Michael Frayn - Skios

“Not anymore, he isn’t,” she said. “Unfortunately.” But all she could see were the wet footprints outside her window.

And no sign of him anywhere. Not that she knew what she was going to say to him when she found him. Or what she was going to do about it.

She was angry, though. Angry with him for making her ridiculous. Angry with herself for letting him. He had looked around — and picked her out to be his victim. He had destroyed her professional credibility and all her hopes for the future.

What kind of lecture was he going to give, anyway? Had he somehow got hold of the real Dr. Wilfred’s text? Or was he going to invent some lecture of his own? A mockery of a lecture? A hoax lecture, in the spirit of the masquerade he had been — was still — performing? Or would it be no lecture at all? Perhaps, when the moment came for him to stand up, he would remain sitting. Or stand up and say nothing. Or prove to have slipped away into the darkness a moment earlier.

But where was he?

And where was the real Dr. Wilfred?

And which of them was going to be standing up to give the Fred Toppler Lecture in two hours’ time?

And if neither of them was, then?

The first thing she had to do, obviously, was to tell Mrs. Toppler what had happened. And to do it before she read out the eulogious introduction that Nikki had written for her to someone who wasn’t Dr. Norman Wilfred at all. Or even to someone who was, supposing he should suddenly turn up, if Mrs. Toppler thought he wasn’t. Or to no one at all.

But how could she tell her, when it would finish her career? Not that she wanted to become director of the Fred Toppler Foundation just at the moment. Or to remain there in any capacity.

Or to be anywhere else on this earth.

* * *

Behind the screens around the new swimming pool the contractors were still working, apparently oblivious of any aspect of European civilization but the financial penalties for failure to complete on schedule. They were contributing to the intellectual life of the community, however, because Chris Binns, the foundation’s writer in residence, gazing out of the window of his room in Epictetus watching the dump trucks emerging from behind the screens, had at last had the idea for a poem.

He had been struggling to find a subject for some time. He obviously had to write something while he was here. If you went to be writer in residence somewhere you had to come back with more than just a suntan and a jar of the local honey. You were supposed to have written a poem, or preferably a whole sequence of poems. Something that alluded to the local landscape, certainly. But not, obviously, just saying how blue the sky was, and how nice the bougainvillea looked. It had to be something that crept up on the place obliquely. Obscurely. Ironically. Something that referenced bits of the place’s history and mythology that no one else knew about. That needed footnotes, and that would provide material for the thesis that a PhD candidate somewhere would one day be writing about you. He could see the thesis more clearly than he could see the poem. “This haunting and elusive work was written during a summer that Binns spent on the island of Skios, and interweaves the crisis of creative barrenness and existential purposelessness from which he was at that time suffering with the vibrant local resonances of…”

Of what, though? This was the problem. Of blue seas and purple bougainvillea? Of all the vibrant local resonances that had already been interwoven with his predecessors’ spiritual crises each year since this place had been open?

Now, however, he seemed to have cracked it. The poem was going to revolve around the figure of Athena. His idea was that the contractors digging out the new swimming pool had hit upon the site of the temple that was supposed to have been dedicated to her, and in some kind of half-hinted, largely incomprehensible way disturbed the goddess’s spirit. Since, as he had discovered from his researches on the Internet, she was the goddess not only of wisdom but of civilization, which was what the foundation was dedicated to, he could see considerable ironic possibilities opening up here. Wearing her helmet and chiton (whatever a chiton was — he could look it up later), carrying her shield, and accompanied by her traditional attendance of serpents, she would emerge from behind the screens and join in the life of the foundation. She might go to a class on Greek mythology. Take off her chiton and sunbathe. Come to one of Chris’s creative writing classes and read him some little epic or tragedy she had written.

This was the idea, but the actual words to express it he hadn’t yet found. It was difficult to concentrate in this place when for so much of the time there was nothing going on. And then suddenly, just as you were getting used to that, there was. A bird flying past the window. Another dump truck emerging from behind the screens around the construction site. The sun sinking ostentatiously towards the horizon. Right now, for example, here on the path below him Nikki was hurrying by, in her crisp white shirt, clipboard in hand, on her way from one mysterious importance to another. The sight of her reminded him of something. What it reminded him of most strongly and distractingly, of course, was herself. Or of Athena, perhaps, in her crisp white chiton, shield in hand. But also of something else. Something she had said.

A lecture? Someone giving a lecture? Someone asking a question?

* * *

In the Temple of Athena the two waiters by the buffet finished filling the hundred flutes with champagne. The string quartet picked up their bows. The headwaiter ushered Mrs. Toppler and Mr. Papadopoulou to their positions facing the entrance. Mrs. Toppler looked in her bag one last time to check that she had the texts of her introduction and her speech of thanks.

She closed her bag and nodded at the headwaiter. The headwaiter nodded at two of the underwaiters, who picked up heavy trays of charged glasses and took up their positions on either side of the entrance. First violin nodded at his colleagues.

Stream upon stream of tiny rising bubbles. Bar upon bar of serene singing notes. The endless pause before something happens.

Nikki, waiting in the shadows, settled a calm but concerned look on her face, and seized her chance. She stepped bravely forward.

“Mrs. Toppler,” she said. “Listen…”

But just at that moment the first guests walked into the temple. “Dickerson! Davina!” said Mrs. Toppler. “I might have known you’d be the first!”

One by one and two by two the tall flutes of champagne vanished from the waiters’ trays. One by one and two by two they wandered among the ruins in the gathering dusk, trying to find other glasses of champagne to talk to, keeping themselves pleasantly occupied by refracting in their pale sparkling depths the torches already flaring around the masonry, the riding lights on the yachts along the waterfront below, and the silently laboring right arms of the string quartet.

“So romantic!” said Rosamund Chailey to Darling Erlunder.

“You feel any moment you might see Agamemnon’s fleet sail over the horizon!” said Russell Pond to Mrs. Comax.

“Or Athena come round with the canapés!” said Mrs. Comax.

“And here’s Nikki, our very own goddess, instead!” said Chuck Friendly.

“Nikki, this is all so divine! But where is our Apollo? Our heavenly Dr. Wilfred?”

“I’m just looking for him myself,” said Nikki.

“We all have so many questions we want to ask him!” said Morton Rinkleman.

“So have I,” said Nikki. She moved on.

“Poor Nikki,” said Mrs. Comax. “She looks just desperate !”