"No, you can sit," she said, "if I won't disturb you. I have to lay the table."

She worked efficiently around him. Now he saw that she was impressively ugly. A gargoyle on the wall of an Egyptian crypt. Large black eyes, a low brow, a wide full mouth, everything asymmetrical, and that nose, like a Tintin villain. Everything else, though, was pretty good: the thick dark Spanish hair, a dancer's body.

"You're mallorquina?" he asked.

"My ancestors are from here. I live in Barcelona but I've come here to Mallorca every summer of my life."

"Ah, like me, except for the ancestors," said Luc. "What are you called?"

"Montserrat," she said.

"I'm called Luc-Lluc in Catalan."

"Yes, I know," she said. She smiled at him suddenly, as if she knew something he didn't that amused her intensely. "Pleased to meet you."

"And you," he said. "This what you do?"

"No. This is work for the summer. I'm studying art history, religious iconography, at the University of Barcelona."

The best university in Spain. Not just an asymmetrical face, then. "Are you religious?"

"When I need to be." She grinned. Sharp white teeth in wine red gums. "Nice to meet you-at last." She went off to set another table.

At last? What's that all about?

Now he couldn't take his eyes off her. Montserrat. Her ancestors, easily discerned, were Roman, Moorish, Catalan. She was the highly evolved product of all of Mediterranean history and cultures. Luc understood her immediately as he would never fathom the opaque shallows of the homogenized April from California. Intelligence poured off her. She was quick, knowing (she knew more than he did about something, apparently), and funny. She would understand him too, he knew it absolutely. He sipped his beer, watching Montserrat swing her lean thighs and narrow hips around a table. Her quick eyes and hands adroitly covering a table. She had strong hands. Her genetic makeup contained eons of domestic skills. She could probably herd goats just as well, with children on her hip. He imagined her in Paris. Reading a book on religious iconography in the Luxembourg Garden. In his apartment. He imagined the view from just above the knees upward between Montserrat's thighs. Maybe she could transfer to the Sorbonne.

He'd got her all wrong, he realized. She wasn't ugly at all. Her face was a Picasso.

His mother was, of course, right again: What was he doing with April? Like a good Californian, she was skilled in bed, but with a rote avidity that smacked more of conscious performance than lust, and was, not astonishingly, beginning to bore him. He would undoubtedly bore her too before long, with his frame of reference that might as well be allusions to the Upanishads for all that April understood at any given moment what he might be on about. He ought to find someone like Montserrat, warm, real, unconcerned about his mother's sexual protection. Like old Gerald had done: married a local woman who'd given him a child and stuck to him, and devoted herself to him until she'd dropped. He imagined the children he and Montserrat would make together: dark-haired, beautiful, artistic, extraordinary, asymmetrical. They would all be Picassos- "Hey!" said April.

Luc tensed reflexively as she dropped into his lap with a proprietorial heedlessness.

"Look. What. Your. Mother. Gave me," she said, her voice full of amazed reverence. "Aren't they just, like, incredibly beautiful?"

"They are," he agreed.

They were straps of braided gold yarn containing glinting metallic filaments. They looked exotic, fabled, Levantine. They had the burnished golden hue of ancient coins.

"You wear them on the top of your feet," she said, raising her bare foot.

"I know. I've seen them before."

April didn't seem to hear him. "You put this loop around the second toe, like this, and then they go over the top of the foot and then around the ankle and fasten like this." She put the pair on her feet, which were like a child's feet: pale, unveined, undistorted by ill-fitting footwear, now dressed as if for a toga party.

"Your mother just, like, floated over to me when I came in and gave them to me. To keep!"

"She's taken a shine to you."

"Really? Aw. She is totally beautiful. Look, what do you think?" She lifted her legs, pivoting them for angled views of her adorned feet, unaware (or perhaps not) of the way her buttocks ground into Luc's lap.

He looked over her scissoring legs at Montserrat, who had moved off to a more distant table.

"Aren't they amazing?" said April. "You wear them on bare feet, without shoes."

"Yes, they're amazing. They were made in the sixties by someone who lived here. A friend of mine."

"I'm going to wear them tonight."

April rubbed her gilded foot along Luc's leg. She moved her buttocks again, consciously now. "Mmm. What's this?"

Only his body's brainless response; Luc wasn't interested in pursuing it. "Nothing much."

April got up and stood beside Luc. She raised her leg, stretching her foot aloft balletically, and then brought it down onto Luc's lap, pushing into him.

"Hey," he said.

April gazed at her feet. "These things are making me feel, like . . . I don't know . . ." She raised her arms and began to sway. She'd shown him her belly-dance technique several times. That's what's coming, he realized. He stood up as the towel around April's hips began to twitch and her gold-topped feet darted toward him. Again, he looked at Montserrat, across the patio.

"Okay," he said. He took her hand and tried to lead her toward the barracks, but April, gyrating slowly, pulled her arm away. He turned and walked on quickly toward the barracks. He leapt up the stairs toward his room.

Three.

Late in the afternoon, Charlie rode his bike down the rutted dirt driveway from C'an Cabrer, his grandfather's farm. It was another kilometer along the paved road into Cala Marsopa. He met Bianca at the English and German bookshop and cafe off the plaza. They bussed each other on both cheeks and walked, Charlie pushing his bike, through town to the port.

"Ho-laaa," Rafaela, the pale, lightly mustached, dark-haired woman who owned the Bar-Restaurante Maritimo, greeted them both with affection.

"Hola," Charlie replied, with a smile, "como estas?" He'd been brought to this restaurant overlooking the port as an infant in a basket, and he'd come back every summer of his life. Rafaela always knew him. It wasn't so everywhere in Cala Marsopa. A week ago, buying a bag of hot churros from the gnarled vendor whom Charlie had known since toddlerhood and remembered like an uncle who always had a treat for him, the old man had looked at him-now a six-foot youth-without recognition, and asked him for "funfundzwanzig pesetas," and Charlie had been cut to the quick.

Rafaela led them to a table on the terrace overlooking the yachts and the fishing boats in the harbor. They ordered hamburguesas, papas fritas, and Cokes. Before the food arrived, Sylvestre, Natalie, and Marie joined them. Rafaela had known them for years too: the children of children of foreign residents who had lived on or come back to the island since Rafaela had been a child herself. They ordered calamari.

"On va tout le monde a l'anniversaire de Lulu au Rocks?" asked Sylvestre.

"Yeah. I'm going to be the DJ," said Charlie.

"Ahhh, non!" said Marie, expectorating the first word with exasperation. "Putain, j'en ai marre de cette musi-i-i-que."

"No, it's cool," said Charlie agreeably. "Anyway, it's what Lulu wants."

After they'd eaten, Sylvestre and the two French girls walked back through town.

The sea breeze had died. It was hot near the stucco apartment buildings and concrete walls that had replaced the shade of bent pines and crumbles of limestone that defined the edges of the old fishing harbor that still appeared in postcards of Cala Marsopa. Charlie and Bianca climbed the steps to the top of the breakwater and walked out to the blinking light at the far end where they sat in the shadow of its structure, out of the flash. It was cooler above the water.

They kissed wetly, hungrily, like people eating steadily under a time constraint. Charlie put his hand inside Bianca's shirt and slipped her precocious breasts free of her bra. She threw her legs over his lap and let her hand rest on Charlie's thigh. Charlie's own crossed legs prevented, he hoped, Bianca feeling his erection pulsing spasmodically beneath her. As a child, Bianca had been skinny. When Charlie saw her the summer they were both twelve, she'd become softer. At thirteen, she was heavier. This year, at fifteen, Charlie's age, that heaviness had concentrated in her sizable breasts, and her hips. Now he thought of Bianca ceaselessly when he masturbated, but they'd been playmates since they were children and he didn't want to spoil their friendship. Sex had come over them, and they played with it nicely like friends playing dolls. They went no further. By unspoken agreement, they'd settled on this decent plateau of intimacy. Charlie liked Bianca too much to make her uncomfortable.

After a bit, he looked at his watch and said, "I better get going."

At the bottom of the steps, Charlie got on his bike. Bianca sat on the crossbar and he pedaled them down the quay. He dropped her close to the plaza and she said, "a toute a l'heure," as he pedaled away.

Five minutes later, he swung into the small driveway off the alley and laid his bike against the wall outside the kitchen.

At seven, with the tables set, dinner being prepared, most of the Rocks' guests were in their rooms, bathing, dressing, or still taking a siesta. A few were sitting at the bar in bathing suits. Charlie walked across the patio toward the bar, past two middle-aged men hunched over a backgammon board. Dominick Cleland, even hunched, was tall and thin, with a thatch of straight gray-blond hair that made him look like a dissolute version of a well-known British cabinet minister. He was wearing a royal blue Turnbull & Asser shirt over Speedo briefs. His long, hairless legs, shapeless and knobbed as a giraffe's, entwined around themselves, ended in long sockless feet and white Gucci loafers. He had written pulp novels about the misbehavior of the British upper classes, but his subject no longer held the public's interest and he hadn't published a book in twenty years. With a small annuity left to him by an uncle, he lived most of the year in a tiny flat in South Kensington, and spent his summers at the Rocks. He felt at home there. If he was near the phone in the bar when it rang, Dominick liked to answer it by shouting into the receiver, "Los Roques! Digame?" regardless of the fact that no one but Anglophones ever telephoned the Rocks.

His opponent, and physiological opposite, Cassian Ollorenshaw, resembled, even in his youth, the actor Edward G. Robinson at his most toadlike and implacable. Now, his face blotchy red from inflamed rosacea, he peered at the board through small, round, yellow-lensed glasses. His body below his large head was inconsequential, swallowed in a voluminous white T-shirt and skirt-sized swimming trunks. They played fast and silently. They'd been there, playing backgammon at a table on the patio, every summer-except a couple of years when Cassian had been in prison-since Charlie's father had first brought him to the Rocks as an infant. They'd been there when he played in the pool as a child with the children of guests, and with those same children when they returned as teenagers. They were more familiar to him than most of his relatives. Cassian looked up now and said, with a small smile, "Hallo, Charlie."

"Hi, Cassian."

"Hallo, Charlie," said Sally, as he approached the bar. "I'm supposed to give you whatever you want to drink tonight."

"A Coke, please. Just the bottle'll be great, thanks."

He took his Coke into the small room off the bar that once housed the gas bottles. It was no wider than its two glass doors. Inside stood a chair and a table that supported a turntable. Charlie set his Coke down on the table and began going through the vinyl albums that filled a wall of shelves.

Lulu came out of the house, gliding across the patio in a gauzy linen djellaba that billowed behind her. She smiled serenely.

"Lulu, darling," Dominick Cleland greeted her loudly, while shaking a cup of dice. "Are you having the most wonderful birthday ever, my love?"

"I am, thank you, Dominick. So happy you're here to share it with me."

Lulu didn't break her pace. Dominick threw the dice.

The guests at the bar wished Lulu a happy birthday. "Thank you," she said, her smile raking them as she swept by. She went into the small music room.

"Charlie," she said.

"Oh, hi, Lulu. Happy birthday."

She hugged him. "I have a present for you."

"For me?"

"Yes, darling."

She handed him a small black bundle of cloth. It fell open in his hands. He held it up. It was a long black shirt without a collar, opening halfway down the chest with lots of small buttons close together.

"It's from Morocco. It's old but it's never been worn. I want you to have it. I think it will look very good on you."

"Thanks, Lulu."

"Put it on."

"What, now?"

"Yes, sweetheart. It's your uniform for this evening. I want to see how it looks on you. Take off your shirt and put it on."

She sounded like a mother, affectionately, matter-of-factly in charge. Charlie unhesitatingly pulled off his white T-shirt. He pulled the black Moroccan shirt over his head.

"Marvelous," she said. She ran a hand over the shirt, smoothing it down his chest. "Do you like it?"

"Oh, yeah," said Charlie. "It's really-"

"It is a man's shirt. Don't worry."

"No, I like it, it's great."

"You look very good in it, Charlie. Now you remember what we discussed about the music?"

"Yeah. Quiet and gentle, Noel Coward, Al Bowlly, Charles Trenet, Sinatra for dinner-"

"Not only."

"No, no, I know, mix it up. And then Beatles and sixties stuff, Tijuana Brass, Motown afterward."

"That's it," said Lulu, looking very happy. "You know, I'm so pleased it's you here to do this for me, Charlie. It's so very sweet of you. Thank you." She smiled at him.

"I'm happy to do it, Lulu. It's fun."

She leaned forward and kissed his cheek. "See you later."

Four.

Are you ready, Papa?" Aegina called. "We'll leave in five minutes."

It was so odd to have her father here and Charlie far away at C'an Cabrer in Mallorca. Even when Charlie spent a night or two at his father Fergus's flat in Chelsea, he was nearby. He always spent the summer holidays with her in Mallorca. Now he was there-she knew he'd be all right with Penny and Franois-and it was a strange, sweet comfort to have her father here with her at home in London. He seemed almost like a son, downstairs in Charlie's room, getting ready for his big night out. He was far more helpless than Charlie, at sea in the world beyond Mallorca and the Mediterranean.

He would never come to London again after this trip. She had to make it fun for both of them. She had to remember it.

"I'm ready now," Gerald called up.

He was sitting on the bed in Charlie's room, looking through The Way to Ithaca. He didn't want to read aloud-it would feel too pompous. He wanted simply to talk, briefly, about how he had come to write the book, but he feared drying up if he tried to waffle along without preparation. He'd decided he would abbreviate and paraphrase the first part of the introduction, which he had rewritten for this new edition. He'd made pencil marks against the paragraphs he thought might sound sufficiently logical in thrust yet conversational if run together. He could glance down at these and tell a brief story.

He closed the book, got up, and left the room. He walked through the kitchen into the large studio living room.