Skios

4

The ping of the seatbelt sign coming on and the feel of the empty champagne glass being taken out of his hand woke Dr. Wilfred from the doze he didn’t realize that he’d fallen into. He looked out of the window. There was a scattering of small rocky islands in the sea below, and then the coastline of another, with buildings, streets, and the first lights coming on here and there as the day faded. Skios.

For no identifiable reason his spirits rose. This time it would be different. New dishes, new wines, new weather. Views over the sea not quite like the views he had seen before, fellow guests not quite like any other fellow guests. A woman would come up to him after his lecture. Lightly tanned, slim, smiling. An American, from a rather well-known university. With tenure already. No, without tenure yet — someone who would be prepared, if she met the right companion, to reshape her life, to change universities and continents. It was seven years now since he had last been in that kind of relationship.

“Dr. Wilfred,” she would say. He would smile and incline his head. “I found your lecture fascinating. It raises so many issues that I’d love to pursue with you. I don’t know whether you have a moment…?”

It might happen even sooner. The woman who would be looking after him, and who would be meeting him just the other side of customs and immigration. “Dr. Wilfred? We’re all so excited!” Vicki had exchanged many e-mails and phone calls with her already. And she was professionally and personally committed to seeing that he had a good time. She would be lightly tanned. Discreetly blond, perhaps. In her thirties …

He checked the right-hand inside pocket of his linen jacket. Passport, credit cards. He checked the left-hand pocket. Phone, three condoms.

You never knew. All you knew was that it was either stored in the long causal chain of the universe or it wasn’t. If it was going to happen, it was going to happen.

* * *

Nikki tapped on the sliding glass window of the lodge. Elli waved at her. She was busy smiling her wonderful dark Greek smile into her headset, which seemed far too skimpy to accommodate it. Nikki knew what she was saying, in English smoothed and streamlined by so many repetitions over the years: “Fred Toppler Foundation. How my dreck your call?” She was the voice with which the foundation spoke to the outside world, the finger that pressed the buzzer to open and close the barrier keeping the confusion and shabbiness of that world at bay, the hand that sorted the incoming mail. She also looked after all the keys. Which was why Nikki was waiting.

Now Elli was frowning her wonderful dark Greek frown. The unseen caller’s answer to her perfectly formed English question was evidently also in English, which she couldn’t always understand.

Nikki waited. She had time in hand. Of course — she always had, in spite of having so much to do. She thought another of her cool thoughts. This particular cool thought was a recurring one: that quite shortly now the director would be out of Empedocles and on a plane back to his native Wuppertal. She knew it from the way Mrs. Toppler pronounced his name these days.

So the post of director would be vacant. The appointment would have to go before the board of trustees, of course, but what could the board of trustees do except what the money told them to? The money was Mrs. Fred Toppler. And, of course, her friend Mr. Vassilis Papadopoulou, who had been such a patron and benefactor of the foundation. In Athens Mr. Papadopoulou made ministers and broke them. No one in Greece who had any hopes of remaining alive and well would want to put obstacles in the way of a candidate supported by Papadopoulou. And there was a candidate to hand whom he might just possibly favor. Someone who over the past five years had gradually made herself indispensable to both Mrs. Toppler and Mr. Papadopoulou. “Oh, that Nikki!” as Mrs. Toppler so often had cause to say. “Whatever should we do without her?”

And now this year she had organized the entire House Party. She had chosen the Fred Toppler lecturer. Mr. Papadopoulou would be present at the lecture himself, and he had invited a number of his business associates. Last year Mr. Papadopoulou and several of his guests had fallen asleep in the lecture. If this year they managed to remain awake …

Well, you never knew in life. You never knew.

Elli slid back the glass and held out a car key.

“Nikki, you should be late! The plane comes in half an hour!”

“It’s ten minutes behind time. I checked.”

“Oh, yes, you check,” said Elli. “Of course.”

“Everything,” said Nikki, smiling her nice open smile. “Always.”

She walked unhurriedly towards the brilliant wall of bougainvillea that concealed the car park, still thinking her cool thought.

Elli watched her go, thinking a cool thought of her own: if Nikki becomes director, Mrs. Fred Toppler will be looking for a new PA …