Rocks, The by Peter Nichols Page A

one point—my mother had to give him a proper bollocking about it.”
    “And you still don’t know what happened between them? Luc never told you?”
    “No.”
    Charlie came running up again. “I’m hungry!” he said.
    “Bueno,”
said Aegina.
“Bocadillos.”
    She and Penny opened baskets and laid a lunch out on their towels. The children nibbled on giant sandwiches.
    •   •   •
    W
hen they returned
to the house from the olive groves, François spread blueprints on the dining room table before Señor Gómez. They showed elevations and construction details for four different designs of two-story villas of approximately the same size and footprint. Each had four bedrooms (or three bedrooms and a study), three bathrooms, an open-plan ground floor with a kitchen and living room flowing toward a terrace. Each house had its own pool. Each design showed slight variations in exterior details and use of interior space. The villas would be oriented toward a view of the sea while not conforming to a uniform relation to each other or the access road. They were similar to but larger than the houses at Los Piños, the small development François had built along the road to Cala Espasa. That project had been a success, all houses sold, but François had found his builder, who lived half an hour away in Artà, merely adequate and was unwilling to expand into a larger project with him. He wanted someone now who could produce a finer finish, with experience of a greater number of units and more difficult terrain, who lived near enough to guarantee a consistent presence. Gómez and another Cala Marsopa builder, Roig, were the only contenders. François wanted Gómez.
    “Bueno,”
said Señor Gómez. He declined François’s invitation to lunch. He had to look in at a job, he said, though François believed he was simply uncomfortable at the idea of any kind of convivial social intimacy. The builder rolled up the blueprints and tucked them under an arm. He would be in touch in a few days. They shook his horny hand again and watched him putter away down the drive on his Lambretta.
    “It’s a wonder he’s still alive,” said Fergus, as they climbed the steps from the drive. “Trundling around on that thing holding on to a set of blueprints at the same time. He’s a proper crank. Is he interested, do you think? And do we want him?”
    “Yes, we want him,” said François. “And at this moment, this is what he wants, I believe. He’s doing a very nice job down at Porto Colom, but this is something different. Quite a big job, but rather nice, you know. A little more cachet. A development of pretty houses in a beautiful setting, on a lovely hill, well made. A showpiece. Yes, he’s interested. Yes, we want Señor Gómez.”
    “Should we see that fellow Roig again?”
    Gerald went out onto the terrace. He stood in the shade and lit a Ducados. He pictured the village of tourists on the hill above his house, playing music late into the night, their screeching cars, screaming drunken laughter, barking dogs, rubbish thrown down the hill onto his property, the quiet of his olive groves gone forever.
    Fergus came out onto the terrace. “Gerald, I’m taking us all to lunch. Shall we go to the Fonda?”
    “What about the Marítimo?” said Gerald.
    Fergus loathed the Marítimo, with its greasy calamari and its plebeian clientele of fishermen and the horribly naff tourists from the blocks of flats above the harbor. “Yes, absolutely. Is that okay with you, François? The Marítimo?”
    “I shall be very happy at the Marítimo.”
    Gerald went into the larder and pulled two plastic HiperSol bags from the basket hanging on a nail. He filled them with lemons from the plastic tub on the floor.
    They drove to town in Fergus’s boxy Range Rover, which seemed to glide and sway like an alpine cable car down Gerald’s steep driveway. The leather interior cosseted one with an upholstered comfort Gerald could only recall from a