Skios: A Novel (14 page)

The doors to the loggia had opened, realized Dr. Wilfred. A short, trim man in a naval blazer and a club tie had stopped in the doorway, and was gazing at the scene with expressionless blue eyes.

“Thank you,” said Mrs. Toppler to Dr. Wilfred. “That really felt nice. We’ll do that again.”

A thundercloud of flesh, now transmuted into piled summer cumulus by white shirt and chinos, was ushering the well-muscled blazer in. “You remember Oleg?” said Mr. Papadopoulou to Mrs. Toppler. “He was here last year also. Oleg Skorbatov.”

“Hi, Oleg!” said Mrs. Toppler as she did her trousers up. “And this is Dr. Wilfred, who’s giving the lecture this evening.”

“Big star,” said Mr. Papadopoulou. “World famous.”

“And you know what?” said Mrs. Toppler. “Dr. Wilfred’s a doctor. On top of everything else. You got any aches or pains, Oleg, you bring them to Dr. Wilfred.”

Oleg Skorbatov’s unblinking blue eyes fixed on Dr. Wilfred for a moment. He nodded briefly.

“Oh, hi there!” said Mrs. Toppler to a young woman with unnaturally long legs who was standing in the doorway in her turn, topped by a piled brass hairdo that brought her up to almost the height of the architrave. “Svetlana! Great to see you again, Svetlana!”

“Tatiana, this one,” said Mr. Papadopoulou.

“Tatiana,” said Mrs. Toppler, as she kissed her. “Oh, Tatiana, that hair of yours is so brave!”

“Don’t trouble yourself,” said Oleg Skorbatov. “She doesn’t speak English.”

“OK,” said Mr. Papadopoulou, steering Oleg Skorbatov back into the house. “See you later, Dr. Wilfred. I have to show Oleg how we do with the new pool.”

“Men!” said Mrs. Toppler to Dr. Wilfred. “He shows Oleg the pool! He won’t let
me
see it! No one! Not even our wonderful Nikki knows what’s going on behind those screens! Wait there, Tatiana, honey, while I see Dr. Wilfred out.”

“May I ask you something?” said Dr. Wilfred to her as they left the loggia. “I’ve been thinking a lot recently about names. What were you before you were Bahama LeStarr?”

“Before I was Bahama LeStarr I was Apricot del Rio. You come back and give me another session, now. I want your advice about something.”

25

Georgie and Dr. Wilfred were having lunch in the shade of an ancient olive tree. She had unfrozen the contents of the freezer—half a sliced loaf and a packet of peas. He had found a jar of peanut butter. There didn’t seem to be anything else to eat in the house.

“That’s this great lecture you’re supposed to be giving, is it?” she said, nodding at the travel-worn binder on the table beside his plate. “You could read it to me instead.”

He looked at it distractedly. He had been thinking about the two moles on her left shoulder blade, which had now vanished, like so much else, inside a T-shirt. He put out his hand to touch the binder, to reassure himself that his lecture at least was still here.

“No, no!” she said. “Joke! Save it up for people who’ll understand it! And they paid your fare to come here, did they, Wilfred? What—economy or business?”

“Business.”

“So you’re someone important?”

He said nothing. Each time she called him Wilfred he felt less like someone important and more as if he were back in school again, stuck in timeless alphabetical order between Walters and Wilkins.

“I’m trying to get a conversation going,” she said. “To keep you entertained, so you don’t brood about your lecture.”

He sighed. “Am I important?” he said. “Yes. As a matter of fact. In my field. Among people who are interested in the scientific management of science.”

She rested her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands, gazing at him, apparently fascinated. He didn’t really suppose that she was, but it was difficult not to respond when someone was staring open-eyed straight into your face at a range of about two feet.

“My area of expertise is the funding of research,” he said. “I write books and articles about it. I advise governments and the UN. Since you ask.”

He looked at the view for some time, but he realized she was still gazing at him as expectantly as ever.

“Research is very expensive,” he said. “Someone has to recommend what research should be supported. You probably think scientists just have sudden brainwaves, or they do experiments with two tin cans and a piece of string in their garage, or they find things they hadn’t been looking for.”

She didn’t deny it.

“But scientists aren’t just a lot of mad professors,” he said. “They’re rational human beings, just like you and me, engaged in a rational human activity which is subject to rational human constraints. The results of scientific research are scientifically measurable. We have developed a discipline for this. It’s called scientometrics. And on the basis of scientometrics science can be scientifically managed.”

“This is your lecture, is it?” she said. “I see why you don’t want people to miss it.”

Those two hidden moles had resurfaced in his brain, so to push them back underground again he went on.

“This is not actually my lecture,” he said. “I’m giving you a little private tuition. I just want to make clear to you for your own benefit that the view some people have of scientists and scientific research is completely wrong. Scientists do of course sometimes have eureka moments, and they do of course sometimes find important results they weren’t looking for. But it’s all still perfectly rational. You can always find a clear causal chain when you look for it. If the answer to a problem suddenly clicks into place in someone’s brain it’s because they’ve already done all the thinking. They know there’s a problem that needs a solution, just like you know there’s a space in the jigsaw that needs a piece to fit it. Scientists aren’t poets! But then poets aren’t irrational, either. Not that I know much about poets, but I’m pretty certain that they’re subject to the same causal laws as all the rest of us. They come up with words that fill a gap in the market, or they go out of business, just like everyone else.”

“Fascinating,” she said. “So you just thought all this up, did you, Wilfred?”

He was about to agree when he saw the trap he was being led into.

“No,” he said, “I didn’t just think it up. It emerged from my reading and observation, as processed by my brain. And my brain is structured the way it is not through any efforts of mine but through my genetic inheritance. You could trace that inheritance back through the generations and see how it was gradually shaped by the various selective pressures on my ancestors. And you could keep going back, through the structure of the cells of which those ancestors were composed, to the organic chemistry that had shaped the fabric of the cells. Then the inorganic chemistry from which the organic had arisen. Back again to the elementary particles whose physics determines the chemistry. Back to the radiation energy that the particles condensed out of. Back, back, back to the tiny object which according to some cosmologists was only a few millimeters in diameter, and from which everything in the universe originated 13.7 billion years ago.

“All I have done is to allow events to take their course. I have simply accepted my inheritance. I’ve worked hard, certainly. I could have played around, and frittered my life away. In fact I chose to work. But that choice was of course determined, like everything else.”

The gaze she still had fixed upon him had become somewhat absent, he realized. He seemed to have exhausted her interest in the subject.

“The only trouble is, Wilfred,” she said finally, “that you cannot stand up in front of people and give a lecture looking like that. Take your shirt off. I’ll wash it out for you.”

“I’m fine,” he said.

“You’re not fine, Wilfred. You’re a total wreck. Take it off.”

He took it off. “Thank you,” he said.

“Trousers.”

He put on one of the bathrobes and turned discreetly away. Wilfred, yes. She was right. He had for all practical purposes reverted to being mere Wilfred, an awkward schoolboy who always said the wrong thing to girls. He had almost forgotten that he had ever been Dr. Wilfred. Dr. Wilfred had faded to an insubstantial fiction, a creature who had never really quite managed to exist.

“Pants. Socks.”

She took the sweaty clothes into the house, holding them at arm’s length, and he sank slowly back onto his chair. There were two last cold peas on his plate. As he contemplated them they seemed to dissolve into the two moles on Georgie’s left shoulder blade. He speared them on his fork, one after the other, and ate them.

*   *   *

It took Dr. Wilfred a long time to get from Mrs. Fred Toppler’s apartment in Democritus to lunch in the taverna, because people kept coming up to him on the way for a private word.

“I know this is a terrible intrusion,” said Kate Katz. “And I know how many people must be begging you to support one good cause or another. But could I just have one moment of your time to tell you about a desperately important campaign of which I happen to be a patron?”

But somebody else was already taking him by the other elbow.

“I have been so impressed by your approach,” said Morton Rinkleman. “Now, I am on the board of trustees of a small but vibrant liberal arts college in Tennessee.”

Already, though, other people had spotted him, and even before Kate Katz and Morton Rinkleman had finished with him more requests, proposals, and invitations were pressing in upon him.

“… expanding our European operation, and looking for a non-executive director…” “… to have you visit with us in Sausalito…” “… your advice on the Hong Kong copra futures market…” “… nothing less than the ending of national and racial conflict throughout the whole of sub-Saharan Africa…” “… our house in Montauk at your disposal…” “… the otherwise certain extinction of the Arkansas horned owl…” “… remuneration in the 300 K range, though this would of course be supplemented by benefits and stock options…” “… some literature here on the habits of the horned owl…”

By the time he reached the taverna Dr. Wilfred had agreed to be a patron of five campaigns and charities, and president of two institutes of higher education. He had invitations to stay in six states and address seven lunch clubs and ladies’ circles, was committed to charitable contributions of some fifty thousand dollars, but on the other hand had prospects of directorships and other appointments which would bring him an income of several million.

He had only just managed to sit down at the table before word of his most recent achievements in life had somehow overtaken him. “I hear you can do miracles with back problems, Dr. Wilfred! Now, I have a displacement of the fourth lumbar vertebra…” “… a red-hot skewer through the nape of my neck…” “… a pain just
here
…” “… just exactly
there
…” “… a strange buzzing in my left ear…”

As he helped himself to salad he discovered that he had also become a counselor on childcare and spiritual values.

“… I of course understand the problems parents have with growing boys, but quite frankly Wade is now thirty-seven…” “… a sense that there must be something
more
to life than Puccini and clam linguine…”

He picked up his fork.

“I still don’t see…” said Professor Ditmuss.

Dr. Wilfred plunged the fork into the salad, but the salad suddenly disappeared from the table and the fork was snatched out of his hand. He looked round. Nikki was holding them both aloft.

“Onions!” she said. “You’re violently allergic to them!”

26

The two moles on Georgie’s left shoulder blade kept disappearing and reappearing, like two bright stars among shifting clouds. She was slowly pursuing Dr. Wilfred’s phone around the bottom of the pool with the net for fishing leaves and insects out. She had only one hand free, though, because she had taken her T-shirt off again to sunbathe, and was using her other hand to hold the towel round her. Every time she tried to get the net under the phone either the phone slipped away from the net or the towel slipped away from her shoulders and she had to hoick it up again.

Dr. Wilfred closed his eyes, then looked at the view, then closed his eyes again.

“I shouldn’t bother,” he said. “The phone’s not going to work.”

“No, it’s just going to leak poisonous chemicals into the water. We’re both going to end up radioactive.”

His eyes seemed to be open again, and the two elusive dancing dots were just reemerging.

“So, this friend of yours,” he said. “Oliver. Oliver? Where is he?”

“No hurry. Your things aren’t dry yet.”

“Yes, but why isn’t he here, if he’s supposed to be?”

“
I
don’t know!” She flung the net down and turned on him, suddenly furious. “Why aren’t
you
wherever you’re supposed to be? Why don’t you have a sun hat of your own? Why’s your phone at the bottom of the pool?
I
don’t know! But you
do,
do you? There’s some rational explanation for it all, is there? It all goes back to that thing that was half an inch wide twenty million years ago? It was all in there, all in that little thing, was it? Your head, your phone, you, me—you ending up in some place you’re not supposed to be—me getting stuck with you?”

He said nothing. There was never any point in replying to this kind of nonsense. Except to make one small simple point. “Thirteen point seven billion years ago,” he said.

He suddenly went blind. Something soft but stinging had hit him in the face. Her towel, he saw, as it fell off and the world returned.

“And
that
?” she said. “You saw
that
coming, did you? Thirteen point seven billion years ago?”

He tried not to look at her as he threw the towel back to her. Or not for longer than was strictly necessary.

“And yes,” she said, “why
are
you here? If you know so much, why didn’t you know where you were going? And even if you
didn’t
know where you were going, why didn’t you park yourself on somebody else? Why
here
?”

Yes, indeed, now she had raised the point, why, out of all the places on the island that were not where he was supposed to be, had he ended up in this particular one? There was an answer to this, of course. It was because the taxi driver had brought him here. So why had the taxi driver brought him here? Because … And in a sudden flash of illumination it came to him. Everything fell into place at last. A eureka moment—though of course just as rationally prepared for as every other eureka moment.