Skios: A Novel (17 page)

The driver put the gear back into neutral.

“They never gave me an address!” said Oliver. So how had he been going to get to the villa? “In a taxi! I was going in a taxi! There was going to be a taxi!”

The driver thought. Then he raised his eyebrows speculatively. “Fox Oliver?” he inquired.

“
Phoksoliva
?” said Oliver. “Oh! Yes! Right! Fox Oliver! And fast, fast, fast!”

“No problem,” said Spiros, as he put the taxi into gear.

*   *   *

“You bastard!” cried Georgie, half in jest and half not, as she came running out of the front gate, then stopped. The taxi was backing and filling as it turned to go. But where was Oliver?

She detached one of the arms holding up her towel and signaled to the taxi. “Wait! Stop!” she shouted.

The driver wound down his window. She knew him—it was Spiros. “OK?” he said. “No problems? Nice holiday?”

“Fine,” she said. “But, Spiros—”

“Stavros,” he replied.

“Stavros. Where is he?”

“Where is he? There he is.”

He pointed. There was a suitcase standing beside the gate.

“Suitcase?” she said.

“OK?” The taxi began to move off.

“Wait! Wait! The person! The person
with
the suitcase!”

Stavros pointed at the villa. And suddenly she realized. What he had brought wasn’t Oliver, it was Wilfred’s missing suitcase.

“Oh,” she said.

“No?” said Stavros.

“Yes. Fine. Thank you.”

“Not a problem.”

The taxi began to move off again.

“Wait,” she said.

He waited. She lifted the suitcase back into the taxi.

“No?” said Stavros. “Don’t want?”

“Of course he wants it,” said Georgie. “But he’s coming with you.”

*   *   *

Slowly Wilfred took his underpants down from the clothesline and put them on in the shelter of the bathrobe. They were still damp. But then so were his spirits. So, obviously, were Georgie’s as she watched him.

“I’m sorry it wasn’t Oliver,” he said.

“You must be pleased to get your bag back, though.”

Was he? He hadn’t really thought about it. His bag had long lost its central place in his picture of the world.

“And to have a taxi. So you’re going to be able to give your wonderful lecture.”

Yes, he was going to be able to give his wonderful lecture. He put his shirt on. It stuck around his armpits and across the back of his neck.

“It’ll dry out as you go along,” she said. “Anyway, you can put some dry things on in the taxi. Now you’ve got your bag back.”

A thought came to him slowly as he forced the buttons back into the damp buttonholes. If no Oliver …

“You wouldn’t like to come with me?” he said. “To the lecture?”

“What, about how it all goes back to some dot in the middle of nowhere ten thousand years ago?” she said, pulling the towel tighter round her. “Thanks most awfully.”

He put his trousers on. They adhered to him in ways that made it quite awkward to walk.

“Thirteen point seven billion years ago,” he said.

30

“Oliver?” said Annuka Vos, putting her head into various rooms of the villa. In her impatience she had left her suitcase where the taxi driver had dumped it, outside the gate. There was no response, though, but the ghostly murmur of the air-conditioning. She had thought for a moment that she could hear his voice somewhere … But no, nothing. He seemed to be out. Out where, doing what? Shopping, swimming? Unlikely. Causing trouble of some sort, more probably. It was entirely characteristic of him not to have answered any of her messages. She wouldn’t have been surprised if he hadn’t even read them. Hadn’t known when she was arriving. Or even that she was arriving at all.

God, she was sick of the whole stupid business!

None of her friends could understand why she put up with him. She couldn’t understand it herself. In fact she
hadn’t
put up with him. She had thrown him out. Three times. And yet here she was, on one last holiday with him yet again. None of her friends could understand how she had got involved with him in the first place. Everyone knew what Oliver Fox was like! She didn’t have to waste her life on people of that sort. She was dark and plump—with the sort of darkness and plumpness that men want to lose themselves in—and there was something fundamentally mysterious about her. No one knew whether she was Finnish or Brazilian. Some said Persian or Latvian, and she didn’t comment, only smiled her dark smile. She could have had anything she wanted in life—a rich husband, six brilliant children, a career in banking. And what she in fact had was Oliver Fox.

Yes, she was a mystery, was Annuka Vos, and to herself most of all.

Still, the villa was everything she had hoped it would be. As her eyes got used to the cool darkness of the interior she began to make a more leisurely tour of inspection, appreciating each room in turn. This was another thing that people failed to understand about her. Unreadable, un-English, yes, but at the same time simple in her tastes and immediate in her responses. She had a natural aesthetic sense, she was a born homemaker. She loved the dark traditional furniture in the living room. Just the kind of thing she would have expected people like Petrus and Persephone to collect for their holiday home, of course. She loved the earthenware pots and plates thrown by Persephone, the watercolors painted by Petrus, the dolls hand sewn by little Petal.

It was entirely characteristic of her relationship with Oliver, of course, that it was friends of
hers
who had lent them the villa. She shuddered to think where she and Oliver would have ended up if they had had to rely on
his
finding somewhere. But then if she hadn’t booked the tickets and made all the arrangements they would never have gone anywhere at all. And if she hadn’t happened to have an income from the Vos family trust, and a flat big enough for both of them, the whole thing would have been over months ago.

Which would have been a thoroughly good thing, of course. Everyone said so. She knew it herself. She had been pretty merciless about throwing him out, after all. You don’t throw someone out four times without demonstrating a pretty cool-headed assessment of their shortcomings.

In the big country kitchen she found a note in Petrus’s handwriting inviting her to help herself to anything she could find. Dear Petrus! Oliver had already helped himself, she saw. There, showing up very distinctly against the shining dark stone worktop, was a characteristic little muddle of used packaging and food scraps— wine bottle left uncorked, the curling remains of a pizza, crumpled wrappings from sliced bread and frozen peas, an empty peanut butter jar. She looked in the refrigerator. Nothing. Of course not. He couldn’t even be bothered to go out and buy a few groceries.

She cleared away the mess, found rubber gloves and kitchen spray, and returned the worktop to the shining dark gleam that it would have had when Petrus and Persephone left it. This was another thing that people failed to understand about her. At the heart of her darkness was a simple housewife, who loved nothing better than getting the rubber gloves on and making everything unspoiled and new.

Again she thought she heard a voice. She stopped cleaning to listen. Nothing. But her heart had leapt up for a moment, she realized, and immediately her irritation returned. She should never have come. She had threatened not to often enough. She should have stuck to it.

She went into the bedroom. Bed unmade, of course, and his suitcase open on the floor, spilling out a muddle of T-shirts and chinos. She gave a little hiss of disapproval, possibly Brazilian in origin, possibly Persian, that she knew would have particularly irritated him, if only he had been here to be irritated. She picked up a handful of the T-shirts and sniffed them to see if they were clean. They smelled as if they had been washed, but not by her. And they certainly hadn’t been ironed, either by her or by anyone else.

In the cupboard in the hall she found an iron and ironing board, and set to work.

*   *   *

“I’ve put your suitcase on the front seat,” said Georgie, “so you can get at some dry clothes as you go along.”

Dr. Wilfred hesitated. “Well,” he said. “Anyway.”

“Off you go, then.”

“Yes … I’d just like to say … Well … Thank you for everything.”

“What—the bread and peas?”

“Everything.” He wanted to mention in particular the two moles on her shoulder blade, but didn’t quite have the nerve.

“So,” she said. “You’ve had a nice little rest. You’re not too burnt. We got your clothes washed and your suitcase back. Haven’t left anything behind? Passport? Credit cards? Phone? The lecture! You’ve got the lecture?”

He unzipped the flight bag and showed her. She held the door of the taxi open for him.

“Or I could wait for a bit,” said Wilfred. “Until Oliver gets here.”

“Wilfred!” She pointed to the lecture.

“Yes…” He took it out of the flight bag and looked at the first page. “It is perhaps particularly appropriate to find myself giving this address here, in the vibrant and bustling city of Kuala Lumpur.” No, that was deleted. “… in the great open spaces of Western Australia…”

He looked at her. “You really wouldn’t like to come and hear it?”

“No, but you really want to go and give it!”

Did he? He heard the familiar voice issuing from some dull inaccessible place a couple of feet above the lectern. He saw the faces raised expectantly towards him. Most particularly the one directly in his eyeline in the middle of the front row that was beginning to close its eyes and sink helplessly into sleep. He saw the woman halfway along Row E who was struggling to get over people’s feet and out, for reasons that everyone in the room was now trying to guess at. He heard the man who made strange little noises, and the woman with the whistling hearing-aid, and the man who laughed at every mention of hunger and disease. He saw the questioners at the end rising to ask him about the existence of God and the moral responsibility of scientists. He heard the never quite enthusiastic enough applause, and the never quite convincing enough “Thank you for that stimulating talk.”

Then he thought about roaming the hillsides for game and fish, for fruit and olives. He thought about Georgie being the only girl in the world and him the only boy.

“I don’t, actually,” he said. “I don’t want to give it. I’d like to make a new start in life.”

“Off you go,” she said, and pushed him towards the taxi. He bent down to get in, then suddenly straightened up at the last moment and gave her a kiss, just at the same moment as she suddenly bent down and gave him one, so that their foreheads collided.

“I bet you saw
that
coming, too,” she said, rubbing her head.

*   *   *

Five assorted T-shirts lay neatly folded on the table by the ironing board. Annuka picked the stack up and felt it against her cheek. They were smooth, they were warm. They felt right. They still smelled alien, though; where had he got them washed? She couldn’t recall any of the logos on them, now she came to look at them; where had he acquired them?

She held up the two pairs of chinos. She was somehow softened to see that his legs were shorter than she had remembered.

Yes, she thought, as she ironed the chinos, however had she got involved with him? She recalled a party. At Vaclav and Bianchetta’s. A lot of noise. Impossible to hear what anyone was saying. Then out of the noise and the darkness, this lopsided smile had appeared, and handfuls of blond hair being brushed out of soft brown eyes. She had somehow got the impression as they talked that he was writing a history of sixteenth-century Tibet.

And he had been so modest about it.

*   *   *

Georgie stretched herself out on the lounger again. The sun was beginning to decline, but at least she didn’t have to cover anything up now.

She had the first premonitions of hunger for the next meal. She should have gone with Wilfred, she realized, at least as far as the nearest supermarket. Or asked him to buy something on his way and bring it back. She knew with a sudden absolute certainty that Oliver wasn’t going to come. What on earth was she going to do?

She suddenly thought she could hear something inside the villa. Footsteps … No. Nothing. Or…? No.

She felt the goose pimples spreading over her skin, even in the heat and light of day. The night was coming. And she was going to have to spend it here alone.

31

Wilfred lay facedown on the soft grass, watching his hand trailing in the stream in front of him. His fingers were softly undulating in time with the water weed around them. Yes, and there was the trout, flicking lazily through the weeds. He watched it edge nearer and nearer. He could feel its cold scales on his quietly tickling fingers. And then, whoosh! It was in his fist! In the air above his head! In the keep-bag he had improvised out of creeper! In the hot ashes of the oven! On the table under the stars! On the fork he was lifting up to her smiling lips …

“So,” said Stavros, nodding at the suitcase beside him, as the taxi bounced along down the unmade-up mountain road, “airport?”

Georgie’s smiling eyes were shining in the candlelight. She moved closer and closer to him. The trout had vanished from the picture. “Yes?” she whispered.

“Yes,” said Wilfred. “Yes. Yes!”

“Not a problem,” said Stavros.

Not a problem. Wilfred slowly emerged into the light of day. Stavros. Of course. Taxi. And he himself was not Wilfred, sharing home-caught trout under the stars with Georgie, but Dr. Wilfred, on his way to give the Fred Toppler Lecture at the Fred Toppler Foundation.

They bounced on down the hillside. He was flung sideways by the hairpin bends, and up against the roof by the potholes; he had presumably been flung around in much the same way ever since they had left the villa, but had been too involved with the trout to notice. Now that he was conscious of his surroundings, though, he realized that in the air-conditioned chill of the taxi his wet clothes were hanging noticeably dank upon him.

He dragged his suitcase over from the front seat. There was something subtly alien about it. And even before he had lifted the flap of the luggage tag to check he knew with a sudden dull certainty what it would say. It wouldn’t be Dr. Norman Wilfred. It would be exactly what it had been before.