Skios: A Novel (24 page)

“No,” said Dr. Wilfred. “I just tell her…” He turned back to Mrs. Skorbatova and whispered in her ear. “Mrs. Toppler wants to know what I tell you to make you laugh,” he said. “But that’s our little secret. The fact that I’m Oliver Fox.” Mrs. Skorbatova laughed again, and gave him a little punch on his arm.

“This is what we need to replace Christian,” said Mrs. Toppler. “Someone like you, who can get along with people. Even with an ice princess who can’t speak English, but who just happens to be married to one of the richest men in the world. You seem to be able to do anything! And stay so calm about it all! Look at me. I’m in such a state! Can’t eat, can’t think—and all I’ve got to say is these two pages! ‘Our guest of honor tonight needs no introduction…’ Whereas you…”

She stopped and looked around.

“Your lecture!” she said. “The script of your lecture! Where is it?”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “My lecture.”

“You hadn’t forgotten about it?”

“Of course not,” he said, though in fact just for the moment he had, under the pressure of events.

“So where is it?” she said in alarm. “The script—the text—the words?”

He shrugged. “Inside my head.”

“You’ve learned it by heart?”

“No, I thought I’d just make it up as I went along.”

She gazed at him.

“It’ll be fresher that way,” he said. “More spontaneous. I’ll take myself by surprise.”

“I’ve sat next to a whole slew of guests of honor since this place opened,” she said. “But I’ve never met one like you. Well, if you can make things up as you go along, so can I! And here’s an idea I’ve just had, straight out of the oven and onto the table, still bubbling…”

She put her hand on his arm and began to murmur something that he had to bend close to hear.

*   *   *

Nikki watched Oliver Fox leaning with his head lowered and then sitting back in surprise. And in one of those eureka moments that the real Dr. Norman Wilfred, she knew, had devoted his life to bringing some order to, she understood why Oliver Fox was so astonished, and why Mrs. Toppler was now waiting so attentively for his response.

Not possible, though! No, no, no! Not possible!

But it
was
possible.
Anything
was possible. In the last twenty-four hours that horrible trickster with the modestly surprised look on his face had proved it over and over again.

This was her flash of insight: that Mrs. Toppler had just invited Mr. Oliver Fox to become the next director of the Fred Toppler Foundation.

Her flash of insight was followed by a second flash. Of anger. At Oliver Fox, at Mrs. Toppler, at herself. And at last she knew how to explain to Mrs. Toppler.

The passport. She would simply show Mrs. Toppler the passport. The passport would say it all, just as it had to her.

43

“Suitcase,” said Annuka Vos into her phone, very loudly and clearly. She was standing in the floodlit garden of the villa, to make sure her words got through with a minimum of interference. “Stolen. Has been. Suitcase. Mine. Yes…? Oh, for heaven’s sake! There must be
someone
in the Greek police who can speak English better than this!

“Yes, but this is the fifth time I’ve phoned you! Fifth! Five! Phoned! Five times! Oh, never mind …

“Busy—yes—I know you are … An event—yes—I know…! I know, I know!
Big
event! I
know
! But I have been traveling all day and I have no clean clothes to change into. Clean clothes! None! No toothbrush! Brush for teeth—no, none! No nightdress! Dress for night! Not got it!

“Stolen—yes! And for the fifth time, the name of the person who stole it is Evers, E-V-E-R-S. Georgina Francesca Evers … Yes, because it’s in her passport … Her passport was in her handbag … Not
my
handbag—
her
handbag! Not stolen, no, not the
handbag
! Left behind when she fled!
Fled!
F-L-E-D! Ran! Left! Went! Oh, let it go, it doesn’t matter …

“Yes, because I found it under the lounger … The
lounger
 … Forget it … Also in the bag were her money and her credit cards, so she won’t have gone far. It can’t be very difficult to find her … And she’ll be easy to spot because she’s wearing a mosquito net …
Mosquito
 … M-O-S-Q … Hello? You haven’t hung up on me?”

*   *   *

Georgie was not, in fact, all that easy to spot, even dressed from head to foot in mosquito netting, because she was hiding behind a clump of broom. It was true, though, that she hadn’t gone far. She had started picking her way down the track, but in bare feet it was like walking on broken glass, and it was plain that she would be permanently lamed long before she reached any possible destination. Also she was frightened of somehow missing Oliver when he at last arrived. Not that she had any great desire, now that she had discovered he was expecting her to share their week together with the cleaning woman, ever to see him again, except perhaps, once she had recovered some shoes, to kick him in the balls. But Oliver and whatever vehicle he eventually arrived in seemed to be her only hope of ever getting away from this horrible house and its horrible occupant. So she had picked her painful way back to the villa, and sat down to wait on the dry, stony ground behind the clump of broom opposite. She was so close to the villa, in fact, that she could see the woman standing in the garden, shouting into her phone again. She could even hear some of the words. “Suitcase … stolen … five … passport … handbag…”

Her passport, yes, and her handbag. That was another reason for staying until Oliver got here.

The woman went back into the villa and slammed the door. The garden lighting went out, and the first faint dusting of stars appeared overhead. The ground that Georgie was sitting on became harder and harder. The emptiness of her stomach became more and more painfully noticeable. Ants spread through every part of her mosquito netting.

And then, at last, she heard the distant whine of an engine laboring uphill in low gear. At each turn in the road it grew louder. A spill of moving light appeared on the track below her, then two blinding beams, rocking and dipping over the potholes. She struggled to her feet, so stiff that she could scarcely manage it.

She hesitated for a moment as the taxi stopped in front of her, uncertain whether she was going to throw her arms around Oliver as she had once so longed to, or whether she was going to stick with her revised plan of inflicting some kind of painful injury on him as best she could in bare feet, or whether she was going to embrace him first and then kick him.

As Oliver got out of the taxi the garden of the villa lit up like fairyland once again, and it wasn’t Oliver. It was Wilfred. Of course. Wilfred back yet again. She might have guessed from the soapy look on his face when he went that she hadn’t really managed to get rid of him.

So she didn’t embrace him. She didn’t kick him. She waited while he lifted something off the back seat, slammed the door, and opened the garden gate. He was holding whatever it was in front of him covered in a sheet, like a nurse carrying a bedpan. But already she was getting into the taxi. The driver turned round and gazed at her. She pulled the mosquito netting more closely around her, then realized that there was something reassuringly familiar about the man’s face, or about the wart in the middle of his bald head.

“It’s Spiros again, isn’t it?” she said.

“Stavros,” said Stavros. “Where you go?”

Yes, where she go? She had not the slightest idea. Nor, now she thought about it, how she was going to pay the fare without her handbag.

“Don’t tell me,” said Stavros. “I know.”

“Do you?”

“Of course!” He nodded at her mosquito netting as he started to turn the car round. “Where else in Skios you going tonight in evening dress except only Fred Toppler?”

*   *   *

Still holding his covered platter of canapés, Dr. Wilfred lifted the wrought-iron knocker on the front door of the villa, and then hesitated. He wasn’t sure, now that he was here, that Georgie would be as pleased to see him as he had assumed. If she opened the door and found him standing on the step she might just possibly jump to the wrong conclusions, and close it again before he could explain.

She would surely be pleased to see the food, however. It might be sensible to make sure that she saw the food before she saw him. He went round to the side of the house, with the idea of showing her the platter through the glass panes of the garden door. This is why he had come, after all, to bring her something to eat. It was the canapés he was thinking about, not her moles or her vertebrae. He was simply going to give her the canapés and leave.

There was no sign of her on the other side of the glass door, though, so he gently pushed it open and listened … She was in the bathroom—he could hear the water running. All right—he would leave the platter on the kitchen table for her to find when she emerged … Though now he was here, he might as well lay the table for her. Only one place, of course … Well, two, just in case she insisted on his having a few of the canapés to keep her company.

He moved around the big kitchen, opening cupboards and drawers. Plates, yes. Crisp white damask napkins. He arranged the canapés as tastefully as he could, and put two more slices of bread in the toaster. He found two silver candlesticks, and two long red candles to go in them, to make her lonely supper seem a little more festive.

He thought of the other dinner that was being eaten even now at the foundation. Of all the idiocies that were being uttered by all the idiots packed in around the overdressed tables, and not heard for the roar of all the other idiocies being uttered by the idiots around them. Of the false Dr. Norman Wilfred watching the courses come and go, feeling his mouth getting drier and drier as the time drew ever closer when he would have to rise and deliver his lecture. And what lecture was he going to deliver? The only lecture that any imaginable Dr. Norman Wilfred might give was here on the table beside the canapés, in the safekeeping of himself, the real Dr. Norman Wilfred, the lucky Dr. Norman Wilfred, the happy Dr. Norman Wilfred, the Dr. Norman Wilfred who had known how to build the great house of his career—and then known the moment to walk out of the front door and abandon it.

He heard the bathroom door open, and then Georgie’s approaching footsteps. His own mouth was a little dry, he realized, even though he didn’t have to deliver a lecture.

She was standing in the doorway, wrapped in a dressing gown. There was a sharp rasp of suddenly indrawn breath.

“
Now
what’s going on?” she cried.

But her voice had changed, had gone large and dark. He looked at her, suddenly fearful. Yes, her face, too, had changed, like a face in a dream. Everything about her had changed, and changed out of all recognition. It had all gone large and dark.

He drew out a chair from the table and sat down.

Something, in the last twenty-four hours, had gone radically wrong with the world. The Gulf Stream of good fortune that had bathed and warmed his shores from the age of twelve or so had without warning turned aside and left him in an unfamiliar and inhospitable new climate.

44

The passport was lying on the desk where Nikki had left it. She picked it up as if it were infectious. It was as alien as an old love letter from someone who had proved false. She remembered how unsettled she had been by the sight of his unsmiling face in it even before. It had been revealing. When he stopped smiling there was something cold about him. Something cruel—something perhaps even verging on the psychopathic. She found herself turning the pages in spite of her distaste, and looking at the photograph again. Yes, there was a mean, watchful light in his eyes, and a hard set to the mouth.

He looked very different from the smiling impostor she had been so dangerously close to falling in love with. In fact he looked very different from the unsmiling version of himself that she had seen in the photograph before. All his blond hair had fallen out—he was half bald. His cheeks were lined and pouched, his jowls baggy. He was fifteen or more years older. It was like the picture of Dorian Gray.

No, he was someone else entirely. The passport had changed its identity, like Dr. Norman Wilfred himself. The entire world had begun to deliquesce around her.

She looked at this stranger’s name.

Yes, of course. In all her anxiety about what to do, and her anger at the false Dr. Norman Wilfred, she had failed to think about his other victim. Now here he was, looking out at her from the ordinariness of the past, from the quiet dullness of things before all this had started to happen: the real Dr. Norman Wilfred.

*   *   *

“We’ll wait till he stands up to speak,” said Annuka Vos to Dr. Wilfred. “Some idiot will introduce him. Everyone will clap, and then there’ll be a moment of silence before he opens his mouth. That’s our cue to stand up and make the biggest, most embarrassing public scene anyone has ever witnessed.”

Dr. Wilfred was sitting beside her in the back of the taxi, holding on to his lecture with one hand and his safety belt with the other, as they plunged down the mountainside, and the potholes and hairpin bends sprang towards them out of the darkness. They had eaten most of the canapés and drunk several glasses of Petrus’s brandy while he had recounted to her the injustice he had suffered at Oliver Fox’s hands. The indignation she felt on her own account had been inflamed even more by her generous outrage on Dr. Wilfred’s behalf than it had by the brandy. They had both been hideously abused. And now she knew where to find their abuser.

“The trouble is,” said Dr. Wilfred, “that no one will believe it’s me. They didn’t before.”

“If any doubts are expressed, leave them to me. I will deal with them. By force if necessary. I don’t know what this lecture of yours is about, and I don’t care. But
you’re
going to give it, not him. Even if we both have to shout him down.”

Dr. Wilfred was silent for a pothole or two. “I don’t really want to,” he said. “I’ve rather gone off the whole idea.”