Skios: A Novel

by Michael Frayn

  He dried his hands on one of the soft towels scattered about the marble counters around the bath, and phoned Vicki. She was back on duty again.

  “Me … Here, yes. Suitcase, however, not … I know, I know. Not the airline this time, though—some idiot woman at the carousel … All my papers, yes … Not the lecture, no. I’ve got the lecture … You’re not in the office now…? No, of course not, but you might e-mail me all the bumf in the morning. All I need now is a phone number. Make contact, set their minds at rest … Not too fast—I’m putting it on the phone … 00 30—yes, go on … Wonderful … Bless you … However should we live without these magical little things?”

  He pressed the new number.

  “Fred Toppler Foundation,” said the voice at the other end. “How my dreck your call?”

  “I just thought I should let you know I’d arrived safely. Your lecturer. Dr. Wilfred.”

  “Oh, Dr. Wilfred, yes, good, thank you! You had a good flight, you found your room, is everything OK, nothing you want, sandwiches, whatever?”

  “Fine,” said Dr. Wilfred. “No, nothing I want. Except my suitcase, which some idiot at the airport seems to have taken.”

  “Not a problem. Leave it to me. I fix it in the morning.”

  “Anyway, it’s a very nice accommodation. Thank you. I thought I’d have an early night. Say hello to everyone in the morning.”

  “OK. Great. Pour yourself a bath. Run a glass of wine.”

  “I already have, thank you.”

  “And in the morning, OK, you come out your door, you walk down the path in front of you towards the sea, there is breakfast by the water, everyone is so pleased to see you. Sleep well.”

  “I will. Phoksoliva.”

  “How was this?”

  “Phoksoliva. No?”

  “Phoks…?”

  “… oliva. Yes?”

  “Oh … OK … Phoksoliva? You too.”

  * * *

  Oliver rose like a god, refreshed from the last of the bubbles in the bath, and wrapped himself in the waiting bathrobe. Straight, then left—veranda on the right. He unzipped his bag to find a clean shirt.

  Except that it wouldn’t unzip. Something was jamming it. A padlock.

  A padlock? He’d never padlocked a bag in his life!

  This was his bag, wasn’t it? Or, to be pedantic, Annuka Vos’s bag? He lifted the cover of the red leather address tag. “Dr. Norman Wilfred.”

  Good God! He had Dr. Norman Wilfred’s suitcase! He had taken over not only his identity but the physical fabric of his life! Was now possessed of everything, probably, that Dr. Norman Wilfred owned on the island of Skios! Had found it put into his hands, without any conscious effort on his part, by fate! The heavens had noted his initiative, and smiled upon it!

  Perhaps he really was now Dr. Norman Wilfred! Had actually become him!

  The flight tag told the same story. “Name,” it said: “Dr. Norman Wilfred. Destination: Fred Toppler Foundation, Skios.” And when he looked in the mirror this time it agreed. The man looking back at him was, yes, Dr. Norman Wilfred.

  All he needed was the key to his own suitcase. Which was where? And for the first time the obvious thought came to him—one he should have thought before, but somehow, in the onrush of events, hadn’t: that somewhere in the world there must be another Dr. Norman Wilfred. A Dr. Norman Wilfred with none of Dr. Norman Wilfred’s worldly possessions, it was true, except the key to the padlock that secured them. A Dr. Norman Wilfred sustained by the dangerous belief that he and no other was Dr. Norman Wilfred, and that his rightful place in the world was precisely here, in this very room.

  Where was he at the moment, this former Dr. Norman Wilfred, whom the gods had so decisively rejected?

  On the island, presumably, arrived on the same plane as the new and improved edition of himself. Not more than a dozen or so miles away, since the island seemed to be only a dozen or so miles long. Still at the airport, perhaps, waiting patiently for someone to collect him. Or, more likely by now, impatiently. Phoning furiously to ask where his car was. Being told that some confusion must have occurred. Finding himself a taxi. In a taxi already. On his way. Raging. Almost in sight of the foundation …

  At any moment now the usual embarrassments would be beginning. “I was somehow confused” the new Dr. Norman Wilfred, already fading back into Oliver Fox, would be saying. “Can’t apologize enough. A moment of inexplicable aberration … Nothing like this has ever happened to me before…”

  So, no time to waste. Straight along the path at once, left, veranda on the right, before the superseded incumbent arrived. No time to put on his clean shirt—and no clean shirt to put on, anyway. Go just as he was, in his snow-white bathrobe.

  He was out of the door so fast that he almost forgot to take his room key—did forget the champagne!—ran back to get it—and was out of the door again in a flash. Heard his phone ringing—realized he’d left it in the pocket of his dirty shirt—couldn’t go back for it, because the door was already closing behind him, and the key was where he had put it down in the kitchen while he’d got the champagne out of the refrigerator.

  Bridges burnt, then. No retreat.

  11

  Georgie Evers came down the steps of the plane into the hot Mediterranean night, her phone to her ear, waiting for Oliver to answer.

  “Hi!” he said at last.

  “Hi!” she said. “It’s me! I suddenly saw there was a flight to Thessaloniki! I thought, Thessaloniki? My God, isn’t that in Greece? So I ran all the way to the ticket desk, I ran all the way to the gate! And at Thessaloniki—I don’t believe this!—there’s a flight just boarding…”

  She stopped, because she had become aware that Oliver was talking at the same time. No, he’d stopped as well.

  “So here I am! I’m in Skios! I’m just getting off the plane…! Oliver? Are you there?”

  Because now there was a disconcerting lack of any further response from Oliver. She pressed End and dialed again.

  “Hi!” said Oliver.

  “Hi!” she said. “We got cut off.”

  But he was still speaking.

  “Sounds like me,” he was saying. “But it’s not me. It’s just my phone, pretending. Tell it your troubles, though, and it’ll listen patiently and pass them on to me as soon as I remember to press the button.”

  Of course. The announcement was only too familiar. But this time it really was a bit of a bugger. She had scarcely expected him to be waiting for her at the airport, since he hadn’t known she was coming. But at least he might have been waiting at the end of the phone. Because otherwise she had no idea where she was supposed to be going. He’d borrowed a villa from someone. But what villa? Where? What was the name of the people he’d borrowed it from?

  She tried once more to phone him as she waited for her bag, and again after it had arrived, but there was still only the answering machine. She felt suddenly lost and lonely. Most of her fellow passengers from Thessaloniki were Greek, and when she emerged from the baggage hall even the signs that the waiting chauffeurs and taxi drivers were holding up were in an unwelcomingly incomprehensible script. Among them, though, was one that had an English translation with it: SKIOS TAXI. It was being held up by a man with a bald head and a large belly. In the middle of his bald head was a black wart like a fly.

  “Do you speak English?” she asked him.

  “Eustrabolgi?”

  “Oh, hello, yes, sorry, eustrabolgi, only I wonder if you could help me…”

  “I wait Strabolgi,” he said. He turned round and said something to a man sitting on the bench behind him, who heaved himself to his feet and ambled slowly over. He had a large belly, a bald head, and a black wart like a fly on the end of his nose. He held out his hand.

  “Spiros,” he said. “Stavros he don’t speak English good. Where you like to go?”

  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 an
other 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 ringi
ng 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!”