Skios: A Novel (19 page)

For a moment they stood facing each other, both too surprised to move—Georgie by the fate of her clothes, the cleaning person by Georgie’s renewed and even more brazen effrontery, because, as the clothes went into the pool, she had stretched out her hands in a remote and ineffectual gesture of dissuasion, which had let the towel she had been holding around her fall to the ground. The standoff lasted only a moment. When Georgie took in the expression on the cleaning person’s face she saw that the situation had somehow got beyond discussion or explanation, and that the only possible action was to get out of her way as fast as possible. She turned and fled. Back to the house, grabbing the fallen heap of mosquito netting on the way and dragging it round herself, the cleaning person right behind, shouting something in what was presumably Greek, was certainly abusive, and was almost certainly obscene.

Georgie slammed the garden door in the cleaning person’s face, which delayed her for a moment, and ran into the bedroom, eager to find some more suitable and dignified covering to replace the mosquito netting. Her clothes had gone, though. Of course. Every last stitch of them. She just had time to run into the bathroom and slam the bolt home as the cleaning person ran into the bedroom.

“Open the door, you filthy little slut!” said the cleaning person. “Or I’ll kick it in!”

Georgie sat down on the lavatory seat, where she had sat for so long during the previous night, and pulled the mosquito netting round her. She was shivering and her hands were shaking. Life seemed to be going round in circles.

*   *   *

Oliver stood in the middle of the roadway, still trying to adjust his plans to the changing situation. So, there were two of them at the villa now. Georgie was no longer alone to face the rapist outside the bathroom door. She had someone to protect her. She had Annuka. Against Annuka even the most violent attacker was unlikely to prevail.

It was one thing to rush to save Georgie if she was on her own. He hadn’t hesitated. He had been ready to sacrifice everything. But if she already had someone to protect her … And if that someone was Annuka …

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 fixed 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 …