Michael Frayn - Skios

It was all too easy! More danger, more danger!

“Just a quick question, if I may,” said a small man in a pair of spectacles held together by sticking plaster. “Oh — Professor Norbert Ditmuss, Department of Applied Dynamics, University of West Idaho. Emeritus, but I like to keep in touch with the subject. Now, sir, you say in your book Planned Innovation, Chapter Seven, I think it is, page 179, am I right, in the footnote on your statistical methodology, that assigning a value of between seven and ten to the theta function in a Wexler Distribution, given that lambda is negative and mu is greater than phi, will yield a solution remarkably close to Theobald’s constant. Now, my question to you, sir, is exactly how close?”

“Oh,” said Dr. Wilfred. “As close as a dog and a flea.”

Everyone laughed respectfully. Except Professor Ditmuss. “Yes, but seriously,” he said.

“Seriously?” said Dr. Wilfred. “An inch and a half.”

“I really do need an answer to this question, Dr. Wilfred,” said Professor Ditmuss, “because I am writing a paper that will reference your work, and I don’t want to be unjust. So would you be kind enough to take us step by step through your calculation?”

“Well…” said Dr. Wilfred.

There was an easy way round this question, just as there was to all the others, but for some reason Dr. Wilfred couldn’t see what it was. He seemed to have come rather suddenly to the end of the golden pathway that had stretched out before him.

Everyone around the table had turned to watch him. None of them had understood a word of the question, and they looked forward to the brilliance that Dr. Wilfred would display in providing an answer not a word of which any of them would understand either.

“Well…” said Oliver, since Oliver was what Dr. Wilfred was now rather swiftly subsiding back into.

“I hate to interrupt,” said a soft and welcome voice. Nikki had stepped forward. “But I shall have to ask you two gentlemen to discuss technical questions at some other time. I’m whisking Dr. Wilfred away for a rather important meeting.”

On the pergolas in the shade garden, the plumbago was piled as high and blue as the sky above it. Nikki looked up at it and felt as serenely happy as the blossom. There were forty different things she should have been doing. But she wasn’t doing any of them. She was strolling through the shade garden with Dr. Wilfred.

“This is the important meeting I’ve got to go to, is it?” said Dr. Wilfred.

“It is important,” she said. “We’ve got to discuss your schedule.”

She couldn’t get over the sheer lightness with which he wore his immense distinction. You would never have guessed from meeting him how much he knew and how much he had done. He was totally unlike any other guest of honor they had ever had. And everyone plainly loved him. Of course. How could they not? From the first moment she had set eyes on him at the airport she had known they would. And it was she who had suggested inviting him. He was her discovery.

She found herself telling him about her childhood. She had always wanted to be an artist, she said — she had had such intense feelings stirring in her when she was sixteen, and the longing to express them had welled up like the sap in spring pouring upwards through the plumbago. Somehow, though, she found herself doing a degree in arts administration instead. Then gradually, step by step, by way of jobs in provincial art galleries and touring theater companies, she had made her way to where she was now.

“Actually,” she said, “what I’m doing is not totally dissimilar to your job. I know you’re dealing with billions of pounds, and decisions that are going to affect the whole future of the world. Whereas I’ve only got the odd few million dollars to play with each year for this place. But I have to say who gets it and who doesn’t! I’m the one who has to provide some structure! Scientific research is probably a bit like the arts, isn’t it? I mean … messy. You don’t really know what’s going to happen until it’s happened.”

“True,” said Dr. Wilfred. “Well, I certainly don’t. Not a clue.”

“It’s like kids messing around in the sandpit. Great fun for the kids. Very educational. But someone’s got to look after the sandpit. Stop the cat from using it as cat litter, and the children from walking it into the house. Wash the sand out of their hair and clean it out of their noses. Yes?”

“Science and scientists! A total mystery to me!”

“Arts and artists are the same. Some of the writers we’ve had here!”

“I can imagine.”

She brushed her hand through the flowers in the herbaceous border. A shower of sparkling drops still hanging on leaves and petals from the overnight sprinklers came cascading down. “Orodigia,” he told her. “Flowering pangloss. Jacantha. Smithia. Peloponnesian daisies.”

“My God, you’re a gardener as well as everything else?”

“Of course not. I’m making it up as I go along. Like all the rest of it.”

They walked on in silence for a while.

“Anyway,” she said, “I’ve got plans for the future. I can’t do much at the moment. Christian’s still in charge. The director. You haven’t met him. No one ever sees him. That’s the way he exercises his power — by being invisible, like God, and doing nothing. Some people don’t even believe he exists. I have a feeling he won’t be here for much longer, though. I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but I think you may be the final nail I’m hammering into his coffin.”

She broke off a low-hanging spray of violet blossom.

“Jacantha?” she said.

“If you like.”

She put the spray in the buttonhole of his shirt.

“Now, your schedule. This morning it’s simply more mingle, mingle, if you can bear it. Yes? Then at midday, you’ll remember, you’re having drinks with Mrs. Fred Toppler. Lunch with the other guests. After lunch…”

“A little siesta? Check that it really is right-hand inside?”

“I shall be at the airport, meeting Mr. Luft.”

“Mr. Luft?”

“Wellesley Luft! For your big interview! It’s in your program!”

“Of course.”

“Then tomorrow you’re on the ten-forty-five flight back to London. After which, I suppose, we’ll never see each other again.”

“But first a good night’s rest.”

“First, the lecture.”

“Oh, yes. The lecture.”

* * *

One after another, all over the newly carpeted piazza, white tablecloths flew up into the sunlit air, spread their wings, and settled on the battered caterer’s tables like huge birds landing. The agency waiters and waitresses who had come off the overnight ferry from Athens pounced on them and wrestled them down. The whole square was turning into an open-air banqueting hall in front of Dr. Wilfred’s eyes.

“This is the agora,” Nikki told him. “The old marketplace. You’ll be sitting exactly where we’re standing, at the same table as Mrs. Toppler and Mr. Papadopoulou and their guests. There’s quite a number of Mr. Papadopoulou’s business associates coming.

“It will be getting dark as we eat. By the end of dinner the only light will be from the candles on the tables.

“And then those spotlights up there will come on, and Mrs. Toppler will stand up and introduce you. I hope I’ve got everything right in her speech. She may read it out wrong, of course, because she doesn’t like to wear her glasses.

“Then the maître d’ will move the lectern and the microphones, and put them here, in front of you.”

He stood in front of the still imaginary microphones and lectern, almost too dazzled by the imaginary spotlights to see the imaginary candlelit faces gazing up at him from the imaginary darkness. He was in no hurry. He waited while the imaginary audience settled. And then …