Rocks, The (31 page)

“I haven’t had time,” said Aegina, moving away. She remembered Arabella and recognized her as the sort of terrifying Amazonian woman she admired and wanted to be when she grew up.

“Don’t go, sweetie. I was just looking to check about the water-skiing. I’m sure Lukey will be here in a moment. He was with us at the Miravista.”

But Aegina kept going, following the shadows around the house. She left Arabella behind.

A large figure coming from the bar loomed in front of her, blocking her exit.

“A-gee-nah—”

She stopped.

Dominick had a bottle in one hand. His shirt was half open, his chest shiny with sweat. His long hair partly stuck to his forehead and flying away from his head. “How lovely to see you. And unexpected too. How are you?”

“I’m fine,” she said, and tried to pass.

“What’s the matter? You all right?”

“Nothing.” She was small and entirely closed up, her eyes ranging in all directions around him. What a fantastic little minx she was in those incredibly tiny shorts and T-shirt, like one of those gamine French film actresses scaled down to three-fifths size.

She staggered slightly—she was drunk.

“Hang on. Don’t be in such a hurry. Look,” he held up the bottle, half full. “Champers. Good stuff. You can’t say no. Come and have a drink.”

He slid his hand around her upper arm. She didn’t immediately withdraw—a telling sign. “Drinkies?” He pulled gently. After a momentary hesitation, she let him pull her. He led her to the stairs.

He didn’t have any glasses in his room. They drank from the bottle. Several long swigs apiece. It took no time at all once he’d kissed her. She said absolutely nothing but compliantly lay down as he pulled her little shirt and shorts off. “My God, look at you,” Dominick mooned, in genuine thrall.

He set about her with all his skills, like a taxidermist, turning her over, lifting her, turning her back again—she weighed nothing. She quickly appeared to lose consciousness, apart from the appropriate respiration and occasional muted cries. Finally, finished, exhausted, Dominick lay back, thinking he must rouse her in a minute and get her out.

When he woke in the morning she was gone. He played it over in his mind. Body out of a fairy tale, or one of the little fairy dancers in a ballet. One of the most fantastic fucks of his life. No entanglement—blessed creature had slipped away like a doe.

His eye caught the sheet and he saw the dried brown stains. He sat up and noticed his hands. He pulled away the sheet and looked between his legs. Fucking Armageddon. He got out of bed and padded across the tiled floor to the tiny sink in the corner of the room. He turned on the tap and looked up into the little majolica framed mirror on the wall.

There was something in his face, framed by his wild hair, of the mad, caught-in-the-act look of
Saturn Devouring His Son
in the Goya painting he’d once seen in the Prado and never forgotten. An impression not softened by the apparent evidence that this Saturn had consumed his boy with lashings of Worcestershire sauce and wiped the gore and condiment across his face with a dripping hand.

Dominick turned on the tap and splashed water over his face.

Never mind the mess. Fucking fantastic. Would she be back for more? Teach her a few things next time.

A
gloomy drive
to the airport. To break the unbearable silence, Gerald ventured what he hoped was a constructive comment about letter writing. Billie must get some Basildon Bond. It makes a difference, he said, what you think and write when you’re writing on good paper.

“We’ll get Basildon Bond,” Billie said.

Aegina said nothing.

He dropped them near the door to the departures hall and rumbled off to park the Simca.

Inside, Gerald ordered a
café con leche
for Billie, a TriNaranjus for Aegina, and a
café
for himself. They sipped glumly. Gerald smoked ferociously, surrounding himself with a dense blue cloud. He could think of nothing comforting to say. It’ll only be a few months—for people of his generation, used to the war, with uncertain outcomes of much longer separations, such partings were trivial. Aegina, in fact, appeared preternaturally composed: no weeping or lamentations. Thank God. Like this, they could simply sip their drinks while waiting for the flight to be called and look out in agreed-upon contemplation at the strangely abiding
Don Quixote
landscape of crumbling stone walls, tawny fields, and sail-powered windmills that still surrounded Palma’s airport.

Billie went off to the loo.

Gerald peered at his daughter through the smoke. She was too composed, he realized. He’d been unwilling to open floodgates of emotion, but now he put his arm around Aegina. “Aegina. Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“It’ll only be a few months, and you’ll come down for Christmas. And we’ll—” Of course, it will be Christmas without her mother. What an idiot he was.

“Yes. I’ll be all right. Don’t worry, Papa. I’m fine.”

She was amazing. Got her strength from her mother.

“Well, what are you thinking?” he asked.

“I’m thinking that my childhood is over. It just ended.”

“No, no, not at all. You are still only fourteen—I mean, you’re just a girl, Aegina. Don’t worry, you’re not being packed off to England to grow up, you know. You’re just going to school. You’ll make new friends. Really, you’re still a young girl, you’ve got lots of time—”

“I’m sure it will be great, Papa. But my childhood is over.”

•   •   •

I
t was that ruddy
great darkie guitar player, Dominick realized, chomping away on an
ensaïmada
with quite amusing delicacy in the airport café.

“You’re off as well, then, Jackson?” said Dominick.

Jackson gazed at him. “Yes.”

“Back to America?”

“No, I’m going to Gibraltar. Got a job playing with a band on an ocean liner for the winter. Going to the Caribbean.”

“Fantastic. Lucky old you. I wish I were in your shoes.” Indeed, what a swath old Jackson would cut through a shipload of widows cruising for a spot of excitement. “So will we see you back here next summer?”

“I don’t know. Depends what comes up.”

“All right, well, have fun aboard your ship of music lovers.”

Dominick walked on toward his gate with the other people heading for the London flight. He saw two familiar faces: the father, the woman who wasn’t his wife—and the girl.

“Hallo,” said Dominick cheerily. “Are you off back home too? We must be on the same flight.” It
was
Aegina. She looked like a child in her little shirt and skirt and cheap plastic sandals. Terribly sweet. “Well, Aegina, it was such fun seeing you this summer.” He grinned at her. “We must get together next year.”

Aegina stepped quickly forward and kicked him in the balls.

Dominick was completely surprised, but he could say nothing because her blow had been devastatingly accurate. He only grunted and crumpled forward, dropping the newspaper he’d bought at the airport shop.

Aegina kicked again, but Dominick’s bent posture offered only his shins to her foot. She threw out her arms and launched herself at his chest, pushing him so that he fell sprawling on the hard marble airport floor.

“Aegina?” said Billie.

Gerald stepped forward and wrapped his arms around his daughter. She was a trembling, throbbing coil. He pulled her away, folding her tightly into his chest, and watched the man on the floor kicking his legs like a fallen horse, scrambling to get away.

T
he mother and daughter
arrived at the beach first.

“¡Mira las olas, mamá!”
yelled the four-year-old girl.

“Sí, son grandes. ¿Qué dijo tu padre?”

“Que tenemos que ser cuidadosos.”

“Bueno. Claro,”
said Paloma.

They crossed the sand to their usual spot.
“¿Dónde están?”
cried the little girl.

“Ya vienen.”

There had been a storm somewhere to the north, said her father, who knew all about the sea, and today the waves at the beach would be large and strong. He was right; they were rolling in as booming funnels and breaking on top of one another close to the beach like something being delivered too fast. As soon as they dropped their towels on the sand, the girl dragged her mother to the water’s edge. The foamy water popped and crackled around them. The girl waded deeper, letting go of her mother’s hand, and a wave rushed at her. She screamed as it caught her and she fell. Her mother didn’t move. The wave surged out and the girl lay in the wet sand, laughing.

“¡Mira, mamá! ¡Ahí están!”
she shouted. She stood up and began waving at the woman approaching with the little boy.
“¡Por aquí!”

The other woman and the little boy, who was almost six, joined them in the shallows. The two women stood together while the children played around them.

“Bueno,”
said Preciosa.
“Voy a sentarme. Luc, te quedas cerca de la playa y te cuidas de Aegina. ¿Entiendes?”

On the beach, not far from the water, the women sat on their towels.

“Aie, a madhouse,” said Preciosa.

“What now?”

“Oy! Everything, all the time. Take Luc to the beach, she says, while telling me to clean up the breakfasts, clean the rooms, do the laundry.”

“She never takes Luc to the beach herself?”

“That one? Never. She never goes to the beach, she doesn’t spend any time with him, poor thing.”

“And the father? When does he arrive?”

“I don’t think he’s coming this summer. He’s staying in Paris. He can’t take her, and I don’t blame him—
¡Cuidado!
” Preciosa yelled at the children.

The waves, tumbling closely one atop another, insistently, left no respite after each surge. As the women watched, a retreating wave met a breaker larger than the others. A heap of water rose over the children and swept them off their feet, pulling them into the next wall, which broke and swallowed them in a chaotic vortex of heaping foam.

Both women stood and walked into the water. They grabbed at shiny brown feet, hands, arms, legs indistinguishable from each other, and hauled the spluttering children into shallower water.

“¡Cuidado con las olas!”
said Preciosa. “Look out for the waves or you’ll be carried off to Minorca before we can get you.”

“Don’t go out any farther,” said Paloma.

The women walked back up to their towels. When they had sat down again, Preciosa said: “I saw Gerald down here again the other day.”

Paloma stared hard at her. “Did he come in?”

“No. Just walking on the road around Los Roques.”

Paloma shook her head. “He’s still hooked by that witch.”

“But he loves you, surely?” said Preciosa. “Not her. Not that one?”

“It’s a sickness,” said Paloma.

She looked out at the children.

They were taunting the most vicious of the approaching waves.

“¡Éste!”
yelled Luc.

“¡No, la próxima!”
screamed Aegina, screeching like a bird.

Another wave engulfed them. The water carried them under with unimagined force. It twisted and rolled them together so that neither child could tell whether the arms and legs and hands and feet thumping into their faces and bodies were their own or the other’s. They were one tumbling creature.

And then the water was gone, and they were left sprawled together on the sand in a moment of unnatural quiet, shrieking and laughing. Shrieking and laughing. Before the next wave broke.

A
fter three years
on the island, Gerald no longer walked along the shore in front of Villa Los Roques. During the first year, he’d stopped at the house and knocked on the door on several occasions, but it had never been opened to him. Then he’d been shot by an air rifle while passing the house on the shore road, the .177 lead pellet (he’d picked it up after seeing it fall to the road beside him and put it in his pocket to keep as a memento of Lulu’s shifting feelings for him) stinging his thigh and later raising a small bruise. He now used calle Rotges, bordering the high wall at the back of the property, and occasionally he heard voices on the other side of the wall—Milly’s he could always make out—but never Lulu’s. Other voices, men and women; sometimes a boy’s, Milly’s son Cassian, he supposed. A little way on, a dirt path led down to the dirt road along the sea, well out of sight of the house. That would take him to the beach at Son Moll and then up to the main road close to his long rutted drive.

Today he saw the man and the little boy again. He’d seen them before along the road here. He couldn’t be sure but he thought it was Lulu’s husband and son. They ate sometimes at the Marítimo, in the evenings when Gerald was never in town—Rafael had told him. Lulu and her American husband and the baby boy and their friends from the house.

They were coming toward him from the beach; the American man walking, hugging the little boy to his chest. As they drew close, the man nodded at Gerald with the polite acknowledgment of people who know each other only by infrequent sighting. Nothing deep or knowing in that look: he doesn’t know who I am, Gerald realized. With his straw hat and threadbare shirt and trousers, Gerald wouldn’t be taken for a holidaymaker. A yachtsman, perhaps, or a laborer.

The child was fast asleep on his father’s shoulder. Gerald looked closely at its face for signs of Lulu, but it was simply a very small boy’s sleeping face—Gerald couldn’t tell how old children were by looking at them, but this one seemed convincingly less than two, which would be right. Just a pure sleeping-boy face, unaware of anything in the world.

Gerald nodded back as they passed and walked on.