Michael Frayn - Skios

He drew out a chair from the table and sat down.

Something, in the last twenty-four hours, had gone radically wrong with the world. The Gulf Stream of good fortune that had bathed and warmed his shores from the age of twelve or so had without warning turned aside and left him in an unfamiliar and inhospitable new climate.

The passport was lying on the desk where Nikki had left it. She picked it up as if it were infectious. It was as alien as an old love letter from someone who had proved false. She remembered how unsettled she had been by the sight of his unsmiling face in it even before. It had been revealing. When he stopped smiling there was something cold about him. Something cruel — something perhaps even verging on the psychopathic. She found herself turning the pages in spite of her distaste, and looking at the photograph again. Yes, there was a mean, watchful light in his eyes, and a hard set to the mouth.

He looked very different from the smiling impostor she had been so dangerously close to falling in love with. In fact he looked very different from the unsmiling version of himself that she had seen in the photograph before. All his blond hair had fallen out — he was half bald. His cheeks were lined and pouched, his jowls baggy. He was fifteen or more years older. It was like the picture of Dorian Gray.

No, he was someone else entirely. The passport had changed its identity, like Dr. Norman Wilfred himself. The entire world had begun to deliquesce around her.

She looked at this stranger’s name.

Yes, of course. In all her anxiety about what to do, and her anger at the false Dr. Norman Wilfred, she had failed to think about his other victim. Now here he was, looking out at her from the ordinariness of the past, from the quiet dullness of things before all this had started to happen: the real Dr. Norman Wilfred.

* * *

“We’ll wait till he stands up to speak,” said Annuka Vos to Dr. Wilfred. “Some idiot will introduce him. Everyone will clap, and then there’ll be a moment of silence before he opens his mouth. That’s our cue to stand up and make the biggest, most embarrassing public scene anyone has ever witnessed.”

Dr. Wilfred was sitting beside her in the back of the taxi, holding on to his lecture with one hand and his safety belt with the other, as they plunged down the mountainside, and the potholes and hairpin bends sprang towards them out of the darkness. They had eaten most of the canapés and drunk several glasses of Petrus’s brandy while he had recounted to her the injustice he had suffered at Oliver Fox’s hands. The indignation she felt on her own account had been inflamed even more by her generous outrage on Dr. Wilfred’s behalf than it had by the brandy. They had both been hideously abused. And now she knew where to find their abuser.

“The trouble is,” said Dr. Wilfred, “that no one will believe it’s me. They didn’t before.”

“If any doubts are expressed, leave them to me. I will deal with them. By force if necessary. I don’t know what this lecture of yours is about, and I don’t care. But you’re going to give it, not him. Even if we both have to shout him down.”

Dr. Wilfred was silent for a pothole or two. “I don’t really want to,” he said. “I’ve rather gone off the whole idea.”

She gazed at him in amazement.

“What? You want to let that ridiculous little fraud give your lecture for you?”

Dr. Wilfred held up his typescript. “He can’t give my lecture.”

“No — he’s going to be doing what he always does — he’s going to make it up himself as he goes along! Some complete rubbish of his own! You’re someone well known, are you? You’re going to be a lot better known still when people hear what you’re supposed to have said! You’re going to be a public laughingstock!”

Still this poor broken specimen was silent.

“Come on!” she said. “Wake up! Make an effort! This little rat has stolen your life!”

God, the effort one always had to make with men! It should have been the other way round! It should have been him struggling to persuade her !

“You’re not worrying about your starving lady friend, are you? I’ll tell you where she is by this time. At the dinner! With him! Eating her head off!”

He seemed to have forgotten about her, though. She had blown into his life by some sequence of mistakes and coincidences. Now, by some further sequence of mistakes and coincidences, she had blown out of it again.

“I’ve had a rather difficult day, one way and another,” he said. “I think what I should really like to do is go back to the villa, if that’s all right with you. We could finish the canapés. Get an early night, perhaps.”

She looked at him. He wasn’t beginning to nourish any illusions about her, was he? It would be typical, of course. A bird in the hand — just what Oliver could never resist.

Yes. Well. Nevertheless. She modified her approach a little.

“We’re going to be doing this together,” she said softly, and kept her eyes fixed on him until he felt the pressure of her gaze, and glanced round at her. She smiled. He looked away, then looked at her again. She switched on the interior light, so that perhaps he could see, in her wide-open dark Latin eyes, the tawny splash of Baltic amber in the pupils.

She had plainly unsettled him a little. She had unsettled herself a little, too, she realized, now that she was looking at him so hard. He wasn’t quite as old and broken as she had supposed. In the dim light of the taxi, with the red baldness of his head and the scruffiness of his clothes hidden in the shadows, he was, well, not so insignificant, after all. Some lingering traces remained of the importance that he had described to her over the canapés. He wasn’t remotely the man she knew in her heart that she really deserved, that quiet, laughing, considerate giant, who would be romping with the children when she came back from an exhausting day of negotiations with her fellow bankers in Zurich — and who would break off to throw his arms round her and whirl her around until he and she and all six children collapsed laughing on the hearth rug in front of the crackling log fire. He was obviously something of a figure in the world, though. In demand to speak at international conferences and festivals. She saw heads turning and cameras flashing as he and she arrived in Montreal or Montevideo for their joint presentation …

An absurd thought. All the same, she made sure that when he looked round at her again he found her still softly gazing at him. He smiled. A little ruefully, perhaps, a little awkwardly, but resignedly.

So — they were going to do it. They were going to finish Mr. Oliver Fox once and for all. Slay the dragon at last that had wrought such havoc up and down the land.

She leaned towards the driver.

“Step on it, will you, Stavros? It is Stavros, isn’t it?”

“Spiros,” said Spiros.

Instead of going faster, though, he was slowing down. The taxi was plowing through some sort of obstruction. It appeared in the headlights to be a broken suitcase that someone had abandoned in the middle of the road, with a long trail of dusty shoes and clothes spilling out of it.

“Disgusting, what some people do with their rubbish,” said Annuka Vos.

Dr. Wilfred said nothing.

* * *

Still Nikki stood in Parmenides, holding Dr. Norman Wilfred’s passport. So where was he? The real Dr. Norman Wilfred?

In London, perhaps. Had missed the flight. No, he’d caught the flight — she’d spoken to his PA. And the flight had arrived. She’d been at the airport to meet it. So he had reached Skios. And yet somehow, on the spur of the same moment in which Oliver Fox had appointed himself to be Dr. Norman Wilfred, he had come into possession of Dr. Norman Wilfred’s passport.