"I'm all right, thanks. Tired. How are you?"

"Why don't you stay in the house, sweetie? In your mum's room? Or in the study? No one's in the study. Wouldn't you be more comfortable there? We could see more of you, instead of making this epic trek to the far end of the barracks-or is that the plan, sweetheart?"

"No, not really. I'm just more used to it here."

"You're sure?"

"Yes. This is sort of my room, really."

"I understand, darling."

Sarah looked at him, wading through years of gooey memories. "Darling, darling, Lukey." She picked up his hand and held it hard against her bosom, kneading his wrist painfully. "You will come and have dinner with us, though, won't you? I don't know what it is but it smells good. And you've got to eat, pet."

"No, I know. Sure. I'll be right down. Everyone else okay?"

"Oh, yes. You know this lot. But it is the saddest possible day for all of us. And we do want you to be with us, darling."

"That's very sweet of you, Sarah. I'll be right down."

"Good."

She leaned forward, her chest pressing down forcibly on his, smothering him in a rancid admixture of booze, body odor, and Chanel No. 5, almost spraining his wrist. She kissed his cheek wetly. "Soon, then?"

"Yes. I'll be right down. Thanks, Sarah."

She rose and went to the door and looked back at him. "We all love you so, so much, darling Lukey, sweetheart darling. We're not going to leave you alone."

"Love you too. Thank you."

He would never move into the house. His mother's room was empty now, but someone would want it. Come summer, there would be a feeding frenzy for Lulu's Room on the booking site. This far end room in the barracks, his room, was geographically closest to the only place where he had ever felt at home at the Rocks: the long-dismantled toolshed against the back wall of the property. The only room that had been exclusively his, unbookable for guests, undesired by anyone else; his boyhood home at the Rocks, the haven for his hormone-addled intrigues, the dank refuge of a thousand lonely wanks.

And the place where, long regretted, one night he could have done something more with Aegina than play the noble grown-up and take her home.

His mother was gone. Strange now: the house, the Rocks, without her. People wandering around as if looking for her. Something essential missing.

Was this grief, this weird non-Lulu atmosphere?

He didn't doubt that she had loved him, in her efficient, streamlined way, and he had, of course, loved her, in a mute, nondeclarative, resentful way. He didn't remember his mother ever saying, "I love you, darling." Nor his saying anything along those lines to her. They hadn't been like that with each other. They'd sort of simply taken the notion of each other for granted: someone crucial-if annoying or disappointing-but always there. Somebody who, however poorly she had expressed it, had loved him. Now there was nobody-except Sarah, and everybody down at the bar, his ersatz family, shuffling through the house, talking about his mother as if she'd been theirs.

None of them would have come and found him floating out at sea.

Two.

It was warm, but still only spring, yet the Maritimo was almost full. Older people mostly-that was, Luc's age, and beyond. The usual British, German, northern European retirees. The terrace was pleasant in the sun. Fishing boats and wintering yachts filled the enlarged marina, but there was little noise. The town was busy, though not the carnival of flesh and summer. Conversation on the terrace was muted and polite.

Luc stood as Aegina came out to his table. She was wearing jeans, a short cotton blazer over a T-shirt, espadrilles.

"You look very well," he said. "Great, actually." He knew her age, fifty-three, to the day, but she'd been lucky-or very disciplined-both, probably. Slimmer than she'd been when he'd last seen her . . . ten years ago? The hair still dark-not a single gray strand? Must color it, but well. The Latin skin wrinkle-free except for some warm weathering around the eyes. She still looked the way he always thought of her, no jarring adjustment. Luc knew he looked, at his best, like every other man in his mid-fifties: beginning to sag noticeably under the jaw, the spare tire no matter what one did, his father's thinning hair-though his father had died before it got too bad.

"Thank you." She looked at him closely. "How are you doing?"

"All right. Feels a bit strange. How about you?"

"Yes: strange. I can't quite take it in. I suppose it will take time. I'm-" She was going to say: I'm glad I have Charlie. Instead she said: "Is it difficult for you with people at the Rocks now? Or is it a help? You know them all."

"I don't know what life down here is like without them. They've always been here. They'll all be gone in a few days. Then maybe I'll know."

"I'm sure they all love you."

"That's what they say."

"Well, it's true, Luc. Why wouldn't it be? You're part of someone they love. And they love you too, of course they do."

A waitress appeared. She was in her twenties, bristling with piercings. She asked them for their order in English with a characteristically sibilant Dutch accent.

"How did you know we spoke English?" Luc asked her.

"Her," the waitress thrust her spiked lower lip at Aegina, "you can't tell, but you, it's easy."

They ordered salads and agua con gas. Luc watched the waitress walk away and turned to look beyond her, into the bar inside. "I don't know anybody in this place anymore."

"Will you keep the Rocks?" Aegina asked.

"Yeah. For now, anyway. Sally's running the place. It makes its costs. Actually, it's doing well. There are people who come through the website now. What about you? Will you sell?"

"C'an Cabrer? Oh, no. It's home to me, more than anywhere. And it's Charlie's too. He loves it, and he still loves coming here. So, no, we'll keep it. Not that you can sell a property in Spain now anyway."

"No, right."

"Luc, Charlie and I both watched Ryan," she said. "We absolutely loved it."

"Thank you."

"Was he really a spy, your father?"

"I'm not sure. He could have been. He used to vaguely mention doing what he called his State Department work. But I really don't know. I made all that stuff up."

"I was very moved by it. I saw you, of course, and your father."

Luc's greatest success had come only in the last two years, with the French television miniseries, broadcast in Britain and many European markets, about an American journalist, Ryan, living in Paris during the Cold War. Under the cover of reporting European events for an unnamed American newspaper based in Paris, Ryan was a minor CIA operative through the decades after World War II. The series' popularity and critical acclaim stemmed from the mix of Ryan's cloak-and-dagger work with the more quotidian drama of raising a child in Paris as a single father. There was something of the tenderness of Franois Truffaut, several critics had noted, in the relationship between Ryan and his growing, sometimes fractious son. Luc's French agent was now "talking" with HBO, AMC, and other television companies about producing an American version of the series. It would be like drug money, his agent said, the sale to the Americans, with an executive producer credit, but Luc was worried that the Americans would also ruin it. A not entirely unpleasant dilemma.

"You know, I never thought much about my father-I didn't see him-while he was there. I've been thinking about him a lot. When I look back now, he seems a shadowy character."

"I'm sure you miss him."

"I'd like to see him again. Talk to him. See who he really was."

"And have you got someone in Paris?"

"Just Sophie."

"Who?"

"Sophie-my made-up girlfriend, years ago, when we went to Morocco. You had somebody too-"

"Dennis! Yes! But do you really have someone? I hope you do."

"You do, huh?" The likelihood of meeting anyone who wouldn't make him feel even lonelier seemed increasingly remote. Life was a dwindling process now, not a building proposition. He couldn't imagine being with someone new, opening up, feeling appreciated and understood, without having to explain his dubious non sequiturs and increasingly arcane or redundant frame of reference. "Not really. But I have friends. You know. A sort of life. You? Are you seeing anyone?"

"I have been."

"Ah." Why did that feel more desolating than the death of his mother? "That's nice."

"It has been."

"Not an unqualified statement."

"No. One changes. Or things change."

"Who was it? Or is it?"

"Was-nobody. Someone I thought I understood, but in fact, didn't."

"That I understand."

Their salads arrived.

"Gracias," said Luc automatically.

"Yeah, no problem," said their waitress.

"You wanted to give me something?" said Aegina.

"Yes." He pushed a small manila envelope in front of him across the table. "I found an old shoe box in my mother's closet. It contained the certificate of marriage between her and your father, and a divorce document, for same. Also an undeveloped roll of black-and-white film, old one-twenty stock. The bloke at the fotograferia in town still does film processing."

Aegina drew a handful of photographs from the envelope. They were glossy and new. "Oh, my God," she said softly.

Luc shifted his chair so that he could look at them with her. "Obviously taken by your father. I guess she took the one of him."

"My God, Luc. Look how beautiful your mother was-look at her hair: it's almost black."

"Is that his boat?"

"Yes," she said.

"Not Mallorca, is it? Looks more like Italy or somewhere."

Aegina looked at him. "It's the honeymoon voyage."

"So it would seem."

Her father had always kept his old Agfa Solinette aboard the boat. He had carefully photographed anchorages, ports, views of small coves from the hills rising above them, harbor approaches from the sea, stretches of coastline all over the Mediterranean. These photographs, adeptly composed and exposed, always in contrasty black-and-white, some dating back more than sixty years, had illustrated his articles and his one book. Visible in many of those old photographs, resting peacefully at anchor against a backdrop of an ancient Greek or Italian fishing village, lay a small, pretty, white-hulled sailboat, his beloved Nereid-on which, Aegina knew, her father and Lulu had sailed from Mallorca on the day after their wedding in July 1948. A short time later they had separated, and Nereid had sunk. There had never been any further, or more specific, details. When she had asked her father, several times, why he had no photographs from that summer, he told her they'd all been lost when the boat sank that September. Yet he'd managed to save the camera, and the important books, and everything else of any value that had been aboard the yacht.

"Can I get copies of these?" she asked.

"These are yours," said Luc. "I made an extra set for you."

She went through them slowly. "It's so strange-to think of them together."

"On a little boat too. She hated boats."

Aegina looked at him. "What happened to them? He would never tell me."

"She wouldn't tell me either," said Luc. "They fell out-that's the way she put it: 'We fell out,' she said. And that's all she ever said."

Aegina handed him three photographs. "What are these?"

"I was wondering if you might know. If he ever said anything about that. It looks like a shipwreck."

Three photos of men waving, in obvious distress, from the bow of a wrecked, apparently sinking fishing boat.

"No," she said. "He never mentioned anything like that."

"I suppose they saved whoever it was." He gave the three photographs back to her.

She pulled a photograph from her handbag and handed it to him.

"Oh, jeez," Luc said.

He stared at the faded color shot of himself and Aegina-so young-leaning against a ship's rail, both smiling awkwardly into the camera.

"I've never seen this," he said. "Where is this?"

"It has to be on the ferry. Minka must have taken it. I don't remember her giving it to me. I found it a few days ago."

"I would guess on the way to Morocco," he said, unable to look at her, "rather than on the way back." It sounded flippant, he immediately regretted it.

She took it from him and put all the photographs in her bag. She looked up at Luc. "Did you know that your mother seduced Charlie?"

Luc stared at her, trying to read her face. It betrayed nothing. "When?"