So she didn’t embrace him. She didn’t kick him. She waited while he lifted something off the back seat, slammed the door, and opened the garden gate. He was holding whatever it was in front of him covered in a sheet, like a nurse carrying a bedpan. But already she was getting into the taxi. The driver turned round and gazed at her. She pulled the mosquito netting more closely around her, then realized that there was something reassuringly familiar about the man’s face, or about the wart in the middle of his bald head.
“It’s Spiros again, isn’t it?” she said.
“Stavros,” said Stavros. “Where you go?”
Yes, where she go? She had not the slightest idea. Nor, now she thought about it, how she was going to pay the fare without her handbag.
“Don’t tell me,” said Stavros. “I know.”
“Do you?”
“Of course!” He nodded at her mosquito netting as he started to turn the car round. “Where else in Skios you going tonight in evening dress except only Fred Toppler?”
* * *
Still holding his covered platter of canapés, Dr. Wilfred lifted the wrought-iron knocker on the front door of the villa, and then hesitated. He wasn’t sure, now that he was here, that Georgie would be as pleased to see him as he had assumed. If she opened the door and found him standing on the step she might just possibly jump to the wrong conclusions, and close it again before he could explain.
She would surely be pleased to see the food, however. It might be sensible to make sure that she saw the food before she saw him. He went round to the side of the house, with the idea of showing her the platter through the glass panes of the garden door. This is why he had come, after all, to bring her something to eat. It was the canapés he was thinking about, not her moles or her vertebrae. He was simply going to give her the canapés and leave.
There was no sign of her on the other side of the glass door, though, so he gently pushed it open and listened … She was in the bathroom — he could hear the water running. All right — he would leave the platter on the kitchen table for her to find when she emerged … Though now he was here, he might as well lay the table for her. Only one place, of course … Well, two, just in case she insisted on his having a few of the canapés to keep her company.
He moved around the big kitchen, opening cupboards and drawers. Plates, yes. Crisp white damask napkins. He arranged the canapés as tastefully as he could, and put two more slices of bread in the toaster. He found two silver candlesticks, and two long red candles to go in them, to make her lonely supper seem a little more festive.
He thought of the other dinner that was being eaten even now at the foundation. Of all the idiocies that were being uttered by all the idiots packed in around the overdressed tables, and not heard for the roar of all the other idiocies being uttered by the idiots around them. Of the false Dr. Norman Wilfred watching the courses come and go, feeling his mouth getting drier and drier as the time drew ever closer when he would have to rise and deliver his lecture. And what lecture was he going to deliver? The only lecture that any imaginable Dr. Norman Wilfred might give was here on the table beside the canapés, in the safekeeping of himself, the real Dr. Norman Wilfred, the lucky Dr. Norman Wilfred, the happy Dr. Norman Wilfred, the Dr. Norman Wilfred who had known how to build the great house of his career — and then known the moment to walk out of the front door and abandon it.
He heard the bathroom door open, and then Georgie’s approaching footsteps. His own mouth was a little dry, he realized, even though he didn’t have to deliver a lecture.
She was standing in the doorway, wrapped in a dressing gown. There was a sharp rasp of suddenly indrawn breath.
“Now what’s going on?” she cried.
But her voice had changed, had gone large and dark. He looked at her, suddenly fearful. Yes, her face, too, had changed, like a face in a dream. Everything about her had changed, and changed out of all recognition. It had all gone large and dark.
He drew out a chair from the table and sat down.
Something, in the last twenty-four hours, had gone radically wrong with the world. The Gulf Stream of good fortune that had bathed and warmed his shores from the age of twelve or so had without warning turned aside and left him in an unfamiliar and inhospitable new climate.
44
The passport was lying on the desk where Nikki had left it. She picked it up as if it were infectious. It was as alien as an old love letter from someone who had proved false. She remembered how unsettled she had been by the sight of his unsmiling face in it even before. It had been revealing. When he stopped smiling there was something cold about him. Something cruel — something perhaps even verging on the psychopathic. She found herself turning the pages in spite of her distaste, and looking at the photograph again. Yes, there was a mean, watchful light in his eyes, and a hard set to the mouth.
He looked very different from the smiling impostor she had been so dangerously close to falling in love with. In fact he looked very different from the unsmiling version of himself that she had seen in the photograph before. All his blond hair had fallen out — he was half bald. His cheeks were lined and pouched, his jowls baggy. He was fifteen or more years older. It was like the picture of Dorian Gray.
No, he was someone else entirely. The passport had changed its identity, like Dr. Norman Wilfred himself. The entire world had begun to deliquesce around her.
She looked at this stranger’s name.
Yes, of course. In all her anxiety about what to do, and her anger at the false Dr. Norman Wilfred, she had failed to think about his other victim. Now here he was, looking out at her from the ordinariness of the past, from the quiet dullness of things before all this had started to happen: the real Dr. Norman Wilfred.
* * *
“We’ll wait till he stands up to speak,” said Annuka Vos to Dr. Wilfred. “Some idiot will introduce him. Everyone will clap, and then there’ll be a moment of silence before he opens his mouth. That’s our cue to stand up and make the biggest, most embarrassing public scene anyone has ever witnessed.”
Dr. Wilfred was sitting beside her in the back of the taxi, holding on to his lecture with one hand and his safety belt with the other, as they plunged down the mountainside, and the potholes and hairpin bends sprang towards them out of the darkness. They had eaten most of the canapés and drunk several glasses of Petrus’s brandy while he had recounted to her the injustice he had suffered at Oliver Fox’s hands. The indignation she felt on her own account had been inflamed even more by her generous outrage on Dr. Wilfred’s behalf than it had by the brandy. They had both been hideously abused. And now she knew where to find their abuser.
“The trouble is,” said Dr. Wilfred, “that no one will believe it’s me. They didn’t before.”
“If any doubts are expressed, leave them to me. I will deal with them. By force if necessary. I don’t know what this lecture of yours is about, and I don’t care. But you’re going to give it, not him. Even if we both have to shout him down.”
Dr. Wilfred was silent for a pothole or two. “I don’t really want to,” he said. “I’ve rather gone off the whole idea.”
She gazed at him in amazement.
“What? You want to let that ridiculous little fraud give your lecture for you?”
Dr. Wilfred held up his typescript. “He can’t give my lecture.”
“No — he’s going to be doing what he always does — he’s going to make it up himself as he goes along! Some complete rubbish of his own! You’re someone well known, are you? You’re going to be a lot better known still when people hear what you’re supposed to have said! You’re going to be a public laughingstock!”