Skios

12

Nikki was getting slowly undressed in the darkness. She was undressing slowly just in case Dr. Wilfred phoned and needed help of some sort. She had turned all the lights off and left the veranda windows open in order to breathe the natural air of the night for once. Every now and then the net curtains would stir and shift, or the plumbago sway in the security lighting. She didn’t look round. She wasn’t worried about intruders. And when finally her phone did ring she jumped out of her skin, she was so surprised. She let it ring on for a while before she answered.

“Nikki Hook,” she said, in a voice that went with pleasantly open eyes and crisply ironed shirts.

“Nikki!” whispered the voice at the other end. “It’s me!”

She couldn’t think of an answer. Whoever me was, it wasn’t the me she’d for one wild moment thought it was going to be.

“Georgie!” said the voice. Georgie? Oh, yes, Georgie. “Hello, Georgie,” said Nikki.

“Nikki, listen. I’m doing something rather silly.”

Of course. The only times Georgie ever phoned was when she was doing something rather silly. Nikki waited.

“I know, I know!” said Georgie. “Oh, Nikki! Why do these things happen to me? But listen, listen. I’ve got something dreadful to ask you. Now I know this is awful, but—”

“You’ve told Patrick you’re staying with me.”

“I’m so sorry, Nikki! I know I should have asked you first. I’ll never do it again! I promise, I promise, I promise! He won’t call you, I’m sure he won’t, he hasn’t got your number, but he might look it up somehow, it would be just like him, and if he does … It’s just that he sounded a bit, you know, scrungy when he rang a moment ago. What was the weather like here, and so on. He might start ringing up the weather people to check.”

“So what was the weather like?”

“I told him cool. Is it?”

“About ninety degrees.”

“Oh, no! Not very good for skiers!”

“For Skios? Oh, about usual. Don’t worry, though. If anyone asks, it’s cool. I’m thinking cool thoughts.”

“Oh, bless you, Nikki! What should I do without you?”

“It’s cool where you are, is it?”

“Actually it’s about ninety degrees here.”

“Which is where? Or I suppose I shouldn’t ask.”

“Well … I think it’s a secret. There’s this woman who keeps phoning him.”

“He’s married, is he?”

“Married?” There was a pause. Nikki could hear the distant sounds of a car driving over an unmade-up road. Also of Georgie thinking. “Probably, now you come to mention it.”

“Georgie! Don’t you even know?”

“He won’t talk about it! He just kind of smiles!”

“Oh, no! Remember the last one!”

“I know. Oh, Nikki! If only I were like you! All sensible and snow-white, and running foundations and things!”

There was another pause, this time because Nikki was looking at the net curtains stirring and the plumbago beyond them swaying. And thinking. Wondering whether to say.

“Nikki?” said Georgie. “Are you still there?”

“The thing is,” said Nikki, in a suddenly small voice, “I think I may be, too.”

“What? You’ve gone a bit quiet. I’m in a taxi. It’s crashing about a lot. I can’t hear. May what?”

“Also be doing something silly.”

There was a colossal shriek down the line.

“Oh, no! Not you! You don’t do silly things!”

“I know.”

“You’re the head girl! You’re supposed to be setting us all an example! Oh, Nikki! Even you! So tell, tell! What’s he like?”

“Well … he’s rather wonderful.”

“No, he isn’t! Don’t be silly, Nikki!”

“I know. But actually he is! Tremendously distinguished and famous, and he knows everything, and he’s done everything, and he’s just so … ordinary about it all!”

“Mine’s terrible. A total no-hoper. You don’t know where you are with him from one moment to the next. How long have you known yours?”

“About two hours.”

“Well, there you go. Wait till you’ve known him for two weeks, like me. Is yours married?”

Now Nikki was silent.

“I don’t think so,” she said finally.

“Nikki!”

“I did actually ask him. But he’s like yours. He just smiles.”

“He’s married! Of course he’s married! Oh, Nikki! Head girl! Remember? And he’s famous? Nikki, you’re going to end up in the newspapers! So, what, he’s nice-looking?”

“Very. Like a kind of blond dish mop.”

“So’s mine! Exactly! How funny!”

“Two hours, that’s all, and I’ve only got him for one day more, and I’m sitting here in the dark because I’ve left the veranda window open just in case, and it’s all absolutely ridiculous, and I’m so ashamed of myself, and if I put the phone down suddenly you’ll know what’s happened.”

Georgie laughed and laughed.

“I know,” said Nikki.

“And is he Swiss?” said Georgie.

“Swiss? No? Why — is yours?”

“Mine? No. Only since you’re in Switzerland…”

But Nikki’s attention had been distracted. There was a noise coming from somewhere like an unoiled door being swung back and forth. Then shouting, and running footsteps.

“Sounds like someone screaming,” said Georgie. “What’s going on up there?”

“Sorry,” said Nikki hurriedly. “I’ve got to go.”

“Have fun!” said Georgie, as Nikki put the phone down. “Just don’t start being in love with him.”

* * *

The screaming, Oliver saw in the confused moment as the lights came on, was emerging from a woman who was cowering away from him on the bed above him as best she could while she kept her finger jammed down on the bedside panic button. She was richly and commandingly tanned and blonded, skin-creamed and silk-nightdressed. Oliver could see, even from where he was lying on the floor, even shocked and confused from having fallen off the bed with his foot caught in his bathrobe, that she was not Nikki.

There seemed to be three other people in the room, though it was difficult to see from where he was lying, and all of them in various states of social disarray. Coming through the open veranda window, where he himself had entered a few moments earlier, was the security guard who had been so eager to see his ID earlier, now struggling to conceal a lighted cigarette. Lowering above the woman on the bed was a bloated dark thundercloud of naked stomach. From the dense black bush beneath the stomach dangled a long male member. Above the thundercloud were piled more stories of hairy flesh, and looking out from on top of it all, like Zeus from high heaven, was a boldly featured face framed by a trim gray beard and a luxuriance of billowing gray locks, raining down thunderbolts of excited and incomprehensible Greek.

In the doorway to the corridor was the only familiar face — Nikki, as discreetly tanned and blonded as ever, still struggling to do up her skirt and tuck her shirt into it.

Oliver disentangled his foot and got himself upright. “I do apologize,” he said, when the screaming and shouting had subsided enough to make himself heard. “I’ve lost the key to my suitcase.”

Nikki was the next to recover her social poise.

“Oh, Mrs. Toppler,” she said, “this is Dr. Norman Wilfred. Our guest of honor. Dr. Wilfred, this is Mrs. Fred Toppler, who is, of course, your hostess.”

“I saw the window open,” said Oliver. “I thought that just possibly I might find some wire cutters … Or a hacksaw…”

“Fetch some wire cutters from the tool room, Giorgios,” said Nikki to the security man. “Then show Dr. Wilfred the way back to Parmenides, and get his suitcase open for him. I’m so sorry about this, Mrs. Toppler. I should have checked that Dr. Wilfred had everything he needed.”

“Welcome to the Fred Toppler Foundation, Dr. Wilfred,” said Mrs. Toppler, recovering at last the use of words. “We’re all so excited.”

Mr. Papadopoulou got his vast mass down from the bed and picked up the bottle of champagne that had rolled away out of Oliver’s hand.

“Oh, and this is Mr. Vassilis Papadopoulou,” said Nikki. “A great patron and benefactor of the Fred Toppler Foundation.”

“Thank you,” said Oliver.

“Change from the guy we got last year, anyway,” said Mr. Papadopoulou.

* * *

“You said the veranda on the right,” said Oliver quietly and reproachfully to Nikki in the corridor outside, while the security guard waited.

“It is on the right. If you’re inside.”

“I see,” said Oliver. “It is if you’re inside. That’s where I went wrong, being outside. Perhaps we could just take a look at it together, from the inside, so I’ve got it absolutely straight in my mind.”

She hesitated, and then became aware that the door of Mrs. Toppler’s room was open a crack, and that Mr. Papadopoulou was watching them.

“You’d better go with Security, Dr. Wilfred,” she said. “You’ll be at breakfast, perhaps?”

* * *

“She tells me she’s getting me this great star,” said Mrs. Fred Toppler. “And all the time it’s her boyfriend!”

“She hooks you a big fish — who cares?” said Mr. Papadopoulou, his hand under Mrs. Fred Toppler’s nightdress in the dark, squeezing the spot that she liked to have squeezed, for medical reasons, just below the small of her back. “She’s happy, he’s happy, you’re happy.”

“‘Oh, Mrs. Toppler,’ she says, ‘he’s world famous! Oh, Mrs. Toppler, he’s going to be so much better than the one last year!’ And all the time they’re doing it right across the corridor!”

“Relax. He never got there.”

“No, this great intellectual, and can’t even find his girlfriend’s fanny!”

“Boy, did you scream!”

“The little tramp, though! That white shirt, that kind of stuffed-English-muffin look on her face. And inside it all she’s a tramp like everybody else!”

Mr. Papadopoulou suddenly laughed. “You know what? She looks out the window for him. She says, ‘Darling, it’s the window on the right!’”

Mrs. Toppler thought about this. Mr. Papadopoulou was kneading her buttocks. She was almost ready for the oven. Suddenly she laughed in her turn.

“He is rather cute, though,” she said.

* * *

Nikki lay wide awake, trying to calm herself with her cool thought. Christian will be going. The foundation will be looking for a new director …

But before she could finish thinking her cool thought it had been overtaken by a hot one: had the scene in Mrs. Toppler’s bedroom cast doubt on the suitability of her choice of lecturer? Hard on the heels of this hot thought came another one, even more hotly embarrassing, even more hotly tormenting: Mrs. Toppler couldn’t possibly have suspected, could she, in whose bed Dr. Wilfred had really been trying to find wire cutters or a hacksaw…?

She got up and checked once again that her veranda window was now closed and bolted.