Forty-one lengths. Forty-two.
But how endlessly uncertain life was! Things might be like this, or might be like that, or might be like nothing anyone could imagine—and it all depended upon the endlessly shifting sands of who was who, and when they were, and where. Upon who was Oliver Fox and who was Dr. Norman Wilfred. Upon whether you were outside the window looking in, or inside the window looking out.
16
When Oliver emerged from Parmenides next morning the confusions of the night landscape had been resolved, and the reasonableness of the world restored, only fresher, greener, lighter, happier than ever. The air was already hot, but still agreeably so. Prostrating itself at his feet, almost whimpering and wagging its tail like a dog begging to be loved and walked, was a neatly cobbled path zigzagging down to the perfectly composed picture laid out below him: translucent blue water, white boats, blue and white cottages. His kingdom, waiting only for him to enter upon it and claim it.
Down there by the water he could see blue umbrellas, with white mess-jackets moving among them and bending to take orders, offer trays, pour juice and coffee. Breakfast! Yes! He had eaten nothing since the economy-class sandwich on the plane, and he had swum fifty lengths in the darkness. He was suddenly seized by a huge hunger—for breakfast, for the world at his feet, for being who he had elected to be. He had a clean shirt on, white and perfectly laundered, even if it was a couple of sizes too big, and clean silk underpants under his chinos, slyly insinuating their luxurious softness, even if they were held up by the paper clip from the foundation’s brochure. His hair, after his nocturnal swim, was more tousled than ever.
He swung down the path with long strides. Nikki had told him that he was expected to mingle. He was happy to oblige. He was Dr. Norman Wilfred. Everyone would be pleased to see him. There might be people there who had known him in the days when he was Oliver Fox, or who knew a rival claimant to the title of Dr. Norman Wilfred. He didn’t care. He would face them down. And when the pretender to his identity turned up, Oliver would face him down, too. This morning he felt himself to be so solidly established as Dr. Norman Wilfred that no other Dr. Norman Wilfred, however freighted with passports and credit cards, could take the title from him. Somewhere in this shining blue world Nikki was waiting. Together they would laugh over the misunderstandings of the night. And even when things went humiliatingly, flesh-crawlingly wrong, as sooner or later they inevitably would, he would laugh about it, and she would laugh with him.
The easy gradient ushered him eagerly on down into the picture. The world was bright, the world was downhill, the world was good again.
* * *
When Dr. Wilfred came out of the villa that morning the unsatisfactorinesses of the night had faded, and he stepped into a new and better world. Just beyond the road he found the promised path, zigzagging enticingly downhill into a pale green sea of olive groves, with the tiled roofs of the foundation’s buildings like red-rocked islands among them, though from up here there was still no sign of the sea. He started down the path with long strides. The sun was already hot, but it was still perfectly bearable, and as the valley opened out below him, he felt his spirits begin to return.
He had found it difficult to get back to sleep after the incident in the night; he had been painfully aware that the woman, who seemed to be seriously deranged, was still concealed behind the bathroom door, only feet away from where he was lying. He was now also ill prepared to face the day ahead. He had had to put yesterday’s shirt, socks, and underpants back on. He was unshaven and his teeth were uncleaned, since he had no razor or toothbrush. In any case, the woman was still locked in the bathroom, so he hadn’t even been able to have a shower.
He had done his best in the night, once he had recovered from his initial shock, to establish rational communication with her. He had suggested, as calmly and temperately as he could through the woodwork, that he would help her find her way to wherever it was she supposed herself to be, but there had been no response. He had tried once again this morning. He was going out, he had told her, to find someone who could help her, though she might prefer to avoid embarrassment by slipping quietly away before he returned. Still no response, and a picture had come into his head of her lying dead on the bathroom floor with her wrists slashed, or an empty pack of pills clutched in her hand, followed by another picture of his name prominent in the resulting headlines. He had very cautiously tried the door. It was locked, but he had been reassured to hear a little cry of alarm as the handle turned.
His problems, though, paled in the bright light of the Mediterranean morning. Sooner or later, obviously, normality would resume. He had his flight bag on his shoulder, and his lecture inside it—that was the main thing. Someone at the foundation would get rid of the woman in his bathroom. Someone would take charge of locating his luggage for him, and in the meanwhile provide him with everything he needed. He would presently be sitting down, shaved and showered, at a table beside the water. Breakfast! Yes! Freshly squeezed orange juice, certainly, and sugary Greek croissants, with perhaps a crisp rasher or two of bacon. He had eaten only a pizza out of the guest-quarters freezer since he had got off the plane. His breakfast would be interrupted, of course, by people coming up to introduce themselves in the usual tiresome way. “Dr. Norman Wilfred? Such an admirer … so looking forward…” This, though, he would bear, philosophically, with breakfast in front of him and clean socks on his feet.
The path was rough underfoot, but so steep that he was striding towards the coffee and the socks with wonderful swiftness. It was a remarkably long way down, though. He had been going for twenty minutes or more before he reached the first of the foundation’s buildings.
It was deserted. The windows were broken, and the front door leaned wearily forward on its one remaining hinge.
The sight was curiously disheartening. The foundation was evidently less well endowed than he had supposed. The sun was getting noticeably hotter as he set out again down the path. He could see another glimpse of tiles among the trees below him, but ten minutes later, as he got a little closer, he discovered that they were a jumbled heap, with no walls left to support them.
He had allowed himself to be inveigled into lending his prestige to an organization that was plainly on its last legs. Or could he possibly have taken a wrong turning somewhere? Perhaps he should retrace his footsteps to check. But at the thought of how much time and effort he had invested in getting to where he was, and how much more still he would have to invest to negate his initial outlay, and to do it uphill instead of down, he hesitated. He looked uphill. He looked down. He could feel the coffee and sweet croissants calling out most eloquently to him. But where was the voice coming from?
He caught a brief glimpse of people moving about among the trees below him. The decision had made itself.
He hurried down the path to catch whoever it was before they disappeared. He found himself going even faster than he had expected, because the ground had somehow alarmingly removed itself from under his feet, and got itself bouncingly and painfully under his bottom and the back of his skull instead. His flight bag came tumbling down the hill behind him, like Jill after Jack. The people he had glimpsed lifted their heads abruptly to watch him, startled by the speed of his approach.
Except that they weren’t people. They were goats.
17
Slowly and silently Georgie eased back the bolt. Slowly and silently she turned the handle and edged the bathroom door open a few inches.
No one. She tiptoed out into the bedroom and listened.
Nothing. She crept out into the corridor, and looked cautiously into each of the rooms of the villa in turn.
Yes, she was alone.
She went back into the bedroom to fetch the intruder’s belongings and put them out in the garden, but he didn’t seem to have any. She bolted the front door, and another door at the back of the house that gave access to the pool. She checked that all the windows were fastened.
She switched
on her phone. It glowed a dull and recalcitrant red at her, but it seemed to have recovered its spirits a little all the same, and managed to utter a grudging little acknowledgment when she pressed Oliver’s number.
“Hi!” said his voice. “I know it sounds like me…”
She ended the call before it taxed the phone’s limited goodwill any further. At once it rang. “Patrick,” said the screen. She ended the call. The phone rang again. “Patrick,” it said. She ended the call. It rang again. “Nikki,” it said.
She snatched the phone to her ear.
“Oh, Nikki, thank God!” she said. “He’s gone out, I’ve locked all the doors, I can’t get hold of Oliver, I might have known it was going to be like this, I simply don’t know what to do, where can he possibly be, what’s happened to him, I’m so worried, I’ll never speak to him again—”
She stopped, because Nikki was talking at the same time.
“… be able to do something if I only knew where you were,” she was saying.
“I don’t know where I am!” said Georgie. “I’m in some villa somewhere, it belongs to some people, only listen, this phone’s going to run out again, I’ll call you back as soon as I’ve plugged it in—”
But she was talking to no one and nothing, she realized. The phone had relapsed into a coma.
She fetched the charger from her suitcase, and found a convenient socket. Socket and plug, though, she realized as soon as she tried to introduce them, were not on speaking terms. Of course. It was Patrick who looked after things like adapters.
* * *
“No,” said Nikki, “I mean what country are you in, because then maybe I could, I don’t know, phone the local police or something—”
But she became aware that she was talking to herself. She had already tried four times that morning to phone Georgie, and now Georgie’s phone had gone dead again. There was nothing she could possibly do to help her.
She would have to go back to her other worry. Four times that morning she had tried to phone Dr. Wilfred. Five times she had gone to tap on his door. Four times she had abandoned the call before she had got through, five times she had walked away again.
All she could think of was wire cutters. And the little pools of water on the veranda outside her window. And the night creams on Mrs. Toppler’s face. And Dr. Wilfred’s soft, lopsided smile. And the dark forest on the lower slopes of Mount Papadopoulou. And Dr. Wilfred’s long list of publications, positions held, honors won. And the wire cutters. And the face cream. She had been thinking of these things all night. She would never forgive Dr. Wilfred. She would never forgive herself.
Her career was over. She had made a disastrous mistake in her choice of lecturer. She hated him.
She was standing by the Temple of Athena, the phone still in her hand, looking absently down at the tables in the square on the waterfront, some of them under the great plane tree, some of them shaded by blue umbrellas. Breakfast was being served. She was waiting to see him come into breakfast, she realized.
Her attention was caught by a shifting straggle of people that had collected around one of the tables. They were all looking at something that was happening in their midst … It was him. It was Dr. Wilfred that was happening.
Her heart gave an uneasy lurch. She hurried down the path towards breakfast to clear up any misunderstandings, and to make clear to everyone who might have got the wrong impression quite what an extraordinary human being Dr. Wilfred was.
* * *
“The Fred Toppler Foundation,” said Elli, for the twelfth time that morning. “How my dreck your call?”
She slid back the window in front of her little cell, trying with her left ear to hear what the postman was saying in Greek as he handed over the morning mail with various receipts that needed her signature, and with her right ear to make sense of the incoming confusion of English in her headset.
“Sorry, who is this, please…? Oh, Dr. Wilfred! Dr. Wilfred…? Yes, hello, good morning. You sleep well? You find breakfast…?
“No? No breakfast…? Oh …
“You’re where…? You don’t know where…? So, what, you don’t want breakfast…? Oh, sorry—you do want breakfast …
“OK … OK, OK, OK … So you just do like I told you. You go straight down the path and you see tables, chairs, people, coffee … No…? Yes! Just by the sea! You can see the sea, I hope…! You can’t see the sea? No sea…? Only trees…? And what…? Goats…?
“OK, so now I understand. Here’s what happened, Dr. Wilfred. You went the wrong way! I told you ‘Go down the path…’ OK, sure, you went down the path … But, Dr. Wilfred, you went down the wrong path!
“So here’s what you do. You go back to where you started … Up the hill, yes…? All the way back up the hill. And then you start again on the right path. OK…? You’re welcome.”
18
“Wilson Westerman…” “Darling Erlunder…” “Peter Comax…”
At every moment the cloud of names hanging about Oliver’s head became more tangled and less attached to all the smiling faces and outstretched hands.
“Dickerson and Davina…” “And I’m Smoky…” “Chuck … Chuck who? Chuck nobody! Just Chuck…!” “Chuck Friendly, in fact—he’s too modest to say…” “Kate Katz…” “Kate Kurz…” “Morton Rinkleman, and you may have met Kellogg Rinkleman, who is in fact my second cousin…”
“Hi,” said Oliver—no, Dr. Wilfred, Dr. Wilfred. “Hello, there. How nice to meet you. Hi.”
“A great honor…” said the smiling faces. “A real pleasure … We’re all so excited…”
Dr. Wilfred remained alert and braced. It would get harder than this, obviously. Sooner or later there would be questions put to him, and he would have to find answers.
“I believe you know Senator Hauptmayer, sir?” said one of the faces.
And here it was—a question. A perfectly easy one to deal with, however, even though he so rarely resorted to lies.
“How is the senator?” he asked.
“Poorly, as you know.”
“Give him my best regards.”
“I will, sir.”
Another face: “I read your book … What was it called…?”
Harder, but not impossible. Dr. Wilfred spread his hands helplessly and smiled. He didn’t know, either. Everyone laughed.
“Anyway,” said the face, “you know the one I mean, and I wanted to ask you: when you wrote this book, what were you trying to tell us?”
He could put this one away in the same fashion as he had the last one.
“Heaven knows,” he said. More laughter. “Only whatever it was I was trying to tell you, I obviously wasn’t trying hard enough.”
Another hit. On the edge of the group, behind all the unfamiliar faces, was one that he knew. Pleasantly open eyes, watching him and smiling. He gave her a little wave, and a small special smile that she would be able to see was different from the smiles he was handing out to all the others. She did; she quickly looked away to hide how pleased she was.
Another face: “Now, I’ve read that book, and I was somehow expecting you to be … well, I don’t know … different…”
“No,” said Dr. Wilfred. “I’m pretty much the way I am.”
They loved it. Another face coming up, though: “You won’t recall this, Dr. Wilfred, but we have met before.”
Ironical, obviously. Means he’s met Dr. Wilfred and it wasn’t me. On the other hand … “Where was it? Not at that thing in Mexico?”
“Montreal,” said the face.
“Montreal … In the bar?”
“In the hot tub!”
“I wonder you recognized me with my clothes on.”
“I never forget a face. Though, yes, you’ve changed.”
“Changed? Have I?” The dark depths waiting below the high wire. The audience watching expectantly.
“You’ve got younger, Dr. Wilfred!”
“Hot tubs, obviously.”
Unbelievable, thought Dr. Wilf
red. You were who you said you were, even if they knew you weren’t! And even as he thought this he realized that it was Dr. Wilfred who was thinking it. He was Dr. Wilfred not just for the people around him. He was becoming Dr. Wilfred for himself.
It was all too easy! More danger, more danger!
“Just a quick question, if I may,” said a small man in a pair of spectacles held together by sticking plaster. “Oh—Professor Norbert Ditmuss, Department of Applied Dynamics, University of West Idaho. Emeritus, but I like to keep in touch with the subject. Now, sir, you say in your book Planned Innovation, Chapter Seven, I think it is, page 179, am I right, in the footnote on your statistical methodology, that assigning a value of between seven and ten to the theta function in a Wexler Distribution, given that lambda is negative and mu is greater than phi, will yield a solution remarkably close to Theobald’s constant. Now, my question to you, sir, is exactly how close?”
“Oh,” said Dr. Wilfred. “As close as a dog and a flea.”
Everyone laughed respectfully. Except Professor Ditmuss. “Yes, but seriously,” he said.
“Seriously?” said Dr. Wilfred. “An inch and a half.”
“I really do need an answer to this question, Dr. Wilfred,” said Professor Ditmuss, “because I am writing a paper that will reference your work, and I don’t want to be unjust. So would you be kind enough to take us step by step through your calculation?”
“Well…” said Dr. Wilfred.
There was an easy way round this question, just as there was to all the others, but for some reason Dr. Wilfred couldn’t see what it was. He seemed to have come rather suddenly to the end of the golden pathway that had stretched out before him.
Skios: A Novel Page 7