Michael Frayn - Skios

In the doorway to the corridor was the only familiar face — Nikki, as discreetly tanned and blonded as ever, still struggling to do up her skirt and tuck her shirt into it.

Oliver disentangled his foot and got himself upright. “I do apologize,” he said, when the screaming and shouting had subsided enough to make himself heard. “I’ve lost the key to my suitcase.”

Nikki was the next to recover her social poise.

“Oh, Mrs. Toppler,” she said, “this is Dr. Norman Wilfred. Our guest of honor. Dr. Wilfred, this is Mrs. Fred Toppler, who is, of course, your hostess.”

“I saw the window open,” said Oliver. “I thought that just possibly I might find some wire cutters … Or a hacksaw…”

“Fetch some wire cutters from the tool room, Giorgios,” said Nikki to the security man. “Then show Dr. Wilfred the way back to Parmenides, and get his suitcase open for him. I’m so sorry about this, Mrs. Toppler. I should have checked that Dr. Wilfred had everything he needed.”

“Welcome to the Fred Toppler Foundation, Dr. Wilfred,” said Mrs. Toppler, recovering at last the use of words. “We’re all so excited.”

Mr. Papadopoulou got his vast mass down from the bed and picked up the bottle of champagne that had rolled away out of Oliver’s hand.

“Oh, and this is Mr. Vassilis Papadopoulou,” said Nikki. “A great patron and benefactor of the Fred Toppler Foundation.”

“Thank you,” said Oliver.

“Change from the guy we got last year, anyway,” said Mr. Papadopoulou.

* * *

“You said the veranda on the right,” said Oliver quietly and reproachfully to Nikki in the corridor outside, while the security guard waited.

“It is on the right. If you’re inside.”

“I see,” said Oliver. “It is if you’re inside . That’s where I went wrong, being outside. Perhaps we could just take a look at it together, from the inside, so I’ve got it absolutely straight in my mind.”

She hesitated, and then became aware that the door of Mrs. Toppler’s room was open a crack, and that Mr. Papadopoulou was watching them.

“You’d better go with Security, Dr. Wilfred,” she said. “You’ll be at breakfast, perhaps?”

* * *

“She tells me she’s getting me this great star,” said Mrs. Fred Toppler. “And all the time it’s her boyfriend!”

“She hooks you a big fish — who cares?” said Mr. Papadopoulou, his hand under Mrs. Fred Toppler’s nightdress in the dark, squeezing the spot that she liked to have squeezed, for medical reasons, just below the small of her back. “ She’s happy, he’s happy, you’re happy.”

“‘Oh, Mrs. Toppler,’ she says, ‘he’s world famous! Oh, Mrs. Toppler, he’s going to be so much better than the one last year!’ And all the time they’re doing it right across the corridor!”

“Relax. He never got there.”

“No, this great intellectual, and can’t even find his girlfriend’s fanny!”

“Boy, did you scream!”

“The little tramp, though! That white shirt, that kind of stuffed-English-muffin look on her face. And inside it all she’s a tramp like everybody else!”

Mr. Papadopoulou suddenly laughed. “You know what? She looks out the window for him. She says, ‘Darling, it’s the window on the right!’”

Mrs. Toppler thought about this. Mr. Papadopoulou was kneading her buttocks. She was almost ready for the oven. Suddenly she laughed in her turn.

“He is rather cute, though,” she said.

* * *

Nikki lay wide awake, trying to calm herself with her cool thought. Christian will be going. The foundation will be looking for a new director …

But before she could finish thinking her cool thought it had been overtaken by a hot one: had the scene in Mrs. Toppler’s bedroom cast doubt on the suitability of her choice of lecturer? Hard on the heels of this hot thought came another one, even more hotly embarrassing, even more hotly tormenting: Mrs. Toppler couldn’t possibly have suspected, could she, in whose bed Dr. Wilfred had really been trying to find wire cutters or a hacksaw…?

She got up and checked once again that her veranda window was now closed and bolted.

Perhaps there was more to Oliver than she had supposed, thought Georgie, as she opened the front door of the villa and the lights revealed the cavern of relaxed wealth within. He certainly seemed to have rich friends.

“Oliver!” she called softly. There was no response but the ghostly murmur of the air-conditioning. And something else … Some elusive sense of a human presence. A faint sound, perhaps, that merged with the air conditioner.

She pulled her suitcase inside and closed the door. After all her adventures she had finally arrived.

She opened a door at random. “Oliver?” But the sound in here was the purring of a vast steel refrigerator. Silhouetted against a discreet glow of light on the draining board sat the remains of a pizza, a single wineglass, and a three-quarters-empty bottle of wine.

She tried another door, and there in the darkness beyond was the sound. It was breathing. The deep, rough breathing of a man asleep, coming from behind the mosquito net around a wide bed. She had entered a fairy story, though it was the wrong way round from usual; she was the princess awakening the enchanted prince from his hundred-year-long sleep. “Oliver!” she whispered. The sleeping prince snorted and turned away. The rough breathing became snoring. She felt a moment of dismay. She somehow hadn’t foreseen that the soft words issuing from that gently rueful face when it was awake might become coarse grunts when it was asleep. Her heart sank as she thought of all the other disconcerting little things she was going to find out about him in the next few days. “Oliver!” she said, rather more sharply.

On he snored behind the white gauze. By the pale shine from the doorway she opened her suitcase and took out her washbag. She fell over his shoes as she felt around for the bathroom, and still he didn’t wake. The bathroom was all soft lighting and soft towels. She was tempted to have a bath, but settled for cleaning her teeth very carefully, and rubbing various creams into her face. She inspected herself in the mirror. Yes, only a few more years and she wouldn’t be doing silly things like this any longer. She would have settled down without any effort on her own part.

She went back into the bedroom. The snoring had become more profound. She closed the door. Complete darkness. She thought for a moment. Snoring or no snoring, this was what she had come all this way for. This was why she had made so many arrangements and told so many lies. She got undressed, and then stood for a moment shivering, though whether from anticipation or simply the chill of the air-conditioning she didn’t know.

Carefully she found her way through the mosquito netting. Carefully she drew it closed behind her.

He was as naked as she was, she discovered as she stretched herself out behind him. His back was a surprise — it was covered in coarse hair. So was his chest, as she put her arm round him. She slid her hand down through the thickets. He was much fatter than she would have guessed; a rounded droop of flesh rested sideways on the sheets like the hang of a heavy swagged curtain. She reached an even denser thicket, and there, hidden in the midst of it, a creature as small and soft as a piglet. All the tender excitement that had been gathering inside her over the past two weeks stirred again.

So did the piglet. So, at last, did the great father pig in whose fur it was nestling.

* * *

Dr. Wilfred slowly surfaced from sleep to discover himself in a most delightful world, though it took him a few moments to realize exactly what the delightfulness of it was. Sometimes before on his travels he had found himself involved in a rather agreeable interlude of some sort. Someone would have approached him after his lecture. Something she hadn’t quite understood, something she wanted to discuss further. A drink or two. Perhaps some exchange of revelations about tastes and feelings … backgrounds and hometowns … aspirations and disappointments … Then usually a certain awkwardness over undressing … But never before had he woken up to find himself in the midst of things, with all the tedious preliminaries short-circuited. The sumptuousness of the Fred Toppler Foundation’s guest quarters had already justified its good name in the profession, but never would he have guessed that it also provided amenities like this. His misfortunes with his luggage and the offhandedness of his reception at the airport had been most handsomely made up for.