Rocks, The by Peter Nichols Read Free Book Online Page A

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, Noël 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
    A
re 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 François—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.
    “I’m ready,” he said again, in case she hadn’t heard him.
    “I’ll be down in a minute,” Aegina called from her bathroom upstairs.
    The large room was full of paintings. Several big ones by an artist who painted people in the vivid colors that might have lain beneath the covering of their skin: organ purples, blood reds, veiny blues, bone whites, pus yellows, slashed across their bodies to delineate light and shadow—and possibly, it occurred to Gerald, character. Were they supposed to be bilious, bloody people? Otherwise, what was the point? They were quite valuable, Aegina had told him. Another artist’s landscapes—or that was what they suggested to Gerald: layers of topography perhaps, in a narrow range of bog hues—filled in most of the other wall spaces. Hardly any of Aegina’s own work, except the portraits of himself and Charlie for which they’d sat impatiently in the living room and on the terrace in Mallorca. And her painting of her mother, his wife, Paloma, from an old photograph.
    Sunlight poured through high northern windows. “I’ll wait outside,” Gerald called upstairs.
    He walked out to the courtyard where Aegina’s little Renault was parked, and smoked a Ducados—his hand shaking, he noticed, as he lit it. It was six o’clock but as sunny and warm as midafternoon. After so many years in the Mediterranean, he’d forgotten the long, light summer evenings at the northern latitude of London. He remembered a perpetual twilight along the Thames