Aegina turned to him. "You'll always have it to look at."

Gerald leaned over and kissed his daughter. Then he said, "Where's Charlie?"

"Penny came and took him to the beach with Bianca. I have a free morning."

Gerald went back outside. He picked up his basket and pruning saw and walked back around the hill to the olive grove. He continued pruning, shaping the trees for how he would want to see them and pick their fruit in fifty years' time. He knelt and held the small trimmed branches against his thighs and cut them into shorter lengths for the basket. He would burn them in the fireplace over the winter.

As she painted her picture of her father's olive grove, Aegina listened to her father's records. He liked the pastoral music of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century English composers: Vaughan Williams, Elgar, Butterworth, Holst, Finzi, Alwyn, Bantock, Parry, Bridge, Delius, Moeran. Gerald liked to read the novels of Thomas Hardy, Arnold Bennett, Anthony Powell, while listening to a stack of his LPs on the old HMV record player. He imagined, Aegina knew, the landscapes of Dorset, the Lake District, and the fen country, London, and the Five Towns in Victorian gaslight, as he read. To Aegina, however, it was all indigenous Mallorcan music-the music she'd listened to growing up. When she heard it she saw the landscape around C'an Cabrer, all the pictures that rose up from her life in Mallorca.

Seeing Luc in town had disassembled her. They had imprinted themselves upon each other in the way babies and animals do with life's earliest emotional and olfactory associations. It would always be Luc, and then everyone else. Would Charlie and Bianca also grow up with a sense of fated inevitability about each other? Naked together at the beach with fat little hands sharing clumps of sand, naked later with hands exploring each other's bodies? Would their whole hermetic world, built of the idea of each other, also rupture and be lost?

In some now unrecallable way, Fergus had seemed the correct antidote to Luc. Stable, cheerful, amusing, massively self-confident, unneurotic, presentable, tall, clean, wearer of suits. A property developer, not an artist or a dreamer. Not her type at all. An odd, incongruent presence at a party seven years earlier at the Sydney Close studio of one of her Chelsea School of Art instructors, Jonquil Thorn, R.A. Half a head taller than everyone else at the party, his pinstripe weaving through a sea of denim and leather.

Fergus had chatted her up as soon as she'd arrived.

"Are you one of Jonquil's students?"

"I was," said Aegina. "I work now."

"Ah. But you're an artist?"

"Yes."

"I don't know a thing about art," he said blissfully.

"Why are you here?"

"Jonquil tells me what to buy. I've bought some of her big abstract thingies. What sort of stuff do you do?"

"Not abstract."

"Like what?"

"Oh, landscapes, drawings, portraits. Very boring."

"Actually, I need some landscapes."

The next evening he appeared at the door to Aegina's small basement flat off Gloucester Road.

"How did you know where I live?" she asked.

"I found your address in Jonquil's Filofax. Can I come in and see your stuff?"

She was offended and flattered. "Does she know?"

"Doubt it."

"Well, since you're here."

He had to stoop through the doorway.

"I like this one," Fergus said, picking up a dark, smudged-looking riverscape, one of Aegina's attempts at a Whistler "nocturne" of the Thames. "It's awfully good-isn't it?"

She was involuntarily charmed that he admitted he didn't know (or affected that he didn't) and asked her, the artist. "Well, it's never as good as one wants it to be-"

"Do you want to sell it? How much do you want for it?"

That was the other thing about Fergus: money.

"I have no idea," she said. He was interested for the wrong reasons. It was embarrassing.

"Two hundred pounds?"

"It's certainly not worth that. You can get a decent nineteenth-century landscape at Christie's for two hundred pounds."

"Well, I like it."

"You don't know a thing about art. You said so yourself." She nodded at her painting in his hand. "QED."

"What's not good about it, then?" Fergus persisted. "What would Jonquil say about it?"

"You'd better ask her-"

"I did. Not about this, obviously, but about you-as an artist. She thinks you're good. Two hundred sounds reasonable, then. You've seen the rubbish out there for ten times that. Right?"

He made her nervous and she wanted him to go away. But she was broke too-always-it infected the way you thought about everything; it weakened resolve. "If you insist."

"I do. Have you eaten?"

It seemed churlish to refuse him. She was even more uncomfortable now. But also hungry.

On the Fulham Road, they were engulfed by a flock of pigeons taking to the air, and Fergus quickly threw his arm around her. He placed himself between her and the pigeons.

He took her to San Frediano. The food and wine were good. Fergus told her about a pigeon he had found and kept for a few days in his dormitory at boarding school. "It shat all over Matron, in her starched white uniform, when she discovered it. I got into terrible trouble."

Aegina laughed. "What happened?"

"Six of the best!"

"What do you mean?"

"A jolly good caning! Six strokes, well laid on."

"You mean they beat you for that?" She saw him as a little boy, hit repeatedly with a bamboo cane.

He asked her out again. She was flattered but not interested. He was ten years older. He was the sort of businessman type she felt she had nothing in common with. He was almost too tall. She put him off, several times.

In late spring, Fergus knocked at the door to her flat.

"You've been gone," he said.

"I was in Morocco." She explained that she'd flown to Morocco and bought some shirts and other clothing and brought them back to sell at various shops, a small but profitable excursion she'd made several years in a row that had helped put her through art school.

"Will you come to dinner? San Fred all right?"

She was off guard, unprepared to think of a good excuse. She was exhausted but, again, hungry, and remembered the food. And he suddenly seemed . . . likable. "All right. But not late, if that's okay with you."

At dinner he told her about the converted barn he'd just bought in Dorset. It needed paintings. There was an auction of British and European nineteenth-century paintings coming up at Christie's, and he wondered if she'd come with him sometime in the next few days and help him pick out a few things.

"I thought you liked modern art," she said.

"I don't know that I like it at all, but one ought to have some of it. I want the older stuff for the barn. You know, cows and hay wains, that sort of thing. Oh, come on."

They went to a viewing on the Thursday before the auction. Aegina recommended a pair of oils of the Bay of Naples by Arthur Meadows: they were good and she believed they would prove good investments.

He drove her home by a circuitous route. "Can I use your fantastic eye for something else?"

He took her to a block of older flats in Fulham. "I've just bought the building." They climbed stairs to a flat on the second floor. "Look, you can just get a view of the river and Wandsworth out this window. What do you think of that molding? I can knock down a few walls and make larger flats of several of these, put an extra bathroom in each. Big open-plan kitchen. Got to put in a lift. What do you think?"

"They'd be fantastic flats," said Aegina, seeing her version of what he saw.

"I'm going down to my barn this weekend. Why don't you come?"

Automatically, but graciously, she declined.

"Oh, come on," he said. "What are you planning on doing otherwise?"

"I'm going to paint. Go for a walk in the park."

"Well, you can paint in the barn. Bring down whatever you need. Walk along the Dorset cliffs. Pretty nice, actually-have you read The French Lieutenant's Woman? That part of the world. I've got masses of work to do. We'll only see each other for meals. Your own bedroom and bathroom, of course. Fireplace in your bedroom. Nice pub. I'll just be too busy to spend any time with you, that's all."

"If you're that busy, why should I come?" But she had already begun to think about it.

"Well, I can make time for you if you insist. But I really want you to see it and tell me what sort of things you think I should get for it."

In the country Fergus wore Levi's. He didn't work that weekend, she didn't paint. He proved to be an indefatigable lover. Friday night, Saturday morning, Saturday night, Sunday morning. On the drive back up to London, he suggested they stop for dinner at San Frediano. It had been a lovely weekend, she said, but she just needed to go home to her flat.

The next day her vagina was red and inflamed. Not surprising, she thought, but a day later it was worse. She went to her doctor. A yeast infection, he pronounced, often the result of activity after a hiatus; might that be a possibility? Yes, said Aegina. She asked if the man might now have it too. Very possibly, her doctor said; he suggested she inform her friend that if he did have anything, it wasn't serious.

Mortified, she rang Fergus.

"I've got a vaginal yeast infection. It's nothing bad, it's not VD, but you might get it or have it too. I'm sorry."

"No, don't be sorry-I'm so sorry-did I give it to you?"

"No, probably not. Don't worry about it. It just happens. You're okay, then?"

"Tip-top, when I last looked. But Aegina, I'm so sorry you're unwell. What can I do for you? Can I take you out to dinner?"

"I'm fine. I'm not unwell, really. I think I'll stay in, though, thank you anyway."

But Fergus was launched on a trajectory of gallant solicitude. He brought flowers and food-a cooked chicken, soup, asparagus, and trifle, from Foxtrot Oscar, a cold bottle of Pouilly-Fuisse-round to her flat. "I'm not inviting myself in," he said. "This is just for you. I'll leave. Please ring me when you need anything." He turned to go, but of course she asked him to stay to help her eat (there was more than enough, it happened, for two). A few days later she brought food to his flat and made them dinner. He had a huge kitchen full of professional equipment.

He wasn't Mr. Right. She knew that absolutely. They were so different. But she began to stop resisting him. Fergus was fun, unexpectedly amusing. Light. Generous. Dependable. This is what a man should be like, she thought, even if he wasn't her sort. But what was her sort? What, actually, was missing? She felt looked after. She liked him-a lot, she decided. He wasn't exactly good-looking, but attractive-a large part of it that incredible self-confidence. There was no drama. She worried that this was because she didn't like him enough.

Then he was knocked down by a taxi outside the Michelin building on Sloane Avenue and when she went to see him in hospital, his face was bruised and he looked so pleased to see her that she felt a surge of emotion that seemed true. She looked after him when he went home. She met his mother, a pleasant woman, when she came up from Basingstoke after the accident. . . .

The music had stopped. Aegina became aware of the solitary sound of her brush on the canvas.

Somehow she always knew when Luc was in town, but she'd managed to avoid him for years. They had seemingly excised each other, like an amputation. But now she could feel the phantom limb; it still itched or stung but it felt like a natural part of her. In its place, Fergus was some sort of efficient prosthesis.

Five.

Luc watched his mother's SEAT 600-the Rocks' car, in practice, the way she let everyone use it-come down the quay. The sun blazed off the windshield, he couldn't see who was inside.

After leaving her at breakfast, full of anger, he'd turned away from the coast, tooling the motorcycle inland along back roads all the way to the nowhere village of Ruberts, almost at the center of the island, a sinuous route remembered from visits to a friend who'd once owned a house there. Far enough to ensure he wouldn't return to the yacht before the lunch. He didn't want to tell Szabo that his mother wasn't coming.

When he stepped aboard Dolphin just before one o'clock, Fergus was the only guest, sitting around the wide cockpit table talking with Szabo, Veronique, and Mireille.

"Ah, Luc!" Szabo seemed overjoyed to see him.

No doubt, Luc thought, he was becoming fatigued by Fergus's relentless bonhomie, though the two women were laughing and appeared to be enjoying Aegina's husband. Mireille particularly. Szabo's sister-in-law, a small creature with a muscular, almost simian build and a chronic poker face, had seemed catatonic to Luc so far, beyond the minimal energy she summoned for sunbathing, reading, and eating. "Veronique's sister will be with us," Szabo had said in Paris when outlining the cruise, working his eyebrows with the apparent suggestion of an intrigue. "She's very attractive. Veronique has told her all about you." The advance praise seemed to have worked against him. Luc found Mireille to be devoid of the remotest interest in him, almost to the point of aversion. She resolutely ignored him, or responded to his attempts to engage her in conversation with the polite sufferance accorded an overtalkative tradesman. Yet now, demonstrating unsuspected reserves of personality and humor, she was smiling, tittering, rocking in her seat with amusement, attending to every word Fergus was saying. It seemed like a miraculous medical recovery.

The abiding mystery of Fergus. Luc had seen him frequently during the last few summers at the Rocks. An English sort Luc understood by the term "Hooray Henry," a loud, shallow twit, though evidently successful at business. Money, Luc knew only too well, effected the most extraordinary alchemy on most women, but even so, he couldn't put Fergus and Aegina together. He didn't see how she could have made that work. The Aegina who could make a life with Fergus was as unsuspected as the suddenly effervescent Mireille.

"Salut," said Luc, choosing French, his own way of cutting Fergus.

"Where are your mother and the others from the Rocks?" Szabo asked him plaintively, in English.

"I guess they'll be along soon." Averting his eyes, he looked down the quay, and then saw the little SEAT. "Actually, here they are."

The car parked beside the yacht. Out came Sarah; Dominick's long legs; then, incredibly, his mother. She glanced up and her eyes found him, and she smiled at him. Luc felt an unaccustomed rush of love for her.

"Thank you, Mum," he whispered, embracing her as she stepped from the aluminum passerelle onto the deck.

"Just for you," Lulu said quietly.