Rocks, The Read Free

out a faded blue Oxford University Press hardback. Its pages long ago rippled from damp,
The Odyssey of Homer
embossed on the spine. On the front cover, in faded gold on top of the blue cloth, was a circular indented depiction of a small fourteen-oar galley. The figure of a bearded man, Odysseus, was bound by ropes to the mast. In the water below the ship, looking up at him, singing, were the Sirens who bewitched anybody hapless enough to draw within hearing of their liquid song—wingèd harpies clutching bones in their talons, who captured and imprisoned sailors and turned them to skeletons as the skin withered upon their bones.
    Aegina opened the cover. The inscription, written in faded black ink on the first blank, yellowed, damp-spotted page:
    For Lulu. An odyssey.
    Love always, Gerald
    20 July 1948.



One
    W
hy shouldn’t I go?
It’s her seventieth birthday,” said Charlie. He was slouched in a chair at the large oak table in the center of the kitchen, picking from a small pile of raw almonds in front of him, one nut at a time. “Just because you and Grandpa loathe her guts—”
    “That’s not true, Charlie,” said Aegina. She was making dinner, chopping onions and garlic and pine nuts at the other end of the table. “I don’t loathe her. I don’t even think about her.”
    “Yes you do,” said the boy.
    “I don’t have the energy to loathe anybody. And I agree with you. Of course you should go if you want to. Have you been invited?”
    “Mum,” he said with pitying exasperation, “you don’t have to be invited to go to the Rocks. People just go. I’ve been going there all my life.”
    “I know, but isn’t it going to be a big to-do?”
    “Yeah, that’s the point: everyone’s going. But as a matter of fact, Lulu invited me.”
    “She
what
?” came the voice from the living room.
    A moment later Gerald appeared in the doorway. “Why did she invite you? How does she know you?” He looked over his reading glasses at his grandson, who was tall and lithe, with his mother’s dark Spanish coloring. The boy had leapt across some boundary from childhood into strapping youth since the previous summer when Gerald had last seen him. He was a foot taller, already shaving. He looked like a louche young matador, Gerald thought. God help him.
    “Grandpa, I’ve been going there for years,” said Charlie. “Of course she knows me. She’s asked me to be the DJ for her party. It’s a job. She’s paying me five thousand pesetas.”
    “That’s nice,” said Aegina evenly. “Why you, sweetheart?”
    “She likes the music I like. And I like what she likes.”
    “Like what?” asked Aegina.
    “Oh, old stuff, newer stuff. She’s got a turntable and all these classic old vinyl LPs. You really should come down and see sometime—if you don’t hate her guts.”
    “Now stop it, Charlie. I’ve just got plenty to do, and I like to spend my evenings here.”
    “I’m sure she likes your concentration camp music,” said Gerald.
    Charlie’s latest enthusiasms, played more than Gerald would have liked on the gramophone in the living room, were Henryk Górecki’s Third Symphony,
Symphony of Sorrowful Songs
, with Dawn Upshaw’s ululant soprano filling the house with waves of mournful music—lyrics, Charlie informed his grandfather, that had been scrawled on the wall of a Gestapo cell—and Olivier Messiaen’s
Quartet for the End of Time
, composed in a German prisoner-of-war camp. Charlie’s music teacher at school was currently keen on Holocaust music.
    “She doesn’t have any of that.”
    “Lucky her,” said Gerald. He stood irresolutely in the doorway for a moment, and then said: “Does she know who you are? I mean, that you’re connected to . . . us?”
    “Of course she does, Grandpa. Lulu knows everyone.”
    Gerald glanced at his daughter. Aegina met his eyes before looking down at her chopping board.
    “Sounds like you two are terrific chums,” he said.
    “Well, Bianca and I go there