Michael Frayn - Skios

“You should have reminded him.”

“I was going to. Only it’s a funny thing. He’s not Norman Wilfred.”

“ Not Norman Wilfred?”

“This one. No. Nothing like him.”

“You mean this is another Norman Wilfred?”

“Same one, apparently. I looked up the biographical note in the brochure.”

“So it is him?”

“But not him.”

“Odd.”

“ I thought so.”

He waited, because Mrs. Chailey had stopped to inhale the scent of a low-hanging branch of deep blue blossom.

“Heavenly!”

“Heavenly.”

They walked on.

“Are you going to mention it to anyone?” said Mrs. Chailey.

“I don’t know. What do you think? Bit awkward. I don’t want to cause trouble.”

Mrs. Chailey had stopped again to stroke a cat that had emerged from the bushes.

“Anyway,” she said. “Motes and beams, perhaps. Since I’m not Mrs. Chailey.”

“That’s true.”

He stopped and looked round. Mrs. Chailey stopped as well and looked at him.

“What?” she said.

Mr. Chailey took her hand and kissed it. She smiled at him.

“Also,” she said, “you’re not always Mr. Chailey.”

“Hush, my love,” said Mr. Chailey. “You don’t know that.”

High up in the villa called Empedocles, behind shutters forever closed and blinds forever drawn, Christian Schneck, the director of the foundation, sat cross-legged on the floor in his prayer shawl. His lank gray hair fell on his shoulders. His face, lit only by the little colored sanctuary lights on the low table in the middle of the austerely empty room, was lined and emaciated. He listened in silence, expressionless, as his assistant, Eric Felt, reported to him on the foundation’s guest lecturer.

“He’s got a lot of blond hair,” said Eric Felt. “He brushes it out of his eyes and smiles. He’s always smiling. He’s the kind of scientist who appears on television. A celebrity. A popularizer. Is there a role for God in physics? That kind of stuff. Jokes. Paradoxes. Pseudo-profundity. Pretty much the sort of fraud that you’d expect Nikki Hook to pick.”

Eric Felt was not just Christian’s assistant. He was his companion and his confidant. His ally in the fight to prevent Nikki from dismantling everything that Christian had fought for since he had taken over from Dieter: proper European intellectual standards, the seriousness that he had always silently embodied. Since Christian never spoke these days, it was Eric Felt who had to express to the world the concern he knew Christian felt. And since Christian never left his room now, Eric was his eyes and ears as well as his voice. This morning he had been lurking unnoticed at the back of the guests surrounding Dr. Wilfred, because he knew how concerned Christian was about Nikki’s choice. It was a testimony perhaps to Dr. Wilfred’s appeal that no one had noticed Eric, even though he bulged at people so aggressively. He bulged partly from indignation, partly from a high intake of organic noodles combined with the sedentary life that he and Christian led together in Empedocles. It was difficult to bulge inconspicuously, particularly if you were doing it as Eric was, in a plum-colored T-shirt and three-quarter-length orange skateboarding trousers.

He bulged much less when he was talking to Christian, because he was sitting cross-legged on the floor himself, and leaning forward to take the strain off his spine. With Christian, also, he was expressing not indignation but reverence. Christian had suffered and had mastered his suffering. The suffering and the mastery were recorded deep in the eroded dry limestone of his face. Once upon a time he had done things. Now he had gone beyond that. What was it that he had once done? No one could now remember, not even Eric. This was how far above and beyond doing he had gone.

“Another Brit, of course, Dr. Wilfred,” said Eric. “The whole place is crawling with them! It’s all Nikki Hook’s doing. Everything you have ever stood for is being Anglo-Saxonized! Trivialized! Ironized!”

Eric knew about Brits. He was one himself.

“I do my best, Christian,” he said. “But I can’t do it all on my own. Nikki Hook’s got her claws into everything. She twists Mrs. Toppler round her finger. And last week I saw her talking to Mr. Papadopoulou. She’s up to something with him as well.”

The whole future of the foundation hung in the balance. Dieter had made the foundation what it was, and Christian, Dieter’s companion and personal assistant, had been his chosen successor. When Dieter had faded quietly away, worn out by austerity and dedication, and been quietly laid to rest under the stones of the agora, head down towards the center of the earth in accordance with his highly specialized private beliefs, there had been no question but that the board of trustees would appoint Christian in his place. In the fullness of time Christian in his turn had taken Eric as his companion and personal assistant, and it seemed that the foundation was developing a line of succession as part of its unwritten constitution. One day, many years hence, no doubt, when Christian faded away in his turn, Eric would assume his office as director. Wouldn’t he? Eric himself wasn’t entirely confident. If Christian failed to make his wishes clear … If he let his powers trickle away through his fingers, while brash newcomers with no sensitivity to the constitutional niceties thrust themselves forward …

“Perhaps the time has come,” said Eric, “when you should at last emerge from your seclusion and strike. Suddenly — out of nowhere — there you are! At the lecture this evening! Like Christ driving the money changers from the Temple! Like God on the Day of Judgment!”

The tiny points of light in the pupils of Christian’s eyes drilled incorruptibly on. The deeply shadowed fissures of his face retained their immobile integrity. Perhaps, thought Eric, he had gone beyond feeling as well as doing. Beyond thought, even. Perhaps he had transcended not only the physical but the spiritual as well, and achieved a state of total inanition.

But no. He slowly lifted his head a little, and those two bright, unblinking lasers struck straight into his disciple. His lips almost moved. He almost spoke.

Yes, the second coming was at hand. Eric could sense it. Christian would appear. And he would be terrible.

* * *

“I’m still not absolutely clear about one thing,” said the same small man in broken spectacles who had badgered Dr. Wilfred earlier. “Oh, Norbert Ditmuss. West Idaho. Emeritus. Yes, I’m still not clear in my own mind how you derive a solution to Wexler’s equation that comes close to Theobald’s constant.”

Dr. Wilfred thought very carefully about this. The professor was evidently going to keep nagging away at whatever small dreary point it was that he was trying to make. Dr. Wilfred considered invoking string theory or quantum entanglement. He had very little idea what either of them was, but had deployed them once or twice before to good effect. But probably Professor Ditmuss did actually know about them. Better might be Colibri’s Conjunction, which the professor certainly wouldn’t know about, since Dr. Wilfred had only just in that very moment discovered it. He suspected, though, that Professor Ditmuss might be honest enough to confess his ignorance and ask Dr. Wilfred to explain what it was. He would need to draw deeper on his intellectual resources.

His silence went on for so long that everyone became aware that something was up. Heads began to turn towards him inquiringly. Even Wilson Westerman stopped thinking about his investments.

“I’m sorry,” said Professor Ditmuss. “I don’t want to hold up the conversation.”