Then again, if Georgie and Annuka were at the villa together there would be other issues to be settled. But it seemed to him that they would be the sort of issues that his presence could only exacerbate. It might be better to let the two of them sort things out between them.
“So,” said Spiros, “we go on?”
Oliver shook his head. “Airport,” he said.
* * *
There was suddenly silence in the bathroom, and the door stopped shuddering so alarmingly in its frame. The house was solidly built, and the door had evidently frustrated the cleaning person’s efforts to kick it in. Georgie held her breath, waiting to hear what the woman would do next, and perhaps also so as to make her own existence loom less objectionably large to her. Even through the thickness of the door she could hear her breathing hard enough for both of them.
“Right, then,” shouted the woman finally. “I’m going to phone the police! I’m going to have you arrested!”
Silence. She had evidently gone off to fetch her phone. Her objections to nudity, even practiced by her employer’s guests in the privacy of their own garden, were astonishingly violent. Perhaps she had weird religious convictions of some sort. Unless she had bristled at being called the cleaning person. She looked Greek, but she sounded English. Maybe you had to call local English employees something different. Cleaning supervisors. Directors of leisure services.
Footsteps coming back, and another sudden volley of blows on the door.
“My phone!” the cleaning whatever-she-was was screaming. “Give me my phone! You’ve got my phone in there!”
Georgie invisibly but involuntarily shook her head. She hadn’t got anything in here! The woman had cleared out even the great muddle of creams and lotions that Georgie had left around the washbasin. They were all in the pool.
Oh, no. Lying where the creams and lotions had been was, yes, a phone.
Georgie picked it up. Her first thought was simply to unbolt the door and hand it to the woman. But then she hesitated. Getting her phone back might still not be enough to appease her. Unbolting the door might create more problems than it solved. Anyway, if the woman was really going to phone the police …
Also … Yes, why not? Now she had a phone she could phone someone herself. Nikki—yes! But without her own phone she didn’t know the number. Oliver, then? She pressed the button, then realized that she had no idea of Oliver’s number, either.
But there, unbelievably, was his name, on the screen of the cleaning woman’s phone, waiting for her. She touched the number.
Even in Greece people had heard of Oliver Fox.
* * *
The airport, yes. Because Oliver could see that the whole enterprise was over. It was doomed. It had seemed to be working—it might even have gone on working—but fate had caught up with him. He might have guessed that Annuka would change her mind, since she’d done it three times before. Three times she had thrown him out, and three times she had phoned him with much the same kind of invitation to reopen negotiations as she had just issued.
Annuka Vos. The very name sounded like the dull tolling of some great bell. The leitmotif of heavy destiny. To find it announcing itself on the same island as he happened to be cast a gray pall over even the most hopeful of initiatives. He had only to think of her and he could feel his foot insecure on the high wire he was treading, his balance uncertain.
He had second thoughts for a moment, as Spiros turned the taxi round and drove down the mountain again. The sound of Annuka’s name was blotted out by the applause of all those people gazing up him from the dinner tables as he began his great lecture on whatever it was that his great lecture was about. And then, with the applause still in his ears, by the look in Nikki’s clear blue eyes, and the freshness of the two crisp and trusting syllables in her name.
“Or rather…” he said to Spiros.
“No?” said Spiros. “Not airport?”
But then his phone rang, and there it was on the screen again: “Annuka Vos, mobile.” He couldn’t face listening to any more of her raging. He wiped the name away with the touch of a button, but a few seconds later it reappeared. This time he put the phone back in his pocket and left the name to bleat on unanswered. He could see what would happen. She would keep phoning. She would find out where he was and pursue him. She would have joined forces with Georgie by this time, their mutual antipathy overtaken by their mutual grievance against him. They would pursue him together—hunt him down like two of the three furies. Into the lecture. Out of the lecture and into Nikki’s room. And there they would explain their joint grievance to her and their joint grievance would become a triple grievance. They would recruit her to their cause. They would become all three of the furies. He was not Dr. Norman Wilfred. He was Oliver Fox, and he was beaten.
Spiros was still looking at him inquiringly in the rearview mirror.
“Airport,” said Oliver.
34
“Dr. Wilfred?” said Nikki cautiously, tapping softly on his door. The interview couldn’t still be going on, could it? If it was, if he had still not managed to get rid of Wellesley Luft, he might welcome an interruption. He would presumably want to freshen up and get changed before the evening began. She tapped again. Still no response.
The door was open a crack. She put her ear to it. Silence … and then a strange low sound, a kind of gathering deep groan.
She pushed the door open at once.
“Dr. Wilfred!” she said in alarm. There was a sharp snort, and the bald head she could see over the back of the armchair jerked upright. The suddenly awakened face of Wellesley Luft appeared, trying to work out in evident confusion where its owner now was.
“I was at Junior Prom,” he said. “I’d just gotten to dance with Jackie Kennedy … I do apologize. I was on the red-eye, as you know. Also I am seven hours out of step with Eastern Standard Time.”
“He’s still not here?” said Nikki. She looked at her watch. “I’m awfully sorry. He must have stepped out for a moment, and then … I don’t know … got cornered by his admirers, perhaps. So many people who want to talk to him!”
“Everyone wants a piece of Dr. Norman Wilfred!”
“He’s going to be in a bit of a rush when he arrives. I’ll try to find you a little time after dinner.”
“Even half an hour would be most deeply appreciated. Oh, and I guess sooner or later he’s going to be needing this. I found it on the floor.”
“On the floor? Oh, dear. He does seem to be a weensy bit disorganized.”
She opened the passport and glanced briefly at the familiar face. “I’ll put it somewhere safe for him. You go on down. Ask them to give you a glass of champagne.”
* * *
Nikki put the passport on the desk, where Dr. Wilfred would be sure to see it. But as soon as Wellesley Luft was out of the room she picked it up again and resumed her study of Dr. Wilfred’s photograph. He was unsmiling, of course, as passport regulations required, and made strangely alien by his staring immobility. He was still Dr. Wilfred, though, still chuckle-headed Norman Wilfred. Her eyes moved to the date of birth and other details beside the photograph. Good God, no wonder he seemed so young! He was only a couple of years older than herself! And he had already achieved so much in life! Her eye moved up to feast on his name for a moment or two …
Her phone was ringing, though. It was him! At once her eyes were more pleasantly open than ever, her shirt more crisply ironed. “Nikki Hook,” she said.
It wasn’t Dr. Wilfred. It was a woman having some kind of hysterical breakdown.
“Sorry—who is this?” said Nikki. “I can’t hear … Oh—Georgie!” Of course. Georgie. Again. Who else? She stood, holding the passport in her hand, trying to make sense of the cascade of sound in her ear. “Georgie,” she said, “Georgie … Georgie…! Slow down a moment…! Yes, but I can’t … Had to Google me…? Fingers shaking…? But why did you have to Google me…? The cleaning person’s phone…?”
She kept her eyes fixe
d on Dr. Wilfred’s sane and untroubled face.
“Georgie … Yes, yes … But just tell me one thing: where are you? The bathroom? You’re back in the bathroom? Oh, Georgie, no!
“And this person outside the door … is the cleaning person? And is he the same man as before?
“Not the same man? Not a man? Her? The cleaning person is the cleaning woman?”
She looked out of the window. The yachts rode quietly at anchor. Shirtsleeved waiters hurried back and forth to the Temple of Athena with crates of champagne and bags of ice. The Fred Toppler Foundation was quietly, thrillingly, doing what it had been founded to do: promote the civilizing values of European culture. Meanwhile, out there in the rest of the world …
“Georgie, let me just make sure I’ve got all this straight. You were lying by the pool. Nothing on—no—of course not—sunbathing—yes. And the cleaning woman came out? Yes … yes … And threw all your clothes in the pool? Everything … Emptied the suitcase …
“Of course … Yes … I understand … So, Georgie, have you got any clothes on now?
“You’ve got what on? Mosquito netting?”
Nikki opened the passport again as she listened. Even without his regular smile there was something calming about Dr. Wilfred’s appearance. You looked at him and you knew that the world could be a simple and straightforward place, that it was possible to live one’s life without getting besieged in bathrooms by cleaning women with insane religious convictions. He had been born in London, she discovered. He was a British citizen. And his name was somehow as reassuring as his appearance. She let her eye move up the list to savor it. “Given names/prénoms: OLIVER.” Yes! It somehow suited him. So did his surname/nom: FOX.
“Georgie,” she said, “you’re in the bathroom, yes, but what country is the bathroom in?”
She didn’t hear Georgie’s reply, though, because it had just occurred to her that there was something odd about the spelling of Dr. Wilfred’s name.
* * *
In fact Georgie hadn’t replied, because she hadn’t heard Nikki’s question. The cleaning woman had suddenly discovered a new grievance. Georgie had only just taken in what it was.
“My suitcase!” she was screaming through the woodwork. “What have you done with my suitcase?”
Her suitcase? What suitcase? There wasn’t a suitcase!
There had been a suitcase, of course. There had been her own suitcase, now floating in the pool. And, yes, there had been another suitcase before that. The one that had come in the taxi—Wilfred’s suitcase.
A queasy, unsettling insight came to Georgie. She had jumped to conclusions, she realized, as she had done quite often in life before. Wilfred’s suitcase hadn’t been Wilfred’s suitcase. It had been the cleaning woman’s. The taxi had been bringing the cleaning woman. And her suitcase with her.
But why would the cleaning woman have been arriving in a taxi? Why would she have been bringing a suitcase with her?
And suddenly, in one lightning leap after another, everything became clear to Georgie. It was because the cleaning woman wasn’t the cleaning woman. She was coming to stay in the villa. Just like Georgie herself. A fellow guest. Of Oliver’s. Like herself. She was some part of Oliver’s notorious past. Or even, like herself, of his notorious present.
There seemed to be another ceasefire in the siege of the door. Instead there was the sound of the suitcase search moving through the house, of doors being flung open, of tables being shifted and chairs overturned. Georgie wondered whether to try shouting through the door that the suitcase was presumably still outside the gate where the taxi driver had put it. But then she remembered—it wasn’t. She had picked it up herself, and put it back in the taxi. So now it was …
Wherever Wilfred was. Giving a lecture. Gone.
At any moment the woman would be back, still suitcaseless, and angrier than ever. It might be an idea, thought Georgie, to follow the example of the suitcase—to be out of the house and away from here.
* * *
Oliver rested his head against the side window of the taxi, absently watching a plane that had taken off from the airport just ahead of them. Up, up it soared, catching the early evening sun as it began a long climbing turn. He felt like that plane—light, unencumbered, free. As magically as a plane becoming airborne he had become Dr. Norman Wilfred. As easily as a plane revolving the landscape beneath itself he had rocked the world a little on its axis. Had varied the great dullness of things, the vast yawning predictability of the planets going round the sun.
Then, just as easily, he had reverted to being Oliver Fox again, and was off. There was nothing he had to drag through the airport and get airborne with him. His suitcase could stay where it was, in the room he had left. Nothing in it that he couldn’t abandon as easily as the room. Nothing in it that belonged to him, in any case, now he thought about it. Not even the suitcase. Somewhere there must be another suitcase, full of things that actually were his. It was presumably in the keeping of that other Dr. Norman Wilfred, the shadowy figure who was now free to step forth into the light again and resume his existence. Let him have both suitcases, whoever he was.
All Oliver needed in life he carried in his pockets. A little cash and a couple of credit cards. He checked his trouser pockets. OK. Fine. He checked his shirt pocket. He had his phone. Not essential, perhaps, but certainly useful. The bar of chocolate and the pack of soluble aspirin. Optional, but handy. Nothing else in the whole wide world did he require.
Oh. One thing …
* * *
Nikki sat down. Her legs had gone wobbly. She looked at the passport yet again.
No, there was no way round it. The spelling was definitely wrong. “Norman” was not spelled O-L-I-V-E-R. “Wilfred” was not spelled F-O-X.
35
“Thirty-two euros,” said Stavros.
He had to say it twice, because the first time Dr. Wilfred was standing on a dark hillside somewhere under the glittering night sky, explaining to Georgie how the apparently random distribution of the heavenly bodies was entirely consonant with a causality fully determined by the preexisting fundamental laws, and it was difficult to see how the sum of thirty-two euros came into the relevant mathematics at any point.
The stars faded. Oh, yes, Stavros. The taxi. They had arrived at the foundation. Dr. Wilfred got out and hoisted his flight bag onto his shoulder while he fumbled for his wallet. He couldn’t help being aware that there were gratifyingly large numbers of people arriving at the same time to hear his lecture. Over and over again the glass doors slid back to admit them. Surprisingly many of them were obese, and they were dressed in surprisingly informal ways, with bare bulging midriffs and sun-reddened knees and shoulders. A lot of them had brought their children, and they were all pushing baggage carts piled with suitcases.
The thirty-five euros Dr. Wilfred had got out of his wallet hesitated in the air above Stavros’s waiting hand.
“Hold on…” he said.
* * *
“Thirty-eight euros,” said Spiros, in the taxi pulling up outside Departures just behind Stavros’s.
Oliver didn’t get out, however. He checked all his pockets once again. No, he hadn’t got it. For a moment he thought he might try to talk his way through passport control without it. If so many people were prepared, without any effort on his part, to believe that he was Dr. Norman Wilfred when he wasn’t, surely a few simple officials would take his word for it that he was Oliver Fox when he actually was …
“No,” he said finally. “I’ll have to go back.”
“Back?” said Spiros.
He had left his identity behind. Put it down in the guest suite somewhere, when he had been taking off Oliver Fox and putting on Dr. Norman Wilfred, and forgotten to pick it up again.
They had to wait, though, because the man who had just got out of the taxi in front was also changing his mind and getting back into it.
* * *
Still Nikki sat gazing at the passport. Her first though
t was that the passport office had made a mistake. It was so obviously Dr. Norman Wilfred in the photograph! But then it started to seem not quite so obvious after all.
She became aware that she was also still holding the phone. She put it back to her ear. There was silence. Georgie had evidently calmed down a bit. Which gave Nikki a chance to tell her that their roles were now reversed.
“Georgie,” she said quietly, “I think I’ve done something rather silly, too.”
Because of course Dr. Wilfred wasn’t Dr. Wilfred. How could he be? Dr. Wilfred would be somewhere in his fifties. She knew that perfectly well. He couldn’t possibly be an amiable young idiot with an engaging smile and hair flopping into his eyes. He was a self-important celebrity with a bald head and a lot of expensive meals built into him.
How had she ever for one moment thought that Dr. Wilfred was Dr. Wilfred?
Because—yes—it had happened at the airport, in the very first moment that she had set eyes on him. He had looked at her sign and smiled. She had said “Dr. Wilfred?” and he had said yes. It was as simple as that.
No, he hadn’t even said yes. She remembered exactly what he had said: “I cannot tell a lie.”
He couldn’t tell a lie. He hadn’t told a lie. She had made Dr. Wilfred into Dr. Wilfred all by herself, single-handed.
“This person I told you about,” she said to Georgie. “He isn’t who I thought he was. You told me, didn’t you. You said, wait till you’ve known him for a bit longer. Actually I suppose I really did know. Always. From the very first moment. Of course I knew. Everything about him was just too good to be true.”
There was no reply from Georgie.
“Georgie?” she said. “Can you hear me? Hello? Are you there?”
“Yes, I am here,” said a voice which was not Georgie’s. “And your filthy little friend isn’t, and nor is my suitcase. And if you were somehow also involved in stealing it then let me tell you that this is my phone and I now have the number of yours.”
Skios: A Novel Page 15