Yes. “Annuka Vos.”
Of course. Naturally. They had sent the same bag. The wrong bag. The transvestite’s bag.
And all at once he was hit by a bolt of black lightning. Every single thing had gone wrong since he had arrived on this horrible island. He was Dr. Norman Wilfred, for God’s sake! Not a helpless victim of forces beyond his control, but a rational human being in a rational world! He was used to something better than this! And he had been mocked and humiliated! Led around like a bear on a rope by idiocy and incompetence, by chance and misunderstanding, by coincidence and two moles on a shoulder blade!
The suitcase sat there beside him, the visible embodiment of all his frustrations. He opened the window and heaved it out. It hit an outcrop of rock in the track with a satisfying crunch, rolled over and over in the wake of the taxi, burst open, and scattered a long trail of clothes in the dust.
The taxi stopped. Stavros turned and looked out of the back window, and then at Dr. Wilfred. His mouth was slightly open. The carapace of apparent indifference that taxi drivers develop to the waywardness of their customers was visibly dented.
“Not mine,” said Dr. Wilfred.
* * *
Annuka took the T-shirts and chinos she had ironed back to the bedroom, hung the chinos in the wardrobe, and laid the T-shirts away in the chest of drawers. There seemed to be no tissue paper to fold in with them, but perhaps it didn’t matter too much. It was only for a week.
She turned back to the still hopeless muddle of clothing on the floor. Men! She picked up a small tangerine-colored garment. Underwear. Tangerine-colored underwear. Also lime-green. Sky-blue ones. Black underwear so scanty that they were scarcely underwear at all. She looked at it all in surprise. None of the underwear that Oliver had left scattered around her floor had ever been anything like this. He had obviously been running a little wild since she last put him out.
She was about to iron them, but somehow the iron hung in the air above them. Tangerine underwear, lime-green and sky-blue underwear, black underwear so scanty that they were scarcely underwear at all — they weren’t things that she wanted to put an iron to. If they had belonged to her, or to some other woman, it would have been a different matter. But to a man …
She folded them all thoughtfully, and put them away unironed.
* * *
Stavros had got out of the taxi and walked back to the long slew of clothing that stretched away up the track from the eviscerated suitcase. Dr. Wilfred could see no reason to accompany him. He looked at his watch. They should be getting on. The adrenaline began to drain out of his bloodstream. What was Stavros up to? What business was it of his what his customers chose to throw out of the window?
He turned round in spite of himself and looked. Stavros was picking up random items of clothing and letting them fall again. In the sunlight their colors appeared brighter than they had at the airport. Now he was holding up what seemed to be a pair of high-heeled silver diamanté shoes.
Under the men’s clothing that he had seen at the airport a layer of women’s clothing must have been concealed. So was Ms. Vos a double agent? A trans-transvestite? A woman dressed as a man dressed as a woman?
Stavros tossed the shoes down on the track with the rest of the clothes, walked slowly back, and got into the taxi again. His face was expressionless.
* * *
Annuka picked up the next heap of clothing on the floor to sort out. It wasn’t clothing, though. It was gauze netting. Yards and yards of torn gauze netting.
Heap after heap of it she picked up. She shifted the heaps from hand to hand, gazing at them in bafflement. Why would Oliver pack half a suitcaseful of torn gauze netting to go on holiday? Or even half a suitcaseful of untorn gauze netting, and then tear it?
With a slowly dawning dismay, the truth came to her. It was a bridal veil.
She sat down on the bed, as if the floor beneath her feet had become all at once uncertain. The Oliver she had known for seven long and difficult months had sprung surprises enough on her. But this was something else again. What she now had to envisage was an Oliver with a secret penchant for dressing up in — yes, it was obvious, now she had found the veil — women’s underwear and see-through bridal outfits. Which he then rent, perhaps in some sickening symbolic representation of defloration.
She looked round the room for any further evidence of ritual perversion. A whip. A crucifix.
From a rail above the far side of the bed hung more swathes of gauze netting, this time still intact. From the hooks on this side hung torn shreds and scraps of the same stuff.
Oh, yes. Mosquito netting.
Her outrage slowly began to subside. He had simply had a bad night. Had thrashed about in his sleep, or flailed wildly against a plague of invading mosquitoes.
As her outrage subsided her irritation returned. She angrily beat the undersheet smooth, thrashed the pillows against each other, and snatched up the duvet from where it was nervously skulking on the floor. How characteristic of him to offer her such a thrilling new cause for dissatisfaction, and then to snatch it away again.
Though there was still the underwear. Her outrage returned.
32
As Spiros swung the taxi at reckless speed, hairpin by hairpin and pothole by pothole, up the mountainside, Oliver was flung back and forth and up and down like a shirt in a washing machine. He was too busy thinking about the forthcoming encounter to notice, though. If the potential rapist was still camped outside the bathroom door he was going to have to confront him. He didn’t fancy his chances of doing anything too egregiously brave; he was being quite brave enough by simply showing up. Calming words seemed a more plausible option. “Perhaps we could sit down and talk about this over a drink.” It might help if he was a psychiatrist. He had done very well as whatever Dr. Norman Wilfred was. There was no reason why he shouldn’t go on to become some sort of mental health professional.
And if the man had already broken down the bathroom door …
“Still faster, if you possibly can,” he said to Spiros. “Life and death.”
And then, in either case, there was the question of the explanation he would have to give Georgie as to why he hadn’t got her messages earlier. This needed a bit of work. Phone out of range, of course. Battery run down. But then how had he eventually managed to get the messages? Moved within range. Oh, sure. Recharged the battery. It was all a bit too plausible. In his experience an explanation really needed to have a touch of the outlandish, even the impossible, if anyone was going to believe it. Phone snatched by wild goat. Stolen by Albanian bandits. Yes, this might be one of those rare occasions when it was necessary to assist fairly actively in the encouragement of misunderstanding.
It was so unfair, though. Whatever explanation he came up with, it would be ungentlemanly to reveal what this dash to her rescue was costing him — the once-in-a-lifetime chance of delivering a learned lecture on a subject that sounded as if it might be important, and to do it before an audience consisting of some of the richest and most influential people in the world. Still less, of course, could he tell her that it meant giving up his one hope of a night with Nikki. Unless he could think of some good reason why he had to return to the foundation. Left his passport behind, perhaps. He felt his pockets. Yes! It was actually true! He had left his passport behind!
There was another taxi coming down the mountainside towards them. As it drew level both drivers stopped, wound down their windows, and exchanged a few words in Greek.