Skios: A Novel (8 page)

Mr. Papadopoulou got his vast mass down from the bed and picked up the bottle of champagne that had rolled away out of Oliver’s hand.

“Oh, and this is Mr. Vassilis Papadopoulou,” said Nikki. “A great patron and benefactor of the Fred Toppler Foundation.”

“Thank you,” said Oliver.

“Change from the guy we got last year, anyway,” said Mr. Papadopoulou.

*   *   *

“You said the veranda on the right,” said Oliver quietly and reproachfully to Nikki in the corridor outside, while the security guard waited.

“It
is
on the right. If you’re inside.”

“I see,” said Oliver. “It is if you’re
inside
. That’s where I went wrong, being outside. Perhaps we could just take a look at it together, from the inside, so I’ve got it absolutely straight in my mind.”

She hesitated, and then became aware that the door of Mrs. Toppler’s room was open a crack, and that Mr. Papadopoulou was watching them.

“You’d better go with Security, Dr. Wilfred,” she said. “You’ll be at breakfast, perhaps?”

*   *   *

“She tells me she’s getting me this great star,” said Mrs. Fred Toppler. “And all the time it’s her boyfriend!”

“She hooks you a big fish—who cares?” said Mr. Papadopoulou, his hand under Mrs. Fred Toppler’s nightdress in the dark, squeezing the spot that she liked to have squeezed, for medical reasons, just below the small of her back. “
She’s
happy,
he’s
happy,
you’re
happy.”

“‘Oh, Mrs. Toppler,’ she says, ‘he’s world famous! Oh, Mrs. Toppler, he’s going to be so much better than the one last year!’ And all the time they’re doing it right across the corridor!”

“Relax. He never got there.”

“No, this great intellectual, and can’t even find his girlfriend’s fanny!”

“Boy, did you scream!”

“The little tramp, though! That white shirt, that kind of stuffed-English-muffin look on her face. And inside it all she’s a tramp like everybody else!”

Mr. Papadopoulou suddenly laughed. “You know what? She looks out the window for him. She says, ‘Darling, it’s the window on the right!’”

Mrs. Toppler thought about this. Mr. Papadopoulou was kneading her buttocks. She was almost ready for the oven. Suddenly she laughed in her turn.

“He is rather cute, though,” she said.

*   *   *

Nikki lay wide awake, trying to calm herself with her cool thought. Christian will be going. The foundation will be looking for a new director …

But before she could finish thinking her cool thought it had been overtaken by a hot one: had the scene in Mrs. Toppler’s bedroom cast doubt on the suitability of her choice of lecturer? Hard on the heels of this hot thought came another one, even more hotly embarrassing, even more hotly tormenting: Mrs. Toppler couldn’t possibly have suspected, could she, in whose bed Dr. Wilfred had really been trying to find wire cutters or a hacksaw…?

She got up and checked once again that her veranda window was now closed and bolted.

13

Perhaps there was more to Oliver than she had supposed, thought Georgie, as she opened the front door of the villa and the lights revealed the cavern of relaxed wealth within. He certainly seemed to have rich friends.

“Oliver!” she called softly. There was no response but the ghostly murmur of the air-conditioning. And something else … Some elusive sense of a human presence. A faint sound, perhaps, that merged with the air conditioner.

She pulled her suitcase inside and closed the door. After all her adventures she had finally arrived.

She opened a door at random. “Oliver?” But the sound in here was the purring of a vast steel refrigerator. Silhouetted against a discreet glow of light on the draining board sat the remains of a pizza, a single wineglass, and a three-quarters-empty bottle of wine.

She tried another door, and there in the darkness beyond was the sound. It was breathing. The deep, rough breathing of a man asleep, coming from behind the mosquito net around a wide bed. She had entered a fairy story, though it was the wrong way round from usual; she was the princess awakening the enchanted prince from his hundred-year-long sleep. “Oliver!” she whispered. The sleeping prince snorted and turned away. The rough breathing became snoring. She felt a moment of dismay. She somehow hadn’t foreseen that the soft words issuing from that gently rueful face when it was awake might become coarse grunts when it was asleep. Her heart sank as she thought of all the other disconcerting little things she was going to find out about him in the next few days. “Oliver!” she said, rather more sharply.

On he snored behind the white gauze. By the pale shine from the doorway she opened her suitcase and took out her washbag. She fell over his shoes as she felt around for the bathroom, and still he didn’t wake. The bathroom was all soft lighting and soft towels. She was tempted to have a bath, but settled for cleaning her teeth very carefully, and rubbing various creams into her face. She inspected herself in the mirror. Yes, only a few more years and she wouldn’t be doing silly things like this any longer. She would have settled down without any effort on her own part.

She went back into the bedroom. The snoring had become more profound. She closed the door. Complete darkness. She thought for a moment. Snoring or no snoring, this was what she had come all this way for. This was why she had made so many arrangements and told so many lies. She got undressed, and then stood for a moment shivering, though whether from anticipation or simply the chill of the air-conditioning she didn’t know.

Carefully she found her way through the mosquito netting. Carefully she drew it closed behind her.

He was as naked as she was, she discovered as she stretched herself out behind him. His back was a surprise—it was covered in coarse hair. So was his chest, as she put her arm round him. She slid her hand down through the thickets. He was much fatter than she would have guessed; a rounded droop of flesh rested sideways on the sheets like the hang of a heavy swagged curtain. She reached an even denser thicket, and there, hidden in the midst of it, a creature as small and soft as a piglet. All the tender excitement that had been gathering inside her over the past two weeks stirred again.

So did the piglet. So, at last, did the great father pig in whose fur it was nestling.

*   *   *

Dr. Wilfred slowly surfaced from sleep to discover himself in a most delightful world, though it took him a few moments to realize exactly what the delightfulness of it was. Sometimes before on his travels he had found himself involved in a rather agreeable interlude of some sort. Someone would have approached him after his lecture. Something she hadn’t quite understood, something she wanted to discuss further. A drink or two. Perhaps some exchange of revelations about tastes and feelings … backgrounds and hometowns … aspirations and disappointments … Then usually a certain awkwardness over undressing … But never before had he woken up to find himself in the midst of things, with all the tedious preliminaries short-circuited. The sumptuousness of the Fred Toppler Foundation’s guest quarters had already justified its good name in the profession, but never would he have guessed that it also provided amenities like this. His misfortunes with his luggage and the offhandedness of his reception at the airport had been most handsomely made up for.

The sweet unknown owner of that sweetly importunate hand pressed herself against his back and kissed his ear. “You bad boy,” she whispered. “Don’t you ever listen to your messages?”

Dr. Wilfred found the soft whisper as delightful as everything else, but the sense of the words hard to construe. “What messages?” he said.

The magical hand stopped moving. For a moment it remained motionless. Then the long softness pressing against his back abruptly removed itself, the bed bounced violently, and there was the sound of the mosquito netting ripping as a body rocketed through it and away into the darkness.

He was too stunned to understand, then too blinded to see as a light came on, then too deafened to think as the room filled with screaming. It seemed to be coming, he slowly made out through the pink dazzle in his eyes, from somewhere in the midst of a scrabble of torn mosquito netting pressed back against the wall near the light switch.

He struggled to sit up, so as to think more clearly. At once the bundle of mosquito netting screamed louder than ever, picked up various pieces of clothing scattered around the floor, and ran into the bathroom. There was the sound of a bolt being slammed home.

He remembered that he had uttered two words, but not, in his state of shock, what they were. What could they possibly have been? Never, surely, in the history of traveling lecturers had two words produced such an abrupt and total reversal of fortune.

14

Somewhere in the world, perhaps in America or India, inside one vast electronic machine among a bank of others, an inaudible voice was saying, “Hi! I know it
sounds
like me. But it’s not me. It’s just my phone, pretending.…”

And then, inside perhaps the same machine, perhaps a different one, on a different continent even, another inaudible voice was saying in a desperate whisper, “Oliver, will you
please
answer your phone! I’m locked in the bathroom! He’s hammering on the door! I thought it was
you
! He nearly raped me! I don’t know how to phone the police in this country! Oliver! Please help me! I’m all on my own! In the bathroom!”

And then, a minute or two later, perhaps inside one of the same machines, perhaps not: “Hi! I know it
sounds
like me. But it’s not me…”

Followed by a voice that had risen to a hysterical scream: “Oliver! Where
are
you? He was in bed! He was pretending to be you! He hasn’t done something to you, has he? Tied you up? Murdered you…?”

*   *   *

And inside perhaps once again the same machine, perhaps another one in some completely different part of the world, two inaudible voices talking simultaneously. A man’s:

“Listen, I don’t know what’s going on here—some woman has broken into the guest quarters—she’s having hysterics—she’s locked herself in the bathroom—can you send someone—or call the police—or tell me what to dial? What did you say?”

And a woman’s:

“You have reached the Fred Toppler Foundation. There is no one here right now to take your call…”

15

As the night wore on Nikki’s worries about the future of the directorship began to change their shape, in the way that worries so often do in the darkness. What was keeping her awake now was a memory of the past. A past only a few hours old, but as lost to her as childhood. Once again she saw that tousled blond head slowly turning, and those rueful dark eyes coming to rest on the sign she was holding up. Once again she saw the summer dawn of that slow smile. And the smile becoming the full sunrise of his laughter.

She kept hearing the name. Dr. Norman Wilfred. She turned onto her other side and pulled the pillow over her ears, but the name spoke through it. “Dr. Wilfred. Norman.”

She might manage to go to sleep, she thought, if she could get some air into the room. She could quite safely unbolt the window now, surely. No one was going to be trying to get in at this time of the night. She jumped out of bed and had her hand on the bolt when her phone rang. She ran back and snatched it up. “Yes?” she said breathlessly. Too late she remembered the tone of voice she used for answering the phone, the one that went with the pleasant expression and the crisp white shirts. “Hello? Yes?”

“Nikki, I know I’ve woken you up,” said Georgie, “and I’m desperately sorry, and I know there’s nothing you can do where you are, and I’ve calmed down, I’m not in a panic, but I can’t get through to anyone, and I’ve just got to talk to
someone,
because I can hear him outside the door, he’s hammering, he’s shouting threats, I’m in the bathroom, he’s going to kick the door down.”

At some point, as Nikki struggled to understand what was happening, and grasped that the man Georgie had found herself getting into bed with was not the one she had expected, and sympathized, and calmed the now supposedly calm Georgie even further, and offered good practical advice about how to negotiate through a stoutly built door and calm the unexpected bedfellow in his turn, she thought she heard a scratching at the window. But by the time the battery in Georgie’s phone had finally gone flat and Nikki was able to get across to the window and open it, there was nothing to be seen outside.

Except, just possibly, one or two little pools of water on the tiled floor of the veranda, already drying in the hot night air.

*   *   *

Now he was Dr. Norman Wilfred, Oliver had discovered, once the security guard had unlocked his room and broken the padlock off his suitcase for him, he had an unexpected taste for pure silk underpants and pure silk pajamas. He was a more substantial man than he had realized; the underpants and pajama trousers were both forty inches round the middle. He was also the master of a pair of swimming trunks of the same size. They were decorated with a motif of smiling dolphins, and were remarkably difficult to keep on.

By the time he had swum fifty lengths of a small floodlit pool he had found near his room to work off his undischarged head of energy he was in a relatively philosophical frame of mind. After the first twenty lengths he had been seized by a sudden hope that Nikki might have forgiven his mistake, and opened her window again. But when he got down to Democritus and crept past the (still open) right-hand veranda window, as it appeared to him to be from outside, with scarcely the sound of a splash or a wet foot on the ground, the left-hand veranda window was firmly closed. He had tapped and pushed at it and peered in. He had thought he could see her sitting on the edge of her bed in the darkness inside, but she had not relented.

Well, there was always tomorrow. The golden pathway still stretched ahead. Until the other claimant to his identity turned up, he was Dr. Norman Wilfred still. He knew everything, he had done everything, and he would be irresistible. And if by any chance his elusive fat Doppelgänger had still not arrived in time to give his lecture … He laughed to himself at the thought as he swam. What would he say? He had no idea. Something would come to him, though. Something would turn up. Something always did. The world would continue to revolve, one way or another.