Her passport, yes, and her handbag. That was another reason for staying until Oliver got here.
The woman went back into the villa and slammed the door. The garden lighting went out, and the first faint dusting of stars appeared overhead. The ground that Georgie was sitting on became harder and harder. The emptiness of her stomach became more and more painfully noticeable. Ants spread through every part of her mosquito netting.
And then, at last, she heard the distant whine of an engine laboring uphill in low gear. At each turn in the road it grew louder. A spill of moving light appeared on the track below her, then two blinding beams, rocking and dipping over the potholes. She struggled to her feet, so stiff that she could scarcely manage it.
She hesitated for a moment as the taxi stopped in front of her, uncertain whether she was going to throw her arms around Oliver as she had once so longed to, or whether she was going to stick with her revised plan of inflicting some kind of painful injury on him as best she could in bare feet, or whether she was going to embrace him first and then kick him.
As Oliver got out of the taxi the garden of the villa lit up like fairyland once again, and it wasn’t Oliver. It was Wilfred. Of course. Wilfred back yet again. She might have guessed from the soapy look on his face when he went that she hadn’t really managed to get rid of him.
So she didn’t embrace him. She didn’t kick him. She waited while he lifted something off the back seat, slammed the door, and opened the garden gate. He was holding whatever it was in front of him covered in a sheet, like a nurse carrying a bedpan. But already she was getting into the taxi. The driver turned round and gazed at her. She pulled the mosquito netting more closely around her, then realized that there was something reassuringly familiar about the man’s face, or about the wart in the middle of his bald head.
“It’s Spiros again, isn’t it?” she said.
“Stavros,” said Stavros. “Where you go?”
Yes, where she go? She had not the slightest idea. Nor, now she thought about it, how she was going to pay the fare without her handbag.
“Don’t tell me,” said Stavros. “I know.”
“Do you?”
“Of course!” He nodded at her mosquito netting as he started to turn the car round. “Where else in Skios you going tonight in evening dress except only Fred Toppler?”
* * *
Still holding his covered platter of canapés, Dr. Wilfred lifted the wrought-iron knocker on the front door of the villa, and then hesitated. He wasn’t sure, now that he was here, that Georgie would be as pleased to see him as he had assumed. If she opened the door and found him standing on the step she might just possibly jump to the wrong conclusions, and close it again before he could explain.
She would surely be pleased to see the food, however. It might be sensible to make sure that she saw the food before she saw him. He went round to the side of the house, with the idea of showing her the platter through the glass panes of the garden door. This is why he had come, after all, to bring her something to eat. It was the canapés he was thinking about, not her moles or her vertebrae. He was simply going to give her the canapés and leave.
There was no sign of her on the other side of the glass door, though, so he gently pushed it open and listened … She was in the bathroom—he could hear the water running. All right—he would leave the platter on the kitchen table for her to find when she emerged … Though now he was here, he might as well lay the table for her. Only one place, of course … Well, two, just in case she insisted on his having a few of the canapés to keep her company.
He moved around the big kitchen, opening cupboards and drawers. Plates, yes. Crisp white damask napkins. He arranged the canapés as tastefully as he could, and put two more slices of bread in the toaster. He found two silver candlesticks, and two long red candles to go in them, to make her lonely supper seem a little more festive.
He thought of the other dinner that was being eaten even now at the foundation. Of all the idiocies that were being uttered by all the idiots packed in around the overdressed tables, and not heard for the roar of all the other idiocies being uttered by the idiots around them. Of the false Dr. Norman Wilfred watching the courses come and go, feeling his mouth getting drier and drier as the time drew ever closer when he would have to rise and deliver his lecture. And what lecture was he going to deliver? The only lecture that any imaginable Dr. Norman Wilfred might give was here on the table beside the canapés, in the safekeeping of himself, the real Dr. Norman Wilfred, the lucky Dr. Norman Wilfred, the happy Dr. Norman Wilfred, the Dr. Norman Wilfred who had known how to build the great house of his career—and then known the moment to walk out of the front door and abandon it.
He heard the bathroom door open, and then Georgie’s approaching footsteps. His own mouth was a little dry, he realized, even though he didn’t have to deliver a lecture.
She was standing in the doorway, wrapped in a dressing gown. There was a sharp rasp of suddenly indrawn breath.
“Now what’s going on?” she cried.
But her voice had changed, had gone large and dark. He looked at her, suddenly fearful. Yes, her face, too, had changed, like a face in a dream. Everything about her had changed, and changed out of all recognition. It had all gone large and dark.
He drew out a chair from the table and sat down.
Something, in the last twenty-four hours, had gone radically wrong with the world. The Gulf Stream of good fortune that had bathed and warmed his shores from the age of twelve or so had without warning turned aside and left him in an unfamiliar and inhospitable new climate.
44
The passport was lying on the desk where Nikki had left it. She picked it up as if it were infectious. It was as alien as an old love letter from someone who had proved false. She remembered how unsettled she had been by the sight of his unsmiling face in it even before. It had been revealing. When he stopped smiling there was something cold about him. Something cruel—something perhaps even verging on the psychopathic. She found herself turning the pages in spite of her distaste, and looking at the photograph again. Yes, there was a mean, watchful light in his eyes, and a hard set to the mouth.
He looked very different from the smiling impostor she had been so dangerously close to falling in love with. In fact he looked very different from the unsmiling version of himself that she had seen in the photograph before. All his blond hair had fallen out—he was half bald. His cheeks were lined and pouched, his jowls baggy. He was fifteen or more years older. It was like the picture of Dorian Gray.
No, he was someone else entirely. The passport had changed its identity, like Dr. Norman Wilfred himself. The entire world had begun to deliquesce around her.
She looked at this stranger’s name.
Yes, of course. In all her anxiety about what to do, and her anger at the false Dr. Norman Wilfred, she had failed to think about his other victim. Now here he was, looking out at her from the ordinariness of the past, from the quiet dullness of things before all this had started to happen: the real Dr. Norman Wilfred.
* * *
“We’ll wait till he stands up to speak,” said Annuka Vos to Dr. Wilfred. “Some idiot will introduce him. Everyone will clap, and then there’ll be a moment of silence before he opens his mouth. That’s our cue to stand up and make the biggest, most embarrassing public scene anyone has ever witnessed.”
Dr. Wilfred was sitting beside her in the back of the taxi, holding on to his lecture with one hand and his safety belt with the other, as they plunged down the mountainside, and the potholes and hairpin bends sprang towards them out of the darkness. They had eaten most of the canapés and drunk several glasses of Petrus’s brandy while he had recounted to her the injustice he had suffered at Oliver Fox’s hands. The indignation she felt on her own account had been inflamed even more by her generous outrage on Dr. Wilfred’s behalf than it had by the brandy. They had both been hideously abused. And now she knew where to find their abuser.
“The
trouble is,” said Dr. Wilfred, “that no one will believe it’s me. They didn’t before.”
“If any doubts are expressed, leave them to me. I will deal with them. By force if necessary. I don’t know what this lecture of yours is about, and I don’t care. But you’re going to give it, not him. Even if we both have to shout him down.”
Dr. Wilfred was silent for a pothole or two. “I don’t really want to,” he said. “I’ve rather gone off the whole idea.”
She gazed at him in amazement.
“What? You want to let that ridiculous little fraud give your lecture for you?”
Dr. Wilfred held up his typescript. “He can’t give my lecture.”
“No—he’s going to be doing what he always does—he’s going to make it up himself as he goes along! Some complete rubbish of his own! You’re someone well known, are you? You’re going to be a lot better known still when people hear what you’re supposed to have said! You’re going to be a public laughingstock!”
Still this poor broken specimen was silent.
“Come on!” she said. “Wake up! Make an effort! This little rat has stolen your life!”
God, the effort one always had to make with men! It should have been the other way round! It should have been him struggling to persuade her!
“You’re not worrying about your starving lady friend, are you? I’ll tell you where she is by this time. At the dinner! With him! Eating her head off!”
He seemed to have forgotten about her, though. She had blown into his life by some sequence of mistakes and coincidences. Now, by some further sequence of mistakes and coincidences, she had blown out of it again.
“I’ve had a rather difficult day, one way and another,” he said. “I think what I should really like to do is go back to the villa, if that’s all right with you. We could finish the canapés. Get an early night, perhaps.”
She looked at him. He wasn’t beginning to nourish any illusions about her, was he? It would be typical, of course. A bird in the hand—just what Oliver could never resist.
Yes. Well. Nevertheless. She modified her approach a little.
“We’re going to be doing this together,” she said softly, and kept her eyes fixed on him until he felt the pressure of her gaze, and glanced round at her. She smiled. He looked away, then looked at her again. She switched on the interior light, so that perhaps he could see, in her wide-open dark Latin eyes, the tawny splash of Baltic amber in the pupils.
She had plainly unsettled him a little. She had unsettled herself a little, too, she realized, now that she was looking at him so hard. He wasn’t quite as old and broken as she had supposed. In the dim light of the taxi, with the red baldness of his head and the scruffiness of his clothes hidden in the shadows, he was, well, not so insignificant, after all. Some lingering traces remained of the importance that he had described to her over the canapés. He wasn’t remotely the man she knew in her heart that she really deserved, that quiet, laughing, considerate giant, who would be romping with the children when she came back from an exhausting day of negotiations with her fellow bankers in Zurich—and who would break off to throw his arms round her and whirl her around until he and she and all six children collapsed laughing on the hearth rug in front of the crackling log fire. He was obviously something of a figure in the world, though. In demand to speak at international conferences and festivals. She saw heads turning and cameras flashing as he and she arrived in Montreal or Montevideo for their joint presentation …
An absurd thought. All the same, she made sure that when he looked round at her again he found her still softly gazing at him. He smiled. A little ruefully, perhaps, a little awkwardly, but resignedly.
So—they were going to do it. They were going to finish Mr. Oliver Fox once and for all. Slay the dragon at last that had wrought such havoc up and down the land.
She leaned towards the driver.
“Step on it, will you, Stavros? It is Stavros, isn’t it?”
“Spiros,” said Spiros.
Instead of going faster, though, he was slowing down. The taxi was plowing through some sort of obstruction. It appeared in the headlights to be a broken suitcase that someone had abandoned in the middle of the road, with a long trail of dusty shoes and clothes spilling out of it.
“Disgusting, what some people do with their rubbish,” said Annuka Vos.
Dr. Wilfred said nothing.
* * *
Still Nikki stood in Parmenides, holding Dr. Norman Wilfred’s passport. So where was he? The real Dr. Norman Wilfred?
In London, perhaps. Had missed the flight. No, he’d caught the flight—she’d spoken to his PA. And the flight had arrived. She’d been at the airport to meet it. So he had reached Skios. And yet somehow, on the spur of the same moment in which Oliver Fox had appointed himself to be Dr. Norman Wilfred, he had come into possession of Dr. Norman Wilfred’s passport.
So he had somehow made the real Dr. Norman Wilfred vanish. Had abducted him. Kidnapped him.
How, though? He could scarcely have done it on his own. Particularly since he had been with her all the time, enjoying himself by watching her become ever more hopelessly entangled in the web he had spun. He must have had people working with him. They would have had to do it, not on the spur of the moment at all, but according to a careful plan made long in advance. They would have had weapons and safe houses.
So perhaps this wasn’t a joke, after all. It was something quite different. Into her mind came the picture of Mrs. Toppler talking to Oliver Fox, her hand on his arm, telling him everything. And then of Oliver Fox turning to talk to Mrs. Skorbatova. And of Mrs. Skorbatova suddenly able to understand English.
And of Mr. Skorbatov cutting the grapes with those tiny silver scissors. She thought about the way he had been holding them, the surgical ruthlessness with which he had used them, and then how each grape had vanished into his mouth, snap, like a fly into the mouth of a lizard …
45
Behind the bougainvillea that screened the car park the fat limousines and four-by-fours purred as contentedly as well-fed cats, while the chauffeurs tipped their seats back and settled to an hour or two of air-conditioned sleep.
In the lodge Elli yawned and phoned her mother in Ioannina.
At the barrier in front of the lodge Giorgios had taken over while the rest of the security staff had their supper break. There was nothing for him to do. All the guests had arrived long since. He sat down in the darkness under an oleander and lit a cigarette. He had scarcely taken his first consoling drag, however, when the lights of an approaching car appeared. He got himself wearily to his feet and stubbed the cigarette out. This job had certain perks, it was true, but there was even less chance for the occasional relaxing smoke than he would have had looking for gas leaks.
The familiar . Spiros or Stavros? Stavros. Giorgios wandered over and shook hands while Stavros’s passenger, a woman wearing an evening dress made of complex folds and swags of tulle, got out of the back. Giorgios and Stavros had quite a lot to talk about. Stavros’s mother was a cousin of Giorgios’s aunt, and they hadn’t seen each other since Uncle Panagiotis had run off with the girl from the ice cream bar.
“Hey!” interrupted Stavros suddenly. He jumped out of the taxi and looked round. His passenger was just disappearing under the barrier, into the darkness inside the foundation, her tulle hoisted up around her.
“Invitation!” shouted Giorgios, and ran after her.
“Thirty-two euros!” shouted Stavros, and ran after Giorgios.
* * *
There was another slight disturbance occurring in the harbor. An incoming yacht, Happy Days, registered in Izmir, had just collided with something large and solid in the darkness.
“Sorry about that,” said the man at the helm, in an expensively educated English voice. “Only paintwork, though.”
“Patrick’s arseholed again!” said a second matching voice. “Someone else take the wheel!”
“Trouble is,” said a third voice
likewise, “all the rest of us are arseholeder than Patrick.”
“Look at it, though!” said a fourth voice. “Is that what we hit? It’s the size of an aircraft carrier!”
Heads had appeared over the rail above their heads, shouting in a foreign language.
“Oh my God!” said the third voice on Happy Days. “Russians! And they’re waving things at us!”
“Submachine guns,” said the second voice.
“Do beg your pardon!” the fourth voice shouted up to them. “Helmsman arseholed!”
Happy Days motored gently on into the darkness and hit the dockside with reassuring firmness. All three men who weren’t holding on to the wheel for support fell over and laughed.
“Anyway, he’s got us there,” said the third voice. “Good old Patrick!”
“Yes, but where’s he got us?” said the second.
“Skabulos,” said the third.
“Skrofulos,” said the fourth, taking a line ashore.
“Who cares?” said the third. “As long as it’s dry and it’s not rocking about.”
“And there’s somewhere we can get a few beers,” said the fourth.
Skios: A Novel Page 19