Skios

33

Georgie tried to go on sunbathing. But the sun was getting low in the sky, and she felt a bit guilty that her nakedness had obviously upset the cleaning person. She pulled the towel around her and went back to the house to put some clothes on. Just as she reached the door, though, it opened, and her clothes came out. They were in her open suitcase, which was being carried by the cleaning person.

“Oh, thank you!” said Georgie. “How sweet of you! And you’ve even folded everything up and put it away for me!”

The cleaning person said nothing, and the clothes marched straight past Georgie without stopping. She turned and watched, still holding the towel around her. The cleaning person was taking the clothes back to the lounger for her to get dressed. No, to the pool … And was tipping them in … was shaking the bag over the water to make sure she had got every last item out of it … was throwing the bag itself into the pool … was wiping her hands on a towel … was turning back to confront Georgie …

For a moment they stood facing each other, both too surprised to move — Georgie by the fate of her clothes, the cleaning person by Georgie’s renewed and even more brazen effrontery, because, as the clothes went into the pool, she had stretched out her hands in a remote and ineffectual gesture of dissuasion, which had let the towel she had been holding around her fall to the ground. The standoff lasted only a moment. When Georgie took in the expression on the cleaning person’s face she saw that the situation had somehow got beyond discussion or explanation, and that the only possible action was to get out of her way as fast as possible. She turned and fled. Back to the house, grabbing the fallen heap of mosquito netting on the way and dragging it round herself, the cleaning person right behind, shouting something in what was presumably Greek, was certainly abusive, and was almost certainly obscene.

Georgie slammed the garden door in the cleaning person’s face, which delayed her for a moment, and ran into the bedroom, eager to find some more suitable and dignified covering to replace the mosquito netting. Her clothes had gone, though. Of course. Every last stitch of them. She just had time to run into the bathroom and slam the bolt home as the cleaning person ran into the bedroom.

“Open the door, you filthy little slut!” said the cleaning person. “Or I’ll kick it in!”

Georgie sat down on the lavatory seat, where she had sat for so long during the previous night, and pulled the mosquito netting round her. She was shivering and her hands were shaking. Life seemed to be going round in circles.

* * *

Oliver stood in the middle of the roadway, still trying to adjust his plans to the changing situation. So, there were two of them at the villa now. Georgie was no longer alone to face the rapist outside the bathroom door. She had someone to protect her. She had Annuka. Against Annuka even the most violent attacker was unlikely to prevail.

It was one thing to rush to save Georgie if she was on her own. He hadn’t hesitated. He had been ready to sacrifice everything. But if she already had someone to protect her … And if that someone was Annuka …

Then again, if Georgie and Annuka were at the villa together there would be other issues to be settled. But it seemed to him that they would be the sort of issues that his presence could only exacerbate. It might be better to let the two of them sort things out between them.

“So,” said Spiros, “we go on?”

Oliver shook his head. “Airport,” he said.

* * *

There was suddenly silence in the bathroom, and the door stopped shuddering so alarmingly in its frame. The house was solidly built, and the door had evidently frustrated the cleaning person’s efforts to kick it in. Georgie held her breath, waiting to hear what the woman would do next, and perhaps also so as to make her own existence loom less objectionably large to her. Even through the thickness of the door she could hear her breathing hard enough for both of them.

“Right, then,” shouted the woman finally. “I’m going to phone the police! I’m going to have you arrested!”

Silence. She had evidently gone off to fetch her phone. Her objections to nudity, even practiced by her employer’s guests in the privacy of their own garden, were astonishingly violent. Perhaps she had weird religious convictions of some sort. Unless she had bristled at being called the cleaning person. She looked Greek, but she sounded English. Maybe you had to call local English employees something different. Cleaning supervisors. Directors of leisure services.

Footsteps coming back, and another sudden volley of blows on the door.

“My phone!” the cleaning whatever-she-was was screaming. “Give me my phone! You’ve got my phone in there!”

Georgie invisibly but involuntarily shook her head. She hadn’t got anything in here! The woman had cleared out even the great muddle of creams and lotions that Georgie had left around the washbasin. They were all in the pool.

Oh, no. Lying where the creams and lotions had been was, yes, a phone.

Georgie picked it up. Her first thought was simply to unbolt the door and hand it to the woman. But then she hesitated. Getting her phone back might still not be enough to appease her. Unbolting the door might create more problems than it solved. Anyway, if the woman was really going to phone the police …

Also … Yes, why not? Now she had a phone she could phone someone herself. Nikki — yes! But without her own phone she didn’t know the number. Oliver, then? She pressed the button, then realized that she had no idea of Oliver’s number, either.

But there, unbelievably, was his name, on the screen of the cleaning woman’s phone, waiting for her. She touched the number.

Even in Greece people had heard of Oliver Fox.

* * *

The airport, yes. Because Oliver could see that the whole enterprise was over. It was doomed. It had seemed to be working — it might even have gone on working — but fate had caught up with him. He might have guessed that Annuka would change her mind, since she’d done it three times before. Three times she had thrown him out, and three times she had phoned him with much the same kind of invitation to reopen negotiations as she had just issued.

Annuka Vos. The very name sounded like the dull tolling of some great bell. The leitmotif of heavy destiny. To find it announcing itself on the same island as he happened to be cast a gray pall over even the most hopeful of initiatives. He had only to think of her and he could feel his foot insecure on the high wire he was treading, his balance uncertain.

He had second thoughts for a moment, as Spiros turned the taxi round and drove down the mountain again. The sound of Annuka’s name was blotted out by the applause of all those people gazing up him from the dinner tables as he began his great lecture on whatever it was that his great lecture was about. And then, with the applause still in his ears, by the look in Nikki’s clear blue eyes, and the freshness of the two crisp and trusting syllables in her name.

“Or rather…” he said to Spiros.

“No?” said Spiros. “Not airport?”

But then his phone rang, and there it was on the screen again: “Annuka Vos, mobile.” He couldn’t face listening to any more of her raging. He wiped the name away with the touch of a button, but a few seconds later it reappeared. This time he put the phone back in his pocket and left the name to bleat on unanswered. He could see what would happen. She would keep phoning. She would find out where he was and pursue him. She would have joined forces with Georgie by this time, their mutual antipathy overtaken by their mutual grievance against him. They would pursue him together — hunt him down like two of the three furies. Into the lecture. Out of the lecture and into Nikki’s room. And there they would explain their joint grievance to her and their joint grievance would become a triple grievance. They would recruit her to their cause. They would become all three of the furies. He was not Dr. Norman Wilfred. He was Oliver Fox, and he was beaten.

Spiros was still looking at him inquiringly in the rearview mirror.

“Airport,” said Oliver.