Authors: Michael Frayn

Skios: A Novel (28 page)

BOOK: Skios: A Novel

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* * *

Among the last of the wounded to be collected was Cedric Chailey, the token Brit. “I knew there was going to be trouble,” he said to Rosamund Chailey, as he lay on one of the tables in the now almost empty agora, with his wounded leg stretched out in front of him and bound up as best she could in a tablecloth. “As soon as they said he was Norman Wilfred. I was in college with Norman Wilfred. That fellow wasn’t Norman Wilfred. If anything should happen to me, you’ll see that control gets this.”

He handed her the mobile phone he had removed from Mr. Skorbatov’s shirt pocket, containing all the great oligarch’s contacts, codes, and passwords.

* * *

By the time Oliver had packed his suitcase—or at any rate Dr. Wilfred’s suitcase—and arrived at the entrance, the counterpoint of sirens from the departing police and ambulances winding their way back through the mountains was becoming fainter. There was no one to be seen, and no limousines or taxis. He tapped on the window of the lodge. Tapped and tapped—banged with his fist—because Elli had her headphones on, oblivious to the world around her.

“Sorry!” she said, when she at last slid back the glass. “I’m talking to my Auntie Soussana in Patras. What tricks those people in Patras do! You never imagine! So in what way my help you?”

“A taxi, if you would.”

“Oh, were you at the lecture? Is it all over? How did it go? No rain? I thought I heard thunder.”

On the agora the last few candles guttered out. The moon rode ever higher in the sky, and poured a soft classical peace ever deeper into the ruins. The warm air was sweet with the blossoms of the Mediterranean night. From the hillside where she had emerged from her abductor’s crate, the white goddess looked serenely down upon her little protectorate, and held her guiding hand over it once again as she had held it three thousand years before. She had restored peace and civilization to her island.

Here and there in the moonlight some of the exhausted cooks and waiters, who had only stirred uneasily in their sleep at the noise of gunfire and screaming, opened their eyes and perhaps pecked at a little abandoned baklava or took a restorative swig from a forgotten bottle of brandy. Giorgios, who had settled down at last to smoke his so long awaited and so richly deserved cigarette, only to discover that the pack had fallen out of his pocket during his exertions, located a box of cigars and made do with one of them.

At a moonlit table in one secluded corner Georgie cut Nikki another handful of grapes, and Nikki poured Georgie another glass of wine.

“I really knew,” said Nikki. “From the moment I set eyes on him. In my heart.”

“So did I,” said Georgie. “I always know if they’re duds. Quite easy, actually, because they always are.”

“What was that one at school called?”

“You mean Mr. Wossop?”

“No, the boy you hid in the changing rooms … Mr.
Wossop
? That awful little man who took us for comparative religion? You didn’t!”

“Not really. Only once, on that retreat thing to the nunnery place.”

“Georgie!”

“You were too busy retreating to notice. You were so ghastly when you were head girl, Nikki!”

“Was I? What, a bit … scrungy?”

“Scrungissimo. I hated you.”

“No, you didn’t. You had some kind of thing about me. Creeping up and peering at me all the time.”

“I didn’t have my lenses then. Oh, Nikki, all that being ghastly of yours, and where’s it got you in the end? She’ll never make you director now!”

“No. Nothing much left to be director of, anyway.”

“Nikki, it’s no good, is it? Suddenly trying not to be ghastly, if ghastly’s what one is.”

They sipped their wine. Nikki refilled their glasses.

“Anyway,” said Georgie, “he seems to have vanished.”

“Norman?”

“Oliver.”

“I still can’t think of him as Oliver.”

“Not that it matters much which. If they shot him.”

“Maybe the cleaning woman got him.”

They laughed. They stopped laughing. They reflected silently for some moments on life and its vicissitudes.

“I like it here,” said Georgie. “We could find somewhere to live. A Greek fisherman’s cottage. With or without Greek fishermen.”

“You mean—together? You and me?”

“Why not? Then if Patrick rings, no problem. You wouldn’t have to invent anything, because there I’d be.”

“So where would Patrick be?”

“Somewhere else. Wherever he is now. Back on the boat with his chums. Floating about.”

They poured another glass of wine.

“I’m so pleased you don’t live in Switzerland,” said Georgie. “I shouldn’t have wanted to live in Switzerland.”

“Switzerland, Switzerland! Georgie, what
is
all this?”

“That time before when I phoned to say I was staying with you. You kept going on about skiers.”

“Skiers? In Skios?”

Georgie thought about this. “Oh, I see,” she said.

“Georgie,” said Nikki, “you’re such a dumbo!”

“Dumbissimo,” said Georgie.

Nikki gazed into her glass of moonlit wine, Georgie at the moonlit goddess gazing down upon them.

“So peaceful here, though,” said Georgie. “So kind of like eternal. All these statues and things.”

Nikki turned to see what Georgie was looking at.

“Never seen that one before,” she said.

* * *

“
Phoksoliva
?” said Spiros, as he and Oliver together struggled to lift the heavy suitcase into the boot of the taxi. “Thirty-two euros. In advance.”

Oliver took out a handful of banknotes he had found in Dr. Wilfred’s suitcase. “Airport,” he said. He was going to start his studies in neurology as soon as he was back in London. Or perhaps in some other branch of science. It would be interesting to know what a Wexler whatever-it-was was.

In the headlights, as Spiros let out the clutch and the taxi moved forward, appeared a familiar and improbable figure—a woman in low-cut evening dress, with strong bare shoulders and a construction of brass-colored hair on her head like the dome of a Russian church. She stood in front of the taxi waving her arms.

“No!” she said. “No! No! Please! Taxi! Yes! Thank you!”

“Oh, hello,” said Oliver. “You want a lift?”

“No, no, no!” said Mrs. Skorbatova, getting in beside him.

“I thought you’d gone! So what, you didn’t leave with your husband?”

“Yes!” said Mrs. Skorbatova.

“No, you didn’t. You got left behind, because here you are.”

“No, no, no!”

“OK?” said Spiros. “Airport?”

“Airport!” said Mrs. Skorbatova. “Yes, yes!”

“Wait!” said Oliver. He smiled his soft, melancholy smile at her, as if he had foreseen the whole thing, and all the beauty of it, and all the sadness that would inevitably follow. Spiros waited, watching the performance in the rearview mirror. “Or
Phoksoliva
?” he said.

“Exactly,” said Oliver. “
Phoksoliva.
” If he started his studies a few days later than he had planned he could always catch up later. And he had surely earned a bit of a break.

“
Phoksoliva
?” said Mrs. Skorbatova. She laughed, seized the end of his nose again, and waggled it from side to side.

“No, no, no!” she said. “No
phoks
! No, no, no, no! No, no, no, no, no!”

“No problem,” said Spiros.

* * *

Millimeter by millimeter in the moonlight Athena began to lean a little closer to the settlement she was responsible for, as the ground subsided beneath her weight. Gradually she leaned a little less slowly, until she passed the point of no return, and measured her length on the ground. She managed it with reasonable dignity, like a duchess overcome by drink, though she broke her arm in three places and her head fell off.

“She’s gone,” said Georgie.

“Everyone goes,” said Nikki, closing one eye to sight the last centimeter of wine left in her glass. “Dr. Wilfred. You. Me. The cleaning woman.”

“No, that white statue thing.”

“Things come, things go,” said Nikki. “Statues, temples. European civilization. Three thousand years. Constant flux.”

“Your boss is back, though,” said Georgie. “I thought she was dead.”

Nikki turned to look. From somewhere in the shadows Mrs. Fred Toppler had appeared. She seemed to be dazed, and was walking as if under water, or in a deep sleep. Slowly she found her way to the microphone. She was holding up a crumpled sheet of paper to read, though there was only moonlight to read it by, and the microphone was as dead as the old gods and goddesses. But Nikki knew what the words were.

“I just want to say a big thank-you to our distinguished guest,” Mrs. Fred Toppler was saying, “for making this evening such a unique and special occasion, and one that I’m sure none of us here will ever forget…”

ALSO BY MICHAEL FRAYN

FICTION

Spies

Headlong

Now You Know

A Landing on the Sun

The Trick of It

Sweet Dreams

A Very Private Life

Towards the End of the Morning

The Russian Interpreter

The Tin Men

NONFICTION

My Father’s Fortune

The Human Touch

The Copenhagen Papers:
An Intrigue
(with David Burke)

Constructions

Chekhov: Plays
(translation)

PLAYS

Afterlife

Democracy

Alarms & Excursions

Copenhagen

Now You Know

Here

Look Look

Benefactors

Noises Off

Make and Break

Balmoral

Clouds

Donkeys’ Years

Alphabetical Order

The Two of Us

FILM AND TELEVISION

Clockwise

First and Last

Remember Me?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

M
ICHAEL
F
RAYN
is the author of ten novels, including the best-selling
Headlong,
which was a
New York Times
Editor’s Choice selection and a Booker Prize finalist, and
Spies,
which received the Whitbread Fiction Award. He has also written a memoir,
My Father’s Fortune,
and fifteen plays, among them
Noises Off
and
Copenhagen,
which won three Tony Awards. He lives just south of London.