Michael Frayn - Skios

“Not at all,” said Dr. Wilfred. “I was trying to think how to explain in some nontechnical way that everyone here can understand. Myself included.”

They all laughed. Except Professor Ditmuss.

Dr. Wilfred looked around. Something would come to him. Something always did …

Everyone waited, even Professor Ditmuss.

Dr. Wilfred’s eye fell on the empty coffee cups on the table. Yes. Well. Empty coffee cups were certainly something. And something was better than nothing.

He picked one up and showed it to them. “An empty coffee cup,” he said. “All right? No problems so far?”

Everyone gazed respectfully at the cup and shook their heads. No, no problems so far. Except for Dr. Wilfred, for whom the problem was what to do next.

“Now,” he said. He carefully smoothed the tablecloth and put the cup back in the middle of it. There was a slight rustling sound, as everyone leaned a little closer in their basket chairs. “Now…”

“Just a moment,” said Suki Brox. “Sorry.”

“Not at all,” said Dr. Wilfred. “All the time in the world.”

“I’m being very stupid,” said Suki Brox. “But I don’t quite understand. What does the coffee cup represent? Is that a very silly question?”

“Not at all,” said Dr. Wilfred. “It’s a very good question. This empty coffee cup represents … an empty coffee cup. All right?”

“All right,” said Suki Brox.

All right for her. But not for Dr. Wilfred. Because now what? He looked around. There seemed to be nothing else to hand but more empty coffee cups. He picked one of them up and placed it carefully beside the first.

“Another empty coffee cup,” he said. “What does this one represent? It represents another empty coffee cup. So now we have two empty coffee cups, side by side. Yes?”

They nodded, and gazed at the two inscrutable white cylinders in the middle of the tablecloth. They looked at him, then back at the cylinders, waiting for them to reveal their hidden meaning. He gazed at them himself, also waiting.

And as he gazed, the first faint foreshadowing of a meaning began to emerge.

“Yes,” he said. “So. Now. I take a third empty coffee cup…”

* * *

There in front of Dr. Wilfred was the sea, certainly, just as How-my-dreck-your-call had said. It appeared to be at least a mile away, though, and about a thousand feet below him. He had long given up all thought of breakfast; it seemed to him unlikely that he would get there even in time for lunch. Though he realized that in the glare and heat of the midday sun his judgment of distance was panic-stricken and unreliable.

He sat down on the ground in a small patch of shade cast by a stunted umbrella pine and got out his phone. As he waited for his call to fly to England, then all the way back again to some spot he couldn’t quite see in the hard brightness below, he thought about a table in the shade, with a pastel-colored tablecloth on it and a gleaming place setting. The sugary croissants and crisp bacon that he had envisaged before had been replaced by bread and olives, gleaming pink taramasalata, and chilled prawns. He also thought about his lack of hat and sunblock, and the friendly offer of both hanging unanswered in the air. For a moment, too, a suntanned back came into his mind, rippling softly with the movements of shoulder blades and spine.

“Fred Toppler Foundation,” began the now depressingly familiar voice at last.

“It’s me,” he interrupted her, before she could get any further with her performance, or he himself any closer to dementia or collapse.

“Dr. Wilfred?” said the voice. “Everything OK at last? You got breakfast? You know where you are now?”

“No,” he said. “I didn’t get breakfast. I don’t know where I am.”

“No?” said How-my. “Something funny with your voice. You saying you don’t know where you are?”

“Yes.”

“What— still don’t know?”

“No.”

There was a pause. I am Dr. Norman Wilfred, he thought. I am the guest of honor. These things cannot be happening to me.

“OK,” said How-my. “Go back to the guest suite. Sit down. Don’t move. I send the buggy for you.”

Nikki scarcely had time to think about Dr. Wilfred more than twenty times in the course of the morning. She was running between the waterfront and the helipad, the helipad and the airport. There were the usual last-minute problems — a dead cat in the yogurt vat in the kitchens, the lighting and sound truck stuck on a hairpin bend somewhere on the way from the ferry — and the usual last-minute cancellations and changes. His Excellency Sheikh Abdul hilal bin-Taimour bin-Hamud bin-Ali al-Said had decided to bring two more wives than he had previously said. The bishop of the Hesperides Archipelago and Parts of Kronikae and Topikos was threatening to walk out if he found himself at the same table as the president of the Panhellenic Rationalist Association. It didn’t matter too much that the minister of prisons had scratched because of a mass escape of convicts in Patras, but it would if the governor and the chief of police of the Hesperides Periphery felt they had to cancel as well, because Mr. Papadopoulou greatly valued the seal of approval that their presence gave to the occasion, and the assurance against any misunderstandings or overzealousness on the part of the local police force.

And yet Nikki and her pale gold hair remained as calm and collected as ever, and her expression as pleasantly open to the world. In her present mood she could cope more effortlessly than ever with any problems that could possibly arise.

When she arrived at Alcmaeon’s Walk to collect Dr. Wilfred for his noon engagement all she could see was a circle of backs, two and three deep, leaning intently forward in complete silence. One of the backs, she noticed at once, was topped by the blond mop she was looking for, and beyond it were his hands — so delicate, so careful — holding something up in the air … A coffee pot … Slowly, slowly they lowered it until it was resting on something else. Which seemed to be a sugar bowl. A sugar bowl floating in the air a foot or two above the table beneath. As she craned farther forward over the watching backs, though, she saw that there was something supporting the sugar bowl. Coffee cups? Yes — four of them, arranged to make a platform. And beneath those four more. And beneath those four another four. And beneath them …

But already Dr. Wilfred’s hands were slowly detaching themselves from the coffee pot. His back was gradually straightening. So were all the backs around him, with a kind of soft collective sigh.

Nikki couldn’t bring herself to break the hush round the delicately teetering tower of chinaware. In any case Mrs. Morton Rinkleman was already making a little speech.

“It’s so inspiring,” she said, “to find someone who knows about science — and who can explain it in a way that we can all understand! No figures, no equations, no funny business about extra dimensions or time going backwards! Just a few coffee cups, a coffee pot, and a bowl of sugar!”

There was a murmur of agreement, and a certain amount of clapping.

“But I still don’t see,” said the same dogged pair of spectacles as before, “what any of this has to do with Wexler’s equation or Theobald’s constant.”

“No,” said Dr. Wilfred, “because we haven’t finished yet. And for the next part of the explanation we need your help. Here — take hold of the edge of the tablecloth.”

“Wait a moment,” said Professor Ditmuss.

“No, don’t wait! Never wait! Just do it! That’s the first rule for getting anything achieved in life. Now, take a good firm grip on the tablecloth. All right? I’ll count up to three, and on ‘three’ you whip the cloth out from underneath it all. Ready? Here we go. One…”