Skios: A Novel (7 page)

She explained to him about how she was supposed to meet a friend here, only she had missed the plane thanks to the difficulties made by another friend, etc., etc., and then she had suddenly seen there was a flight to Thessaloniki, etc., etc., and her friend’s phone was etc., etc., and all she knew about the villa they were staying in was that it belonged to some people, only she didn’t know their name.

“No problem,” said the man with the wart on the end of his nose. “What?”

She had missed the plane, she explained again, thanks to the tiresomeness of her friend Patrick, with the result that another friend of hers who was supposed to be meeting her here, and who was called Oliver—

“Wait!” said the man. “You want Mr. Fox Oliver?”

“
Mystaphoksoliva
?” she repeated blankly. And suddenly she realized how easy it was to understand Greek. “Yes!” she cried. “Mr. Fox Oliver! Yes, yes!”

“No problem,” said Spiros. He took the handle of her suitcase and ushered her towards the parking. “I know where. I drive him. Mr. Fox Oliver. Already now he have the bath waiting you, glass of wine on the table.”

*   *   *

Straight along the path and then left.

It had sounded so easy when Nikki said it. But in the darkness, as the new Dr. Norman Wilfred groped his way around in his white bathrobe, with the bottle of chilled champagne tucked under his arm, he found it difficult to make any sense of the world he had invented himself into. Straight along the path, yes, but none of the paths
was
straight! They were all elegantly landscaped into the complex contours of the hillside. Then left. But when was a left a left, and when was it a winding straight with a right turning off it?

Here and there small lights kept their eyes modestly downcast upon the ground, or half concealed behind veils of sweet-scented vegetation. Every now and then he heard a snatch of conversation or laughter, but lights and sounds alike only made the surrounding darkness and silence seem deeper. He caught occasional glimpses through the trees of some kind of life—of people moving about, or sitting at tables—but it was way down the hillside below him, and there seemed to be no possible approach.

His surroundings became stranger still when the moon rose above the hills in the east, silvering some of the darkness, plunging the rest into yet deeper shadow. There was something maddening about the timelessness of it all when he was so short of time himself. Somewhere in this great peacefulness those welcoming eyes were turned towards the veranda window that she had left open. But where, where? Already the smile in the eyes was beginning to fade, and at any moment the other Dr. Norman Wilfred would come raging out of the shadows and shoulder him aside. The embowered bungalows were a long way from one another, and even in the moonlight he had to get very close to see the names carved in the stonework. Xenocles, Theodectes, Menander … Leucippus, Empedocles, Anaximander … He realized that he had forgotten the name of the one he was looking for. Demosthenes. No—Damocles.

He would have to give up. Go back to his own room, get a good night’s sleep, and hope that somehow, somewhere, the old Dr. Norman Wilfred was as lost as he was himself.

But he couldn’t go back to his room. He didn’t know the way and, even if he could find someone to ask, he’d forgotten the name of it. In any case he hadn’t got the key.

He was beginning to feel nostalgic for the old days, when he had still been Oliver Fox. As so often in life, though, there was nowhere to go but on, and nothing to do but what you had so recklessly started doing.

*   *   *

At last, as the taxi swayed and rocked on the dirt road through the mountains, Georgie’s phone rang. She was holding it in her hand, ready and waiting.

“Hi!” she said joyfully. “I’m here! Where are you?”

“On the boat,” said Patrick. “Where you left me.”

It took her no more than a quarter of a second to reconfigure herself.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said.

“Obviously. Who did you think I was?”

“I thought you might be Nikki. My old schoolfriend. The one I’m staying with. I told you! She was supposed to meet me at the airport. At Zurich.”

“You’re in Switzerland already? You said you missed the plane.”

“I found another one. Via somewhere … Belgrade.”

Silence from Izmir. She wound down the window and felt the hot scented night air flowing over her face. She was aware that the man with the wart on his nose was watching her in his rearview mirror.

“What’s the weather like in Switzerland?” said Patrick.

“Oh, you know. The usual. Bit cool.”

“So you’re still in Zurich? Still at the airport?”

“I’m in a taxi.”

“What happened to your pal?”

“Nikki? Busy at her foundation thing. Tied up with her skiers.”

“Skiers?”

“I told you.”

“In June?”

“They go very high.”

“I thought this was some sort of cultural institute?”

“It is. Culture and skiing.”

Another silence.

“Yes, well … Just checking you’re OK.” A special strangulated note came into his voice. “I love you, you know.”

“I know. Me, too—me you.”

She pressed the red button. She tried not to catch the taxi driver’s eye in the mirror.

“Spiros,” he said, and handed a card over his shoulder to her. “You want taxi? Spiros. Not Stavros. Stavros he’s my brother. He drive very bad. Kill you for sure.”

She wasn’t thinking about Greece, though. She was thinking about Nikki, at her foundation thing high in the Alps. She couldn’t remember now what Nikki had said about it. Only something about there being skiing there, or skiers. She thought about the skiers swooping across the whiteness of the high snowfields through the sparkling cold mountain air. And Nikki, up there with them, leading her clear, white, well-organized life. If only she could have been like that!

She pressed a number on her phone, then turned sideways to get away from Spiros, and hid her mouth behind her hand. There were some conversations that even she felt a little self-conscious about.

“Also electrical,” said Spiros. “Also genuine antique amphorae. Also smell by septic tank. Send for Spiros. You don’t like Mr. Fox Oliver? No problem. You phone, you ask for Spiros.”

12

Nikki was getting slowly undressed in the darkness. She was undressing slowly just in case Dr. Wilfred phoned and needed help of some sort. She had turned all the lights off and left the veranda windows open in order to breathe the natural air of the night for once. Every now and then the net curtains would stir and shift, or the plumbago sway in the security lighting. She didn’t look round. She wasn’t worried about intruders. And when finally her phone did ring she jumped out of her skin, she was so surprised. She let it ring on for a while before she answered.

“Nikki Hook,” she said, in a voice that went with pleasantly open eyes and crisply ironed shirts.

“Nikki!” whispered the voice at the other end. “It’s me!”

She couldn’t think of an answer. Whoever me was, it wasn’t the me she’d for one wild moment thought it was going to be.

“Georgie!” said the voice. Georgie? Oh, yes, Georgie. “Hello, Georgie,” said Nikki.

“Nikki, listen. I’m doing something rather silly.”

Of course. The only times Georgie ever phoned was when she was doing something rather silly. Nikki waited.

“I know, I know!” said Georgie. “Oh, Nikki! Why do these things happen to me? But listen, listen. I’ve got something dreadful to ask you. Now I know this is awful, but—”

“You’ve told Patrick you’re staying with me.”

“I’m so sorry, Nikki! I know I should have asked you first. I’ll
never
do it again! I promise, I promise, I promise! He
won’t
call you, I’m sure he won’t, he hasn’t got your number, but he might look it up somehow, it would be just like him, and if he does … It’s just that he sounded a bit, you know,
scrungy
when he rang a moment ago. What was the weather like here, and so on. He might start ringing up the weather people to check.”

“So what
was
the weather like?”

“I told him cool. Is it?”

“About ninety degrees.”

“Oh, no! Not very good for skiers!”

“For Skios? Oh, about usual. Don’t worry, though. If anyone asks, it’s cool. I’m thinking cool thoughts.”

“Oh, bless you, Nikki! What should I do without you?”

“It’s cool where
you
are, is it?”

“Actually it’s about ninety degrees here.”

“Which is where? Or I suppose I shouldn’t ask.”

“Well … I think it’s a secret. There’s this woman who keeps phoning him.”

“He’s married, is he?”

“Married?” There was a pause. Nikki could hear the distant sounds of a car driving over an unmade-up road. Also of Georgie thinking. “Probably, now you come to mention it.”

“Georgie! Don’t you even
know
?”

“He won’t talk about it! He just kind of smiles!”

“Oh, no! Remember the last one!”

“I know. Oh, Nikki! If only I were like you! All sensible and snow-white, and running foundations and things!”

There was another pause, this time because Nikki was looking at the net curtains stirring and the plumbago beyond them swaying. And thinking. Wondering whether to say.

“Nikki?” said Georgie. “Are you still there?”

“The thing is,” said Nikki, in a suddenly small voice, “I think I may be, too.”

“What? You’ve gone a bit quiet. I’m in a taxi. It’s crashing about a lot. I can’t hear. May what?”

“Also be doing something silly.”

There was a colossal shriek down the line.

“Oh,
no
! Not you! You don’t do silly things!”

“I know.”

“You’re the head girl! You’re supposed to be setting us all an example! Oh, Nikki! Even you! So tell, tell! What’s he like?”

“Well … he’s rather wonderful.”

“No, he isn’t! Don’t be silly, Nikki!”

“I know. But actually he
is
! Tremendously distinguished and famous, and he knows everything, and he’s done everything, and he’s just so …
ordinary
about it all!”

“Mine’s terrible. A total no-hoper. You don’t know where you are with him from one moment to the next. How long have you known yours?”

“About two hours.”

“Well, there you go. Wait till you’ve known him for two weeks, like me. Is yours married?”

Now Nikki was silent.

“I don’t think so,” she said finally.

“Nikki!”

“I did actually ask him. But he’s like yours. He just smiles.”

“He’s married! Of course he’s married! Oh, Nikki! Head girl! Remember? And he’s famous? Nikki, you’re going to end up in the newspapers! So, what, he’s nice-looking?”

“Very. Like a kind of blond dish mop.”

“So’s mine! Exactly! How funny!”

“Two hours, that’s all, and I’ve only got him for one day more, and I’m sitting here in the dark because I’ve left the veranda window open just in case, and it’s all absolutely ridiculous, and I’m so ashamed of myself, and if I put the phone down suddenly you’ll know what’s happened.”

Georgie laughed and laughed.

“I know,” said Nikki.

“And is he Swiss?” said Georgie.

“Swiss? No? Why—is yours?”

“Mine? No. Only since you’re in Switzerland…”

But Nikki’s attention had been distracted. There was a noise coming from somewhere like an unoiled door being swung back and forth. Then shouting, and running footsteps.

“Sounds like someone screaming,” said Georgie. “What’s going on up there?”

“Sorry,” said Nikki hurriedly. “I’ve got to go.”

“Have fun!” said Georgie, as Nikki put the phone down. “Just don’t start being
in love
with him.”

*   *   *

The screaming, Oliver saw in the confused moment as the lights came on, was emerging from a woman who was cowering away from him on the bed above him as best she could while she kept her finger jammed down on the bedside panic button. She was richly and commandingly tanned and blonded, skin-creamed and silk-nightdressed. Oliver could see, even from where he was lying on the floor, even shocked and confused from having fallen off the bed with his foot caught in his bathrobe, that she was not Nikki.

There seemed to be three other people in the room, though it was difficult to see from where he was lying, and all of them in various states of social disarray. Coming through the open veranda window, where he himself had entered a few moments earlier, was the security guard who had been so eager to see his ID earlier, now struggling to conceal a lighted cigarette. Lowering above the woman on the bed was a bloated dark thundercloud of naked stomach. From the dense black bush beneath the stomach dangled a long male member. Above the thundercloud were piled more stories of hairy flesh, and looking out from on top of it all, like Zeus from high heaven, was a boldly featured face framed by a trim gray beard and a luxuriance of billowing gray locks, raining down thunderbolts of excited and incomprehensible Greek.

In the doorway to the corridor was the only familiar face—Nikki, as discreetly tanned and blonded as ever, still struggling to do up her skirt and tuck her shirt into it.

Oliver disentangled his foot and got himself upright. “I do apologize,” he said, when the screaming and shouting had subsided enough to make himself heard. “I’ve lost the key to my suitcase.”

Nikki was the next to recover her social poise.

“Oh, Mrs. Toppler,” she said, “this is Dr. Norman Wilfred. Our guest of honor. Dr. Wilfred, this is Mrs. Fred Toppler, who is, of course, your hostess.”

“I saw the window open,” said Oliver. “I thought that just possibly I might find some wire cutters … Or a hacksaw…”

“Fetch some wire cutters from the tool room, Giorgios,” said Nikki to the security man. “Then show Dr. Wilfred the way back to Parmenides, and get his suitcase open for him. I’m so sorry about this, Mrs. Toppler. I should have checked that Dr. Wilfred had everything he needed.”

“Welcome to the Fred Toppler Foundation, Dr. Wilfred,” said Mrs. Toppler, recovering at last the use of words. “We’re all so excited.”