Michael Frayn - Skios

“And then,” said Nikki. “Scientometrics!”

“Scientometrics? What are scientometrics?”

“What you’re talking about! Isn’t it? That’s what we’ve announced! ‘Innovation and Governance: The Promise of Scientometrics.’ You don’t want to change it, do you?”

“No, no. Scientometrics. Wonderful.”

“I can’t wait to hear what you’re going to say!” said Nikki.

“Nor can I,” said Dr. Norman Wilfred.

* * *

“And then at last,” said Dr. Norman Wilfred, “after the lecture…”

They had left the agora and reached a belvedere overlooking the sea. He leaned slowly towards her, smiling his lopsided smile. She put her finger on his nose and pushed him gently away.

“Some of your audience arriving,” she said. She nodded at the waterfront below them.

A vessel that looked like a miniature cruise liner was backing towards its moorings. On the stern, in huge chromium letters clearly legible even from where they were standing: RUSALKA, SEVASTOPOL.

“Oleg Skorbatov,” said Nikki. “You’ve read about him in the papers. Everything you’ve read is true. Rich and ruthless. What Mr. Papadopoulou is to Athens, Mr. Skorbatov is to Moscow. A lot more yachts still to come. From Sicily, from Egypt, from Lebanon. All the places that Mr. Papadopoulou does business with. Also helicopters at the helipad down there behind the winter garden. Executive jets at the airport. And me, rushing back and forth all day from waterfront to airport, from airport to helipad. All so that people can hear you speak!”

“I’ll try to think of something good.”

She laughed. “I love your casualness about it all.”

“What I love is the way you take it all so seriously.” He leaned towards her again.

“Back to work,” she said. “Go and be lionized … Excuse me one moment.”

Her phone was ringing. “Thank God,” she told it. “I’ve been trying and trying to get you! Are you all right…? You’re lying where …? Oh, in the sun. I see. So what’s happened to this rapist person…?”

She gazed at Oliver as she listened, and moved her head from side to side a little to indicate to him a detached and mocking attitude to what she was hearing. He smiled back at her, and for no reason at all suddenly remembered Georgie.

He was suddenly engulfed in a wave of panic. When had she said she was arriving? Wasn’t it tomorrow? But that was yesterday. Tomorrow today was today.

“Me?” said Nikki into the phone. “No. Not yet … I know, but things got in a bit of a tangle…”

She looked straight at Oliver as she spoke. She laughed. “Yes, he is … Yes, more than ever. Never mind about me, though. Where exactly are you?”

She waited for a moment. The phone at the other end had obviously gone dead. She put her own back in her pocket and laughed. “Old schoolfriend of mine,” she said. “She’s quite sweet, and I can’t help being rather fond of her. But she is a total idiot. She spends her entire life getting herself into the most ridiculous situations.”

“A rapist, though?”

“Yes, well. My idiot friend has gone off God knows where on some wild fling with some other idiot she’s only just met. The other idiot doesn’t turn up, and then suddenly in the middle of the night he does, and he gets into bed with her, only it’s not her idiot, it’s some other idiot. And now this other idiot, who’s not her idiot, has vanished again. I think. Only of course her phone keeps going dead, probably because it hasn’t ever occurred to her to plug it in and charge it, and I still haven’t heard the end of the story.”

Oliver’s moment of panic had passed. He might well have not have listened to her message yesterday, he realized. He might have listened to it only today. He would listen to it today, as soon as he got back to his room, where he had left his phone. If he listened to it today then tomorrow would still be tomorrow.

Georgie’s phone had not, in fact, gone dead. Not, at any rate, when Nikki had assumed. The silence was simply because Georgie had stopped breathing. She had stopped breathing because she was suddenly paralyzed from head to foot.

This was the problem:

As the morning had worn on and her assailant had not returned, her confidence had. He had evidently passed out of her life, as inexplicably as he had come into it, the way so many no less confused and unsought companions had in the past. Her life had returned to normal. Or to as near normal as it ever seemed to get.

So she had unlocked the garden door and sat on a canvas chair that she had found outside to wait for Oliver in the sunshine. She had a good field of view in every direction, and she was ready to run back into the house and lock the door again if by chance any more uninvited non-Olivers turned up. After a while it had occurred to her that she would have an even better field of view if she moved away from the house and sat on one of the loungers by the pool. It was so hot, though, that she had gone back indoors and changed into a bikini. She could run at least as fast in a bikini as she could in shirt and trousers. She had not been sunbathing for very long, however, when she had begun to worry that she would end up with piebald breasts. So she had taken her top off, and then a little later turned on her front so as not to have tomato-red ones. She had tried the phone again and discovered that a little life had returned to it.

It was while she was deep in her conversation with Nikki that she had slowly become aware of … what? Something. Some kind of feeling in her back. An uneasiness … The faint clammy touch of an alien gaze resting upon it. She was not alone. She was being watched. This was when the freezing paralysis had crept through her, even in the heat of the midmorning sun.

Very slowly she turned her head. Him. Of course. He had returned. As, she recalled, the lunatics she thought she had got rid of in the past had tended to do.

He had come round the corner from the front of the villa, and was leaning on the back of a bench. For some time nothing happened. They were both transfixed. He, apparently, by the sight of her. She by the awareness that she couldn’t move to cover herself without offering up yet more to those vulpine eyes. Now that she saw him in daylight and dressed, he looked even more sinister than he had in the night. The whiteness of his face was shadowed by a gray scum of unshaven whiskers. His balding head was sweating like an old cheese. His trousers were torn. There were large damp patches on his grubby shirt. He was clutching with an unnerving intensity the flight bag that was dangling round his neck. The phrase “escaped convict” came into her mind.

He spoke. “Water,” he said, and there was a harsh convict croak in his voice.

He vanished into the house. Georgie sprang up at once and wrapped herself in her towel, but now that the intruder had occupied the house her planned line of retreat had been cut off. She ran to the gate, but stopped at the sight of the unmade-up road because she’d left her sandals indoors. She ran back to the lounger and snatched up the phone to call … someone — Oliver, Nikki … But now it really was dead.

The only thing she could think of was to go on doing what she had been doing before, which was waiting for Oliver. Perhaps by some miracle he would choose this very moment to put in an appearance.

The appearance, however, was put in not by Oliver but by the intruder once again. He looked even more alarming than before. He had evidently not only drunk water but poured it over his head, and his fringe of lank gray hair trailed down from his gleaming bullet skull like seaweed from a washed-up mine.