Everyone around the table had turned to watch him. None of them had understood a word of the question, and they looked forward to the brilliance that Dr. Wilfred would display in providing an answer not a word of which any of them would understand either.
“Well…” said Oliver, since Oliver was what Dr. Wilfred was now rather swiftly subsiding back into.
“I hate to interrupt,” said a soft and welcome voice. Nikki had stepped forward. “But I shall have to ask you two gentlemen to discuss technical questions at some other time. I’m whisking Dr. Wilfred away for a rather important meeting.”
19
On the pergolas in the shade garden, the plumbago was piled as high and blue as the sky above it. Nikki looked up at it and felt as serenely happy as the blossom. There were forty different things she should have been doing. But she wasn’t doing any of them. She was strolling through the shade garden with Dr. Wilfred.
“This is the important meeting I’ve got to go to, is it?” said Dr. Wilfred.
“It is important,” she said. “We’ve got to discuss your schedule.”
She couldn’t get over the sheer lightness with which he wore his immense distinction. You would never have guessed from meeting him how much he knew and how much he had done. He was totally unlike any other guest of honor they had ever had. And everyone plainly loved him. Of course. How could they not? From the first moment she had set eyes on him at the airport she had known they would. And it was she who had suggested inviting him. He was her discovery.
She found herself telling him about her childhood. She had always wanted to be an artist, she said—she had had such intense feelings stirring in her when she was sixteen, and the longing to express them had welled up like the sap in spring pouring upwards through the plumbago. Somehow, though, she found herself doing a degree in arts administration instead. Then gradually, step by step, by way of jobs in provincial art galleries and touring theater companies, she had made her way to where she was now.
“Actually,” she said, “what I’m doing is not totally dissimilar to your job. I know you’re dealing with billions of pounds, and decisions that are going to affect the whole future of the world. Whereas I’ve only got the odd few million dollars to play with each year for this place. But I have to say who gets it and who doesn’t! I’m the one who has to provide some structure! Scientific research is probably a bit like the arts, isn’t it? I mean … messy. You don’t really know what’s going to happen until it’s happened.”
“True,” said Dr. Wilfred. “Well, I certainly don’t. Not a clue.”
“It’s like kids messing around in the sandpit. Great fun for the kids. Very educational. But someone’s got to look after the sandpit. Stop the cat from using it as cat litter, and the children from walking it into the house. Wash the sand out of their hair and clean it out of their noses. Yes?”
“Science and scientists! A total mystery to me!”
“Arts and artists are the same. Some of the writers we’ve had here!”
“I can imagine.”
She brushed her hand through the flowers in the herbaceous border. A shower of sparkling drops still hanging on leaves and petals from the overnight sprinklers came cascading down. “Orodigia,” he told her. “Flowering pangloss. Jacantha. Smithia. Peloponnesian daisies.”
“My God, you’re a gardener as well as everything else?”
“Of course not. I’m making it up as I go along. Like all the rest of it.”
They walked on in silence for a while.
“Anyway,” she said, “I’ve got plans for the future. I can’t do much at the moment. Christian’s still in charge. The director. You haven’t met him. No one ever sees him. That’s the way he exercises his power—by being invisible, like God, and doing nothing. Some people don’t even believe he exists. I have a feeling he won’t be here for much longer, though. I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but I think you may be the final nail I’m hammering into his coffin.”
She broke off a low-hanging spray of violet blossom.
“Jacantha?” she said.
“If you like.”
She put the spray in the buttonhole of his shirt.
“Now, your schedule. This morning it’s simply more mingle, mingle, if you can bear it. Yes? Then at midday, you’ll remember, you’re having drinks with Mrs. Fred Toppler. Lunch with the other guests. After lunch…”
“A little siesta? Check that it really is right-hand inside?”
“I shall be at the airport, meeting Mr. Luft.”
“Mr. Luft?”
“Wellesley Luft! For your big interview! It’s in your program!”
“Of course.”
“Then tomorrow you’re on the ten-forty-five flight back to London. After which, I suppose, we’ll never see each other again.”
“But first a good night’s rest.”
“First, the lecture.”
“Oh, yes. The lecture.”
* * *
One after another, all over the newly carpeted piazza, white tablecloths flew up into the sunlit air, spread their wings, and settled on the battered caterer’s tables like huge birds landing. The agency waiters and waitresses who had come off the overnight ferry from Athens pounced on them and wrestled them down. The whole square was turning into an open-air banqueting hall in front of Dr. Wilfred’s eyes.
“This is the agora,” Nikki told him. “The old marketplace. You’ll be sitting exactly where we’re standing, at the same table as Mrs. Toppler and Mr. Papadopoulou and their guests. There’s quite a number of Mr. Papadopoulou’s business associates coming.
“It will be getting dark as we eat. By the end of dinner the only light will be from the candles on the tables.
“And then those spotlights up there will come on, and Mrs. Toppler will stand up and introduce you. I hope I’ve got everything right in her speech. She may read it out wrong, of course, because she doesn’t like to wear her glasses.
“Then the maître d’ will move the lectern and the microphones, and put them here, in front of you.”
He stood in front of the still imaginary microphones and lectern, almost too dazzled by the imaginary spotlights to see the imaginary candlelit faces gazing up at him from the imaginary darkness. He was in no hurry. He waited while the imaginary audience settled. And then …
“And then,” said Nikki. “Scientometrics!”
“Scientometrics? What are scientometrics?”
“What you’re talking about! Isn’t it? That’s what we’ve announced! ‘Innovation and Governance: The Promise of Scientometrics.’ You don’t want to change it, do you?”
“No, no. Scientometrics. Wonderful.”
“I can’t wait to hear what you’re going to say!” said Nikki.
“Nor can I,” said Dr. Norman Wilfred.
* * *
“And then at last,” said Dr. Norman Wilfred, “after the lecture…”
They had left the agora and reached a belvedere overlooking the sea. He leaned slowly towards her, smiling his lopsided smile. She put her finger on his nose and pushed him gently away.
“Some of your audience arriving,” she said. She nodded at the waterfront below them.
A vessel that looked like a miniature cruise liner was backing towards its moorings. On the stern, in huge chromium letters clearly legible even from where they were standing: RUSALKA, SEVASTOPOL.
“Oleg Skorbatov,” said Nikki. “You’ve read about him in the papers. Everything you’ve read is true. Rich and ruthless. What Mr. Papadopoulou is to Athens, Mr. Skorbatov is to Moscow. A lot more yachts still to come. From Sicily, from Egypt, from Lebanon. All the places that Mr. Papadopoulou does business with. Also helicopters at the helipad down there behind the winter garden. Executive jets at the airport. And me, rushing back and forth all day from waterfront to airport, from airport to helipad. All so that people can hear you speak!”
“I’ll try to think of something good.”
She laughed. “I love your casu
alness about it all.”
“What I love is the way you take it all so seriously.” He leaned towards her again.
“Back to work,” she said. “Go and be lionized … Excuse me one moment.”
Her phone was ringing. “Thank God,” she told it. “I’ve been trying and trying to get you! Are you all right…? You’re lying where…? Oh, in the sun. I see. So what’s happened to this rapist person…?”
She gazed at Oliver as she listened, and moved her head from side to side a little to indicate to him a detached and mocking attitude to what she was hearing. He smiled back at her, and for no reason at all suddenly remembered Georgie.
He was suddenly engulfed in a wave of panic. When had she said she was arriving? Wasn’t it tomorrow? But that was yesterday. Tomorrow today was today.
“Me?” said Nikki into the phone. “No. Not yet … I know, but things got in a bit of a tangle…”
She looked straight at Oliver as she spoke. She laughed. “Yes, he is … Yes, more than ever. Never mind about me, though. Where exactly are you?”
She waited for a moment. The phone at the other end had obviously gone dead. She put her own back in her pocket and laughed. “Old schoolfriend of mine,” she said. “She’s quite sweet, and I can’t help being rather fond of her. But she is a total idiot. She spends her entire life getting herself into the most ridiculous situations.”
“A rapist, though?”
“Yes, well. My idiot friend has gone off God knows where on some wild fling with some other idiot she’s only just met. The other idiot doesn’t turn up, and then suddenly in the middle of the night he does, and he gets into bed with her, only it’s not her idiot, it’s some other idiot. And now this other idiot, who’s not her idiot, has vanished again. I think. Only of course her phone keeps going dead, probably because it hasn’t ever occurred to her to plug it in and charge it, and I still haven’t heard the end of the story.”
Oliver’s moment of panic had passed. He might well have not have listened to her message yesterday, he realized. He might have listened to it only today. He would listen to it today, as soon as he got back to his room, where he had left his phone. If he listened to it today then tomorrow would still be tomorrow.
20
Georgie’s phone had not, in fact, gone dead. Not, at any rate, when Nikki had assumed. The silence was simply because Georgie had stopped breathing. She had stopped breathing because she was suddenly paralyzed from head to foot.
This was the problem:
As the morning had worn on and her assailant had not returned, her confidence had. He had evidently passed out of her life, as inexplicably as he had come into it, the way so many no less confused and unsought companions had in the past. Her life had returned to normal. Or to as near normal as it ever seemed to get.
So she had unlocked the garden door and sat on a canvas chair that she had found outside to wait for Oliver in the sunshine. She had a good field of view in every direction, and she was ready to run back into the house and lock the door again if by chance any more uninvited non-Olivers turned up. After a while it had occurred to her that she would have an even better field of view if she moved away from the house and sat on one of the loungers by the pool. It was so hot, though, that she had gone back indoors and changed into a bikini. She could run at least as fast in a bikini as she could in shirt and trousers. She had not been sunbathing for very long, however, when she had begun to worry that she would end up with piebald breasts. So she had taken her top off, and then a little later turned on her front so as not to have tomato-red ones. She had tried the phone again and discovered that a little life had returned to it.
It was while she was deep in her conversation with Nikki that she had slowly become aware of … what? Something. Some kind of feeling in her back. An uneasiness … The faint clammy touch of an alien gaze resting upon it. She was not alone. She was being watched. This was when the freezing paralysis had crept through her, even in the heat of the midmorning sun.
Very slowly she turned her head. Him. Of course. He had returned. As, she recalled, the lunatics she thought she had got rid of in the past had tended to do.
He had come round the corner from the front of the villa, and was leaning on the back of a bench. For some time nothing happened. They were both transfixed. He, apparently, by the sight of her. She by the awareness that she couldn’t move to cover herself without offering up yet more to those vulpine eyes. Now that she saw him in daylight and dressed, he looked even more sinister than he had in the night. The whiteness of his face was shadowed by a gray scum of unshaven whiskers. His balding head was sweating like an old cheese. His trousers were torn. There were large damp patches on his grubby shirt. He was clutching with an unnerving intensity the flight bag that was dangling round his neck. The phrase “escaped convict” came into her mind.
He spoke. “Water,” he said, and there was a harsh convict croak in his voice.
He vanished into the house. Georgie sprang up at once and wrapped herself in her towel, but now that the intruder had occupied the house her planned line of retreat had been cut off. She ran to the gate, but stopped at the sight of the unmade-up road because she’d left her sandals indoors. She ran back to the lounger and snatched up the phone to call … someone—Oliver, Nikki … But now it really was dead.
The only thing she could think of was to go on doing what she had been doing before, which was waiting for Oliver. Perhaps by some miracle he would choose this very moment to put in an appearance.
The appearance, however, was put in not by Oliver but by the intruder once again. He looked even more alarming than before. He had evidently not only drunk water but poured it over his head, and his fringe of lank gray hair trailed down from his gleaming bullet skull like seaweed from a washed-up mine.
“I assume that this is a genuine mistake on your part,” he said, “and not some attempt to demand money, which I may say has happened to me before.”
He hesitated, and then said in a different voice, “Or are you something to do with the foundation in some kind of way?”
The foundation? She gazed at him blankly.
“The Fred Toppler Foundation.”
Some kind of clinic, perhaps. Of course. He wasn’t a convict. He was an inmate of a clinic, out on day release.
“You’re not also a guest?” he said. “Of the foundation?”
She risked shaking her head.
“Because, you see, this is the foundation’s guest quarters,” he said. “It is reserved for guests of the foundation. I am endeavoring to find someone in authority who will be able to help you to get wherever you are supposed to be. Unfortunately I set out in the wrong direction. Which is why I have come back. I apparently need to go in the opposite direction.”
He turned towards the corner that led to the back of the villa. But by this time Georgie had had time to recover a little from her alarm. He was a sick man who needed help and understanding. Maybe he’d forgotten to take his medication. Or was so full of it that he didn’t know what he was doing. He certainly seemed to be deeply confused. Exposure to the midday sun had probably not helped matters.
“Hat!” she called after him. “Sunblock!”
She waved her own hat and tube of sunblock at him, but he vanished round the corner. She waited, with the towel clutched around her. After a while her alarm began to fade. The sun, however, did not. She took off the towel, removed the rest of her bikini, stretched herself out on the lounger, and applied the sunblock to herself.
* * *
Midmorning coffee was being served under the trees shading Alcmaeon’s Walk. Everyone was reclining on the basket chairs around Dr. Wilfred, but in ways suggesting that their ease was tempered by deference.
Dr. Wilfred himself, however, was entirely at his ease. Among all the confusion of faces and names around him, the identity he was now most certain of was his own. His brief panic at breakfast, when for a moment he had slipped back into being Oliver Fox again, was long since over.
He was Dr. Norman Wilfred, and the long years of being Oliver Fox had receded into the past like the brief spells when he had been Ophelia and Father Christmas. In some ways he was more Dr. Norman Wilfred than he had ever been Oliver Fox. He had had many negative feelings about his old persona; he had none at all about his new one. He enjoyed his distinction and importance. He was proud of his achievements, whatever they were. He felt as if he had moved into a spacious new house, where there was room for extra furniture and new pictures on the walls, where there were roomy attics and cellars in which the unwanted lumber of the past could be dumped. It was what estate agents called an imposing residence, and living in it was a perpetual adventure, a challenge that brought out the best in him. Ideas and opinions seemed to like it, too. They found the occasion to drop in on him in a way they rarely had in his old house.
Ideas about climate change, for instance; views about stem-cell research; thoughts about the genetic modification of crops. To none of these subjects had he ever in his old life given a moment’s consideration. The faces around him had no sooner to mention them, though, and accord him a respectful silence for his reply, than a reply began to utter itself—and often one of an originality and oracular profundity that plainly took them by surprise. Himself, too. Dr. Norman Wilfred, discovered Dr. Norman Wilfred, believed that climate change would encourage the study of foreign languages. Stem cells were like the little silver balls that were used to decorate children’s birthday cakes. Genetic modification reminded him of the attempts made by his eccentric Auntie Jane, of whom he had never heard before, to train her four cats to appreciate poetry.
For a moment, as people heard these simple but mysterious utterances, they seemed to catch a glimpse of a meaning, like a touch of gold appearing through a passing window high in the stacked and complex cumulus of the world. The meaning vanished again as swiftly as the shifting gold, but was as transcendent while it lasted.
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