Free Skios: A Novel by Michael Frayn Page B

“and I’m desperately sorry, and I know there’s nothing you can do where you are, and I’ve calmed down, I’m not in a panic, but I can’t get through to anyone, and I’ve just got to talk to someone, because I can hear him outside the door, he’s hammering, he’s shouting threats, I’m in the bathroom, he’s going to kick the door down.”
    At some point, as Nikki struggled to understand what was happening, and grasped that the man Georgie had found herself getting into bed with was not the one she had expected, and sympathized, and calmed the now supposedly calm Georgie even further, and offered good practical advice about how to negotiate through a stoutly built door and calm the unexpected bedfellow in his turn, she thought she heard a scratching at the window. But by the time the battery in Georgie’s phone had finally gone flat and Nikki was able to get across to the window and open it, there was nothing to be seen outside.
    Except, just possibly, one or two little pools of water on the tiled floor of the veranda, already drying in the hot night air.
    *   *   *
    Now he was Dr. Norman Wilfred, Oliver had discovered, once the security guard had unlocked his room and broken the padlock off his suitcase for him, he had an unexpected taste for pure silk underpants and pure silk pajamas. He was a more substantial man than he had realized; the underpants and pajama trousers were both forty inches round the middle. He was also the master of a pair of swimming trunks of the same size. They were decorated with a motif of smiling dolphins, and were remarkably difficult to keep on.
    By the time he had swum fifty lengths of a small floodlit pool he had found near his room to work off his undischarged head of energy he was in a relatively philosophical frame of mind. After the first twenty lengths he had been seized by a sudden hope that Nikki might have forgiven his mistake, and opened her window again. But when he got down to Democritus and crept past the (still open) right-hand veranda window, as it appeared to him to be from outside, with scarcely the sound of a splash or a wet foot on the ground, the left-hand veranda window was firmly closed. He had tapped and pushed at it and peered in. He had thought he could see her sitting on the edge of her bed in the darkness inside, but she had not relented.
    Well, there was always tomorrow. The golden pathway still stretched ahead. Until the other claimant to his identity turned up, he was Dr. Norman Wilfred still. He knew everything, he had done everything, and he would be irresistible. And if by any chance his elusive fat Doppelgänger had still not arrived in time to give his lecture … He laughed to himself at the thought as he swam. What would he say? He had no idea. Something would come to him, though. Something would turn up. Something always did. The world would continue to revolve, one way or another.
    Forty-one lengths. Forty-two.
    But how endlessly uncertain life was! Things might be like this, or might be like that, or might be like nothing anyone could imagine—and it all depended upon the endlessly shifting sands of who was who, and when they were, and where. Upon who was Oliver Fox and who was Dr. Norman Wilfred. Upon whether you were outside the window looking in, or inside the window looking out.

 
    16
    When Oliver emerged from Parmenides next morning the confusions of the night landscape had been resolved, and the reasonableness of the world restored, only fresher, greener, lighter, happier than ever. The air was already hot, but still agreeably so. Prostrating itself at his feet, almost whimpering and wagging its tail like a dog begging to be loved and walked, was a neatly cobbled path zigzagging down to the perfectly composed picture laid out below him: translucent blue water, white boats, blue and white cottages. His kingdom, waiting only for him to enter upon it and claim it.
    Down there by the water he could see blue umbrellas, with white