“Villa!” he said.
The driver put the gear back into neutral. Oliver saw that he was looking at him in the rearview mirror. He had a wart like a bluebottle on the end of his nose. He seemed to be waiting for something. Of course. He was waiting to know which villa, and where it was.
Oliver quickly reviewed the arrangements of the last few days, before he had become Dr. Norman Wilfred. Got it! Of course! “It’s in my suitcase!” he said.
Still the taxi remained motionless. Still the driver watched him in the rearview mirror.
“So, yes, where’s my suitcase?” said Oliver. “In my room! No!”
The suitcase in his room was Dr. Wilfred’s. He was not Dr. Wilfred — he was Oliver Fox. And Oliver Fox’s suitcase was presumably still at the, yes—“Airport!”
“Airport?” said the driver. “No problem.” He put the taxi into gear.
“No!” said Oliver. “Not in my suitcase!”
The driver put the gear back into neutral.
“They never gave me an address!” said Oliver. So how had he been going to get to the villa? “In a taxi! I was going in a taxi! There was going to be a taxi!”
The driver thought. Then he raised his eyebrows speculatively. “Fox Oliver?” he inquired.
“Phoksoliva?” said Oliver. “Oh! Yes! Right! Fox Oliver! And fast, fast, fast!”
“No problem,” said Spiros, as he put the taxi into gear.
* * *
“You bastard!” cried Georgie, half in jest and half not, as she came running out of the front gate, then stopped. The taxi was backing and filling as it turned to go. But where was Oliver?
She detached one of the arms holding up her towel and signaled to the taxi. “Wait! Stop!” she shouted.
The driver wound down his window. She knew him — it was Spiros. “OK?” he said. “No problems? Nice holiday?”
“Fine,” she said. “But, Spiros—”
“Stavros,” he replied.
“Stavros. Where is he?”
“Where is he? There he is.”
He pointed. There was a suitcase standing beside the gate.
“Suitcase?” she said.
“OK?” The taxi began to move off.
“Wait! Wait! The person! The person with the suitcase!”
Stavros pointed at the villa. And suddenly she realized. What he had brought wasn’t Oliver, it was Wilfred’s missing suitcase.
“Oh,” she said.
“No?” said Stavros.
“Yes. Fine. Thank you.”
“Not a problem.”
The taxi began to move off again.
“Wait,” she said.
He waited. She lifted the suitcase back into the taxi.
“No?” said Stavros. “Don’t want?”
“Of course he wants it,” said Georgie. “But he’s coming with you.”
* * *
Slowly Wilfred took his underpants down from the clothesline and put them on in the shelter of the bathrobe. They were still damp. But then so were his spirits. So, obviously, were Georgie’s as she watched him.
“I’m sorry it wasn’t Oliver,” he said.
“You must be pleased to get your bag back, though.”
Was he? He hadn’t really thought about it. His bag had long lost its central place in his picture of the world.
“And to have a taxi. So you’re going to be able to give your wonderful lecture.”
Yes, he was going to be able to give his wonderful lecture. He put his shirt on. It stuck around his armpits and across the back of his neck.
“It’ll dry out as you go along,” she said. “Anyway, you can put some dry things on in the taxi. Now you’ve got your bag back.”
A thought came to him slowly as he forced the buttons back into the damp buttonholes. If no Oliver …
“You wouldn’t like to come with me?” he said. “To the lecture?”
“What, about how it all goes back to some dot in the middle of nowhere ten thousand years ago?” she said, pulling the towel tighter round her. “Thanks most awfully.”
He put his trousers on. They adhered to him in ways that made it quite awkward to walk.
“Thirteen point seven billion years ago,” he said.
30
“Oliver?” said Annuka Vos, putting her head into various rooms of the villa. In her impatience she had left her suitcase where the taxi driver had dumped it, outside the gate. There was no response, though, but the ghostly murmur of the air-conditioning. She had thought for a moment that she could hear his voice somewhere … But no, nothing. He seemed to be out. Out where, doing what? Shopping, swimming? Unlikely. Causing trouble of some sort, more probably. It was entirely characteristic of him not to have answered any of her messages. She wouldn’t have been surprised if he hadn’t even read them. Hadn’t known when she was arriving. Or even that she was arriving at all.
God, she was sick of the whole stupid business!
None of her friends could understand why she put up with him. She couldn’t understand it herself. In fact she hadn’t put up with him. She had thrown him out. Three times. And yet here she was, on one last holiday with him yet again. None of her friends could understand how she had got involved with him in the first place. Everyone knew what Oliver Fox was like! She didn’t have to waste her life on people of that sort. She was dark and plump — with the sort of darkness and plumpness that men want to lose themselves in — and there was something fundamentally mysterious about her. No one knew whether she was Finnish or Brazilian. Some said Persian or Latvian, and she didn’t comment, only smiled her dark smile. She could have had anything she wanted in life — a rich husband, six brilliant children, a career in banking. And what she in fact had was Oliver Fox.
Yes, she was a mystery, was Annuka Vos, and to herself most of all.
Still, the villa was everything she had hoped it would be. As her eyes got used to the cool darkness of the interior she began to make a more leisurely tour of inspection, appreciating each room in turn. This was another thing that people failed to understand about her. Unreadable, un-English, yes, but at the same time simple in her tastes and immediate in her responses. She had a natural aesthetic sense, she was a born homemaker. She loved the dark traditional furniture in the living room. Just the kind of thing she would have expected people like Petrus and Persephone to collect for their holiday home, of course. She loved the earthenware pots and plates thrown by Persephone, the watercolors painted by Petrus, the dolls hand sewn by little Petal.
It was entirely characteristic of her relationship with Oliver, of course, that it was friends of hers who had lent them the villa. She shuddered to think where she and Oliver would have ended up if they had had to rely on his finding somewhere. But then if she hadn’t booked the tickets and made all the arrangements they would never have gone anywhere at all. And if she hadn’t happened to have an income from the Vos family trust, and a flat big enough for both of them, the whole thing would have been over months ago.
Which would have been a thoroughly good thing, of course. Everyone said so. She knew it herself. She had been pretty merciless about throwing him out, after all. You don’t throw someone out four times without demonstrating a pretty cool-headed assessment of their shortcomings.
In the big country kitchen she found a note in Petrus’s handwriting inviting her to help herself to anything she could find. Dear Petrus! Oliver had already helped himself, she saw. There, showing up very distinctly against the shining dark stone worktop, was a characteristic little muddle of used packaging and food scraps— wine bottle left uncorked, the curling remains of a pizza, crumpled wrappings from sliced bread and frozen peas, an empty peanut butter jar. She looked in the refrigerator. Nothing. Of course not. He couldn’t even be bothered to go out and buy a few groceries.