Skios: A Novel (13 page)

“They’re sending a buggy for me,” he said. “It’s too far to walk. I have to wait for the buggy. I am giving a lecture. This evening. At the foundation. The Fred Toppler Lecture.”

He dragged a scruffy binder out of the flight bag that he was still clutching and held it up for her to see.

“At least I still have the lecture. Everything else has gone. It was all in my suitcase. Someone took my suitcase.” He loosened the damp shirt around his neck. “Clean clothes, toilet bag. I shall have to borrow things from the foundation.”

He wiped his hands on his torn trousers and extracted a phone from his sweaty shirt pocket. He wiped more sweat off his hands.

“So where’s this buggy they’re sending?” he said. “It should be here by now.”

She watched him as he waited with the phone to his ear.

“Or have they forgotten about me?” he said. “Do I actually exist? Or have I somehow vanished like my suitcase?”

For a moment he remained completely still and silent, listening.

“Engaged,” he said. He pressed a button to redial. Another patient pause. Then he let out a sudden howl of fury that made Georgie jump.

“Not in service!” He hurled the phone away from him to the other end of the lounger. It skidded over the edge and disappeared into the pool.

For a moment he sat there, watching the blue reflections of the sky in the water, which lapped gently back and forth, as serene and unconcerned as a lizard that has just swallowed a fly. Then he put his head into his hands and gazed for some minutes at his dusty shoes.

“I’m sorry,” said Georgie. “You’re having a bad time.”

Eventually he lifted his head, and sat gazing at something else. Her beach bag, she realized, and the things that had spilled out of it. One of them was her phone.

“I might be able to remember my PA’s number,” he said humbly.

She switched on the phone and held it up to show him the blankness of the screen. “Battery,” she said.

“Charger?” he said.

“But no adapter.”

He sprang to his feet, energized and reborn.

“
I’ve
got an adapter!” he said.

“In your suitcase?” she said.

He sank back onto the lounger and looked at his shoes again for a long time. Then he raised his head once more. “The buggy’s going to the guest quarters,” he said. He had become a different person, calm and quiet, like someone recovered from a fever. He looked at the house. “This isn’t the guest quarters,” he said. “It’s nothing to do with the foundation. It’s somebody’s villa. What—yours?”

She nodded. He bowed his head. “I do apologize for my misunderstanding.”

He had become a normal human being. An abnormally quiet one, perhaps. She knew what particular aspect of his trespass he was thinking about, but was too embarrassed to specify: how he had taken possession of not only her house but her bed, and how close he had come to taking possession of her as well. Well, everyone made mistakes. She had made a slight mistake herself. She decided to forgive him, and to put him out of his misery.

“I’m waiting for my friend to arrive,” she said. “I presume he’ll be in a taxi. You can have the taxi.”

“Thank you,” he said humbly. “I should be extremely grateful. Do you mind if I wait here? It’s very hot out there.”

She picked up the wide flowered sun hat lying beside the lounger and spun it across to him. “You’re going pink,” she said.

He looked at the hat, and reluctantly put it on. She laughed. He took it off.

“Come on,” she said. “You’re going to look a lot sillier if you stand there giving your lecture and you’re bright red.”

He put it on again, and she threw him the tube of sunblock. He obediently anointed himself, and they went on waiting.

“So when are you expecting your friend?” he asked.

“Yesterday,” she said.

24

Mrs. Fred Toppler and Dr. Norman Wilfred were getting on like a house on fire. They were sipping champagne cocktails in the loggia high up on the corner of Democritus, where it caught every slight breath of air from the sea. His nocturnal expedition into her bed in search of the wire cutters seemed to have been forgotten.

“It’s such a tonic,” she said, “to have someone here who is not only so distinguished but so
young
! It sometimes makes me just a little bit sad that the people who share our passion for promoting civilized values are almost all past retiring age. I feel so young in heart myself! This is what brought the late Mr. Fred Toppler and me together. He was eighty-one years old when we first met. ‘Baby,’ he said—he always called me Baby—‘you make me feel young again.’ I was a dancer. A serious dancer. Nothing cheap. I had a beautiful body. I was happy to express myself with it. I was in a show in Vegas. I’m in my dressing room afterwards and the girl comes in and says, ‘Miss LeStarr’—I was Bahama LeStarr, second billing—‘there’s a gentleman to see you, and he’s in a white tux!’ A white tux, would you believe! Like something in an old movie!

“So he takes me out to dinner. Champagne, caviar, all the baloola. He was a gentleman. This was twenty years ago. There were gentlemen then. ‘Baby,’ he says, ‘you make me feel like I’ve never grown up. Will you marry me?’

“I say, ‘Mr. Toppler, that is so sweet, I am so touched, but I have my career!’

“And he says, ‘You go right on with your career, Baby, because that’s what I love, to watch you dance.’

“So, OK, I’m on tour, I have a contract. Palm Springs, Houston, Honolulu. And, Dr. Wilfred, Mr. Toppler follows me! Everywhere! Ten cities in ten weeks! Eighty-one! And he’s on the road!

“I say, ‘OK, honey, you win.’ We fly to LA, because I’m his fourth, and LA is where he always likes to get divorced. Sweet! We get married in New Orleans—it’s Carnival—we dance in the streets! Then straight back to Lake Tahoe to start the next tour. And for the next six weeks I’m dancing all night and we’re honeymooning all day. Never out of our suite from dawn to dusk! ‘Baby,’ he says, ‘you make me feel like I can touch the stars!’

“Six weeks of true love. And then—oh, Dr. Wilfred, this is so sad!—in Fort Lauderdale I lost him.

“Heart. Just like that. He didn’t suffer. You wouldn’t believe the unkind things some people said. I took no notice. I knew I’d given him those six wonderful weeks.

“So there I am, a widow already. And the major stockholder in TipToppler Beauty Products, plus a string of TV stations and industrial-refuse facilities. Plus also—and this Mr. Toppler had never even mentioned when he told me about his will—a plot of ground someplace in Greece where he was building a vacation home for his second wife—she was Greek—singer—bouzouki—only then he moved on to number three and he forgot about it.

“So I cry my eyes out for a bit, and then I think, How best can I honor the memory of that wonderful man? And I think to myself, When I was Bahama LeStarr I worked my butt off to give something back to humanity, and I did it by the only means I had to offer, which was my dancing. But how many cities can you dance in before your knees go and your boobs need some work on them and agents won’t return your calls? And I see I have to stop thinking like Bahama LeStarr now and start thinking like Mrs. Fred Toppler, because Mrs. Fred Toppler is what I am, and as Mrs. Fred Toppler I can do so much more to make the world a better place than I ever could as Bahama LeStarr.

“And it’s a funny thing—if you’re Mrs. Fred Toppler you suddenly find there are a lot of other people out there who also want to make the world a better place, and all they need to do it is for you to come in with them, and maybe help them out with a dime or two. So this German guy comes to see me. Dieter. Pointy ears, no hair, looks like some creature on Planet Zog. Two minutes with him and I know he’s the cat’s meow. Architect—thinker—everything. A true visionary—and don’t worry, he’s gay.

“He comes here, he looks at the site, he reads stuff in the library, and what do you think? This place was sacred to the goddess Athena! And what was Athena in charge of? Wisdom and civilization! ‘Mrs. Toppler,’ says Dieter, ‘together you and I will dedicate this beautiful property of yours to Athena again! We will turn it into a center of wisdom and civilization, a place of beauty where the finest minds in the English-speaking world can mix with the leaders of English-speaking society.’”

She indicated the view out of the window.

“Every stick and stone that you can see, we had to bring here. Where was the Temple of Athena? Gone. Vanished. We had experts out here from Athens, holes in the ground all over. Nothing. We had to fetch our own temple from Zakynthos. It was dedicated to Aphrodite. We changed her name, the way I changed mine. Now she’s Athena. The agora came from Pelion. The church from Samos. We built this place from the ground up. You know what was on this site when Mr. Fred Toppler first set eyes on it? Two rusty iron sheds where they gutted fish.”

Dr. Wilfred looked at the perfection that had grown out of those two iron sheds. Several more large yachts had backed up to the waterfront, he saw. Their crews were coiling lines and running out hoses, reefing and brailing.

“And all this because you stopped being Bahama LeStarr and became Mrs. Fred Toppler.”

“All this,” she said, “because I became Bahama LeStarr in the first place. And we’re not finished yet. Up there on the hillside—behind the fences—they’re still working. A new fifty-meter pool. Olympic standard. Mr. Papadopoulou’s pride and joy. He’s taken the work over personally! He’s crazy about that pool of his!

“Hey, it’s so nice talking to you, Dr. Wilfred, because you don’t keep saying things yourself, like some of our other guest speakers. You know how to listen! What are you a doctor of, by the way?”

“Oh, you know … this and that.”

“I love it! You Brits! So, not medicine?”

“Aren’t I?”

“You are? You’re a doctor of medicine?”

“Why not?”

“In that case…”

She pulled her shirt out of her trousers, turned her back towards him, and touched a spot on the brown bulge that was struggling to be free of the waistband.

“Just …
there.
Like a drill was boring into me. I’ve been to specialists, I’ve been to chiropractors and faith healers … Maybe
you
can feel something … No…? Press it … Lower, lower … Wait…”

She undid her trousers, pulled them down an inch or two, and leaned over the back of a chair.

“There, yes … Harder … Harder! It doesn’t hurt … Well, OK, it hurts, but it hurts in a way that feels kind of good…”

*   *   *

“Rub it in properly, then,” said the woman who had turned out to be the occupant of what had turned out to be someone’s villa. She was lying on the lounger, facedown, with a towel over her bottom. Dr. Wilfred was spreading sunblock over her back. “Use your thumbs. You might as well give me a massage while you’re about it … The top of my spine … Yes, good … Take hold of my shoulder blades … One hand on each shoulder blade … Press your thumbs into the inside edges and slide them up and down … Harder! I won’t break.”

Dr. Wilfred had not thought about the injustice of his fate for several minutes now, he realized. He was still obediently wearing the flowered sun hat to keep the sun off his own neck, and he was absorbed in seeing how the shiny whiteness of the sunblock gleamed in the sunlight, and then slowly vanished into the brown softness of the skin. The shoulder blades moved with a disturbing fluidity under his hands. The vertebrae, too, were leading a subterranean life of their own that he could only speculate about. There were two moles on the left shoulder which seemed somehow to emphasize its smoothness.

“That’s good,” said the owner of the back. “I’m Georgie, by the way. And you’re…?”

“Wilfred. Dr. Wilfred. Dr. Norman Wilfred.”

“Oh, no! I hate names that you can never remember which way round they go! And you’re a doctor, are you, Norman? No—Wilfred … Wilfred?”

“Norman.”

“Norman. I should have thought a doctor would have had more sense than to go around in the midday sun with no sunblock on.”

“I’m not a doctor of medicine.”

“No? So what are you a doctor of?”

“Management. Among other things.”

“Management? And what kinds of things do you manage, Wilfred, apart from losing your luggage and getting into bed with people you’ve never met in houses that don’t belong to you?”

His hands followed the lines of her rib cage, downward and outward.

“Scientific research,” he said reluctantly.

“What, atoms and things? Pollution and stuff?”

Pointless to attempt any reply to this. His hands were working their way round to the front of her rib cage.

“Not round there,” she said sharply. “I can do the front myself. And the only reason I haven’t got an adapter is because it’s Patrick who looks after things like that.”

His hands started again at the top of her spine, and moved slowly downward.

“Patrick’s the one who’s coming with the taxi?”

“Patrick? Why should it be Patrick? Patrick’s in Turkey.”

Dr. Wilfred’s hands stopped short, somewhere around the third thoracic vertebra.

“If it was Patrick,” said Georgie, “he
would
be here. With an adapter. And a spare one, in case the first one broke down. And water-purifying tablets. And an antimosquito thing. And a jar of Marmite.”

“But this person who
is
coming … The one with the taxi…”

“Oliver.”

“Oliver. You’ve really no idea when?”

“Not the foggiest.”

Dr. Wilfred fell back into despair. “I’ve got to get to this place I’m going and I’ve got to find some clean clothes to put on and I don’t know when I’m supposed to be there and I don’t know where it is and I don’t know how long it’s going to take me to get there. I don’t even know where we are
now
! So where in fact
are
we?”

“Search me. Ask Oliver when he arrives. Look, are you putting sunblock on me or aren’t you?”

His hands resumed their journey down her spine.

“Not down there,” she said. “Don’t get any ideas.”

*   *   *

“So clever of Nikki to find you!” said Mrs. Toppler as Dr. Wilfred worked away on a spot just to the left and up a bit from her coccyx. “Magic fingers, as well as everything else.”