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

and gratitude to each one of you. And I want those of you—that’s most of you, of course—who remember our
dear
Tom and Milly, whom we loved so very much”—she turned briefly to Cassian, and then looked again around the tables—“to remember them now too. Happy birthday to all of us!”
    Lulu raised a glass of Champagne. Everyone clapped and drank. A man rose to make a toast but Lulu interrupted him briskly. “Roddy, darling, you’re sweet, but let’s eat our lovely dinner that Bronwyn’s made for us, and we can talk some more later.”
    There was an excited buzz, a Christmas sound of everyone’s packages being torn open. Lulu had bought them Swatch watches, necklaces and bracelets from Morocco and New Mexico, embroidered slippers, scarves, Montblanc pens, Filofaxes; gifts that were useful and would see a long life.
    “Can you believe this?” April said, raising an Hermès scarf to her cheek, looking around and seeing tears and delight on the faces of the other guests. “Look, Luc! Lookit this stuff! Lookit how all these people
love
her! My God, do you, like, know how lucky you are to have such a mother?”
    “The best mummy in the world,” said Luc, watching Montserrat weave through the tables carrying a tray laden with plates heaped with food.
    Dominick Cleland had noticed April the day before, as soon as she and Luc had arrived. Partly, naturally, because she was with Luc, which rendered her an immediate curiosity, and because she was fantastic-looking, with that incredible complexion—he could see in his mind’s eye the apricot dusting and flesh of her pubis as clearly as if he were standing inches from an impastoed painting. Dominick admired Luc’s consistency. He always managed to turn up with some tasty bint. Never held on to them from one year to the next, but he rarely came down empty-handed. Once he’d arrived with a yacht full of people; a little adventure that had turned out very nicely for Dominick. Generally they were young and still undemanding, grateful, curious, and interested in making a career in the arts—ideal fodder for Dominick’s well-oiled mix of elevated conversation and carnal suggestion. It must be the films, he supposed, the endless supply of hopeful supplicants grabbing at anything for a way in. It couldn’t be Luc himself, who would never have what a man needed—power, or the illusion of it, confidence, an inherent disregard for a woman’s tenderer feelings—to hook the sort of woman he was still delusionally looking for. Dominick had long ago rid himself of the desire for such thoroughbreds. They ate a man up faster than cancer. Now all he wanted was a bit of a chase, a delicious conquest (wasn’t that really the finest moment?) culminating in a fuck, preferably delectable, but any fuck at all would do—it was like Chinese dinners: he’d never really had a bad one—a dalliance of no more than a week or so, after which one of them, he or the girl but not together, would hopefully get onto an airplane.
    After dinner, when they cleared a dancing floor on the patio, Dominick went directly to their table and asked April to dance. She seemed flattered.
    “Go ahead,” Luc said to her, smiling as beatifically as his mother.
    Dominick, now in pink shirt and white slacks above the white Guccis, still had the moves: the Hully Gully, the Pony, the Watusi and the Mashed Potato. They’d worked at Annabel’s a hundred years ago and the girls still seemed to go for it. Anyway, it made them laugh, especially if he really cranked it up, and it was amazing how he could work a kind of snake charmer routine on them: fix them with a smile, laugh at himself, pour good Champagne down them, make it dribble from their lips. He could see them reappraising him as the evening went on: he wasn’t
that
old, they began to think—he was certainly fit. He was jolly good fun. He liked women, they could tell; and they could tell that he knew what they wanted. Most evenings, by a certain