Skios: A Novel (3 page)

Nikki waited. She had time in hand. Of course—she always had, in spite of having so much to do. She thought another of her cool thoughts. This particular cool thought was a recurring one: that quite shortly now the director would be out of Empedocles and on a plane back to his native Wuppertal. She knew it from the way Mrs. Toppler pronounced his name these days.

So the post of director would be vacant. The appointment would have to go before the board of trustees, of course, but what could the board of trustees do except what the money told them to? The money was Mrs. Fred Toppler. And, of course, her friend Mr. Vassilis Papadopoulou, who had been such a patron and benefactor of the foundation. In Athens Mr. Papadopoulou made ministers and broke them. No one in Greece who had any hopes of remaining alive and well would want to put obstacles in the way of a candidate supported by Papadopoulou. And there was a candidate to hand whom he might just possibly favor. Someone who over the past five years had gradually made herself indispensable to both Mrs. Toppler and Mr. Papadopoulou. “Oh, that Nikki!” as Mrs. Toppler so often had cause to say. “Whatever should we do without her?”

And now this year she had organized the entire House Party. She had chosen the Fred Toppler lecturer. Mr. Papadopoulou would be present at the lecture himself, and he had invited a number of his business associates. Last year Mr. Papadopoulou and several of his guests had fallen asleep in the lecture. If this year they managed to remain awake …

Well, you never knew in life. You never knew.

Elli slid back the glass and held out a car key.

“Nikki, you should be late! The plane comes in half an hour!”

“It’s ten minutes behind time. I checked.”

“Oh, yes, you check,” said Elli. “Of course.”

“Everything,” said Nikki, smiling her nice open smile. “Always.”

She walked unhurriedly towards the brilliant wall of bougainvillea that concealed the car park, still thinking her cool thought.

Elli watched her go, thinking a cool thought of her own: if Nikki becomes director, Mrs. Fred Toppler will be looking for a new PA …

5

Dr. Wilfred had established himself in the prime position by the carousel, identified through long experience, and granted by right of being in business class and so among the first off the plane: hard up against the track, close to the point where the tide of tumbled black wheelie-bags would at any moment burst through the doors, but just far enough away to get a good sight of them approaching before they reached him. His own was easy to spot, because its red leather address tag made it stand out from the sea of black all around; the fruit of experience once again. Which reminded him of his flight bag, and the lecture inside it. He checked. Yes, wedged safely between his feet, where he could feel it while he turned his phone on and found out what tedious demands upon him had accumulated while he was airborne.

Five e-mails and seven texts. Would he consider…? No, he would not. Would he address a conference …—No…!—in Hawaii? Oh God, Hawaii again. Well, possibly. Would he write, join, read, judge…? No … yes … maybe … Nothing that Vicki couldn’t deal with. Except one e-mail from Vicki herself. Did he wish to respond to the attached? It turned out to be a review of his life’s work from some publication he had never heard of in Manitoba, and it was entirely ridiculous. The author was disabled by stupidity and ignorance, motivated by spite, and didn’t understand what “disinterested” meant. It was not something he would dream of responding to.

He was about to put the phone back in his pocket when one particular phrase in the article suddenly came back into his mind: “Dr. Wilfred’s entirely mystical faith in reason.” He switched the phone on again. His thumbs began to move, almost of their own accord. “I should not normally accord uninformed abuse of this nature the dignity of a reply,” he typed, “but…” His thumbs flew back and forth over the keyboard like eager pigeons snapping up seed. His response was effortlessly authoritative, pleasantly amused, and totally devastating.

Even in the crowded baggage hall of a strange airport he was a master of his craft.

*   *   *

Nikki Hook felt the back of her shirt, to make sure that it was still tucked into her skirt, then touched her hair to check that it had not been blown out of place by the air-conditioning in the car. She could see the passengers through the glass screen as they emerged from passport control and crowded around the carousel like impatient pigs round an empty trough. There were twenty or so other people on either side of her, holding clipboards and lists, also waiting. Chauffeurs, drivers of taxis and limousines, representatives of tour operators. Some of the women from the tour companies were tanned and blond, but none of them was as lightly tanned or as discreetly blond as Nikki, and even the ones in their thirties, like her, were not as tastefully ensconced in them as she was. All these people, young and old, had their own opinions and memories, their own secret weaknesses and choice of underwear. In their own eyes, in the eyes of boyfriends, wives, children, and grandchildren, of employers and fellow employees, they were all no doubt whoever they were. But only Nikki Hook, she couldn’t help being aware at the back of her mind, was Nikki Hook.

This was always a slightly tense moment, though. She imagined an actress standing in the wings waiting for her entrance on a first night. Not the star of the show, perhaps, but that long moment of waiting for her cue, of checking yet again that she remembered her first line, was just as long for her as it was for the star. And it wasn’t possible to run through all the rest of her part. She couldn’t know how the volatile combination of her and her fellow actors, of text and set, of audience and circumstance, was going to turn out.

No doubt each of the visiting lecturers she had met year by year felt something similar. But then it wasn’t their responsibility to charm and flatter
her
—it was hers to charm and flatter
them
. Some of them could absorb amazing amounts of charm and flattery—and still not show the benefit.

On the other side of the glass a klaxon sounded. The carousel began to turn. A series of irregular black shapes shouldered their way through the flaps from the outside world, like swaggering cowboys through the doors of a saloon. The passengers pressed impatiently forward to greet them.

All around Nikki the waiting drivers and tour operators lifted up little placards. “Merryweather,” said the signs expectantly, some handwritten, some printed. “Horizon Holidays … Johanssen …
 … Sand and Sun … Purefoy … Silver Beach Hotel…”

Nikki lifted hers. “D
R.
N
ORMAN
W
ILFRED
,” it said in neat, clear capitals. She softened the set of her mouth, relaxed the skin around her pleasantly open eyes, and became a couple of years younger.

6

Why, though? Oliver Fox asked himself. Why do I do this kind of thing?

His tumbled dishmop of hair was as blond as blanched almonds, his soft eyes as brown and shining as dates. His thoughts, though, were as black as the tumbled black wheelie-bags coming towards him along the carousel. Why? he thought as his eyes jumped from one to the next. Why, why, why? It had seemed so natural to start with. So inevitable, even. But now, with the black bags filing past him like mourners in a funeral procession, he could see that it was going to turn out as badly as all the other adventures he had launched upon so lightly.

Georgie, this one was called. And he scarcely knew her! He’d only ever met her once! And now here he was, on his way to spend a week with her in a villa he’d borrowed from some people he knew even less. Why
did
he do it?

He’d watched her across the bar for some time, it’s true, over the shoulder of a man he was having a drink with, before he’d introduced himself. He’d also subsequently spent many hours on rather complex detective work to find out who she was and where she lived, on flurries of increasingly frequent messages and phone calls, and on many changes of plan—because
her
plans depended upon the plans of someone called Patrick, and Patrick’s plans on the plans of the three colleagues from the trading floor he was going yachting with. Now here Oliver was, watching the bags plodding round the carousel, and there Georgie was, waiting for him on the other side of customs, if the plane had arrived on time from wherever it was where she had been seeing Patrick safely out of the way on his yacht. They were going to have to talk to each other for some of the time, and there wouldn’t be anything to talk about. They were going to have to share a bathroom and a lavatory. She was going to find out that he wasn’t as charming as he had seemed for that brief moment in the bar.

So why had he done it? Because he couldn’t help it! It was just another sudden bit of being Oliver Fox. And being Oliver Fox was destroying his life.

As soon as he had seen that the man she was with (Patrick, of course, as he later discovered) was outside on the street, smoking and talking on his phone, and that she was on her own for the length of a cigarette, he had known what he had to do—what he had been born to do—what he was obliged by the laws of God and man to do—what he was
going
to do. It was stretching out before him as frightening and irresistible as the tightrope before the tightrope walker. Suddenly, once again, the world had darkened, and there was only the narrow spotlit wire above the abyss, the unstable narrow line that had to be walked. And already there he was, just as he had known all his life he would be, sliding his first foot over the dark depths of failure and humiliation, not looking down, his shining eyes fixed on some dim goal he could scarcely see. Already he was slipping into the empty chair beside her …

She was almost as irresistible close up as she had been across the bar, though rather older than he had supposed. But this wasn’t really the point. The point was that the chair beside her was empty, and he had probably only three or four minutes at most before her companion came back to claim it.

What had he said to her? He couldn’t remember. All he could remember was how she had responded. She hadn’t laughed, or ignored him, or told him to get lost. “You’re Oliver Fox,” she’d said.

He had been unable in all honesty to deny it. This was the trouble. He was Oliver Fox. In the kind of circles he moved in, everyone had heard of him even before they met him. Friends of friends—even complete strangers, sometimes—started laughing as soon as they were introduced, waiting for him to be Oliver Fox in front of them. He had tousled blond hair, and soft smiling eyes that fixed on yours, and no one ever had any idea what he was going to do next. Least of all himself. Until suddenly he’d found that something had come into his head, and there he was, doing it already. Whereupon they’d laugh again. Or scream and run for cover, or phone the police.

“Oh,
no
!” the people he’d met would tend to cry. “This time he’s really gone too far!”

In the baggage hall here, of course, surrounded by fat holidaymakers who had never heard of him, there was no one but himself to be Oliver Fox for. He felt as if he were like the aircraft he had been sitting on for the past five hours, suspended over the void by his own bootstraps, with nothing in his head but the long boring swoosh of nothingness.

So why was he like this? Why wasn’t he doing a job of work like a normal human being? Something where you helped people. On a run-down council estate somewhere. In the third world. There were tens of millions of people in the world out there who needed help. He was too old to go on the way he was. He would change. He would put himself humbly at their service. Train as a doctor, perhaps. Specialize. Become a neurologist. He had always wanted to know how his brain worked, why and how he did what he did. He wasn’t a fool, though—he knew how many years of study and hard work it would take. But he could still do it. He
would
do it. He would have applied for medical school this very moment, if only he could have found an application form.

Everyone would be astonished. “Oliver Fox?” they’d laugh. “A neurologist? We certainly weren’t expecting
that
! How absolutely typical!”

On and on the mournful bags processed. Oliver’s eye was caught by the sight of the man beside him, who had his phone in his hand and with his two thumbs was writing a text as long as a doctoral thesis. It reminded him to get his own phone out and switch it back on. Not that there would be any good news.

And no, there wasn’t. The first of the waiting messages was from A. A was Annuka, Annuka Vos, with whom he had borrowed the villa, and who should have been standing here beside him at the carousel if she had not flown into a rage at his coming home with a donkey he had bought off the donkey man in the park, or rather at his proposing to stable it in her flat, whereupon she had found herself abruptly unable to put up a moment longer with his being Oliver Fox, and he had been forced to leave, with nothing but the donkey and a handful of possessions, mostly his, in one of her rather elegant suitcases.