She cleared away the mess, found rubber gloves and kitchen spray, and returned the worktop to the shining dark gleam that it would have had when Petrus and Persephone left it. This was another thing that people failed to understand about her. At the heart of her darkness was a simple housewife, who loved nothing better than getting the rubber gloves on and making everything unspoiled and new.
Again she thought she heard a voice. She stopped cleaning to listen. Nothing. But her heart had leapt up for a moment, she realized, and immediately her irritation returned. She should never have come. She had threatened not to often enough. She should have stuck to it.
She went into the bedroom. Bed unmade, of course, and his suitcase open on the floor, spilling out a muddle of T-shirts and chinos. She gave a little hiss of disapproval, possibly Brazilian in origin, possibly Persian, that she knew would have particularly irritated him, if only he had been here to be irritated. She picked up a handful of the T-shirts and sniffed them to see if they were clean. They smelled as if they had been washed, but not by her. And they certainly hadn’t been ironed, either by her or by anyone else.
In the cupboard in the hall she found an iron and ironing board, and set to work.
* * *
“I’ve put your suitcase on the front seat,” said Georgie, “so you can get at some dry clothes as you go along.”
Dr. Wilfred hesitated. “Well,” he said. “Anyway.”
“Off you go, then.”
“Yes … I’d just like to say … Well … Thank you for everything.”
“What — the bread and peas?”
“Everything.” He wanted to mention in particular the two moles on her shoulder blade, but didn’t quite have the nerve.
“So,” she said. “You’ve had a nice little rest. You’re not too burnt. We got your clothes washed and your suitcase back. Haven’t left anything behind? Passport? Credit cards? Phone? The lecture! You’ve got the lecture?”
He unzipped the flight bag and showed her. She held the door of the taxi open for him.
“Or I could wait for a bit,” said Wilfred. “Until Oliver gets here.”
“Wilfred!” She pointed to the lecture.
“Yes…” He took it out of the flight bag and looked at the first page. “It is perhaps particularly appropriate to find myself giving this address here, in the vibrant and bustling city of Kuala Lumpur.” No, that was deleted. “… in the great open spaces of Western Australia…”
He looked at her. “You really wouldn’t like to come and hear it?”
“No, but you really want to go and give it!”
Did he? He heard the familiar voice issuing from some dull inaccessible place a couple of feet above the lectern. He saw the faces raised expectantly towards him. Most particularly the one directly in his eyeline in the middle of the front row that was beginning to close its eyes and sink helplessly into sleep. He saw the woman halfway along Row E who was struggling to get over people’s feet and out, for reasons that everyone in the room was now trying to guess at. He heard the man who made strange little noises, and the woman with the whistling hearing-aid, and the man who laughed at every mention of hunger and disease. He saw the questioners at the end rising to ask him about the existence of God and the moral responsibility of scientists. He heard the never quite enthusiastic enough applause, and the never quite convincing enough “Thank you for that stimulating talk.”
Then he thought about roaming the hillsides for game and fish, for fruit and olives. He thought about Georgie being the only girl in the world and him the only boy.
“I don’t, actually,” he said. “I don’t want to give it. I’d like to make a new start in life.”
“Off you go,” she said, and pushed him towards the taxi. He bent down to get in, then suddenly straightened up at the last moment and gave her a kiss, just at the same moment as she suddenly bent down and gave him one, so that their foreheads collided.
“I bet you saw that coming, too,” she said, rubbing her head.
* * *
Five assorted T-shirts lay neatly folded on the table by the ironing board. Annuka picked the stack up and felt it against her cheek. They were smooth, they were warm. They felt right. They still smelled alien, though; where had he got them washed? She couldn’t recall any of the logos on them, now she came to look at them; where had he acquired them?
She held up the two pairs of chinos. She was somehow softened to see that his legs were shorter than she had remembered.
Yes, she thought, as she ironed the chinos, however had she got involved with him? She recalled a party. At Vaclav and Bianchetta’s. A lot of noise. Impossible to hear what anyone was saying. Then out of the noise and the darkness, this lopsided smile had appeared, and handfuls of blond hair being brushed out of soft brown eyes. She had somehow got the impression as they talked that he was writing a history of sixteenth-century Tibet.
And he had been so modest about it.
* * *
Georgie stretched herself out on the lounger again. The sun was beginning to decline, but at least she didn’t have to cover anything up now.
She had the first premonitions of hunger for the next meal. She should have gone with Wilfred, she realized, at least as far as the nearest supermarket. Or asked him to buy something on his way and bring it back. She knew with a sudden absolute certainty that Oliver wasn’t going to come. What on earth was she going to do?
She suddenly thought she could hear something inside the villa. Footsteps … No. Nothing. Or…? No.
She felt the goose pimples spreading over her skin, even in the heat and light of day. The night was coming. And she was going to have to spend it here alone.
31
Wilfred lay facedown on the soft grass, watching his hand trailing in the stream in front of him. His fingers were softly undulating in time with the water weed around them. Yes, and there was the trout, flicking lazily through the weeds. He watched it edge nearer and nearer. He could feel its cold scales on his quietly tickling fingers. And then, whoosh! It was in his fist! In the air above his head! In the keep-bag he had improvised out of creeper! In the hot ashes of the oven! On the table under the stars! On the fork he was lifting up to her smiling lips …
“So,” said Stavros, nodding at the suitcase beside him, as the taxi bounced along down the unmade-up mountain road, “airport?”
Georgie’s smiling eyes were shining in the candlelight. She moved closer and closer to him. The trout had vanished from the picture. “Yes?” she whispered.
“Yes,” said Wilfred. “Yes. Yes!”
“Not a problem,” said Stavros.
Not a problem. Wilfred slowly emerged into the light of day. Stavros. Of course. Taxi. And he himself was not Wilfred, sharing home-caught trout under the stars with Georgie, but Dr. Wilfred, on his way to give the Fred Toppler Lecture at the Fred Toppler Foundation.
They bounced on down the hillside. He was flung sideways by the hairpin bends, and up against the roof by the potholes; he had presumably been flung around in much the same way ever since they had left the villa, but had been too involved with the trout to notice. Now that he was conscious of his surroundings, though, he realized that in the air-conditioned chill of the taxi his wet clothes were hanging noticeably dank upon him.
He dragged his suitcase over from the front seat. There was something subtly alien about it. And even before he had lifted the flap of the luggage tag to check he knew with a sudden dull certainty what it would say. It wouldn’t be Dr. Norman Wilfred. It would be exactly what it had been before.