Skios: A Novel Read online

  “Jesus, Nikki,” said an elderly lady, dabbing a little eau-de-cologne-soaked lace handkerchief to her brow as they passed her near the Aphrodite fountain, “you always look like something out of a deodorant ad. I don’t know how you do it.”

  “I think cool thoughts, Mrs. Comax,” said Nikki.

  Her cool thoughts were that she herself was as discreetly necessary to the workings of the foundation as the water in the buried pipes and the mysterious flow of funds through the balance sheet. She didn’t like to say this to Dr. Wilfred, but probably he could see it for himself. Particularly when she took him on a slight diversion backstage. Screened by dense shrubs was a world not of traditional stone cottages or villas with the names of philosophers and poets, but of prefabricated sheds with no designation at all.

  “This is where the staff live,” she explained. “Will you wait here a moment? I’ve just got to put my head into the kitchens.”

  “Now what?” shouted Yannis Voskopoulos, the chef de cuisine, over the clatter of stainless steel on stainless steel and the roar of the air extractors, and the endlessly Levantine pop wailing of the woman on the radio. “I don’t know what you gonna tell me but you told me already! Twice! And we done it! Twice over!”

  Some of the white-robed ghosts looked up from ovens and worktops and waved amiable ladles and cleavers at her. Some looked up and didn’t recognize her.

  “But these new guys, Yannis,” she said, not in Greek but in American English, because Yannis had worked in America and liked to keep the language up. “The agency guys. You’ve got your eye on them?”

  “Got my eye on everyone, Nikki. Everyone and everything. The same like you.”

  “Last year you forgot kosher.”

  “Nikki, you wanna see kosher? Look—kosher. Halal. Diabetic. Vegetarian. Gluten-free, nut-free, salt-free. Vegetarian kosher. Diabetic halal. Gluten-free diabetic. Salt-free nut-free vegetarian. Get outta here, Nikki!”

  “And onion-free?”

  “Onion-free?”

  “Salt-free onion-free! For the guest speaker! I told you!”

  Yannis looked at the ceiling, then wiped his face on the oven cloth he was carrying. He sighed.

  “When I was a kid in Piraeus,” he said, “was only two sorts of food. Was food, and was no food.”

  “You see why I check everything?” said Nikki.

  She rejoined the imaginary Dr. Wilfred and walked on with him towards Parmenides, the quietly luxurious guest quarters where he would be staying. He was already impressed, she could see, as they climbed the hillside towards it. When they got inside and she opened the shutters to let in the great sweep of bay below, the piled cumulus above the horizon, and the rocking caïques along the waterfront, she thought she could hear him catch his breath. Just as well he was seeing it now—it would probably be dark by the time he actually arrived.

  She checked the air-conditioning, topped up the water in the vases of yellow lilies and white roses, and put a recirculating disc on the CD player. A quiet murmur of plainsong softened the air.

  “The monks of the local monastery,” she explained.

  She took the whisky out of the sideboard and put it by the tumblers on top. “A rather rare straight malt,” she said. “Is that all right?”

  She went into the bedroom, turned down the cover, and laid out the white bathrobe and slippers, as richly fluffy as the hide of a subtropical polar bear. Moved on to the study: stationery on the desk, yes, directory of services, history of the foundation. The kitchen: champagne in the refrigerator, together with two flutes, a good local white wine, and two liters of chilled water.

  “From the foundation’s own spring,” she told him. “It’s famously pure.”

  She took grapes out of the refrigerator and a bowl from the sideboard to arrange them in. “Thrown in the foundation’s pottery room,” she explained. “It shows that bit in Homer when Odysseus landed on Skios disguised as an itinerant knife grinder.”

  She took a last look round before she left … The lilies … Oh my God! Better double-check that too …

  She touched “Vicki” on her phone. She’d had the number stored for the last six months.

  “Vicki…? It’s me yet again, I’m afraid—Nikki. So sorry … PA to PA—the well-worn back channel once more! He’s on the plane…? Yes, well, I think we’re all ready for him, only I had a last-minute panic … Lilies! I’ve put lilies in his room! And I’ve just thought, Wait a minute, if he’s allergic to onions…! Onions—bulbs … Bulbs—lilies…! No? Oh, wonderful … Bless you … So sorry to bother you. We’re all so excited!”

  Far too excited in her case, she thought as she put the phone back in her bag. Dr. Wilfred had suddenly slipped back to being the overweight, self-important figure she had originally expected. Though you never knew. He was only sixteen years older than she was, after all, according to his CV. She remembered a discreet but lyrical episode three years before with “The Challenge of Post-Modernist Topology.” The laughter in the warm darkness—his lips coming close to hers—the softly invading hands … So there were surprises in life. She also remembered driving him back to the airport the following morning to return to his wife …

  There was nothing in Dr. Wilfred’s CV, so far as she could remember, about being married. Not that she herself had any ambitions in that direction. She loved it here, she loved her work. All the same …

  All the same, it was time to go to the airport.

  4

  The ping of the seatbelt sign coming on and the feel of the empty champagne glass being taken out of his hand woke Dr. Wilfred from the doze he didn’t realize that he’d fallen into. He looked out of the window. There was a scattering of small rocky islands in the sea below, and then the coastline of another, with buildings, streets, and the first lights coming on here and there as the day faded. Skios.

  For no identifiable reason his spirits rose. This time it would be different. New dishes, new wines, new weather. Views over the sea not quite like the views he had seen before, fellow guests not quite like any other fellow guests. A woman would come up to him after his lecture. Lightly tanned, slim, smiling. An American, from a rather well-known university. With tenure already. No, without tenure yet—someone who would be prepared, if she met the right companion, to reshape her life, to change universities and continents. It was seven years now since he had last been in that kind of relationship.

  “Dr. Wilfred,” she would say. He would smile and incline his head. “I found your lecture fascinating. It raises so many issues that I’d love to pursue with you. I don’t know whether you have a moment…?”

  It might happen even sooner. The woman who would be looking after him, and who would be meeting him just the other side of customs and immigration. “Dr. Wilfred? We’re all so excited!” Vicki had exchanged many e-mails and phone calls with her already. And she was professionally and personally committed to seeing that he had a good time. She would be lightly tanned. Discreetly blond, perhaps. In her thirties …

  He checked the right-hand inside pocket of his linen jacket. Passport, credit cards. He checked the left-hand pocket. Phone, three condoms.

  You never knew. All you knew was that it was either stored in the long causal chain of the universe or it wasn’t. If it was going to happen, it was going to happen.

  * * *

  Nikki tapped on the sliding glass window of the lodge. Elli waved at her. She was busy smiling her wonderful dark Greek smile into her headset, which seemed far too skimpy to accommodate it. Nikki knew what she was saying, in English smoothed and streamlined by so many repetitions over the years: “Fred Toppler Foundation. How my dreck your call?” She was the voice with which the foundation spoke to the outside world, the finger that pressed the buzzer to open and close the barrier keeping the confusion and shabbiness of that world at bay, the hand that sorted the incoming mail. She also looked after all the keys. Which was why Nikki was waiting.

  Now Elli was frowning her wonderful dark Greek frown. The unsee
n caller’s answer to her perfectly formed English question was evidently also in English, which she couldn’t always understand.

  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. “DR. NORMAN WILFRED,” 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 pla
ns 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.