Skios: A Novel (26 page)

Dr. Wilfred looked up at the candle flames swaying in the warm darkness, and knew that everything was possible. He could do it. He could deliver the lecture. Then all the rest would follow. After the lecture Nikki would be waiting for him. Tomorrow Georgie would turn up. He would find a way to get rid of Annuka Vos. No, he would win over even Annuka Vos. Then he would become director of this delightful place. He would spend the long summer days and short summer nights rubbing Mrs. Toppler’s back, and making Mrs. Skorbatova laugh.

With the fingers of his left hand still deep in the bulge of flesh around the base of Mrs. Toppler’s spine, he took another sip from his wineglass, then put his right hand on Mrs. Skorbatova’s wrist.

“This is what every man needs,” he said to her. “To be Norman Wilfred to the lady on one side of him, and Oliver Fox to the lady on the other.”

Mrs. Skorbatova let her wrist remain under his hand, and laughed again. At last she spoke.

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

“No?” said Oliver Fox.

She gently detached her wrist, seized the end of his nose, and waggled it from side to side. “No!” she said. She pointed to the heavy gold ring on the third finger of her left hand, then waved the index finger on her right warningly from side to side.

“No focks!” she said.

*   *   *

Right, thought Reg Bolt, the director of security, watching from the shadows opposite the top table, as everyone finally settled back into their rightful places. They were all assembled. The guests, the hosts. The speaker. Nikki and Eric. The waiters, bodyguards, and personal security advisers. He checked each of their dimly lit faces in turn. The director was shut away in his darkened villa and everyone else was here on the agora, and settled for the lecture. The darkness around him deepened as a pool of bright light lit up the lectern on the top table. He eased himself carefully back, deeper into the shadow, and slipped quietly away into the night.

For the next hour at least he and the lads had the rest of the foundation to themselves. There would be just time to do the job. The big one. The one that was so big that even the least curious bystander might begin to ask questions. The one that could only be done in the darkness, when all eyes and ears were safely here, and bent upon Dr. Norman Wilfred.

*   *   *

“OK?” said Mrs. Toppler. Dr. Wilfred nodded. She rose and hammered with the olive-wood gavel. Beyond the little pool of brightness in which they were bathed he was aware of the darkness being softened by the indistinct paleness of faces turning towards them. The reassuring static of conversation subsided into an unnatural calm.

Mrs. Toppler looked down through a pair of folded spectacles at her script.

“Our guest of honor tonight,” she said, “needs no introduction…”

47

Everywhere beyond the agora a soft nocturnal peace descended upon the grounds of the foundation, as upon a little town where everyone was indoors celebrating Christmas or watching the football. The warm darkness of the night was made more profound by the flecks of silver floodlight glimpsed through the branches of the trees, the quietness made more palpable by the scribbling of the cicadas and the faint amplified echoes of Mrs. Toppler’s voice off the ancient stonework.

Outside the kitchens little collapsed white heaps began to become visible in the darkness, as Yannis and the kitchen crew emerged from their stainless-steel hell and sank down onto the ground, too tired even to eat the leftovers.

In the harbor the dark water slapped tenderly at the moored yachts. The landward-facing windsock by the helicopter pad sank as the light daytime breeze off the sea died away, then lifted again to face seawards.

Chris Binns, the writer in residence, gazed out of the window of Epictetus, murmuring to himself over and over again the first stanza of his poem—
The goddess, looking wise, / Whisky sour in hand, / Nibbling the excellent local cocktail olives / And pushing the stones down the back of the sofa / In the most civilized manner
. What he hoped was that if he repeated it often enough, it would prove to be the run-up to an effortless leap into the still undecided-upon main verb and the still unwritten second stanza. No leap had so far occurred.

He was, however, becoming slowly conscious that the silence was not quite the usual silence, or the darkness the usual darkness. Some of the trees had a faint silvering of light among their branches. Someone somewhere was speaking. He couldn’t distinguish the words, only an occasional North American vowel, and an electronic timbre. Yes, something was certainly going on out there. He had forgotten what it was, but at least he now remembered that he had forgotten.

“The goddess,” he murmured, “looking wise…”

*   *   *

Back on the agora Mrs. Toppler’s voice came and went, came and went, according to the varying closeness of her acquaintance with the microphone.

“… public bodies far too numerous to list here…” she said, very audibly, and then somehow let the relationship lapse again. “… mention only the Board of Governors … the Joint Standing Committee … the Council for the Preservation … for the Abolition … the Expansion … the Limitation…”

It all came back to Dr. Wilfred, sitting modestly beside her as she spoke. The boards, the committees, the councils. The books and papers. The prizes and fellowships. What an astonishing amount he had packed into his life.

“… and last but by no means least … his keen interest … his lifelong devotion … never spared himself … somehow found time for … an avid follower…”

The shadowy faces in front of Mrs. Toppler gazed respectfully up at her out of the half-darkness. Here and there eyelids and heads sank in sympathy with her sinking voice, but often rose again as the voice returned. Behind the faces thoughts were thought: memories and regrets, plans and hopes, reasonings and computations.

V. J. D. Chaudhury, for example, was regretting that he had not taken the opportunity to relieve himself when it had been offered. Davina Smokey was worrying about her grandchildren’s table manners. His Excellency Sheikh Abdul hilal bin-Taimour bin-Hamud bin-Ali al-Said was trying to calculate the proceeds from a rise of 0.073 percent in the royalty on 4.833 billion barrels of light crude. K. D. Clopper was absorbed in the Yankees-Orioles game on his phone behind the tablecloth. The bishop of the Hesperides Archipelago was reexamining the Orthodox Church’s position on original sin in the light of recent advances in neurology. Wellesley Luft was fast asleep, deep in yet another dream about Jackie Kennedy. Mr. Papadopoulou’s personal bodyguard was checking the safety catch on his gun. Norbert Ditmuss was waiting patiently for a chance to ask his question.

And at the back of the audience more shadowy new faces were still arriving.

*   *   *

The moon put its head cautiously above the hills to the east of the foundation, was evidently reassured by the peacefulness of the scene, and emerged completely from hiding.

On the hillside to the west, from behind the screens around the site where the new swimming pool was being built, something else no less cautiously began to emerge to face the moon. Something not gracefully round, but obstinately rectangular.

Evidently reassured, like the moon, it slowly, slowly rose into the whiteness of the moonlight beneath the sheltering arm of the contractors’ crane. More and more of it, vaster and vaster. Not two feet high, like the moon. A crate. Not five feet high, though, like the crate of marine diesel spares. Seven feet, eight feet. And still, inch by inch, it came. More and more of it. Nine feet, ten feet. Now a stencil, just legible in the moonlight. Not marine diesel spares this time. Refrigeration plant.

“Come on, come on!” whispered Reg Bolt urgently into his walkie-talkie as he watched. “They’ll have finished the lecture before she’s halfway down the hill!”

*   *   *

Dr. Wilfred became aware that Mrs. Toppler had turned towards him, and heard in retrospect the recently spoken words that were still hanging in the air around her: “… not come here to listen to me … without further ado…”

There was the sound of applause, and of people coming back to life. Someone was leaning over and moving the microphones to stand in front of him.

He rose. He smiled and brushed the hair away from his eyes. He nodded his acknowledgment to Mrs. Toppler, then to the audience. He waited for the applause to die away, and then raked the agora with his soft brown eyes, from left to right, from front to back. He suddenly felt not like Dr. Wilfred at all, but like the old Oliver as he had been so many times before, with the familiar abyss opening in front of him, now deeper and darker than ever. The earth’s gravitational field reached out to him from the depths, dragging him down, pulling on the nerves of his legs, of his stomach, of his whole body.

He took two good lungfuls of air and opened his mouth.

48

So all the many elements were now in place that would shape the culmination of this year’s Great European House Party. The various story lines were obviously about to come together to produce a single event of great complexity and significance. A showdown. The grand dénouement.

Exactly what form this event would take no one at that point knew or could know. Most of the participants no doubt had expectations of some kind, but even these were confused and indefinite, and hopelessly mixed up with what they
intended
to happen, or
hoped
would, or
feared
might. In any case, none of them had more than the most partial knowledge of the factors involved—nor much time to think about it, since the present moment of stasis while Oliver was drawing breath and opening his mouth to speak was so brief.

If they had been living in a story, of course, they might have guessed that someone somewhere had the rest of the book in his hands, and that what was just about to happen was already there in the printed pages, fixed, unalterable, solidly existent. Not that it would have helped
them
very much, because no one in a story ever knows they are. And even Dr. Wilfred, with his doggedly Newtonian faith in causality, wouldn’t claim that future events in the real world have that kind of already achieved actuality. Even if he had known the position and movements of everyone involved, and understood all their feelings and intentions—even if he hadn’t been so involved in the proceedings himself—he would have conceded that, according to the present state of scientific thinking, what the previous state of the universe had determined for the future was a set of probabilities. The bishop of the Hesperides Archipelago, for that matter, whose public pronouncements sometimes suggested that God possessed very clearly established plans and purposes with which he himself as bishop was well acquainted, would have had to agree that even these were probabilities rather than settled states of affairs, since God surely had the right and the power to change his mind at the last minute, just as a mere bishop like himself might.

Nevertheless, those probabilities, as both Dr. Wilfred and the bishop saw them in their different ways, must themselves have been real entities. They existed already in that brief moment between Oliver’s standing up and beginning to speak, when the event would become simply part of the established furniture of the universe. They
must
have existed! Surely. What kind of a probability is it that doesn’t actually exist?

If someone with a mind as synoptic, comprehensive, and swift as God’s had attempted to catalog them they would surely have been these:

Dr. Wilfred will be forced to his feet by Annuka Vos to deliver the real Fred Toppler Lecture from the text that he has so carefully kept with him through all the vicissitudes of the trip. He will be disconcerted, however, to find that Oliver is not wearing orange skateboarding trousers, and will hesitate for a fatal fraction of a second himself, which will allow Georgie time to realize that the Dr. Norman Wilfred at the lectern is her missing boyfriend, whereupon she will be unable to resist waving to him. This tiny anomaly in the proceedings, insignificant in itself, will be like the last crystal dropped into a supersaturated solution. Around it the whole invisibly overloaded mass will change its state, because:

Stavros, spotting Georgie as she waves, will step forward to demand the thirty-two euros she owes him;

Georgie, looking round for someone to borrow the thirty-two euros from, will see the real Dr. Wilfred, and beg him to help her out;

the real Dr. Wilfred, now even more confused to find Georgie holding his hand and looking up into his eyes, will fumble for his wallet;

Spiros, seeing Dr. Wilfred finding the thirty-two euros for Stavros, will demand the thirty-two euros that Dr. Wilfred and Annuka owe
him;

Annuka Vos, ready to shout down any opposition to Dr. Wilfred, will take time out first to demand that Georgie return the suitcase she has stolen;

Georgie, at the sight of Annuka, will give a cry of alarm, and warn Dr. Wilfred that this is the cleaning woman from the villa, whose extreme religious convictions make her a danger to society;

Nikki will hurry discreetly forward to deal with the disturbance;

Georgie, believing Nikki to be in Switzerland, will be unable to prevent herself crying out in astonishment, “Nikki!”;

Nikki, no less astonished, her normally greater self-control briefly failing under the accumulated strain of events, will reply “Georgie!” almost as loudly;

several members of the audience will indignantly try to hush them, and whisper for everyone to sit down;

Patrick, nevertheless, seeing Nikki with her clipboard and air of authority, will slip twenty euros down the front of her bra and ask her to find him a table, even though the place is so busy, with four Carlsbergs while they’re waiting;

Georgie, at the sight of Patrick, will give another clearly audible gasp of surprise, and say, “You!”;

Patrick, at the sight of Georgie, will gasp in his turn and say much the same;

Oliver, as he watches the developing chaos in front of him, will brush the tangle of blond hair out of his soft brown eyes and say nothing;