Skios

19

On the pergolas in the shade garden, the plumbago was piled as high and blue as the sky above it. Nikki looked up at it and felt as serenely happy as the blossom. There were forty different things she should have been doing. But she wasn’t doing any of them. She was strolling through the shade garden with Dr. Wilfred.

“This is the important meeting I’ve got to go to, is it?” said Dr. Wilfred.

“It is important,” she said. “We’ve got to discuss your schedule.”

She couldn’t get over the sheer lightness with which he wore his immense distinction. You would never have guessed from meeting him how much he knew and how much he had done. He was totally unlike any other guest of honor they had ever had. And everyone plainly loved him. Of course. How could they not? From the first moment she had set eyes on him at the airport she had known they would. And it was she who had suggested inviting him. He was her discovery.

She found herself telling him about her childhood. She had always wanted to be an artist, she said — she had had such intense feelings stirring in her when she was sixteen, and the longing to express them had welled up like the sap in spring pouring upwards through the plumbago. Somehow, though, she found herself doing a degree in arts administration instead. Then gradually, step by step, by way of jobs in provincial art galleries and touring theater companies, she had made her way to where she was now.

“Actually,” she said, “what I’m doing is not totally dissimilar to your job. I know you’re dealing with billions of pounds, and decisions that are going to affect the whole future of the world. Whereas I’ve only got the odd few million dollars to play with each year for this place. But I have to say who gets it and who doesn’t! I’m the one who has to provide some structure! Scientific research is probably a bit like the arts, isn’t it? I mean … messy. You don’t really know what’s going to happen until it’s happened.”

“True,” said Dr. Wilfred. “Well, I certainly don’t. Not a clue.”

“It’s like kids messing around in the sandpit. Great fun for the kids. Very educational. But someone’s got to look after the sandpit. Stop the cat from using it as cat litter, and the children from walking it into the house. Wash the sand out of their hair and clean it out of their noses. Yes?”

“Science and scientists! A total mystery to me!”

“Arts and artists are the same. Some of the writers we’ve had here!”

“I can imagine.”

She brushed her hand through the flowers in the herbaceous border. A shower of sparkling drops still hanging on leaves and petals from the overnight sprinklers came cascading down. “Orodigia,” he told her. “Flowering pangloss. Jacantha. Smithia. Peloponnesian daisies.”

“My God, you’re a gardener as well as everything else?”

“Of course not. I’m making it up as I go along. Like all the rest of it.”

They walked on in silence for a while.

“Anyway,” she said, “I’ve got plans for the future. I can’t do much at the moment. Christian’s still in charge. The director. You haven’t met him. No one ever sees him. That’s the way he exercises his power — by being invisible, like God, and doing nothing. Some people don’t even believe he exists. I have a feeling he won’t be here for much longer, though. I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but I think you may be the final nail I’m hammering into his coffin.”

She broke off a low-hanging spray of violet blossom.

“Jacantha?” she said.

“If you like.”

She put the spray in the buttonhole of his shirt.

“Now, your schedule. This morning it’s simply more mingle, mingle, if you can bear it. Yes? Then at midday, you’ll remember, you’re having drinks with Mrs. Fred Toppler. Lunch with the other guests. After lunch…”

“A little siesta? Check that it really is right-hand inside?”

“I shall be at the airport, meeting Mr. Luft.”

“Mr. Luft?”

“Wellesley Luft! For your big interview! It’s in your program!”

“Of course.”

“Then tomorrow you’re on the ten-forty-five flight back to London. After which, I suppose, we’ll never see each other again.”

“But first a good night’s rest.”

“First, the lecture.”

“Oh, yes. The lecture.”

* * *

One after another, all over the newly carpeted piazza, white tablecloths flew up into the sunlit air, spread their wings, and settled on the battered caterer’s tables like huge birds landing. The agency waiters and waitresses who had come off the overnight ferry from Athens pounced on them and wrestled them down. The whole square was turning into an open-air banqueting hall in front of Dr. Wilfred’s eyes.

“This is the agora,” Nikki told him. “The old marketplace. You’ll be sitting exactly where we’re standing, at the same table as Mrs. Toppler and Mr. Papadopoulou and their guests. There’s quite a number of Mr. Papadopoulou’s business associates coming.

“It will be getting dark as we eat. By the end of dinner the only light will be from the candles on the tables.

“And then those spotlights up there will come on, and Mrs. Toppler will stand up and introduce you. I hope I’ve got everything right in her speech. She may read it out wrong, of course, because she doesn’t like to wear her glasses.

“Then the maître d’ will move the lectern and the microphones, and put them here, in front of you.”

He stood in front of the still imaginary microphones and lectern, almost too dazzled by the imaginary spotlights to see the imaginary candlelit faces gazing up at him from the imaginary darkness. He was in no hurry. He waited while the imaginary audience settled. And then …

“And then,” said Nikki. “Scientometrics!”

“Scientometrics? What are scientometrics?”

“What you’re talking about! Isn’t it? That’s what we’ve announced! ‘Innovation and Governance: The Promise of Scientometrics.’ You don’t want to change it, do you?”

“No, no. Scientometrics. Wonderful.”

“I can’t wait to hear what you’re going to say!” said Nikki.

“Nor can I,” said Dr. Norman Wilfred.

* * *

“And then at last,” said Dr. Norman Wilfred, “after the lecture…”

They had left the agora and reached a belvedere overlooking the sea. He leaned slowly towards her, smiling his lopsided smile. She put her finger on his nose and pushed him gently away.

“Some of your audience arriving,” she said. She nodded at the waterfront below them.

A vessel that looked like a miniature cruise liner was backing towards its moorings. On the stern, in huge chromium letters clearly legible even from where they were standing: RUSALKA, SEVASTOPOL.

“Oleg Skorbatov,” said Nikki. “You’ve read about him in the papers. Everything you’ve read is true. Rich and ruthless. What Mr. Papadopoulou is to Athens, Mr. Skorbatov is to Moscow. A lot more yachts still to come. From Sicily, from Egypt, from Lebanon. All the places that Mr. Papadopoulou does business with. Also helicopters at the helipad down there behind the winter garden. Executive jets at the airport. And me, rushing back and forth all day from waterfront to airport, from airport to helipad. All so that people can hear you speak!”

“I’ll try to think of something good.”

She laughed. “I love your casualness about it all.”

“What I love is the way you take it all so seriously.” He leaned towards her again.

“Back to work,” she said. “Go and be lionized … Excuse me one moment.”

Her phone was ringing. “Thank God,” she told it. “I’ve been trying and trying to get you! Are you all right…? You’re lying where…? Oh, in the sun. I see. So what’s happened to this rapist person…?”

She gazed at Oliver as she listened, and moved her head from side to side a little to indicate to him a detached and mocking attitude to what she was hearing. He smiled back at her, and for no reason at all suddenly remembered Georgie.

He was suddenly engulfed in a wave of panic. When had she said she was arriving? Wasn’t it tomorrow? But that was yesterday. Tomorrow today was today.

“Me?” said Nikki into the phone. “No. Not yet … I know, but things got in a bit of a tangle…”

She looked straight at Oliver as she spoke. She laughed. “Yes, he is … Yes, more than ever. Never mind about me, though. Where exactly are you?”

She waited for a moment. The phone at the other end had obviously gone dead. She put her own back in her pocket and laughed. “Old schoolfriend of mine,” she said. “She’s quite sweet, and I can’t help being rather fond of her. But she is a total idiot. She spends her entire life getting herself into the most ridiculous situations.”

“A rapist, though?”

“Yes, well. My idiot friend has gone off God knows where on some wild fling with some other idiot she’s only just met. The other idiot doesn’t turn up, and then suddenly in the middle of the night he does, and he gets into bed with her, only it’s not her idiot, it’s some other idiot. And now this other idiot, who’s not her idiot, has vanished again. I think. Only of course her phone keeps going dead, probably because it hasn’t ever occurred to her to plug it in and charge it, and I still haven’t heard the end of the story.”

Oliver’s moment of panic had passed. He might well have not have listened to her message yesterday, he realized. He might have listened to it only today. He would listen to it today, as soon as he got back to his room, where he had left his phone. If he listened to it today then tomorrow would still be tomorrow.