Michael Frayn - Skios

The dinner that marked the triumphal finale of the Fred Toppler Foundation’s annual Great European House Party had begun.

Nikki stood on the steps at the edge of the agora, in the darkness of the gathering night, looking out over the world she had created. Candlelit eyes sparkled. Candlelit lips talked and smiled. Candlelit heads bent forward to listen, were thrown back to laugh. Candlelit hands lifted soup spoons, broke bread, made charming gestures. More faces emerged from the shadows as waiters leaned into the light to serve and pour, to lay plates and clear them. A reassuring music of incomprehensible social noise rose into the night. Everything was going well.

All Nikki could see, though, was Dr. Norman Wilfred, as she still couldn’t help thinking of him, smiling his lopsided smile at Mrs. Toppler as she talked to him — talked and talked to him, leaning close to him, her hand resting on his arm. He couldn’t tell a lie, he had told Nikki at the airport, but he could smile a lie and he could listen a lie. He could look a lie as he brushed the lying rumpled blond hair out of his soft brown lying eyes.

Who was he, this Oliver Fox?

Why had he done it?

What was he going to do next?

And, most important of all, what was she going to do about it?

She knew what she was going to do about it. She was going to stop it. She was going to tell Mrs. Toppler. She was going to tell her now.

How, though? She would have to approach her on her right side, away from Dr. Wilfred, and interrupt her even as she spoke to him. Then do her best to whisper over the noise of the dinner …

But what whispered words could she find that could possibly make Mrs. Toppler understand something so incomprehensible? And even if she could find the words, how could she ever make Mrs. Toppler believe them?

All around Nikki the world continued on its allotted course. The forks went back and forth between plates and mouths. The first faint stars overhead moved westward. She was alone with her problem in the midst of it all.

She was going to do it, though, and do it precisely now. The decision was made. Somehow, though, the decision failed to reach the appropriate muscles. Still she stood watching.

* * *

“I must stop monopolizing you!” said Mrs. Fred Toppler to Dr. Wilfred. “I get so nervous, though! Every year it’s the same! Dance, yes, no trouble at all. I could get up on the table right now and dance my heart out, and I’d love every second of it! I have to make a speech, though, and all I want to do is get under the table and die ! So of course I just keep talking! It’s terrible! I should be listening to you!

“So where was I? Oh, yes. Christian. I shouldn’t be criticizing our own director to you. But why isn’t he here? Why is he never anywhere? What does he do all day? We don’t know! We never see him! OK, he’s an elf, like Dieter. But even an elf has to come out of elfland sometimes!”

Dr. Wilfred gazed at her, nodding and smiling his soft sympathetic smile as she went on and on about whatever it was she was going on about. But he was thinking uneasy thoughts. He had succeeded in climbing the impossible climb. Only now he couldn’t get down again. He was stuck on the mountaintop. He had made himself Dr. Wilfred by his own individual act of will. He remained Dr. Wilfred by the will of others.

“So,” said Mrs. Toppler, “Christian’s days here are numbered. Only he doesn’t know it yet. How are we going to do it? Mr. Papadopoulou’s going to fix it. Cut off his supply of lentils. Underage boys on his computer. Concrete boots. I don’t know. I don’t want to know. Tell me after it’s all over.

“I shouldn’t be saying all this to someone I only met this afternoon. But I feel I know you really well! I feel I can talk to you!”

He had pulled a face, thought Dr. Wilfred, and the wind had changed. He had created a monster, and his creation had risen from the laboratory bench and walked. And talked. And been listened to. And had quietly killed off its creator.

“So, OK,” said Mrs. Toppler, “this is what I wanted to talk to you about. This is where I need your advice. Who do we get to succeed Christian?”

She stopped. She was looking round the side of Dr. Wilfred’s head at the guest on his other side.

“Oh my God!” she said. “Mrs. Skorbatova! She looks as if they just dug her out of the permafrost! You better talk to her. I can pick your brains later. If she has a bad time here she takes it out on Mr. Skorbatov — Mr. Skorbatov takes it out on Mr. Papadopoulou — we don’t get this great new deal the boys are talking about. What great new deal? I don’t know. I don’t want to know. Tell me when we got it.”

Dr. Wilfred turned his head. Mrs. Skorbatova was gazing into space, her face as expressionless as her piled blond hair and her naked brown shoulders: an ice goddess, inhabiting some freezing world of her own in the midst of the warm Mediterranean night.

“She doesn’t speak English, though, does she?” said Dr. Wilfred.

“Not a word,” said Mrs. Toppler. “Say anything you like. Just so long as she sees someone making the effort. Tell her the ten times table. She won’t know. A mouth opening and shutting. That’s all most people here want, when you come right down to it. Plus one of your nice smiles. I’ll just read through my speech again.”

“Imagine it’s you,” Dr. Wilfred told Mrs. Skorbatova as he ate his mushrooms à la grecque and she ate her rump steak. “You’re standing here at the lectern. A few last coughs and rustlings as the audience settles. You wait until there’s absolute silence. You look out into the darkness, and there are all these faces gazing up at you, waiting to hear what you’re going to say.

“And you don’t know what you’re going to say! You may be about to say anything! Things you never knew you knew! Things you can’t understand! And all the time the real Dr. Norman Wilfred may be out there somewhere. May be about to get to his feet and humiliate you in front of the entire world …

“Now, don’t you feel a kind of horrible, wonderful tingling running up your arms?”

He had already told her that she was perhaps the most beautiful woman he had ever set eyes upon. She had slowly turned and looked at him, but her face had remained as unflawed as ever by any trace of an expression. He had been encouraged enough by this response to confide in her completely. He had confessed to her that he wasn’t Dr. Wilfred. He had told her about Georgie, and Nikki, and Annuka Vos. About how he had climbed the climb and couldn’t climb down, performed the magic spell and couldn’t reverse it. And still she had gazed at him with her eyes apparently focused on something about two inches beneath the surface of his forehead. It was difficult to know whether she was doing it out of the same sense of social obligation as everyone else, or whether, in the great sea of meaninglessness on which she found herself cast away, even the sight of a particular mouth meaninglessly moving, particular eyes meaninglessly crinkling, and a particular hand meaninglessly brushing at its owner’s hair, was a piece of flotsam worth clinging to.

“Well, there we are,” he said. “Our hostess told me to talk to you, and now I have. So, if you’ll excuse me, I’d better resume my conversation with her. I don’t think I ever actually introduced myself, though. My name is really Fox. Oliver Fox.”

And now at last her expression changed slightly. She was still gazing at him. But her eyes were a little more widely open, and they seemed to have come into focus. Her lips had softened a little, as if she were contemplating the possibility of a smile. He was taken aback. She seemed to have understood something he had said. But what?