Michael Frayn - Skios

“Dr. Wilfred,” she would say. He would smile and incline his head. “I found your lecture fascinating. It raises so many issues that I’d love to pursue with you. I don’t know whether you have a moment…?”

It might happen even sooner. The woman who would be looking after him, and who would be meeting him just the other side of customs and immigration. “Dr. Wilfred? We’re all so excited!” Vicki had exchanged many e-mails and phone calls with her already. And she was professionally and personally committed to seeing that he had a good time. She would be lightly tanned. Discreetly blond, perhaps. In her thirties …

He checked the right-hand inside pocket of his linen jacket. Passport, credit cards. He checked the left-hand pocket. Phone, three condoms.

You never knew. All you knew was that it was either stored in the long causal chain of the universe or it wasn’t. If it was going to happen, it was going to happen.

* * *

Nikki tapped on the sliding glass window of the lodge. Elli waved at her. She was busy smiling her wonderful dark Greek smile into her headset, which seemed far too skimpy to accommodate it. Nikki knew what she was saying, in English smoothed and streamlined by so many repetitions over the years: “Fred Toppler Foundation. How my dreck your call?” She was the voice with which the foundation spoke to the outside world, the finger that pressed the buzzer to open and close the barrier keeping the confusion and shabbiness of that world at bay, the hand that sorted the incoming mail. She also looked after all the keys. Which was why Nikki was waiting.

Now Elli was frowning her wonderful dark Greek frown. The unseen caller’s answer to her perfectly formed English question was evidently also in English, which she couldn’t always understand.

Nikki waited. She had time in hand. Of course — she always had, in spite of having so much to do. She thought another of her cool thoughts. This particular cool thought was a recurring one: that quite shortly now the director would be out of Empedocles and on a plane back to his native Wuppertal. She knew it from the way Mrs. Toppler pronounced his name these days.

So the post of director would be vacant. The appointment would have to go before the board of trustees, of course, but what could the board of trustees do except what the money told them to? The money was Mrs. Fred Toppler. And, of course, her friend Mr. Vassilis Papadopoulou, who had been such a patron and benefactor of the foundation. In Athens Mr. Papadopoulou made ministers and broke them. No one in Greece who had any hopes of remaining alive and well would want to put obstacles in the way of a candidate supported by Papadopoulou. And there was a candidate to hand whom he might just possibly favor. Someone who over the past five years had gradually made herself indispensable to both Mrs. Toppler and Mr. Papadopoulou. “Oh, that Nikki!” as Mrs. Toppler so often had cause to say. “Whatever should we do without her?”

And now this year she had organized the entire House Party. She had chosen the Fred Toppler lecturer. Mr. Papadopoulou would be present at the lecture himself, and he had invited a number of his business associates. Last year Mr. Papadopoulou and several of his guests had fallen asleep in the lecture. If this year they managed to remain awake …

Well, you never knew in life. You never knew.

Elli slid back the glass and held out a car key.

“Nikki, you should be late! The plane comes in half an hour!”

“It’s ten minutes behind time. I checked.”

“Oh, yes, you check,” said Elli. “Of course.”

“Everything,” said Nikki, smiling her nice open smile. “Always.”

She walked unhurriedly towards the brilliant wall of bougainvillea that concealed the car park, still thinking her cool thought.

Elli watched her go, thinking a cool thought of her own: if Nikki becomes director, Mrs. Fred Toppler will be looking for a new PA …

Dr. Wilfred had established himself in the prime position by the carousel, identified through long experience, and granted by right of being in business class and so among the first off the plane: hard up against the track, close to the point where the tide of tumbled black wheelie-bags would at any moment burst through the doors, but just far enough away to get a good sight of them approaching before they reached him. His own was easy to spot, because its red leather address tag made it stand out from the sea of black all around; the fruit of experience once again. Which reminded him of his flight bag, and the lecture inside it. He checked. Yes, wedged safely between his feet, where he could feel it while he turned his phone on and found out what tedious demands upon him had accumulated while he was airborne.

Five e-mails and seven texts. Would he consider…? No, he would not. Would he address a conference …—No…! — in Hawaii? Oh God, Hawaii again. Well, possibly. Would he write, join, read, judge…? No … yes … maybe … Nothing that Vicki couldn’t deal with. Except one e-mail from Vicki herself. Did he wish to respond to the attached? It turned out to be a review of his life’s work from some publication he had never heard of in Manitoba, and it was entirely ridiculous. The author was disabled by stupidity and ignorance, motivated by spite, and didn’t understand what “disinterested” meant. It was not something he would dream of responding to.

He was about to put the phone back in his pocket when one particular phrase in the article suddenly came back into his mind: “Dr. Wilfred’s entirely mystical faith in reason.” He switched the phone on again. His thumbs began to move, almost of their own accord. “I should not normally accord uninformed abuse of this nature the dignity of a reply,” he typed, “but…” His thumbs flew back and forth over the keyboard like eager pigeons snapping up seed. His response was effortlessly authoritative, pleasantly amused, and totally devastating.

Even in the crowded baggage hall of a strange airport he was a master of his craft.

* * *

Nikki Hook felt the back of her shirt, to make sure that it was still tucked into her skirt, then touched her hair to check that it had not been blown out of place by the air-conditioning in the car. She could see the passengers through the glass screen as they emerged from passport control and crowded around the carousel like impatient pigs round an empty trough. There were twenty or so other people on either side of her, holding clipboards and lists, also waiting. Chauffeurs, drivers of taxis and limousines, representatives of tour operators. Some of the women from the tour companies were tanned and blond, but none of them was as lightly tanned or as discreetly blond as Nikki, and even the ones in their thirties, like her, were not as tastefully ensconced in them as she was. All these people, young and old, had their own opinions and memories, their own secret weaknesses and choice of underwear. In their own eyes, in the eyes of boyfriends, wives, children, and grandchildren, of employers and fellow employees, they were all no doubt whoever they were. But only Nikki Hook, she couldn’t help being aware at the back of her mind, was Nikki Hook.

This was always a slightly tense moment, though. She imagined an actress standing in the wings waiting for her entrance on a first night. Not the star of the show, perhaps, but that long moment of waiting for her cue, of checking yet again that she remembered her first line, was just as long for her as it was for the star. And it wasn’t possible to run through all the rest of her part. She couldn’t know how the volatile combination of her and her fellow actors, of text and set, of audience and circumstance, was going to turn out.