"Then, give me something to carry," said Rafael.

"No, thank you. I have to pack up. I'll bring them to the bar later. Thank you."

Gerald walked around the port and then along the sandy road beside the shore above the rocks. Past white villas with tiled roofs and shutters closed either for the season or against the midday light.

He opened the iron gate in the wall in front of the large house with sage-green shutters. The house spread around a courtyard and a fountain visible through an inner gate. He pulled the bell knob beside the green front door.

After a minute, the boy opened the door. "Oh, it's you," he said. Despite the unruly carrot-colored thatch of hair and the smooth, freckled face of a twelve-year-old, he gazed at Gerald with the freighted appraisal of someone cognizant of the entire range of human failing. A tall, large-boned woman in her late thirties appeared beside him. She glared at Gerald.

"Cassian, leave us," she said firmly.

With a retreating glance, the boy disappeared.

"Oh, Gerald!" said Milly Ollorenshaw. She stepped just beyond the doorway, pulling the door half-closed behind her.

"Hullo, Milly. Is she here?"

"She saw you come in on the boat and she left. She doesn't want to see you."

"How is she?"

"As I told you on the phone-she's alive, thank God!"

"I must talk to her, Milly-"

"I don't know what you could possibly say. How could you have abandoned her like that? After what happened? And what do you think Tom and I thought when you telephoned from Sardinia asking if we'd heard from Lulu? We were frantic! I don't know what to say to you, Gerald. It was unspeakable of you."

He'd phoned once, from Cagliari. He'd been told by both Tom and Milly that Lulu had arrived back in Mallorca but did not want to speak with him. "Milly, I understand that Lulu couldn't know where I went and what I did, and so you don't either. I did it for her. I had to get them away. And I did. It took a bit of time, I know. But when I went back, she wasn't there."

"Did you think she'd be sitting there, knitting you a cardigan?" Milly shouted at him. She was furious. "She was naked, Gerald! She had to beg for clothing! We had to send her money! I don't know what you did, Gerald, and more to the point, nor did Lulu. She only knew that you'd gone and left her there!"

"I know. I came back as soon as I could. I can explain-"

"Gerald!" She took a deep breath and looked at him with not entirely unfriendly distress, sadly. "Whatever you have to say doesn't alter what happened to Lulu. It doesn't alter the fact that you left. Do you understand that? No explanation will change that."

Gerald was silent, pale.

More gently, Milly said: "Once someone loses trust, that's it, Gerald. It's gone. It's broken. You can't repair it with explanations. You can't wheedle trust back from someone. She will never forget that you left. Whatever your reasons . . . well, they don't matter, don't you see? It doesn't alter anything. I'm sorry, Gerald. Do you remember what I told you? Lulu needed someone whom she could trust. That was all she needed-but she needed that."

Gerald looked down at Milly's enormous feet in dirty plimsolls. He looked up at her. "When will she be back?"

"She's gone off in the car with Tom. She doesn't want to see you. You should go."

He drew something out of the pocket of his trousers and held his hand out. "Will you please give her this."

It was a roll of film.

"What is she supposed to do with that?"

"Please ask her to have it developed."

"Why?"

"It will show her what I did. I know it doesn't change what happened to her, but it will show her why I left-I got them away, you see, otherwise I don't know what would have happened-and . . . well, it'll show what I did."

Hesitantly, Milly reached out and took the roll.

"Do have her develop the film. Please."

"I'll give it to her, that's all I can do," said Milly. "Now I must ask you to leave, Gerald. I'm sorry. We've all been enormously upset, as perhaps you can imagine."

Unhappily-generous by nature and unused to being dismissive-Milly turned away and closed the door.

Gerald went out through the gate and walked quickly away toward the harbor.

He unloaded four bulging sail bags, and a small bag of Lulu's clothes, from the small yacht and carried them to the Bar Maritimo across the field of black fishing nets that had been spread out to dry in front of the fishermen's storage caves. They were heavy with books. He and Rafael heaped them against the stone wall in the narrow back room beside demijohns of wine and crates of beer. He returned to the boat and came back with a wooden tool chest, his typewriter, and the varnished dovetailed box holding his sextant.

"You won't need the tools in Palma?" asked Rafael.

"I'll have most of the work done by the yard's carpenters. I expect they'll have their own tools."

"Yes, of course."

Rafael stood on the quay as Gerald hauled aloft the stained brown mainsail, held to the mast by wooden hoops. The canvas flapped idly in the light wind.

"I'll take the line now, thank you, Rafael."

Rafael untied the line he had knotted earlier, unwound it from the bollard, coiled it quickly, and threw it to Gerald, who dropped the coil on the deck. The yacht drifted slowly off the quay. The two men were still close enough to talk quietly.

"So, you will come back, when, in a week or so?" asked Rafael.

"Yes. It depends on the work. But I'll see you soon. Thank you for your help, Rafael."

"It's nothing. Go with God, Gerald."

The yacht made a slow U-turn, and Rafael now saw on the other side of the hull a gash of blue paint, streaks of dirt, and a depression where two planks were cracked halfway between the deck and the water sliding by.

"Now I see it," Rafael called, walking down the quay to stay abreast of the boat. He pointed toward the broken planks. "The work that needs to be done. What happened?"

Gerald leaned out and looked down at the damage, as if noticing it for the first time. He shrugged. "An accident. A fishing boat."

Nereid was gathering speed. Her course wove through the moored fishing boats past the end of the breakwater. She was sliding past the houses above the rocks. Gerald stood on deck at the stern and looked up at the house with the green shutters.

Gerald walked into the Maritimo three days later.

"Gerald!" said Rafael. He looked out at the port; he hadn't seen the boat come in. "So soon? You come from Palma?"

"Yes. I came on the bus." Gerald seemed subdued. He sat down at a small table.

"On the bus?" said Rafael as he poured Gerald a Cognac. "And the yacht? They are doing the work, in Palma?"

"I lost the yacht," said Gerald.

"What?"

"She sank."

"She sank? The Nereid?"

"Yes."

Rafael stared at Gerald. "Your boat-she is gone?"

"Yes." Gerald raised the glass to his mouth and drank the burning liquor.

Rafael was filled with disquiet. He had been aboard Nereid many times; he had drunk wine and Cognac with Gerald in the little cabin, seen his charts and his sextant and heard Gerald's ideas about the navigation of the ancient Greeks. The Englishman was a sailor of a type Rafael had never met; he knew more about the sea and navigation than his father's oldest friends, who knew only the waters around Mallorca. Gerald was English, a race famous for its sailors; he had sailed from England, itself a feat, and he had sailed the little Nereid without an engine all over the Mediterranean with one hand on the tiller and a book in the other, and it was the last thing Rafael could imagine that Gerald could ever lose his yacht, even in a storm-but there had been no storms.

"Where did this happen?"

"Off Cabrera. In deep water."

Rafael poured himself a Cognac. He knew the loss of the boat was a disaster for his friend, and like the death of a loved one. He was hesitant to press Gerald for the details.

"How, Gerald?" he said finally.

Gerald's eyes squinted and he looked out over the port. "The damage was worse than I'd thought. She came down hard on a wave and started a plank below the waterline. I only had time to put the dinghy in the water and get in before she sank. I managed to get to the shore, but the dinghy got quite badly smashed on the rocks and that sank too."

"My God," said Rafael. He stared furtively at Gerald as you stare at a man whose wife has drowned. What would he do without his boat and all his books . . . "But what incredible luck that you unloaded your books and the other things."

"Yes," said Gerald.

"Then . . . what will you do, Gerald? Where will you go? You can stay here, in the back, for a few days, of course, but then . . . ?"

"Thank you, Rafael." Gerald drained his glass and rose. "I'll find something."

When Gerald reached the door, Rafael said, "Where are you going now?"

"I'm going for a walk." Gerald smiled at Rafael, as if to reassure him.

Gerald would not see himself reduced to Rafael's kind offer to put up among the crates and demijohns in the back of the Maritimo. It wasn't going to be like that.

In one of his sail bags, he'd packed the rubber canvas groundsheet that had been part of his naval kit on shore maneuvers. With this and a few other essentials, he made camp under the small pines above the shore at Cala Espasa, to the north of Cala Marsopa. He made small fires of pine and scrub oak that snapped inordinately but burned sufficiently to heat tins of beans, and he slept tolerably well wrapped in his groundsheet. He was on maneuvers again.

When he woke in the mornings, he read beneath the pines from the small Cambridge editions of Marcus Aurelius (always immediately useful) and scraps of Hesiod. Not a compulsive adventurer-Hesiod's only sea voyage was from the city of Aulis, on the Strait of Euripus, to the island of Euboea, a crossing of just under two hundred feet. Yet Gerald admired the Greek poet's seamanlike instincts about when came "the timely season for men to voyage" and when they should remain in port.

What, he wondered, would Hesiod make of this season?

Gerald could never have imagined such . . . flights of lovemaking. edith, the French widow in Alexandria during the war, had been appreciative, instructive, and very kind to him. Six-foot-two-inch Felicity at Oxford, keen and sweaty, solid as a pony, great pale shanks revealed in the fumbling of damp tweed beside the gas fire, had been like weekend rides at a gymkhana.

Beside these, Lulu was a kinetic wild child. She made love to him with a feral hunger. She showed him everything: first, what he wanted, then what she wanted. Their lovemaking became an obsessive preoccupation, anticipated, ritualized, deliberated over. A fascination. A drowning in sensation that was new to him.

The mesmerizing animal sight of her as she sat astride him now in the moonlit cabin, panting like a runner, slim muscled arms raised with hands gripping, pushing, at the cabin beams overhead, sweat streaming from her face and neck, soaking her hair, rilling down her small breasts and torso, pooling between her thighs at the junction of their sucking groins. Her hips drove forward and backward with the insistent motion of piston arms. Gerald watched her-an almost fiendish sight in the bars of moonlight coming through the portholes-amazed as always that such a thing could take place anywhere near, let alone on top of, him. It happened almost every night: at some point they came out of sleep together, shedding sleep for this feverish embrace.

Then he lost all thought, as a locus of sensation seized the base of his spine and he stiffened, broke with her rhythm, and Lulu quickly slipped off him, moved down and lowered her face and hands over him as if in prayer and deftly midwived his shuddering contractions. He felt the vibration of her vocal cords driving back into him as she hummed a long note and then he heard her take a breath, and she said, "You taste of the sea."

An inchoate emotion flooded through Gerald and he began to weep. It only lasted a few seconds, no more than an involuntary spasm in the chest as he squeezed his eyes shut against the tears. It happened often when they were finished-fortunately Lulu never seemed to notice, for he wouldn't have been able to explain the sudden loss of his composure. Except to say that she made him happy.

She got off the narrow settee and stood upright (almost, at five-three, beneath the cabin roof) and rubbed the slick wetness across her face and body like lotion. "Come on." She disappeared up the companionway steps and Gerald heard a splash. He followed her up, with admiration, but always a kernel of anxiety at her readiness to leap off the boat in the dark. It was something he had never done before knowing Lulu.

On deck he saw her wriggling in the water beside the boat like a small porpoise. He looked around, uneasy at her exposed nakedness, but the little bay four miles south of Trapani was deserted. They had ghosted in at dusk, eaten a simple meal, and fallen asleep, both tired after the slow crossing in light air and hot sun from their last anchorage on the small island of Favignana.

"Come on, darling!" Lulu called from the sea. "Come in! It's unbelievably warm, like a bath!"

It would be, long into the night after the heat of a Sicilian summer's day. Gerald looked around: now bathed in moonlight, there was no sign of a dwelling of any kind on this rocky stretch of the coast. "I'm coming, my darling."

He rigged the small rope boarding ladder to the cleat at the stern and hung it over the side-he was always careful about the ladder and it had proved worthwhile. Then, naked himself, he dove in.

He swam toward Lulu but she vanished beneath the surface. He couldn't see beneath the mercury-seeming liquid surrounding him. In the salty water, he ran his hands over the human film that still clung to his skin, instinctively touching his genitals, faintly surprised to find things there as they had always been. Lulu's head quietly broke the surface thirty feet away like a water bird's. It began to move toward the shore.

"Lulu, darling, do come back," called Gerald. "It's the middle of the night."

"No! We're going into the beach-come on!"

Gerald felt uncomfortable going far from the yacht without a stitch on him-and in the dead of night-but they were quite alone. Before they'd gone to bed, he'd hung the paraffin anchor light in Nereid's rigging, the lone sign of Man anywhere around them. The coast here in the pale moonlight appeared unchanged since Homer's time-that is, it bore the ancient, worn-to-nub appearance of countless Mediterranean shores: torturously indented limestone crowned with a scrub of stunted, goat-nibbled vegetation; whereas, of course, in Homer's time, twenty-eight or so centuries earlier, the shores had been densely forested-younger-looking lands, barely peopled, with so much history yet to play out. Gerald had sailed these waters in HMS Furious six years earlier during the obliterating tumult of war-history was always war-but now the land and sea appeared quiet and peaceful.

He struck out after his wife.

They had sailed from Cala Marsopa a week earlier, crossing the emptiest stretch of the western Mediterranean in light winds; a gentle and pleasurable introduction to travel under sail for Gerald's new wife. By now, August, the season was half over. He'd once hoped to be finished with Sicily and be across the Ionian Sea, exploring the Ionian islands-Ithaca itself-but he'd never expected to spend two months in Mallorca. He had long discounted Spain or the Balearics as a location for any part of The Odyssey. There was little in Homer to account for a passage so far west in the big, black, slow ships of Odysseus and his men-unless one considered the wild card of the "floating" island of Aeolia, whose "cliffs rise sheer from the sea," a six-day, six-night row-westward? southward?-from the land of the Laestrygonians. Homer himself was no seaman, Lawrence had decided during the four years he'd worked on his translation, but the poet had listened to navigators and stitched their stories together, situating lands and peoples in relation to one another in the seascape of his mind's eye. So, for a firsthand view, a definitive rejection of the western Mediterranean for the geography of The Odyssey, Gerald had sailed southwestward to the Spanish islands, a two-day reach from the Strait of Bonifacio.

Tom and Milly Ollorenshaw had espied his red ensign in the port and brought him up to the villa for dinner with their cook-houseguest. They asked him where he was headed in his little boat and he told them about his effort to decode and explore the geography of The Odyssey. What a clever idea, they all said.

"But I recognize this," Lulu, Tom and Milly's friend, said, with genuine amazement, when she ducked her head and came down the companionway steps the first time and saw the interior of Nereid's tiny cabin: the tongue-and-groove pine trimmed in teak, the small gunmetal stove with its aluminum kettle, the shelves of books, the cushioned settee berths, the paraffin lamps, the beams, the portholes. "It's Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle's cottage! I want to live here!" She turned to him, their heads close enough under the hatch for him to feel her breath in his face while she said seriously, "You have to take me with you, now."

"All right," Gerald said easily.

But from that moment on, he imagined it.