Rocks, The Read Free Page A

a lot. She invited both of us to her birthday party.”
    “Ah,” said Gerald. Bianca, the daughter of Aegina’s best friends in Cala Marsopa, was Charlie’s age, fifteen. She had grown up noticeably the past year. She now looked at least twenty-five, he thought.
    “And people your age go to the Rocks?”
    “Sometimes,” said Charlie, nonchalantly munching almonds. “After dinner.”
    “They don’t serve you drinks, do they?”
    “No, Coke. Or TriNaranjus.”
    Coming from Charlie, this lolling, smoldering youth, it sounded like a joke. Gerald was unsure if his leg was being pulled. Perhaps they drank like fishes now at fifteen and he was the last to know. “Really?” He looked over at Aegina.
    “They drink Coke, Papa.”
    Gerald said, “Hmm,” in a way that he himself detested as soon as he heard it because it made him sound like a hopelessly reactionary dotard.
    “Will Tom and Milly be there?” he asked.
    Aegina looked up at him. “Papa, they’ve been dead for years.”
    “Oh, right.”
    He returned to the living room, sat on the old sagging leather couch, and picked up what he had put down before going into the kitchen: his book,
The Way to Ithaca
. Out of print for more than forty years, a new edition was being brought out by Doughty Books, Ltd, in London. Doughty had published a line of short works about ancient history, small, attractively designed hardback books written in lively, readable prose by experts who managed to avoid the pedantry of scholarship. They had proved popular and sold well. Founded only seven years earlier, Doughty had twice won
The Sunday Times
’ Small Publisher of the Year Award.
    Ten months ago, out of the blue, Gerald had found a letter from Kate Smythe, Doughty’s editor in chief, in his dusty letter box under the carob trees at the bottom of the drive. One of her authors had “discovered”
The Way to Ithaca
, the original John Murray edition, in a library sale and sent it to her. She thought the book “absolutely brilliant in its accessible and charming approach to the modern, nonnautical, reader, and still as relevant to the world of today as on the day it was first published.” Everybody at Doughty believed that with a “very little light editing,” it would stand neatly alongside their recent books on the Parthenon, the Greco-Persian Wars, the Elgin Marbles. They agreed that Gerald’s original black-and-white photographs were “essential to the book, classic in composition, and conveying a timeless sense of the Mediterranean that appeared to give the modern reader contemporary snapshots of the Homeric world.” (In other words, Gerald had remarked to Aegina, they think I’m three thousand years old.) Did Gerald have a literary agent to whom they could present their offer? If not, Kate Smythe would be happy to refer him to an agent with whom Doughty did frequent business and whose impartiality and commitment to Gerald’s best interests were guaranteed. And did he have a phone number?
    Skeptical, suspecting this offer would evaporate before anything came of it, Gerald had written back that he did not at present have a literary agent (he’d never had one) but that he would be pleased to consider their offer. Within days of dropping his return letter in the yellow Correos box in Cala Marsopa, he received a gushing phone call from Kate Smythe in London. She sounded sincerely enthusiastic. She told him again how much she loved his book, how excited Doughty would be to bring out a new edition, how well they thought it would do.
    “How very nice,” Gerald told her, still not convinced, looking abstractedly at bottles of his own honey-colored olive oil that sat on the shelf beside the phone. (When he’d finally allowed the installation of a phone in 1987, he’d wanted it out of the way and put it in the larder.)
    Less than an hour later, he was back in the larder, answering the phone again. The caller identified herself as Deborah Greene. She was a literary agent,