Rocks, The by Peter Nichols

Charlie, or I drop him off. School events.”
    “And do you get on?”
    “Oh, sure. I mean, as far as we need to. We agree pretty much about all things Charlie.”
    “And how is Charlie with you both? Does he get on with Fergus?”
    “Oh yes,” said Aegina, flicking glances right and left, into the mirror, shifting down, shifting lanes. “He’s navigated between us and through the divorce with some kind of fish instinct. Always swimming smoothly around anything that might catch him up. He doesn’t talk about it much, or about either of us to the other. I think he’s all right. He’s happy.”
    “Good,” said Gerald. He was silent for a minute. “And are you happy?”
    “Yes, I am.”
    “Good,” said Gerald. “Do you have . . . you know . . . anybody?”
    “Not right now.”
    “Not ever, then?”
    “Well, Papa, of course.” She shot him a quick look between checking three mirrors and hurtling around a double-parked car. “What do you want me to tell you?”
    Well, not
too
much
. But he wanted Aegina to be happy. She was certainly successful. Pity his sister Billie was dead, he thought. She could have told him more. Aegina had gone to school in England after her mother died, and she’d stayed with Billie at half-terms and other times during the school year. They’d become close—Billie not quite a surrogate mother, but more than an aunt—and she’d come to know details of Aegina’s life that Gerald had missed.
    He still had a great sense of having failed Aegina. She’d run wild in Mallorca and he’d shipped her off to Billie. And look at her. She had turned out unarguably well—the divorce from Fergus was surely not a bad thing—but he still asked himself if he should have kept her at home, or, God forbid, moved back with her to England somehow himself . . .
    “Just that you’re happy,” said Gerald.
    “I’m happy,” she said firmly. She looked at him quickly again, smiling beautifully. “I’m
very
happy about you and your brilliant book.”
    •   •   •
    G
erald!”
A thin, broadly grinning, frizzy-haired woman with round steel-rim glasses, black tube dress, bore toward him from a group standing before an enormous marbled statue of an ancient Greek the size of King Kong who appeared to be lying in a deck chair. “I’m Kate! Gosh, you’re
handsome
! Damn, we should have had you properly photographed! May I kiss you?”
    She’d already done so as Gerald said, “Certainly.” Over her shoulder, he saw a group of smiling people opening toward them.
    “You must be Aegina!” said Kate Smythe. “How wonderful to finally meet you both! We’re
so
pleased with the book—it’s getting the most fantastic buzz! Don’t fill up on the hors d’oeuvres, we’re taking you out to dinner after the party. Gerald, come and meet everybody.”
    Nicky, Ruth, Claire, William—Gerald had spoken with them all on the telephone while gazing at his olive oil in the larder. He’d forgotten now who did what, but Kate was tagging them again, “publicity . . . foreign rights . . . art direction . . . editorial.” Their fulsome display of affection for him, a total stranger, was unnerving.
    Then Kate took his arm and steered him to other people: Doughty authors, editors of the
Guardian Review
,
The Sunday Times
, the
London Review of Books
, buyers from Waterstones, Foyles.
    “I love your book!” everyone said. “
Adore
your book!”
    They chattered and milled in clusters that broke and regrouped beneath the giant friezes and marble figures of mostly reclining, glaze-eyed, superbly muscled figures looted from the Parthenon and lining the long, austere, Zen space of the Duveen Gallery. Gerald held tightly on to a glass of Champagne as people spoke to him. He barely drank.
    They didn’t, in fact, want to talk about his book. Apart from the Doughties, as they called themselves, no one appeared to have actually read it. They wanted to tell Gerald what they were doing and how