The Sandpit

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Dyer likes Silvi because she likes his son, and because there is something generous in her that has nothing to do with her husband’s wealth.

  Shapely in her expensive grey latex, like the smooth rubber handle on a hammer, Silvi flashes Dyer a smile. Long white face, short hair, reddish, as the breast of a robin, she looks at him in the way of a woman who needs to be played, not approached head on.

  ‘Has his mother been in touch recently?’ she asks.

  ‘Hardly at all.’

  Angry to justify herself, Nissa had cast Dyer as the Devil: ‘He’s addicted to everyone’s stories but mine. He’s nicer to people on buses than he is to my family. He’s a cold Englishman. He’s a … he’s a … é um narcisista maligno.’

  ‘Where’s Leandro going to go after the Phoenix?’ Gilles meanwhile was wanting to know.

  ‘It’s still up in the air.’

  ‘Eton, he should go to Eton,’ decided Gilles. ‘Or Wellington. They do the IB programme. Where were you?’

  Dyer told him.

  ‘That’s a good school. Why doesn’t he go there?’

  ‘He might,’ said Dyer, reluctant to admit that a fee-paying school was unlikely. Not saying, I can only just about cover the Phoenix’s astronomical fees.

  Brushing past Dyer, a curly-haired brown dog lunged after a flock of pigeons that had landed on the grass, and was shouted back.

  The whistle for the second half reverted their attention to the game.

  Silvi touched his arm before she moved off. ‘See you tonight. You’re coming to dinner, remember? There’s a woman I want you to meet …’

  Dyer was about to reply when a male voice stopped him: ‘How’s that boy of yours? Still winning every race?’

  Chapter Seven

  THE SPEAKER HAD APPROACHED FROM behind, unannounced. It shocked Dyer to recognise the dog-owner, who walked right past him and snapped on a lead. Beneath thick dark hair combed back and jetty eyebrows, his handsome face was blotched as though from eczema or sunburn.

  Dyer had last seen Lionel Updark on a January evening six weeks before, at a cocktail party thrown to mark his return to England. Dyer didn’t recall his cheeks and forehead looking like a stickered trunk then.

  The man with the shiny disturbances on his skin was a diplomat, based until December in Rabat, and currently awaiting news of his next posting in an oat-coloured manor house near Woodeaton. At the Phoenix, they had sat in the same class. Forty or more years went by before their next encounter, at Updark’s party: an occasion when the host did not hide that he had pulled away in the race which mattered. Dyer couldn’t remember who that evening had told him that Updark had been promised Paris. Feeling patronised and a failure, Dyer had drunk too much duty-free claret and flirted unsuccessfully with Updark’s over-perfumed wife.

  This is the first time he has noticed Updark at a football match. That Updark might have chosen to avoid public appearances was understandable. Closer to, his mottled face looked as though red chilli had been pounded into it. The unwholesome effect was emphasised by the neatness of his clothes. Polished brogues, blue corduroy trousers sharply creased, well-fitting tweed jacket with a burgundy V-neck jersey beneath.

  The ends of a faded yellow-and-blue scarf trail down over his padded coat, and it takes Dyer a further second to register that the scarf is striped in the Phoenix colours.

  ‘Hello, Lionel. I didn’t know you were a football dad.’

  An autumn father like Dyer, Updark has a daughter at the school who does not, to Dyer’s knowledge, play team sports.

  ‘Oh, I always like to see who’s in the first eleven.’

  He stands scrutinising the Phoenix players. ‘Dyer, L. And Marvar, S. to boot. I say, they’ve done well to be in the team. You, I recall, were captain of the second cricket eleven.’

  Dyer can’t put his finger on it, but there is something artificial in Updark’s behaviour, like a man pretending to have a limp.

  ‘Who’s winning?’ asks Updark, distracted. He was late because his dog had run off.

  ‘Horris Hill.’

  ‘By how much?’ scratching his maculate cheek, his attention no longer on the players but on the parents congregated beside the touchline.

  ‘Two–one.’

  Dyer is tempted to ask Updark about his ugly rash, but his wait-I’m-watching-the-football expression puts him off.

  This smartly dressed Updark is at odds with the plump, ungainly boy who sat in Slimy Prentice’s Latin class flawlessly translating Horace. The mismatch is disturbing and it gets in the way of Dyer’s memory. They were not especially close at the Phoenix. Updark had been academic-minded, aloof, interested in the classics and cricket – he was scorer for the first XI. Highest tally of Cothill wickets taken by a Phoenix bowler? Most number of runs against the Dragon? Ask Updark. His knowledge allowed him to participate, to be a player himself.

  Hard to recreate that studious introverted character from this compact man. Only the thick dark hair was the same. He could have been a farmer with his dog and corduroys, the sort of ruddy-face you’d see behind the wheel of a Range Rover, or unfolding a shooting stick at a point-to-point, not at a prep-school football match.

  ‘You must find this weather tedious,’ Dyer said to him, for something to say, ‘after Morocco.’

  ‘No more so than you,’ and spun around.

  His dog now was barking at some swans.

  ‘Come here!’ Updark yanked at the turquoise lead. He wore an open-necked shirt, but moved up and down the touchline like a man in a tie.

  ‘What’s he called?’

  ‘Spassky,’ in the tone of someone who had not chosen the name.

  He was a dog like a poodle with tight clumps of brown fur, the same tan colour as Marvar’s coat, and a white streak on the belly.

  ‘Hello, Spassky,’ bending down to tickle his chin.

  Two eyes partially hidden beneath long brows seemed to take him in. Leandro was always asking for a dog. From the day of their arrival.

  A wet tongue licked his fingers.

  ‘We’ve only just got him,’ said Updark, his face reddening all over at the effort to restrain him. When he reached out his hand, Spassky shunned it. ‘He’s a cockadoodle.’

  Cockadoodles made good bird-dogs, Updark explained, and they didn’t shed hair. His daughter had allergies.

  Did that explain the fiery patches on Updark’s cheeks which made Dyer think of the lobster on the Pitu bottle? Was it genetic?

  Dyer stood up. ‘How is …’ He had forgotten the name as he had forgotten the name of her mother, and then remembered. ‘… Beatrice enjoying the Phoenix?’

  Updark’s daughter – Leandro thought her odd – was in the year above Leandro.

  The school was perfect for her, said Updark, enumerating why: she was captain of the chess team and head of the debating society. In all the top sets, too, with the exception of biology.

  ‘Have you decided where she’s going afterwards?’ was Dyer’s inevitable next question.

  ‘She’s set her heart on Wycombe Abbey,’ said Updark. ‘But she’s got to get in first,’ adding in an indulgent tone: ‘She wants to be a diplomat.’

  ‘Is that what you’d like?’

  ‘Oh, I think so. She’d be the fourth generation Updark in the Service.’

  There was something touching in Updark’s inherited loyalty to Queen and Country, even if the pride that he took in his daughter impeded him from enquiring after Leandro. Had Updark asked, ‘What do you wish for your child?’, Dyer would have replied that he wanted Leandro to connect with something he cared about and to lead the life that suited him, and neither wealth nor climate should have anything to do with it. ‘Be considerate’ was cockadoodle as far as it went, but the Phoenix motto left out too much. In place of the name of another school, Dyer had hoped by now to have come across one unseen line or story that he could give his son; like in a Borges parable, it would encompass and answer everything, it would be the pin number to the universe’s va
ult. He was still in the process of searching for it.

  Dyer nodded. ‘And you? Have you heard what your next post will be?’ The rumour in the Bon Croissant was that Updark’s Paris Embassy was on hold, suddenly, for something more hush-hush.

  ‘Not yet,’ said Updark. ‘Not yet.’

  As a journalist, Dyer had come across diplomats like Updark, and in general he got along well with them. The majority were civilised merchants of high-class gossip. They shared a professional interest, immortalised by the poet Flecker, at whose college Dyer had been, as the ‘lust of knowing what should not be known’. Only, in Dyer’s case this forbidden knowledge was tailored for public consumption.

  ‘You know where would be interesting?’ reflected Dyer. ‘Iran.’

  Updark’s alert hazel eyes fixed him. ‘What do you know about Iran?’

  His expression was hard to read. He looked combative, as though ready to thrust his crimson face into a scrum.

  ‘Not much more than I learn from the news,’ said Dyer. ‘But I was nearly posted there. One always has a tender spot for the things one didn’t do.’

  ‘The problem is, which Iran are you talking about?’ There were two Irans, Updark went on, a little over-eager, like a teacher, to share his superior knowledge on the subject. ‘The nice, democratic, charming face to the world, which we would all like to believe in, ancient, sunny, Paris-educated – or Scottish, in the case of the current president.’ Then there was the Iran of the hard shadows, the Revolutionary Guard, the judiciary, the nuclear commission—

  The dog was chewing the end of his scarf. ‘Stop that!’ Updark jerked his scarf away and coiled it tighter around his neck.

  Spassky watched Dyer, then barked. The whirr of the docked tail. Pigeons scattering like applause into the sky.

  ‘Come on, Phoenix … move it!’ Other shouts returned Dyer to the pitch.

  ‘Good pass, Leandro!’ The game had ten minutes left to go when Dyer heard the shout.

  Updark had vanished in the same disarming manner as he had materialised. In his place stood Rustum Marvar.

  He was in his gangsterish coat, unbuttoned, the pale green lining the colour of dry grass. Dyer had seen him the day before, on a bicycle racing through traffic lights. Marvar was so deep in thought that he had failed to register Dyer waving.

  He had only just arrived. ‘Please,’ dropping his voice to a dramatic whisper, ‘who is winning?’

  Dyer told him.

  Marvar nodded, then bent to do up his laces. He still had sand on his shoes.

  ‘Can Phoenix rise from the ashes?’ Marvar said sonorously, standing up.

  ‘Possibly,’ smiled Dyer, glad to see him. ‘They don’t like to lose to Horris Hill.’

  With some people you could feel friends straight away. A bond had sprung up between them beside the sandpit.

  But this Marvar was not the subdued person Dyer recalled talking to on Tuesday evening. He was excited, carefree, drunk – except that he was sober. ‘Go on, Samir!’ he flung in a loud, almost hysterical voice, after Samir received a pass from Leandro through the legs of the Horris Hill striker.

  His father’s shout burned through Samir like a thrill. He straightened his back, lifted his elbows like wings in the cold air. In an electrifying sequence of quick, deft moves, he trapped the ball with his left foot, dribbled it past one defender, then another, flicked it onto his right foot and booted it between the goalkeeper’s outstretched hands into the back of the net.

  Instinctively, Marvar and Dyer embraced. A dog was barking. Unfamiliar with touchline protocol, Marvar was punching the air and emitting loud whoops.

  Dyer did not remember afterwards what he thought of at that moment, but he was aware that Marvar radiated with an extraordinary energy. He was having a moment in the sun.

  ‘See what happens when you come and support him!’ laughed Dyer.

  His earlier conversation with Updark had filled Dyer with a powerful desire for Phoenix not to lose this match against Horris Hill. It was important in a way that he had not felt before. Not merely to justify Leandro’s position in the team – and to have his talent recognised alongside the achievements of Beatrice bleeding Updark – but to justify Dyer’s belated defence of his son against Vasily.

  He almost wished Katya was watching. His eyes kept sliding to the second XI pitch, until someone told him they were playing away; that was the third XI.

  It hadn’t gone anywhere. Not even a drink.

  The whistle again. One of the Horris Hill players was down. The play paused while both teams stood in a circle around the boy, and the referee checked that he was unhurt.

  Over Marvar’s shoulder, Dyer saw Gilles Asselin glancing in his direction. He had the furtive look of a man who wanted to slip away and make a call. He lifted a hand on noticing that Dyer was staring at him.

  Dyer was relieved when Gilles resumed his discussion with the person he’d been talking to, a short fleshy man of about forty, with curly orange hair and the hint of a moustache, and wearing a peaked blue baseball cap with ‘Cal’ stitched on to it in gold letters. As Silvi had reminded him, Dyer would anyway be seeing Gilles later. Better to keep dry till then what remained of their conversational powder.

  Marvar, brimming, turned to Dyer: ‘Hey, I wanted to ask you something.’

  Dyer waited, curious. Phoenix parents seldom asked him anything.

  ‘Ullswater, do you know it?’

  ‘In the Lake District?’

  ‘Tell me, what is it like?’

  Dyer had once fished with his father near Pooley Bridge. ‘Extremely beautiful and surprisingly wild,’ and remembered his first trek in the Peruvian Andes. How the peaks and clear blue lakes above Huaraz carried him back to Cumbria.

  When Marvar said that he had decided for the upcoming exeat to take Samir climbing in the mountains around Ullswater – a poem that Samir had had to learn by heart, composed there, had given Marvar the idea – Dyer looked at him in his long thick enveloping coat, and almost laughed.

  ‘But keep this to yourself. Please. I haven’t told anyone.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Dyer. Although why anyone should be interested in Marvar’s excursion to the Lake District, he couldn’t fathom.

  ‘I know I can trust you not to say anything.’

  ‘Really?’ said Dyer, amused. ‘And how can you be sure?’

  ‘Samir told me. About that policeman in Peru. You got this story out of him. This incredible, incredible story, and you didn’t tell it.’

  Dyer gave an inward groan. Leandro. Shooting his mouth off.

  ‘Is it always so important to say everything? You never told me about your problem.’

  ‘Touché. But really. Why didn’t you tell it?’

  ‘Oh, lots of reasons.’

  ‘Give me one.’

  ‘It was too personal, too unhistorical to use as journalism.’

  ‘You only wanted to write historical stories?’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘Another reason. Please …’ He wanted more, like someone holding out a glass to be refilled.

  ‘There was a woman.’

  ‘There’s always a woman.’

  ‘It was a great love. If I told his story, he was likely never to see her again.’

  Marvar looked carefully at him. ‘And did he see her again?’

  Dyer smiled, as back, back went his mind to the bargain that Rejas had forged with his government. Yolanda had been arrested for protecting the revolutionary leader Ezequiel in an apartment above her dance studio. Rejas had agreed not to stand for president, in a campaign he was favoured to win, on condition that she was given a quiet release after two or three years.

  ‘Quién sabe? After that, I stopped being a journalist.’

  Serious all of a sudden, Marvar said: ‘I have a story … not a love story exactly,’ and paused, as though meaning to go on, a comma not a full stop. But he was interrupted by the whistle for play to continue. After that, conversation was pointless. It was al
l about the match, which ended, with no further goals scored, in a draw.

  The players shook hands and gave three cheers. The parents started to dribble off to the match tea before the scones were all devoured. Inside the Phoenix goal, Spassky lay on his back, rolling in the mud.

  Chapter Eight

  LEANDRO ASKS DYER TO CARRY the games bag with his dirty clothes. Leandro’s arms are full already with his satchel that’s bulging with textbooks and notes on the Battle of Trafalgar; he is to be tested on this in a few days.

  They step through the gates and set off down Bardwell Road.

  It always depressed Dyer on their walks back to Jericho to notice what Oxford had become: it seemed to have mimicked London, with 4×4s on the pavements, and scaffolding, which did not tally with his idea of it. This feeling extended to the dinner parties to which, as a single father, Dyer received plenty of invitations – at least early on.

  He had never forgotten his first dinner party, in Summertown. The hostess was a Phoenix parent. A husband found at INSEAD, two children raised to be considerate, a kitchen that spilled out over white marble tops into the living room. The refurbished home of many a brittle, unattended North Oxford mother. Conversation, like a blurring fan, went round and round the same subjects; where you were going on holiday, where your child was going to school next, how very lucky everyone was to be living here, in Summertown.

  Summertown. It could have been Luton, save for the prices of the pinched red-brick houses, the M & S food hall – said to boast the highest turnover of any branch in England – and the coffee shop, started up by a Phoenix father and his new organic girlfriend; everybody rolled their eyes about it, but you saw them in the queue, spending their £8 per ‘change your life’ latte. Smuggertown, its detractors called it.

  The Smuggertown mothers reminded him of Nissa. They behaved like characters from the Globo soaps. He was familiar with their bickerings, the little piranha bites that stripped a marriage of its flesh. Had Dyer married one of them he might have lived here, in Stratfield Road or South Parade, an insider, calm in the eye of a storm that was blind to its own rampages. Watching life jog by from the windows of the Bon Croissant. Working out at the St Edwards Sports Club. Dying day by grey cold day of tumeric chai lattes and artichoke ice cream.