hormone-addled intrigues, the dank refuge of a thousand lonely wanks.

And the place where, long regretted, one night he could have done something more with Aegina than play the noble grown-up and take her home.

His mother was gone. Strange now: the house, the Rocks, without her. People wandering around as if looking for her. Something essential missing.

Was this grief, this weird non-Lulu atmosphere?

He didn’t doubt that she had loved him, in her efficient, streamlined way, and he had, of course, loved her, in a mute, nondeclarative, resentful way. He didn’t remember his mother ever saying, “I love you, darling.” Nor his saying anything along those lines to her. They hadn’t been like that with each other. They’d sort of simply taken the notion of each other for granted: someone crucial—if annoying or disappointing—but always there. Somebody who, however poorly she had expressed it, had loved him. Now there was nobody—except Sarah, and everybody down at the bar, his ersatz family, shuffling through the house, talking about his mother as if she’d been theirs.

None of them would have come and found him floating out at sea.

I
t was warm,
but still only spring, yet the Marítimo was almost full. Older people mostly—that was, Luc’s age, and beyond. The usual British, German, northern European retirees. The terrace was pleasant in the sun. Fishing boats and wintering yachts filled the enlarged marina, but there was little noise. The town was busy, though not the carnival of flesh and summer. Conversation on the terrace was muted and polite.

Luc stood as Aegina came out to his table. She was wearing jeans, a short cotton blazer over a T-shirt, espadrilles.

“You look very well,” he said. “Great, actually.” He knew her age, fifty-three, to the day, but she’d been lucky—or very disciplined—both, probably. Slimmer than she’d been when he’d last seen her . . . ten years ago? The hair still dark—not a single gray strand? Must color it, but well. The Latin skin wrinkle-free except for some warm weathering around the eyes. She still looked the way he always thought of her, no jarring adjustment. Luc knew he looked, at his best, like every other man in his mid-fifties: beginning to sag noticeably under the jaw, the spare tire no matter what one did, his father’s thinning hair—though his father had died before it got too bad.

“Thank you.” She looked at him closely. “How are you doing?”

“All right. Feels a bit strange. How about you?”

“Yes: strange. I can’t quite take it in. I suppose it will take time. I’m—” She was going to say:
I’m glad I have Charlie.
Instead she said: “Is it difficult for you with people at the Rocks now? Or is it a help? You know them all.”

“I don’t know what life down here is like without them. They’ve always been here. They’ll all be gone in a few days. Then maybe I’ll know.”

“I’m sure they all love you.”

“That’s what they say.”

“Well, it’s true, Luc. Why wouldn’t it be? You’re part of someone they love. And they love you too, of course they do.”

A waitress appeared. She was in her twenties, bristling with piercings. She asked them for their order in English with a characteristically sibilant Dutch accent.

“How did you know we spoke English?” Luc asked her.

“Her,” the waitress thrust her spiked lower lip at Aegina, “you can’t tell, but you, it’s easy.”

They ordered salads and
agua con gas
. Luc watched the waitress walk away and turned to look beyond her, into the bar inside. “I don’t know anybody in this place anymore.”

“Will you keep the Rocks?” Aegina asked.

“Yeah. For now, anyway. Sally’s running the place. It makes its costs. Actually, it’s doing well. There are people who come through the website now. What about you? Will you sell?”

“C’an Cabrer? Oh, no. It’s home to me, more than anywhere. And it’s Charlie’s too. He loves it, and he still loves coming here. So, no, we’ll keep it. Not that you can sell a property in Spain now anyway.”

“No, right.”

“Luc, Charlie and I both watched
Ryan
,” she said. “We absolutely loved it.”

“Thank you.”

“Was he really a spy, your father?”

“I’m not sure. He could have been. He used to vaguely mention doing what he called his State Department work. But I really don’t know. I made all that stuff up.”

“I was very moved by it. I saw you, of course, and your father.”

Luc’s greatest success had come only in the last two years, with the French television miniseries, broadcast in Britain and many European markets, about an American journalist, Ryan, living in Paris during the Cold War. Under the cover of reporting European events for an unnamed American newspaper based in Paris, Ryan was a minor CIA operative through the decades after World War II. The series’ popularity and critical acclaim stemmed from the mix of Ryan’s cloak-and-dagger work with the more quotidian drama of raising a child in Paris as a single father. There was something of the tenderness of François Truffaut, several critics had noted, in the relationship between Ryan and his growing, sometimes fractious son. Luc’s French agent was now “talking” with HBO, AMC, and other television companies about producing an American version of the series. It would be like drug money, his agent said, the sale to the Americans, with an executive producer credit, but Luc was worried that the Americans would also ruin it. A not entirely unpleasant dilemma.

“You know, I never thought much about my father—I didn’t see him—while he was there. I’ve been thinking about him a lot. When I look back now, he seems a shadowy character.”

“I’m sure you miss him.”

“I’d like to see him again. Talk to him. See who he really was.”

“And have you got someone in Paris?”

“Just Sophie.”

“Who?”

“Sophie—my made-up girlfriend, years ago, when we went to Morocco. You had somebody too—”

“Dennis! Yes! But do you really have someone? I hope you do.”

“You do, huh?” The likelihood of meeting anyone who wouldn’t make him feel even lonelier seemed increasingly remote. Life was a dwindling process now, not a building proposition. He couldn’t imagine being with someone new, opening up, feeling appreciated and understood, without having to explain his dubious non sequiturs and increasingly arcane or redundant frame of reference. “Not really. But I have friends. You know. A sort of life. You? Are you seeing anyone?”

“I have been.”

“Ah.” Why did that feel more desolating than the death of his mother? “That’s nice.”

“It has been.”

“Not an unqualified statement.”

“No. One changes. Or things change.”

“Who was it? Or is it?”

“Was—nobody. Someone I thought I understood, but in fact, didn’t.”

“That I understand.”

Their salads arrived.

“Gracias,”
said Luc automatically.

“Yeah, no problem,” said their waitress.

“You wanted to give me something?” said Aegina.

“Yes.” He pushed a small manila envelope in front of him across the table. “I found an old shoe box in my mother’s closet. It contained the certificate of marriage between her and your father, and a divorce document, for same. Also an undeveloped roll of black-and-white film, old one-twenty stock. The bloke at the
fotografería
in town still does film processing.”

Aegina drew a handful of photographs from the envelope. They were glossy and new. “Oh, my God,” she said softly.

Luc shifted his chair so that he could look at them with her. “Obviously taken by your father. I guess she took the one of him.”

“My God, Luc. Look how beautiful your mother was—look at her hair: it’s almost black.”

“Is that his boat?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Not Mallorca, is it? Looks more like Italy or somewhere.”

Aegina looked at him. “It’s the honeymoon voyage.”

“So it would seem.”

Her father had always kept his old Agfa Solinette aboard the boat. He had carefully photographed anchorages, ports, views of small coves from the hills rising above them, harbor approaches from the sea, stretches of coastline all over the Mediterranean. These photographs, adeptly composed and exposed, always in contrasty black-and-white, some dating back more than sixty years, had illustrated his articles and his one book. Visible in many of those old photographs, resting peacefully at anchor against a backdrop of an ancient Greek or Italian fishing village, lay a small, pretty, white-hulled sailboat, his beloved
Nereid
—on which, Aegina knew, her father and Lulu had sailed from Mallorca on the day after their wedding in July 1948. A short time later they had separated, and
Nereid
had sunk. There had never been any further, or more specific, details. When she had asked her father, several times, why he had no photographs from that summer, he told her they’d all been lost when the boat sank that September. Yet he’d managed to save the camera, and the important books, and everything else of any value that had been aboard the yacht.

“Can I get copies of these?” she asked.

“These are yours,” said Luc. “I made an extra set for you.”

She went through them slowly. “It’s so strange—to think of them together.”

“On a little boat too. She hated boats.”

Aegina looked at him. “What
happened
to them? He would never tell me.”

“She wouldn’t tell me either,” said Luc. “They fell out—that’s the way she put it: ‘We fell out,’ she said. And that’s all she ever said.”

Aegina handed him three photographs. “What are these?”

“I was wondering if you might know. If he ever said anything about that. It looks like a shipwreck.”

Three photos of men waving, in obvious distress, from the bow of a wrecked, apparently sinking fishing boat.

“No,” she said. “He never mentioned anything like that.”

“I suppose they saved whoever it was.” He gave the three photographs back to her.

She pulled a photograph from her handbag and handed it to him.

“Oh, jeez,” Luc said.

He stared at the faded color shot of himself and Aegina—so
young
—leaning against a ship’s rail, both smiling awkwardly into the camera.

“I’ve never seen this,” he said. “Where is this?”

“It has to be on the ferry. Minka must have taken it. I don’t remember her giving it to me. I found it a few days ago.”

“I would guess on the way to Morocco,” he said, unable to look at her, “rather than on the way back.” It sounded flippant, he immediately regretted it.

She took it from him and put all the photographs in her bag. She looked up at Luc. “Did you know that your mother seduced Charlie?”

Luc stared at her, trying to read her face. It betrayed nothing. “When?”

“On her birthday. When he was fifteen. It might be called rape now. Certainly child abuse.”

“No, I didn’t know that. I’m sorry to hear it.”

“Are you surprised?”

“No.” Not at all. “I won’t be absurd and apologize for her. But . . . I’m sorry to know that.” Then, he couldn’t help it, “Thanks so much for telling me.”

“I’m sorry. I really didn’t mean to.” Aegina stabbed a fork into her salad. But she put it down and looked across the table at Luc. “Do you know how I found out?”

“No.” Luc wanted to get up and dive headfirst over the iron railing to the concrete quay below, but he sat still and modulated his voice into a pleasant tone. “Why don’t you tell me.”

“Charlie never actually told me—he wouldn’t tell me who it was, only what happened—but I put it together. She gave him the Moroccan shirt—the original, the one I brought from London. I saw it in his room after the party—he kept it for years. He thought he was in love with her. And of course, she didn’t want to see him again, like that.”

Luc remembered Charlie wearing the shirt the night of the birthday party.

“Fuck,” said Aegina. “I’m sorry, Luc.” She reached across the table and pulled his hand out of his lap and wrapped hers around it. “I don’t know why I told you—except I think I’ve been wanting to for years . . . I’m not sure why. And it’s the Rocks . . . it wasn’t easy for me there either. I’m sorry.”

She let go his hand, put the photographs in the envelope and the envelope in her bag. She pulled out a twenty-euro bill and laid it on the table.

“I’ll get it,” said Luc.

“No, it’s all right. Let me. Thank you for the photos. I’m so sorry . . .” Aegina stood up abruptly. “I’m sorry,” she said again. “Bye.”

“Bye.”

She walked away.

Luc turned his head and watched her until his eyes filled and he could see nothing but an unfocused wash of light and color.

He looked back in the direction of the boats spread below until the port came back into focus. He looked down the long quay ending in the small port light that blinked at night. He looked out toward the sea, which today sparkled with a harsh relentlessness.

The chair grated on the tile and Aegina sat down beside him. She’d pulled it around the table until she was right beside him. She put both hands on his arm and he turned to look at her. He saw that her eyes were wet.

“Come up to the house for dinner.”

“No, thanks. You’ve got Charlie and Fergus there. Family time.”

“They’re both going back to London tomorrow. I’m staying on for a bit. Come up tomorrow.”

He blinked again. He felt her hands tighten on his arm. “Come up, Luc.” She was looking into him in a way he remembered from long ago . . . the toolshed one night.

“What time?”

“Seven.”

Aegina leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. She drew back and her thumb moved gently across his cheek where it was wet. Her eyes wandered all over his face and finally came back to his eyes. “You’ll come, right?”

“Yes. I’ll come.”

“Seven.”

“Yes.”

“Good,” she said.

She stood again and walked across the terrace. He watched her as she got into her rented Renault Clio, and followed the car until he lost it down on calle Llobet.

He looked back out across the port, this time to the rocks and the dirt road along the harbor.

He felt suddenly strange. Off-kilter, weak . . . dizzy? Was he going to have a stroke . . .
now
?

After a moment he realized what it was.

He was filled with joy.