Rocks, The (6 page)

The noise of their laughter affected Gerald like the sudden infusion of a drug. He looked down at his book in his hands. He saw the pencil-marked paragraphs in his mind’s eye and realized that he knew it all by heart, he’d known the story for most of his life, and wouldn’t need to open the book at all.

“I won’t bore you for long, but I thought I’d tell you something of how I came to write the book. I spent most of World War Two aboard British Navy vessels in the Mediterranean. At one point, we were anchored on Skerki Bank west of Sicily. This is a remote reef between Sicily and Tunisia that rises from the sea floor to only a foot or so beneath the surface. Four thousand years of shipping has navigated, successfully and otherwise, around this unmarked reef. It was hot and, along with some of the crew, I went swimming. There was no land in sight, but we discovered that we could wade calf-deep in the water. We had no swimming masks as everyone has today, but we could see that the reef was littered with ancient amphorae, the two-handled pots in which Greeks like King Agamemnon and his armies that fought the Trojan War carried wine, olive oil, almonds, dates, honey, and, of course, gold and valuables, aboard their ships. We had no breathing apparatus either, of course, yet simply by shallow diving, we brought eight or ten of these barnacle-encrusted amphorae to the surface—archaeological looting it would probably be called today. Some of the amphorae were almost intact after who knew how many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years they’d spent underwater. What, we wondered, was inside them?”

Gerald’s audience had become as still as the surrounding ancient Greeks. Kate looked enthralled, as if she hadn’t yet read what he was going to say and couldn’t wait to hear it.

Gerald smiled. “Thick, ageless sludge. No gold. No honey or almonds either, to augment His Majesty’s naval rations.”

Titters, happy smiles.

“But seeing these old jars coming up out of the sea, breaking the surface into the light of present day—breaking through the membrane of history, as it were—gripped me quite powerfully. During that one afternoon on Skerki Bank, all the tales of ancient Greece became real for me. Here was proof.”

Aegina stared at her father. Before her eyes, he had transformed into an instinctual storyteller—or, he was living it all again: he was back there now, on that reef.

Gerald went on. “Throughout the war, and afterward, during the years I spent cruising the Mediterranean in an old, twenty-four-foot gaff cutter, I read again and again passages in my old green, tattered, salt-stained edition of A. T. Murray’s prose translation of
The
Odyssey
. Two volumes, published by the Loeb Classical Library. I also read many volumes of British Admiralty sailing directions for the Mediterranean Sea. These were not literature, usually written in very dry prose, but occasionally the men who penned the descriptions of harbors and coastlines—not scholars, but one could detect a certain level of education in their idiom and references—managed to get past their editors”—more, knowing laughs—“the suggestion that many of the islands, harbors, headlands I was seeing might well stand as the factual locations of various episodes from
The
Odyssey
. Some of this was obvious. If there
were
a factual geography to
The
Odyssey
, the whirlpool of Charybdis could hardly have been anywhere but the Strait of Messina, which, at the wrong state of the tide, could spin a corvette in circles. The cliffs where Odysseus was ambushed by the boulder-throwing Laestrygonians might well have been—I can’t think of any other location—the entrance to the Corsican harbor of Bonifacio. And there is a cave . . .” Gerald’s attention, and then his voice, momentarily faltered “. . . where I believe Odysseus found the cunning to outwit Polyphemus, the Cyclops. . . .” He fell silent, gazing at the marble frieze on the opposite wall.

Aegina had never seen her father in such a state. He was transported.

At the moment when his pause became conspicuous, Gerald collected himself and started up again. “Well, why shouldn’t
The
Odyssey
be a real story? I thought. We know that Troy was real, that a great battle was fought there, and that Schliemann and others, only a hundred or so years ago, armed with a copy of
The
Iliad
, went to a mound of rock and grass in Asia Minor and found the city, and the proof of war. Descriptions of place fill
The
Odyssey
, often as detailed and accurate as the particulars of a property listed by an estate agent. Over time, sailing these same seas and coastlines, propelled by the same winds that pushed Odysseus’s ships,
The
Odyssey
acquired for me the weight of truth. I began to think that Homer, whether he was blind or not, had heard detailed descriptions of these places, or perhaps even seen them for himself. Eventually, I became determined to sail my own small boat from Troy to Ithaca, using
The
Odyssey
for sailing directions, as Schliemann had used
The
Iliad
to find Troy, to discover the true geographic route of Odysseus’s long, treacherous voyage home from the Trojan War. In time, in one vessel or another, I sailed the whole route.
The Way to Ithaca
describes his voyage, and mine alongside it.”

Gerald stopped, suddenly spent. He looked at the expectant faces. He felt he had stopped too abruptly; he needed to say something more. “The title of my book, of course, comes from Cavafy’s poem ‘Ithaka.’ I like his suggestion that it wasn’t reaching Ithaca that mattered so much, as what happened to one along the way. Thank you all, so very much.”

The noise of applause and chatter rose in the gallery and echoed around the splendid marbles. Aegina clapped and watched her father. He had gone somewhere while talking and not all of him had come back.

Then the yachtsman, the chap with the boat in Lymington, asked: “How long a trip was that, actually, Gerald, to sail from Troy to Ithaca? Not as long as it took Odysseus, I hope?” He chortled knowingly. “Could one do it in a season?”

Gerald had to think for a moment. He spoke quietly, as if remembering out loud. “I didn’t do it all at once. Over a number of years I traveled every leg, in my own yacht, or aboard British naval vessels during the war, but not in the order in which I set out the route in my book, Troy to Ithaca. I was going to do it . . .” He stopped.

Aegina stepped forward. Something was happening to him. In his brain or heart.

Gerald’s hand rose hesitantly to his throat. His face contorted. His eyes rose to the marble figures on the far wall.

“Oh dear,” said Kate. “Do you need some water?”

Aegina swept quickly past her. She reached Gerald and held both his arms, partially shielding him, as he began to weep.

A
s everyone sat down
to dinner, Lulu rose.

“Thank you all for being here for my birthday. I consider myself incredibly fortunate to have such dear and faithful friends. Most of you have come back here to the Rocks year after year, for decades—some of you as long as I’ve been here—what on earth are you thinking?”

Adoring laughter.

“You’ve given me lovely birthday gifts—after I told you not to—but you are, each of you, all the gift I want. I wanted to get something for you too. Just baubles.”

At each place setting on the five tables was a name card for the guest and a wrapped gift. Well, this was Lulu, wasn’t it? She was being truthful: her greatest joy was her friends, and she was the best friend anyone present had ever known. Some of them, at difficult moments in their lives, had come down for a few weeks in the summer, occupied rooms, ate the Rocks’ food, children in tow even, to find that Lulu refused to accept a penny from them. Cassian Ollorenshaw had become a fixture at the Rocks for at least six months of the year after his spell in Pentonville prison. (He wasn’t a
bad
man, of course, but a trusted friend to Lulu and others, and he’d made a number of people, Lulu included, quite a lot of money.) Everyone here had seen Lulu, at the drop of a hat, drive anybody all over the island; give them books, clothing, paintings; pull whatever she had from her closets, off her walls, out of her fridge; give whatever she had to her friends when Lulu knew before they did that it was exactly what they needed at that moment.

“Tokens of my love and gratitude to each one of you. And I want those of you—that’s most of you, of course—who remember our
dear
Tom and Milly, whom we loved so very much”—she turned briefly to Cassian, and then looked again around the tables—“to remember them now too. Happy birthday to all of us!”

Lulu raised a glass of Champagne. Everyone clapped and drank. A man rose to make a toast but Lulu interrupted him briskly. “Roddy, darling, you’re sweet, but let’s eat our lovely dinner that Bronwyn’s made for us, and we can talk some more later.”

There was an excited buzz, a Christmas sound of everyone’s packages being torn open. Lulu had bought them Swatch watches, necklaces and bracelets from Morocco and New Mexico, embroidered slippers, scarves, Montblanc pens, Filofaxes; gifts that were useful and would see a long life.

“Can you believe this?” April said, raising an Hermès scarf to her cheek, looking around and seeing tears and delight on the faces of the other guests. “Look, Luc! Lookit this stuff! Lookit how all these people
love
her! My God, do you, like, know how lucky you are to have such a mother?”

“The best mummy in the world,” said Luc, watching Montserrat weave through the tables carrying a tray laden with plates heaped with food.

Dominick Cleland had noticed April the day before, as soon as she and Luc had arrived. Partly, naturally, because she was with Luc, which rendered her an immediate curiosity, and because she was fantastic-looking, with that incredible complexion—he could see in his mind’s eye the apricot dusting and flesh of her pubis as clearly as if he were standing inches from an impastoed painting. Dominick admired Luc’s consistency. He always managed to turn up with some tasty bint. Never held on to them from one year to the next, but he rarely came down empty-handed. Once he’d arrived with a yacht full of people; a little adventure that had turned out very nicely for Dominick. Generally they were young and still undemanding, grateful, curious, and interested in making a career in the arts—ideal fodder for Dominick’s well-oiled mix of elevated conversation and carnal suggestion. It must be the films, he supposed, the endless supply of hopeful supplicants grabbing at anything for a way in. It couldn’t be Luc himself, who would never have what a man needed—power, or the illusion of it, confidence, an inherent disregard for a woman’s tenderer feelings—to hook the sort of woman he was still delusionally looking for. Dominick had long ago rid himself of the desire for such thoroughbreds. They ate a man up faster than cancer. Now all he wanted was a bit of a chase, a delicious conquest (wasn’t that really the finest moment?) culminating in a fuck, preferably delectable, but any fuck at all would do—it was like Chinese dinners: he’d never really had a bad one—a dalliance of no more than a week or so, after which one of them, he or the girl but not together, would hopefully get onto an airplane.

After dinner, when they cleared a dancing floor on the patio, Dominick went directly to their table and asked April to dance. She seemed flattered.

“Go ahead,” Luc said to her, smiling as beatifically as his mother.

Dominick, now in pink shirt and white slacks above the white Guccis, still had the moves: the Hully Gully, the Pony, the Watusi and the Mashed Potato. They’d worked at Annabel’s a hundred years ago and the girls still seemed to go for it. Anyway, it made them laugh, especially if he really cranked it up, and it was amazing how he could work a kind of snake charmer routine on them: fix them with a smile, laugh at himself, pour good Champagne down them, make it dribble from their lips. He could see them reappraising him as the evening went on: he wasn’t
that
old, they began to think—he was certainly fit. He was jolly good fun. He liked women, they could tell; and they could tell that he knew what they wanted. Most evenings, by a certain point, if they were still there, he was home.

He wasn’t trying to seduce Luc’s little playmate. Not now anyway, but you never knew when you might meet one of them again—as he had, several times, in London, and by then, introductions and Mallorca behind them, he could find the situation marvelously well along.

Luc was relieved. He knew April wanted to dance—she wanted to show off her shimmy and flick her golden feet between someone’s legs. None better than Dominick. They were made for each other. He didn’t give a toss if Dominick managed to get her phone number.

Luc got up and wandered into the house, into the kitchen. A number of the caterers were washing the dishes, drying glasses in the scullery in back of the main kitchen. Montserrat was not in sight.

“Like the dinner?” Bronwyn asked. She was sitting at the kitchen table, a bottle of Laphroaig and three fingers in a large crystal glass in front of her, smoking a small cigar. She wore a generalissimo-sized chef’s jacket, heavily stained with food and wine, a linen napkin tied around her head like a bandanna.

“Great,” said Luc. “Loved the blood orange sorbet.”

“It was good, wasn’t it? Want a drink?”

“Sure.” Luc got a glass, sat down, and poured himself a shot from Bronwyn’s bottle.

“Down for long?” she asked.

“A week maybe. If I can stick it out.”

“Well, you’re a good boy, coming down for your mummy’s birthday. She’s very pleased.”

“Hardly. I’m the fly in her Yves Saint Laurent body lotion.”

“Don’t be silly. She loves you. She means well. She talks about you all the time.”

“Yes, in terms of unfailing disappointment. Like a bad bet she can’t get over.”

“Oh, rubbish. You know she loves you. You can hear it whenever she mentions your name. You may be forty-whatever-it-is but you’re still her little boy, you know. She says you’re coming down, and you can hear how much it means to her.”

Luc drank half his glass. “Where’d you get the caterers?”

“Which one?”

He looked round again. “Not here now. The nose.”

“Montserrat.”

“That’s right. Montserrat.”

“She worked in the kitchen at the Fonda when Javier was the cook. She’s a Llobet.”

“What, as in Juan Llobet?”

The name that loomed over Cala Marsopa like the permanently shuttered Llobet house hulking above the town on the road to the lighthouse, a severe, forbidding, Stalinist-era mansion that might have been designed for Lavrentiy Beria’s house parties that included assassinations. Juan Llobet, the reclusive billionaire, Barbary Coast smuggler in his criminal infancy before World War I, later Franco crony, banker to the Nacionalistas of the Spanish Civil War, Mallorca’s oligarchic Boo Radley; dead decades ago. Everyone coming into town drove along Carretera Juan Llobet, and most did some business, if just at the ATM, with Banco Llobet. At one point, Luc’s mother had known a Llobet, one of the old boy’s sons, who came to Cala Marsopa with his family every summer, but that association seemed to have faded years ago.
Montserrat
Llobet.
It didn’t surprise him. She was Mediterranean aristocracy, albeit from a dark, bent strain, like having Barbarossa for a grandfather.

“Yes, sweetheart. Some offshoot of the family. She’s gorgeous, isn’t she? Good luck.”

“No, you know, I was just curious. I was talking to her earlier. She seemed interesting. Studying at the University of Barcelona.”

“Yeah, she’s interesting. Intelligent and ambitious. She sent Javier out of his mind.”

“What’s she doing waiting tables here, then?”

“Her father makes her work through the summers, even though he’s filthy rich. She’s good with food. Got a good work ethic. She’s into art history. She’ll probably end up running Christie’s in Madrid.”

Luc saw Montserrat Llobet’s life unfolding like a spread in
Paris Match
. The yachts, the villas on Cap Ferrat, the gorgeous children—someone else’s Picassos. Why the fuck can’t I get a woman like that, and have such a life? But he knew. You were either born into it, a Llobet or a Grimaldi, or were positioned through the immense crimes, laundered in the oblivion of time, of a previous generation. Or you made it really big in the movies—you became Sam Spiegel or Alexander Korda—and you met someone like Montserrat Llobet at a party on a yacht at Cannes. And the world was yours.

Or you were someone who wrote French B movies that went straight to video and you got April Gressens from Tarzana.

Luc emptied his glass. “Great dinner, Bronwyn.”

“Thanks, sweetie.”

He got up and went outside. “Je T’Aime . . . Moi Non Plus” was coming out of the patio speakers. He’d heard it from inside the kitchen, but the crest of the time warp didn’t hit him until he set foot on the patio. Then he remembered everything, or the feeling of everything, of the summer of 1969. The way the world felt then and what he thought would happen to his life.

He walked to the music room. Inside, Charlie was flipping through stacks of records; on a barstool sat his rather ripe-looking
petite amie
, a girl Luc had seen around, holding a glass of Coke. They looked like a shot from
Vanity Fair
’s party page.

“Oh, hiya!” said Charlie, breaking into a huge grin as he saw Luc. “I saw you out there at dinner. I was going to come out and say hi, but Lulu gave me the job of DJ and I gotta stay on it.”

Luc was staring at him oddly, his eyes ranging up and down between Charlie’s neck and hips. “Nice shirt,” he said after a moment.

“Oh, yeah. Actually, your mum gave it to me. It’s Moroccan, apparently. I think it’s quite old.”

Luc continued looking at the shirt, smiling. “Nice of her. Yeah, it’s from Marrakech. It’s about twenty-five years old—I remember when she got it.”

He looked at Charlie in the shirt. What a sweet kid Charlie is, Luc thought. He seems genuinely pleased to see me. Evidently, he knows nothing, about the shirt’s provenance, or anything else. Looks just like his mother.

“Cool! Um, Luc, this is Bianca. Bianca, Luc.”

“Hi,” said Bianca.

“Hi.”

They shook hands.

“How’re the films going?” asked Charlie.

“Good. Just wrapped a movie.”

“Fantastic. What’s it called? Who’s in it?”

“Probably no one you’ve heard of, or will ever hear of. It’s called
Perdu
. Lost. It’ll be out in about eight or ten months. I think.”

“Oh, I bet it’s great. I loved
L’Autre
! I’ve told you that. It was really great.”

“Thank you, Charlie. I’d forgotten that you’d seen it.”

“You down for long?”

“About a week. You?”

“The summer, as usual. Hang on—” “Je T’Aime . . . Moi Non Plus” was ending, and Charlie started looking through the albums in his hand.

“I’ll leave you to it, Charlie. It’s nice to see you.”

“Thanks. It’s really good to see you, Luc. Take care.”

“You too.” And to Bianca, Luc said, “Nice to meet you.”

Luc walked to the bar. Charlie had put on “A Taste of Honey” by the Tijuana Brass, blasting away the plangent intravenous melancholy of Serge Gainsbourg. Dominick was frugging vigorously around April, who was laughing as she wove her own sinuous, smoldering thrusts toward him.

His mother, in flowing white shirt and trousers, was dancing affectionately with Cassian, her arms stretched out and resting on his shoulders, while he talked to her about something that clearly meant a lot to both of them, perhaps the Footsie 100.

Luc turned away and went through the gate and crossed the road to the rocks. Here, the music was not so insistent, or pungent with memory, and he heard the sound of the waves slapping and sucking at the rocks somewhere below his feet, and he remembered jumping into the water, long ago, right here, unwillingly, at exactly this time of the night—

A tiny red glow indicated someone sitting nearby on the ledge over the sea, smoking a cigarette. A dark slender shape with hair diffusing the lights of the port.

“Hola,”
she said.

A great electric charge passed through Luc. “Montserrat,” he said.

“Yes.”

“It’s me, Luc. We spoke—”

“Of course. I know it’s you.”

He walked toward her. He could see her face now, his eyes adjusting to the dark, and she had turned so that her strong features caught the light from across the road. He couldn’t understand how he hadn’t seen it immediately: it was the most beautiful face he’d ever seen.

He said, “I liked talking with you earlier.”

“Yes, me too. It was nice, finally, after all these years.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well”—she laughed—“I was in love with you for years.”

Luc’s Spanish was fluent, so he knew he hadn’t misunderstood her. He’d imagined it, then. So clearly too. “What?” he said.