Michael Frayn - Skios

“Georgie,” she said, “you’re in the bathroom, yes, but what country is the bathroom in?”

She didn’t hear Georgie’s reply, though, because it had just occurred to her that there was something odd about the spelling of Dr. Wilfred’s name.

* * *

In fact Georgie hadn’t replied, because she hadn’t heard Nikki’s question. The cleaning woman had suddenly discovered a new grievance. Georgie had only just taken in what it was.

“My suitcase!” she was screaming through the woodwork. “What have you done with my suitcase?”

Her suitcase? What suitcase? There wasn’t a suitcase!

There had been a suitcase, of course. There had been her own suitcase, now floating in the pool. And, yes, there had been another suitcase before that. The one that had come in the taxi — Wilfred’s suitcase.

A queasy, unsettling insight came to Georgie. She had jumped to conclusions, she realized, as she had done quite often in life before. Wilfred’s suitcase hadn’t been Wilfred’s suitcase. It had been the cleaning woman’s. The taxi had been bringing the cleaning woman. And her suitcase with her.

But why would the cleaning woman have been arriving in a taxi? Why would she have been bringing a suitcase with her?

And suddenly, in one lightning leap after another, everything became clear to Georgie. It was because the cleaning woman wasn’t the cleaning woman. She was coming to stay in the villa. Just like Georgie herself. A fellow guest. Of Oliver’s. Like herself. She was some part of Oliver’s notorious past. Or even, like herself, of his notorious present.

There seemed to be another ceasefire in the siege of the door. Instead there was the sound of the suitcase search moving through the house, of doors being flung open, of tables being shifted and chairs overturned. Georgie wondered whether to try shouting through the door that the suitcase was presumably still outside the gate where the taxi driver had put it. But then she remembered — it wasn’t. She had picked it up herself, and put it back in the taxi. So now it was …

Wherever Wilfred was. Giving a lecture. Gone.

At any moment the woman would be back, still suitcaseless, and angrier than ever. It might be an idea, thought Georgie, to follow the example of the suitcase — to be out of the house and away from here.

* * *

Oliver rested his head against the side window of the taxi, absently watching a plane that had taken off from the airport just ahead of them. Up, up it soared, catching the early evening sun as it began a long climbing turn. He felt like that plane — light, unencumbered, free. As magically as a plane becoming airborne he had become Dr. Norman Wilfred. As easily as a plane revolving the landscape beneath itself he had rocked the world a little on its axis. Had varied the great dullness of things, the vast yawning predictability of the planets going round the sun.

Then, just as easily, he had reverted to being Oliver Fox again, and was off. There was nothing he had to drag through the airport and get airborne with him. His suitcase could stay where it was, in the room he had left. Nothing in it that he couldn’t abandon as easily as the room. Nothing in it that belonged to him, in any case, now he thought about it. Not even the suitcase. Somewhere there must be another suitcase, full of things that actually were his. It was presumably in the keeping of that other Dr. Norman Wilfred, the shadowy figure who was now free to step forth into the light again and resume his existence. Let him have both suitcases, whoever he was.

All Oliver needed in life he carried in his pockets. A little cash and a couple of credit cards. He checked his trouser pockets. OK. Fine. He checked his shirt pocket. He had his phone. Not essential, perhaps, but certainly useful. The bar of chocolate and the pack of soluble aspirin. Optional, but handy. Nothing else in the whole wide world did he require.

Oh. One thing …

* * *

Nikki sat down. Her legs had gone wobbly. She looked at the passport yet again.

No, there was no way round it. The spelling was definitely wrong. “Norman” was not spelled O-L–I-V-E-R. “Wilfred” was not spelled F-O-X.

“Thirty-two euros,” said Stavros.

He had to say it twice, because the first time Dr. Wilfred was standing on a dark hillside somewhere under the glittering night sky, explaining to Georgie how the apparently random distribution of the heavenly bodies was entirely consonant with a causality fully determined by the preexisting fundamental laws, and it was difficult to see how the sum of thirty-two euros came into the relevant mathematics at any point.

The stars faded. Oh, yes, Stavros. The taxi. They had arrived at the foundation. Dr. Wilfred got out and hoisted his flight bag onto his shoulder while he fumbled for his wallet. He couldn’t help being aware that there were gratifyingly large numbers of people arriving at the same time to hear his lecture. Over and over again the glass doors slid back to admit them. Surprisingly many of them were obese, and they were dressed in surprisingly informal ways, with bare bulging midriffs and sun-reddened knees and shoulders. A lot of them had brought their children, and they were all pushing baggage carts piled with suitcases.

The thirty-five euros Dr. Wilfred had got out of his wallet hesitated in the air above Stavros’s waiting hand.

“Hold on…” he said.

* * *

“Thirty-eight euros,” said Spiros, in the taxi pulling up outside Departures just behind Stavros’s.

Oliver didn’t get out, however. He checked all his pockets once again. No, he hadn’t got it. For a moment he thought he might try to talk his way through passport control without it. If so many people were prepared, without any effort on his part, to believe that he was Dr. Norman Wilfred when he wasn’t, surely a few simple officials would take his word for it that he was Oliver Fox when he actually was …

“No,” he said finally. “I’ll have to go back.”

“Back?” said Spiros.

He had left his identity behind. Put it down in the guest suite somewhere, when he had been taking off Oliver Fox and putting on Dr. Norman Wilfred, and forgotten to pick it up again.

They had to wait, though, because the man who had just got out of the taxi in front was also changing his mind and getting back into it.

* * *

Still Nikki sat gazing at the passport. Her first thought was that the passport office had made a mistake. It was so obviously Dr. Norman Wilfred in the photograph! But then it started to seem not quite so obvious after all.

She became aware that she was also still holding the phone. She put it back to her ear. There was silence. Georgie had evidently calmed down a bit. Which gave Nikki a chance to tell her that their roles were now reversed.

“Georgie,” she said quietly, “I think I’ve done something rather silly, too.”

Because of course Dr. Wilfred wasn’t Dr. Wilfred. How could he be? Dr. Wilfred would be somewhere in his fifties. She knew that perfectly well. He couldn’t possibly be an amiable young idiot with an engaging smile and hair flopping into his eyes. He was a self-important celebrity with a bald head and a lot of expensive meals built into him.

How had she ever for one moment thought that Dr. Wilfred was Dr. Wilfred?

Because — yes — it had happened at the airport, in the very first moment that she had set eyes on him. He had looked at her sign and smiled. She had said “Dr. Wilfred?” and he had said yes. It was as simple as that.

No, he hadn’t even said yes. She remembered exactly what he had said: “I cannot tell a lie.”

He couldn’t tell a lie. He hadn’t told a lie. She had made Dr. Wilfred into Dr. Wilfred all by herself, single-handed.