"I say, you're not headed to Cala Marsopa, are you? I couldn't possibly catch a lift with you? Lulu said someone might meet the plane, but there's no one here and it'll take forever to get a taxi."

Billie and Aegina were silent. They looked toward Gerald.

"We're-" Gerald began to say.

"I've just got the one bag. And a typewriter . . ." Dominick felt a pall settle over them. "But I'm sure I'll find a taxi-"

"We're going as far as Manacor," said Gerald. "We can drop you at the taxi rank there."

"That's on the way, isn't it? That would be fantastic. Are you sure?"

"Of course," said Gerald. He opened the hatchback and lifted Dominick's large, fat suitcase, which took up the entire footprint of the Simca's rear compartment. Dominick handed him the typewriter, a slim Olivetti Lettera. "Anywhere you like with this," he said cheerfully. "Unbreakable."

When they opened the doors, Dominick said, "No, I insist, I'll be fine in the back."

"No, you sit in the front," Billie said firmly.

"Are you sure?"

Billie got into the back with Aegina.

"I can't thank you enough," said Dominick feelingly as they drove away from the airport. "The taxis don't seem to be keeping up with the tourists. I was hoping to get to the Rocks in time for a bathe before drinks, and now I hope, I believe, I shall." He turned in his seat and grinned at Billie, who had slipped her sunglasses on. "We must have been on the same plane. Are you just down for your holiday?"

"Yes," said Billie. She looked at him briefly, then opened the sliding window so the air blew over her and stopped further conversation. She looked out at the windmills made of limestone towers and sailcloth.

Dominick craned his head farther round to see Aegina. She was expressionless. He couldn't see her eyes behind her sunglasses. She was looking forward, either at him or past him. "Have you broken up for the holiday, or are you still in school?"

"We've broken up," intoned Aegina.

"You've got the whole summer ahead of you. Marvelous! It seems endless when you're young, doesn't it?"

"Yes," said Aegina.

It was an hour to Manacor. Dominick noted the changes that were more apparent every year. The same Cezanney landscape he'd first seen in 1962, but every year the island became more built up. Urbanizacion Los Eucaliptos, Urbanizacion Las Almendras, square, unattractive apartamientos sprouting up around the inland towns serving the coastal resorts. More cars. Jerry everywhere now and nobody seeming to remember that they'd popped all those people into the ovens. Hardly saw anyone on a donkey anymore. But the heat, the swarthy peasants, the bright un-Englishness of it all, and the ancient-looking landscape, where it wasn't smothered by car hire or estate agent premises, still worked for Dominick. He felt as he always had when he came to Mallorca: he'd reached Shangri-la.

"I've been worried about development," he said, looking at Gerald and then around at the two in the backseat again, "but it's still ineffably beautiful, isn't it?"

They all looked ahead through the windscreen that was spattered with flies.

"It is, yes," agreed Gerald.

They dropped him beside the taxi rank at the bus station in Manacor.

"I can't thank you enough," said Dominick, as Gerald got out and opened the back of the Simca. An alert taxi driver was already out of his car and lifting Dominick's bag the moment Gerald set it down. "You will all come round to the Rocks and let me buy you a drink, won't you?" said Dominick. He bent and waved through the back window at Aegina. "Do come and see me!"

They drove on to the hospital and parked. Billie noticed grimly the way the staff smiled at Gerald and Aegina as they walked through the building.

In bed, there was little of Paloma visible to recognize. Her head was wrapped in a bandage. A ventilator tube was taped over her mouth, the noise of her respiration regular and overlaid with the machine that sounded like a bellows. Her eyes were shut, the lids dark as if sprinkled with kohl.

Approaching her bed, Gerald spoke to Paloma conversationally. "Hola, querida. Billie esta aqui. Va quedarse con nosotros un poco. Aegina esta aqui tambien."

"Hallo, Paloma," said Billie almost cheerfully. She picked up Paloma's left hand, which lay on the thin blanket beside her thigh, and bent down and kissed it. Then she looked at the patient in bed. "Hallo," she said with less conviction.

Aegina sat on the other side of the bed and held her mother's right hand. Gerald pulled items from a straw bag-bread, small plastic bags of almonds and olives, a piece of Manchego cheese; a corked half-liter bottle of red wine; a tattered paperback, The World of Odysseus, by M. I. Finley-and arranged these on the table between the upholstered visitor's chair and Paloma's bed.

"I can stay now, if you like," Billie said.

"No, I'm fine," insisted Gerald. "Why don't you go home and relax. Come back later. Or when you like. It's wonderful that you're here now. You and Aegina can come and go, and you can leave me here."

"All right. Can we bring you anything else?"

"No. I'm all set for a bit, thanks."

"Aegina," said Billie. "Do you want to stay for a bit? I don't mind. I'm in no hurry to leave, we can stay as long as you like."

"No, it's all right," said Aegina. "We were here before we came to the airport." She stood up.

Billie looked at Gerald as he settled into the chair. "What, about seven or eight?"

"Yes. Fine. Don't wait dinner for me. Whenever you like after you eat."

In the car, Aegina was silent.

"Sweetheart," Billie said, "you must tell me what I can do for you, and for your papa. Whatever you need at the shops. Whatever you both need me to do. It's what I'm here for. All right?"

"Okay." Aegina was gazing out the car window. Her limp body bumped and jostled like an abandoned marionette with the motion of the car. "Thank you."

Billie glanced at Aegina. That dreadful man was right: she certainly had grown in a year. She had her mother's small yet already womanly shape. Still staring through her enormous sunglasses out the window. Billie could think of nothing comforting to say-Mummy may be brain-dead, sweetheart, but at least she's in no pain wouldn't be helpful.

East of Manacor, the land showed less development. The road still ran beside the limestone walls of the terraced olive and citrus groves of small fincas. Above them rose hills covered with small pines and scrub oak.

"It is lovely here, isn't it?" said Billie. She immediately regretted her remark. It sounded trite and cheerful. "What I mean, sweetie, is that it's a beautiful land where your mother comes from, and that is a part of you."

Aegina's sunglasses swung toward Billie. "Thank you," she said.

Two.

Arabella Squibb crouched on one foot on the lowermost rock ledge above the water, the other foot lifting the monoski in the air.

Luc gunned the engine and the speedboat leapt forward. Arabella tensed as the towline whipped up out of the fantail of foam behind the boat like something alive.

Yesterday, Arabella had spent the entire afternoon learning to let the towline pull her literally off her feet into midair to land on the rapidly deployed monoski without plunging face-first into the water. She could get up on one ski when pulled out of the water easily enough, but once she'd seen Lucy Valence plucked from a standstill off the rocks like a fly by the crack of a whip, Arabella was instantly determined to be able to do it. It was all about the little leap into the air you had to make at just the right moment. She'd got it, twice, yesterday, and then dreamt about it, that little push off into thin air, all night.

She pushed off-first time today-came down on the monoski, lurched forward from the waist before recovering and wobbling away across the water, precarious but upright, carving a trail of tight erratic curlicues on top of the boat's wake.

"Well done, darling!" shouted Richard Squibb. He had come across the road to watch his wife do this new water-ski trick she'd told him he simply had to come and see. He wore a much-creased Panama and a tiny, red man-bikini beneath his sunburned potbelly. He puffed at a fat Romeo y Julieta Belicoso and watched a moment longer, wreathed in blue smoke in the still air, before he turned and walked back across the road to the Rocks.

As the ski chattered and bounced beneath her like a runaway horse, Arabella slowly straightened her back until she found the position of relative equipoise she already knew from being pulled up out of the water on one ski. But the thrill of going from nought to flying off the rocks in a single moment with barely a splash to race across the surface of the sea after the boat had reinvented the experience.

She leaned back and dug in her right, rearmost heel and swooped to the right, with thrilling acceleration, across the speedboat's wake into the smooth water beyond. She heard a shout from ahead and looked up to see Luc turned in his seat looking back at her, his arm out, raising a thumb in the air, his sun-bleached hair flying about his head.

Darling Lukey. All of a sudden a very yummy sixteen. His father, an American whom nobody had ever seen who lived in Paris, had bought him the speedboat and engine so he could make some money for the summer. Five hundred pesetas a go, Lukey was charging the Rocks guests, and he'd been making thousands a day. Most of the guests were running a tab, but Arabella handed him the cash each time. Today she'd put a finger into his swimming costume and stuffed the bills into the waistband.

She zigzagged across the wake, leaning back and shooting off sideways and accelerating at what felt like incredible speed. Every time she turned and sped off in the other direction, Luc raised the Kodak Instamatic she'd given him to take pictures of her. Then he raised his thumb again and grinned. He made her feel that she was doing fabulously. Perhaps she was. At fleeting moments she felt graceful. She knew her body looked good. She skied for the camera-and for Luc. Just for you, scrumptious darling. He was looking at her the entire time through his sunglasses, glancing over his shoulder only now and then to see where they were headed. As the salt spray dried on her warm thighs and stomach and the thrumming vibration of the ski made itself felt in every muscle of her body, she felt tremendously sexy. She gazed steadily, despite the bumps, back at him.

Apart from the air on her face made by their skimming progress, the sea was mirror calm today, disturbed only by the surface-peeling wake of Luc's motorboat dispersing slowly like skywriting. The sea was sky-blue, the sky azure. Arabella felt she could water-ski all the way to Africa. She saw herself in one of those Italian films: water-skiing on the Bay of Naples, or off Portofino. The louche, tightly muscled boat boy, the blond version, staring at her through his sunglasses while he steered the boat with one arm cradled over the wheel. In the film she was supposed to let him take her to a fisherman's shack after water-skiing for a savage shagging, a classic symbiosis. Later her rich husband would tip the boy and thank him for giving his wife such a good time. Richard's tip, however, wouldn't be a good one. He was so awfully tight, despite being well-off. Poor Lukey, darling.

Abruptly she fell. When she came to the surface, Luc had turned the boat and was planing toward her. He throttled back and the boat slowed, settling lower into the sea, grumbling as it drew near. Luc bent overboard and picked up the floating monoski. Then he turned the wheel again, and the boat floated close to Arabella.

"You've lost your top," Luc said, scanning the water for the missing tendril of garment.

Arabella looked around for a moment, revolving in the water. "Never mind," she said.

Luc continued to peer intently into the water around the boat. The small ones, the sort Arabella had been wearing, made of cloth with no spongy filler, didn't always float on the surface. They could sink slowly and wrap themselves around the propeller.

"Sweet of you to worry, Lukey darling, but I've got a suitcase full of them. Can I get in?"

"You don't want to ski back?" He proffered the ski.

"I think I'll get out actually, darling, and dry off."

Luc hung the boarding ladder over the side and Arabella climbed up. She made no attempt to cover her breasts. She lowered her head, wrung out her hair with her hands, then threw her head up, arching her back with her chest pushed forward as she tossed her long, interesting if unnaturally dark hair back to splay out across her shoulders, splashing Luc's hot skin with cool drops. He handed her a blue Rocks bathing towel while politely though not overtly aiming his eyes elsewhere, but he caught a jolting peripheral impression of very dark nipples at the center of the triangles of pale skin surrounded by her deep tan. He had imagined just such a mishap with her mishap-suggestive bathing costume, the top of which seemed designed to come readily adrift, offering just such a view of Arabella's breasts, and they were better than he'd imagined. They were large, and though Arabella must be close to forty, he hadn't expected such a statuesque retention of their harnessed shape.

She sat beside him on the white and turquoise vinyl-upholstered seat as they flew smoothly at what felt like a hundred miles an hour above the surface of the sea toward the shore.

"Marvelous!" shouted Arabella. "Go, baby!"

She leaned back against Luc's arm, as if confusing it for the seat's backrest, and opened the towel to expose her goose-pimpled breasts to the sun. She moved again, settling herself more comfortably against him. The top of her head was level with his shoulder and he looked down on her breasts and the mound of her belly and its noticeable stretch marks rising above the tiny remnant of her bikini.

A moment later she said something he didn't catch.

"Sorry?"

"I said you're so polite, darling."

"Oh." Luc tried to remember what he'd said that was so polite. "Thank you."

They sped toward the shore. Luc felt every part of Arabella against him, almost a dead weight that heaved and lurched into him with the movement of the boat. Their thighs touched and bounced together, her skin was still cool from the water. He had a barely concealed erection and he hoped she would see it and touch it, but as far as he could tell, her eyes were closed. The boat tore on, jarred occasionally by an errant hillock of swell, and, for a moment, everything was in balance.

Luc recognized the tall figure waving at them from the rocks. "Dominick's arrived," he said.

Arabella sat up and looked ahead. "Dear Dominick. Such a silly old cunt. I can't imagine who reads those dreadful novels he writes or how he lives."

"Have you read them?" asked Luc. He was always meaning to but had been put off by their covers, which looked like dramatic renderings of the window displays of men's and women's fashions at Galeries Lafayette.

"I read part of one," said Arabella, as if only just now remembering. "It was killingly bad. But I do love him." She waved at Dominick.

"Hal-lo, dar-ling!" Dominick shouted. "Luc, you must tell me where you caught such a Siren."

Luc pulled the throttle to neutral and the boat wallowed closer to the shore.

"Darling, Dominick, how are you, silly old sausage?" Arabella said. She put a hand on Luc's thigh, squeezed it, and dove off the boat. She swam to the steel ladder Lulu'd had cemented into the rocks and climbed gracefully out of the water to where Dominick stood at the top, grinning at her.

"Good God," he said, staring at her breasts. "You come bearing gifts."

They kissed. "Give me your towel, you leering bastard," said Arabella.

She wrapped herself in the towel and turned toward Luc. "Thank you, Lukey, darling." She walked across the road to the Rocks.

Dominick watched her for a moment. Then he turned toward Luc. "Catch of the day?"

Luc smiled. "Ha-ha."

"Have you got time to take me out, or are you packing up now?"

"No, sure. Come on."

"Fan-tastic!" said Dominick. He dove into the sea.

Three.

Arabella was no different from usual at dinner. But Luc understood now.

After the water-skiing and the sensational ride in the boat back to shore while she lay heavy and virtually naked against him, he was convinced that real, actual sex was in the offing. Arabella would give him some signal, arrange something, and it would finally happen. She'd always made him feel that she liked him particularly, that he alone understood her. For years, her eyes had swung to Luc's to let him-just him-know with a droll expression what she thought as someone beside the pool or at dinner was waffling on about Prime Minister Harold Wilson's ghastly teeth-"Why on earth doesn't the man go to a fucking dentist? Must he be so insistently the common prole?"-or the rising London property market. Last summer she'd told Luc he was turning into a "complete sexpot." From that day to reaching some sort of apotheosis this afternoon, he'd been engorged with fantasies of Arabella Squibb.

She bantered comfortably with Richard across the table, threw no more than normally conspiratorial looks at Luc, and at ten said she was tired, would forgo pudding and port, and stood up.

"I'm off to bed, my darlings," she said as she pushed back her chair and stood up.