Skios

13

Perhaps there was more to Oliver than she had supposed, thought Georgie, as she opened the front door of the villa and the lights revealed the cavern of relaxed wealth within. He certainly seemed to have rich friends.

“Oliver!” she called softly. There was no response but the ghostly murmur of the air-conditioning. And something else … Some elusive sense of a human presence. A faint sound, perhaps, that merged with the air conditioner.

She pulled her suitcase inside and closed the door. After all her adventures she had finally arrived.

She opened a door at random. “Oliver?” But the sound in here was the purring of a vast steel refrigerator. Silhouetted against a discreet glow of light on the draining board sat the remains of a pizza, a single wineglass, and a three-quarters-empty bottle of wine.

She tried another door, and there in the darkness beyond was the sound. It was breathing. The deep, rough breathing of a man asleep, coming from behind the mosquito net around a wide bed. She had entered a fairy story, though it was the wrong way round from usual; she was the princess awakening the enchanted prince from his hundred-year-long sleep. “Oliver!” she whispered. The sleeping prince snorted and turned away. The rough breathing became snoring. She felt a moment of dismay. She somehow hadn’t foreseen that the soft words issuing from that gently rueful face when it was awake might become coarse grunts when it was asleep. Her heart sank as she thought of all the other disconcerting little things she was going to find out about him in the next few days. “Oliver!” she said, rather more sharply.

On he snored behind the white gauze. By the pale shine from the doorway she opened her suitcase and took out her washbag. She fell over his shoes as she felt around for the bathroom, and still he didn’t wake. The bathroom was all soft lighting and soft towels. She was tempted to have a bath, but settled for cleaning her teeth very carefully, and rubbing various creams into her face. She inspected herself in the mirror. Yes, only a few more years and she wouldn’t be doing silly things like this any longer. She would have settled down without any effort on her own part.

She went back into the bedroom. The snoring had become more profound. She closed the door. Complete darkness. She thought for a moment. Snoring or no snoring, this was what she had come all this way for. This was why she had made so many arrangements and told so many lies. She got undressed, and then stood for a moment shivering, though whether from anticipation or simply the chill of the air-conditioning she didn’t know.

Carefully she found her way through the mosquito netting. Carefully she drew it closed behind her.

He was as naked as she was, she discovered as she stretched herself out behind him. His back was a surprise — it was covered in coarse hair. So was his chest, as she put her arm round him. She slid her hand down through the thickets. He was much fatter than she would have guessed; a rounded droop of flesh rested sideways on the sheets like the hang of a heavy swagged curtain. She reached an even denser thicket, and there, hidden in the midst of it, a creature as small and soft as a piglet. All the tender excitement that had been gathering inside her over the past two weeks stirred again.

So did the piglet. So, at last, did the great father pig in whose fur it was nestling.

* * *

Dr. Wilfred slowly surfaced from sleep to discover himself in a most delightful world, though it took him a few moments to realize exactly what the delightfulness of it was. Sometimes before on his travels he had found himself involved in a rather agreeable interlude of some sort. Someone would have approached him after his lecture. Something she hadn’t quite understood, something she wanted to discuss further. A drink or two. Perhaps some exchange of revelations about tastes and feelings … backgrounds and hometowns … aspirations and disappointments … Then usually a certain awkwardness over undressing … But never before had he woken up to find himself in the midst of things, with all the tedious preliminaries short-circuited. The sumptuousness of the Fred Toppler Foundation’s guest quarters had already justified its good name in the profession, but never would he have guessed that it also provided amenities like this. His misfortunes with his luggage and the offhandedness of his reception at the airport had been most handsomely made up for.

The sweet unknown owner of that sweetly importunate hand pressed herself against his back and kissed his ear. “You bad boy,” she whispered. “Don’t you ever listen to your messages?”

Dr. Wilfred found the soft whisper as delightful as everything else, but the sense of the words hard to construe. “What messages?” he said.

The magical hand stopped moving. For a moment it remained motionless. Then the long softness pressing against his back abruptly removed itself, the bed bounced violently, and there was the sound of the mosquito netting ripping as a body rocketed through it and away into the darkness.

He was too stunned to understand, then too blinded to see as a light came on, then too deafened to think as the room filled with screaming. It seemed to be coming, he slowly made out through the pink dazzle in his eyes, from somewhere in the midst of a scrabble of torn mosquito netting pressed back against the wall near the light switch.

He struggled to sit up, so as to think more clearly. At once the bundle of mosquito netting screamed louder than ever, picked up various pieces of clothing scattered around the floor, and ran into the bathroom. There was the sound of a bolt being slammed home.

He remembered that he had uttered two words, but not, in his state of shock, what they were. What could they possibly have been? Never, surely, in the history of traveling lecturers had two words produced such an abrupt and total reversal of fortune.