Early in the year, an editor at John Murray, Ltd-publisher of Byron, Darwin, Livingstone, Conan Doyle, Jane Austen, and Herman Melville, and still publishing sturdy, literate travel narratives-had sent Gerald a letter, forwarded to him by Griffiths at Yachting Monthly: 22 February 1951 Dear Mr. Rutledge, For the past several years, I've read your articles in Yachting Monthly, Cornhill, The Listener, about Odysseus's route home from the Trojan War with the greatest of pleasure. It has occurred to me, now in agreement with others in the house, that these pieces could be advantageously collected into a small but exceptional book.

I am a keen coastal yachtsman myself, and consequently have read the run of our contemporary sailing literature. Most of it is abysmal: turgid accounts of anchoring replete with gauges of chain and details of muddy bottoms. Your pieces stand distinctly apart. The mix of gentle erudition with travelogue and your sailorly insights into the geography of The Odyssey would make, we believe, a unique narrative. Such a book would prove attractive to a general reader whose interests go beyond the classical or nautical, yet draw back at the stolidly academic. Indeed, we see in your seamanlike deduction and navigation of the possible route of The Odyssey the makings of a small classic of travel literature.

This may have occurred to you too-perhaps you already have plans with another publisher? But if not, we are prepared to offer you an advance of 750 against royalties, with every expectation that this advance will be earned back in a short time and see us all with a modest profit. If this interests you, please let me know your thoughts by return, with, if possible, a detailed list of your Odyssey articles-are there any that remain unpublished?-and to what extent they cover the entire route from Troy to Ithaca.

I look forward to hearing from you at your earliest opportunity.

By the way, where are you? If you are in or near London, I should be very happy to discuss all this with you over a drink at the RTYC.

Yours sincerely, Eric Pocock During respites in action-lying in his bunk in the bilgy bowels of, first, the aircraft carrier HMS Furious, and then the destroyer HMS Avon Vale-Gerald had read a Cambridge University translation of Heinrich Schliemann's account of the discovery of Troy. On August 14, 1868, after picking his way on horseback across a rubble-strewn plateau in northwest Turkey, Schliemann found traces of a circular wall at a place called Hisarlik. "The site fully agrees with the description given by Homer. . . . As soon as one sets foot on the Trojan plain, the view of the beautiful hill of Hisarlik grips one with astonishment." Later that day, Schliemann climbed to the roof of a house at the northern edge of the plain: With the Iliad in hand, I sat on the roof and looked around me. I imagined seeing below me the fleet, camp, and assemblies of the Greeks; Troy and its fortress on the plateau of Hisarlik; troops marching to and fro and battling each other . . . For two hours the main events of the Iliad passed before my eyes until darkness and violent hunger forced me to leave the roof. I had become fully convinced that it was here that ancient Troy had stood.

Schliemann dug and unearthed an ancient city that had been sacked by war.

Immediately after being demobbed in Alexandria at the end of the war, Gerald had traveled to Istanbul. He reached Hisarlik and the gouged mounds of Troy by ferry, charabanc, and foot. Afterward, Odyssey in hand, he visited the surrounding coasts in a number of craft, large and small. What he saw, he concluded, was what Odysseus (whether a real man or not seemed moot) had seen. Since here was Troy, and to the southwest at a known coordinate lay Ithaca, and between them the mysteries of that ten-year voyage home, Gerald determined then to return in his own small yacht and find his way, navigating by Homer's cloaked directions, from Troy to Ithaca. He'd done exactly that, purchasing and sailing the nimble Nereid from Sussex, all the way to the Aegean in 19461947, and west back around Italy's boot into the Tyrrhenian Sea in 1948 to explore Corsica and Sardinia as possible sites for the home of the Laestrygonians, and the cave of the Cyclops, Polyphemus. The Strait of Messina, he had always known, must be the location of Scylla and Charybdis, and he had been sure he would find the cave somewhere on the west coast of Sicily. His undoing, like Odysseus's, had been straying too far to the west and becoming enmeshed with a nymph on an island.

With what he had already published, Gerald had most of his propounded route of The Odyssey written, with photographs, including the Nereid lying to her anchor in the same spots where he believed Homer had placed his hero. Only the most eastern early locations of The Odyssey, Troy itself and Ismarus, he had not sailed to himself-the cruise abandoned after the aborted honeymoon voyage with Lulu-but these were known, unequivocal, and he had already visited them in one vessel or another.

He and Pocock corresponded. He sent him all his articles, including several that had not yet been published; he sent his photos and his own rough maps. Pocock sent him a contract to sign, and just a few weeks later, at the dusty Correos in Cala Marsopa, Gerald opened a brown envelope containing a check for 750. A life-altering sum. More money than he'd ever seen, or perhaps would ever see again. What to do with it?

He could buy another boat and, at last, sail back to the Aegean. It was where he had aimed himself and his fascination with Ancient Greece since he'd been a schoolboy in shorts. He had sailed, in one boat or another, to most places he believed were contenders for locations in The Odyssey, but he had always believed he could spend a lifetime exploring the waters of Greece and Turkey, or, as he thought of the place in classical terms, Asia Minor, the supposed birthplace of Homer. Mallorca had proved a catastrophic interruption to this grand plan. Something like a terrible automobile crash.

The morning after he received Pocock's letter, Gerald took his habitual morning walk through the olive groves along the ridge above C'an Cabrer, to gaze down the hill, over the town, out to sea.

I could buy a boat, he thought.

Then he turned and looked at the olive trees.

Four.

They were sitting under the shaded arbor on the patio overlooking the rocks and the sea, ready for a late lunch, when Bernie and Cassian returned from Palma.

Rested and safe at last among friends, Schooner Trelawney was back in top form. Over lunch, he related the difficulties he'd experienced trying to locate his friends in Monaco.

"Well, you'd said the place was small and that you knew absolutely everybody, so when I stepped out of the train station and beheld the entire, sparkling Faberge principality spread out beneath me, I was impressed." Schooner looked at Tom. "I must say, m'dear, you rose instantly in my estimation. I thought, Golly, Tom is doing well. And if, indeed, you knew everybody, then it was a simple deduction that I should start inquiring after you at the palace."

Tom and Milly were weaving in their chairs and hooting. Cassian giggled, more at seeing his parents reduced to helplessness than for Schooner's story.

"You can imagine my disappointment-after such a journey-when nobody at the palace had heard of you. Well, that was the guards, and what would they know? They couldn't care less. Deaf to any logic or appeal. They wouldn't even let me in to ask the prince or somebody who might have been expected to know you. The Ollorenshaws! I began shouting it past the guards up at the windows-for all I knew, you were inside, at some do." Schooner looked around the table, his eyebrows raised, happy.

Lulu looked sideways at Bernie. Luc sat at his chair between them, impervious to the hysterics and noise of the adults, and Bernie seemed wholly intent on watching his son gather spoonfuls of his lunch of rice and mashed sardines.

After she'd put Luc down for his nap, Lulu found Bernie in a chair beneath the pines behind the house. She sat down nearby.

"You were positively funereal at lunch. I'm sure you're repelled by Schooner, but you might make an effort not to be so boorishly disapproving among my friends."

"I wasn't disapproving. I simply wasn't amused."

"No, of course not. Your sense of humor doesn't extend beyond Laurel and Hardy. What's going on with you, then?"

"When were you going to tell me that you're buying this place with Tom's money?"

"Actually, it's Milly's money."

"Oh, Milly's money. I was misinformed. I got what little I know from Cassian, who was able to give me the broad details about the financial transfer. Bright kid. So when were you going to tell me?"

"Not until I bloody well had to," she said. She pulled from her shorts a pack of cigarettes and the gold Ronson lighter Bernie had given her, and busily lit a cigarette, blowing a spout of smoke upward toward the overarching pine boughs.

"I might have helped you," Bernie said, "if you'd asked. But you spend your summers here anyway, so why do you want to buy the place?" In the nearly three years he'd known her, even after they were married, Lulu spent all summer in Cala Marsopa with Tom and Milly, who had rented Villa Los Roques every summer since the war. Lulu had come down with them from England, initially to cook, later as an inseparable part of their summer group, which included rotating rooms of friends. After she'd married Bernie and moved into his apartment in Paris, she and Luc would leave the city early in June and not return until after la rentree in early September. Bernie made trips down to see them when he could.

"Because I'm going to make it into a business. I'm going to have people come and stay and eat here for their holidays and pay me money for it. It was Milly's idea. They want to do other things, they want to travel more, but they still want this place to come to."

"Oh," said Bernie. The ramifications spread outward slowly, the way following a moving object will raise the head to broader, unsuspected views. "That'll take a lot of work."

"Yes, it will. It means a big change. I'm going to stay here. I'm not coming back to Paris."

"But you know I can't live here," said Bernie. "I have to be based in Paris-that's my work."

"Of course I know it. You love France and the French. Well, I'm sorry, I hate it there."

"I thought you were feeling better about it. You've seemed happier the last few months."

"That's because I've been planning this for months," said Lulu.

"Let me have one of your cigarettes," said Bernie. After he'd lit a cigarette, he said, "And you want Luc to grow up here? To go to school here?"

"Of course not. I don't want him growing up to be some Spanish oick any more than you do."

"So what are you suggesting?"

"Well, obviously he has to stay here with me until school becomes important-I mean beyond counting and reading and all that, when he's eight or nine or ten, whenever it is they start learning things properly-then he should go to school in Paris and stay with you during term time. He'll come down here in the holidays."

Bernie didn't know what to say. Or, rather, he quelled and swallowed all the thoughtful objections, savage rebuttals, angry recriminations, legal threats, and reasonable entreaties that boiled in his mind and mouth.

He understood that he didn't know Lulu at all. The longer he'd known her, the more of a mystery she had become to him. Over the past year, he'd come to realize that he had almost entirely invented the person he'd fallen in love with. He realized too that she had no idea who he was. They were complete strangers to each other, and they'd been growing more mystified and estranged. Since Luc's birth, the enigma that each was to the other had enlarged into a yawning space between them. Now he was stunned, perhaps, but not surprised.

He smoked. Beyond the abundant, cosseting, superior health and educational services vouchsafed all mothers and children in France, Paris had always seemed to him the unsurpassable ideal garden in which to plant and grow a child. A few days after his birth, Bernie had taken Luc into the Jardin du Luxembourg. Thereafter they wandered regularly into the Lux-a short walk from Bernie's apartment-following their ears and eyes, discovering together more than Bernie had known existed there: the model Breton fishing smacks sailing across the octagonal basin before the palace, the theatre des marionnettes, the gently galloping horses of the carousel. Together, they watched the chess players, and the even more serious boules players, and gazed without shyness at the serene, spectral stone and bronze people frozen mid-pensee while the seasons and the centuries drifted over them.

There was the wider Paris he had planned to explore with Luc: the bouquinistes, the coal-roasted chataignes, the bric-a-brac of les puces, the jungle-rich parade of humankind and the wonder of who all these people were and where they came from, these artists and musicians, filmmakers, writers, academics, White Russian emigres, Roma gypsies, the Walter Benjamins, the Ben Franklins, the serious wanderers of the Earth, all of whom ineluctably pass through Paris at one time or another. No roiling mobs, or stunting urban canyonscapes, but a world passing by on a human, absorbable scale, like a puttering Mobylette; the entire human story, touchable, instructive, charming, reeking agreeably, inexhaustible but not exhausting-all this he had planned to show his son, Luc.

In his mind now, Bernie saw the life he had fully imagined for Luc in Paris go pfftt.

"You think he'll be happy here?"

"Of course he'll be happy," said Lulu. "The weather's pleasant. It's quiet and peaceful. He's already familiar with Preciosa. She'll look after him. There are other children about, not just Spaniards."

"You don't think he'll miss me?"

"I'm sure he'll miss you, though children need their mothers more than their fathers. You're off half the time anyway. You're welcome to come and stay at a hotel and see him on a reasonable basis."

"You'd like me to be reasonable?"

"Yes. Why not? That's what's best for Luc, isn't it? We must put his needs first. Besides, I'm going to be reasonable with you. I won't take any money from you. You need to support Luc, but I've got my own money and I'll make what I need. You needn't worry about me."

"I can see that. You've thought of everything."

"Oh, believe me, Bernard"-how brutal it sounded, to hear her use his name, for once-"I have."

Five.

Senor Gerald!" exclaimed Lestrado Puig, rising to his feet as Gerald came into his office along the street from the mercado in Cala Marsopa. "This is a pleasure. Sit, please."

They sat on either side of the lawyer's desk. Early in their acquaintance, Puig had abandoned efforts to speak Gerald's surname, the unpronounceable "Rutledge" with its thicket of confusing consonants, and since they had become friendly, there had been no need-though he could now spell Gerald's surname to a nicety, for Puig represented the owners of C'an Cabrer, the small farmhouse in the hills above Cala Marsopa where Gerald had lived for the previous three years. Once a month Gerald walked into town and paid his rent to Senor Lestrado Puig, who then sent it on to the owners in Palma.

"I have had some good fortune," said Gerald. He explained, as best he could in his now serviceable Spanish, the nature of his earlier voyaging, his published articles, the letter from the publisher in London.

"This is splendid news," said Puig. "You should make an investment."

"I thought so too," said Gerald.

"Do you have an idea?"

"Yes."

Six.

For his first night as master of C'an Cabrer, Gerald slept again on the thin mattress in the small room where he had slept for the last three years. In the middle of the night he woke and walked around the other, still-empty, rooms of the house. He wondered how long he would live here. Perhaps he'd buy another boat someday and sail to Greece. Perhaps the book would sell. But here he would stay and live, for now . . . somehow.

The night air coming through the open window of the larger room was warm and smelled of citrus and the trees and vegetation around the house. He stood before the window for a moment and then climbed out onto the solid surface of the cistern at the side of the house and looked down the hill, to the sea. The partial moon had risen late and hung over its scattered reflection on the Mediterranean in the southeast-it hung over the Aegean. Suddenly, now that he could, he no longer had the urge to be sailing away. Was it gone, that long-held desire, or would it come back? For three shore-bound years, during which he had felt marooned, he had wanted to be on a boat again, sailing southeast across the Mediterranean. Yet when he'd seriously considered buying another boat and leaving . . .

He walked to the edge of the cistern top. Put a rail here and he'd have a terrace that overlooked the sea. Knock out the lower part of that window and he'd have a door to his terrace. Sit here and look at the sea and the dirt road between Son Moll and the port, and the villas along the road fronting the rocky shore.

At the bottom of his hill, Gerald found two letters in his dusty mailbox. One was from his sister, Billie, in Sevenoaks. "So you are a Man of Property! Well done! Swallowed the anchor? I must come down for the vendemmia! What larks we'll have!"

The other letter was from Pocock at John Murray. A fear gripped Gerald: what if they'd changed their mind and wanted the money back? Well, it was too bloody late!

Dear Gerald, Everything going well with the book here; on course for publication early in the autumn; I'll be sending you proofs in September.

The only spot of dissent amongst the savants is with the title. Some feel, and I have to count myself among them, that The Route of Odysseus is rather too prosaic. It's quite accurate, as far as it goes, but limiting and not exciting. The book is only a little removed from being a gripping travel narrative, and the right title could position it very favorably for reviewers at the Sunday papers, not to mention readers. We've been batting this about a bit. I'm sure you'll appreciate that the word Odysseus doesn't lend itself easily to the possessive: Odysseus's Voyage, Odysseus's Journey, etc., as some have suggested here. Odysseus is, in fact, a bit of a mouthful. Odyssey is preferable to Odysseus and also looks better on the page, although, again, this says scholarly rather than fun. Other suggestions have been: Homer's Voyage, Homer's Ill Winds, etc., etc. The best of a poor lot, and really not right.

Can you put your thinking cap on and suggest something less literal; a little more, dare I say it, poetic, Homeric? We are doing same.

Otherwise, all bodes well for a good autumn launch and run up to Christmas.

Sincerely, Eric Pocock But "route" was the whole point, thought Gerald, a little tetchily. Where Odysseus Sailed-worse. He could think of nothing. Blow the savants; let them come up with it, then.

He was in the lemon grove when he heard the sound of Lupe the donkey: the usual one-note honking for which there was no anthropomorphizing a meaning beyond generalized asinine complaint. Lupe brayed often and Gerald was always pleased when Gonzalo, who lived down the hill and across the road and had worked the farm for the owners, took her away. Gonzalo had used Lupe to carry straw panniers filled with olives, almonds, and lemons down the hill. He was surprised to hear Lupe again, for he had let Gonzalo go, intending from now on to do all the work at C'an Cabrer himself and try to live off the proceeds of the produce he would harvest and take to market-he would somehow have to be the beast of burden. Gonzalo had been told of the sale of the farm by someone, Puig perhaps, or the owners, and he had been visibly upset when Gerald told him he would do all the work himself and no longer required his services.

Then he heard the girl's voice. He walked through the trees and found Gonzalo's daughter, the third member of the Gonzalo labor force that had worked the farm. She was standing beside the house with the donkey, which was now quiescent and staring at the wall.

She smiled when she saw Gerald. It was hard to tell her age; Gonzalo didn't look older than thirty-five. His daughter's looks and womanly figure had initially strongly reminded Gerald of the Italian film star Anna Magnani, whom he had seen in a film screened by a faltering projector in a bar in Argostoli, Greece, shortly after the end of the war. The actress had screamed a great deal during the film, and the Greeks in the bar, all men, had shouted back Anna Magnani! Anna Magnani! after each of her outbursts, which was how Gerald knew and remembered her name. However, Gonzalo's daughter didn't have the Italian's piercing eyes or volcanic behavior or her appearance of innate intelligence-she seemed more a lobotomized version of the actress-but her heavy-lidded eyes and openmouthed smile that habitually found Gerald had persistently made him aware of her interest in him. Gonzalo usually spoke to her in peremptory or rough tones, and Gerald had twice seen him cuffing his daughter on her arms, back, the side of her head. The first time he saw this they were some distance away through the trees and it took Gerald a minute to be sure of what he had seen. The second time they were closer, and he had called out, "Please do not touch the girl like that, it's not correct," in his awkward Spanish.

"Que?" Gonzalo answered, and Gerald repeated what he had said. Gonzalo shrugged and moved away, mumbling. Gerald was pleased to let the man and his daughter go when he returned to C'an Cabrer as owner. So he was surprised and discomfited by her appearance. He looked around but didn't see Gonzalo.

"Hola," the girl said now, swaying slightly in her thin cotton dress beside Lupe's flicking tail.

"Hola," answered Gerald.

"Good, then, here's your animal."

"Pardon me?"

"Lupe. She is yours."

"No, she belongs to your father. She is of Gonzalo."

"No, she is of C'an Cabrer. She is of you now."