The Sandpit

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  In Smuggertown, you did things para inglês ver – for the English to see; above board, in full view, keeping up appearances, and politically correct. Meanwhile, the real business was going on down the coast, in the quiet deserted streets off Norham Gardens.

  Tonight, it was a dinner party in Ward Road. Guests from London. ‘You must come for a meal’ had been repeated many times over, and finally a date was given. Dyer had accepted weeks before, hoping somehow it might go away, but the evening had arrived.

  He has booked his usual babysitter. Paula is a disabled navy widow from the council house next door who enjoys leading a proxy life through the Dyers. One of his favourite people in Oxford, Paula does not yell at the Jamaican family whose children everyone assumes are drug dealers. She does not shoo away those distributing flyers for Art Week, or the Labour councillor who comes knocking for her vote. She does not put up Brexit stickers in her window, run after rubbish men to persuade them to take her recyclables in the week when they collect household rubbish. Neighbours give her their keys. Delivery men give her Amazon parcels. Dyer would be happy to leave her with his secrets.

  Before going out tonight, he asks Paula to superintend his son’s homework on Trafalgar, only after which is Leandro granted leave to watch television or go on his Xbox.

  ‘Yes, yes, now you go and have a lovely time,’ she commands Dyer, sounding like his aunt. ‘You never know who you’re going to meet.’ Although by now he does have an idea.

  In the beginning, in Leandro’s first term, Dyer had clamped everyone by the shoulders, hugged them, and for a while was centre of the party. And then the vitality ebbed away. He stood there, but unless there was a glass of wine in his hand, he had nothing to say.

  As the weeks in Oxford passed into months, he had drifted back out to the margin, feeling like the spy that at university he once was approached to become. He watched parents salute each other at the school gates. The minute gestures of recognition, like secret handshakes; the alteration in the voices. He saw how they worked hard, focused, entertained well; Davos at Easter, summer in the Muskokas, with seats at the opera, Ascot, Wimbledon, Wembley. But kindred spirits were punishingly few. He did not share the aspirations which bound most of these people, their masonic sense of kinship. He had not yielded to their world; it was outside anything that mattered to him. He was poorer, older; his experience was in subjects and countries that held neither curiosity for them, nor profit. They made him feel like the survivor of a tribe that was dying out.

  If Dyer’s impression of other Phoenix parents was delible, the same could not be said of the opinions of a dominant section of English parents about Dyer. Their initial rush to embrace him had been coloured by an expectation that he was bound to share the opinions of his former newspaper. This, they discovered, was not so.

  It wasn’t merely Dyer’s different attitudes towards Europe, America and the dispossessed which destabilised them. Written on his face was the drear history of a messy private life and imprecise employment in a far-flung backwater. When they bloviated about their careers in the planet’s commercial hotspots, he sensed their insecurity, a concern that in his response Dyer was likely to cross the boundary between wit and rudeness. What they ended up seeing was an abrasive, arrogant character who was the complete opposite of the person he concealed.

  For the most part, his compatriots in Oxford were the archivists and cataloguers, the Portuguese medievalist in the house opposite, the young Polish woman in the porter’s lodge who had been spat at in the bus on the day after the Brexit referendum.

  Plus there were ridiculously wealthy exceptions like Gilles and Silvi Asselin.

  A bayoneting wind had set in as he walked up Ward Road clutching a copy of his book. He thought of February in Rio, the yellow sand, the warm tessellated pavements beneath his bare feet, a bar–café in the eighties just along from where Joaquim Nabuco met Ipanema, Astrud’s converted maid’s room with a ceiling fan.

  The grey light fell on a detached modern house the size of a large rectory. A man in a tight dark suit opened the security gate and pointed the way across the pale gravel. The lights are on in the tall rooms where people move between gilt-framed portraits.

  Silvi greeted him in the hallway. Her figure compressed into a shiny jacket, liquorice black. She was wearing her latest lipstick (‘burnt rhubarb’) and, around her graceful neck, a string of green jade beads.

  ‘This is for you,’ said Dyer.

  ‘Did you write this?’ a beringed hand flying to her face, as if he had handed her a menu.

  A pot plant looked monstrously at him out of the jardinière.

  ‘Oh, darling,’ said Gilles, appearing suddenly with an open magnum of Jacquesson, and peering at the cover, ‘that’s the kind of book you love. You should do it for your reading group.’ And to Dyer, ‘You know Silvi went out with a writer.’

  ‘Gilles.’

  ‘Who was the writer?’ asked Dyer.

  ‘He wasn’t a proper writer, Gilles. That was just a silly thing about scarves.’

  ‘She likes to argue,’ he said.

  ‘I love to argue,’ she smiled.

  ‘He wrote that history of Hermès,’ said Gilles, filling a crystal flute which he handed to Dyer. ‘Here. Try this. If you don’t like it, fuck off.’

  There is a price for arrogance, but Gilles Asselin could afford to pay it. In his alpaca evening jacket with a blue velvet lapel, he exuded the burnt-rubber smell of deals that had left nations scorched. In colonial Brazil he would have been a bandeirante, hunting for gold and precious stones, rounding up Indians and crushing the uprisings of black slaves, bringing them back in chains. In the twenty-first century, he ruled as a banqueiro, on the hunt for insider knowledge that would leapfrog him ahead of the game. He had lived his life in accordance with a complete lack of conviction and no ideology other than to make money. His mantra, he told Dyer during one of their touchline chats, ‘How do I shove my way into immediate profit?’

  Dyer never concealed from Gilles that he considered him to be a moral hunchback, yet his voice with its undertones of French was listened to with respect in boardrooms from the City to Seattle. Wherever in the financial world you looked, Gilles dominated, he dazzled and bewildered. One of his specialities was debt: ‘No assets or personnel to worry about.’ He was rumoured to have brokered the deal which had caused Greece to default, then the deal that secured Greece’s bail-out. He had bought Argentina’s debt and taken her Tall Ships as collateral. The Ukrainian debt, so that he could advise the finance minister in Kiev on how to restructure his economy in a way calculated to benefit Gilles’s investors. Governments were among his clients.

  At the heart of his operations, nourishing them, lay a colossal vacuum. ‘There’s three times more debt than equity out there. If you set up all the financial assets in the world, there is $120 trillion GDP and $400 trillion debt.’ In this black hole Gilles flourished. He derived a sizeable portion of his company’s profits from betting on the volatility indices. With noteworthy patience, Gilles had tried to explain his method to Dyer. ‘Let’s say I think the BP share price, currently at £6, is going to collapse on some news. I call my prime broker in New York, borrow BP shares and place an order to sell them forward at £6. All I care about is that I have enough margin collateral to cover my bet that BP is heading south fast. If the shares go up, I have to buy the shares to cover the short. But if the share price goes below £6 on the news, I’m in the money … if they hit £3, I buy them back at that level and make multiples, because my only cost is what the broker charges me to borrow the shares.’

  To Gilles, this was the way the world had always worked. To Dyer, it was gobbledygook.

  On more than one occasion Gilles had told Dyer, or ‘Jean’, as he called him, ‘You put too great a faith in Christ’s promise that the meek shall inherit the earth.’ Meekness was absent from Gilles’s make-up. Control was what he sought. He had reached the stage where nobody questioned his financial clout, his blatant wea
lth, his global contacts. Yet were anyone to penetrate Gilles’s urbane exterior they would soon learn that he sat on a volcanic temper, his natural irritability constantly darting to the surface to inspect a lure. That was how he first had appeared to Dyer at the Headmaster’s Breakfast.

  At this ‘Fathers Only’ gathering beside the Cherwell, it was not Mr Crotty who kept the fathers’ spellbound eyes on him, laughing when he laughed, frowning when he frowned, even coughing when he coughed, as if he controlled the river and the trees, but Gilles. When he raised his breakfast bap to speak, no one could move; his eyes were fixed on them the whole time, holding their attention – all, that is, save for Leandro’s father. Perhaps Dyer had interviewed too many presidential candidates. At any rate, something in his expression piqued Gilles enough to seek him out, win him over. But whatever Gilles hoped to achieve that morning, he failed. His brain whirred on, not dwelling on what he was saying, flicking his fingers, impatient, dissatisfied. He knew that he was boring Dyer.

  So it came as a surprise when Silvi announced how much her husband had enjoyed talking to him. Gilles Asselin, it seemed, had taken a shine to Dyer in the knowledge that he could not afford him. Dyer’s poverty was a condition as unassailable as the bells of St Barnabas. He was poor, but free in a way that meant he paid not a penny of attention to Gilles’s luxuries or dominance, and in that unaccustomed freedom Gilles appeared to find a vicarious ease.

  ‘I don’t read books,’ Gilles said to Dyer, adjusting the napkin around the magnum. ‘My life is a book.’

  ‘I never loved your looks. What I loved was your mind,’ said Silvi. Her thoughts were always two notes away from a pop song.

  ‘Darling, he said books not looks,’ came a tart voice. It belonged to a chestnut-haired woman in odd-shaped glasses who had entered after Dyer.

  ‘I don’t read anything any more,’ Gilles harped on, ‘except Silvi’s bank statements.’

  Blurry pastels of snowscapes with chevrons of birds. A decanter on the sideboard like the glass chamberpot under his mother’s bed. Silvi has arranged the flowers. She’s left Gilles in charge of the wine.

  The Jacquesson has yielded to a Sauternes. Even as Dyer sips it, he loathes himself. He knows that as soon as he’s had a couple of glasses, he will go along with the party. Yet he also has to drink to get through it. An evening like this is a long-haul flight. After half an hour he’s demented, with all his faculties poised to bolt, but by the end he’ll be exchanging addresses and telephone numbers, he will see they’re actually not so bad, his fellow passengers, they’re all pilgrims on the same journey, part of the same humanity. He’ll be one of them, even if he wakes up next morning with a rapidly beating heart, back to his old self, instantly feeling dread as he surfaces through the scum of his remorse: Was I rude, did I show how bored I was, did I bore on too much? But he won’t be able to hide. He has to face them at the school gates. He has to talk to them under the harsh light of sobriety, when he can’t remember how to live up to who he was the night before.

  Aside from his hosts, who sat at each end of the gigantic mahogany table, Dyer knew none of the thirteen others present, some of whom appeared to be clients of Gilles. The only couple he thought he recognised – from a school concert in January – were the Cubbages. Ralph, from California, and his intense-looking wife Bonnie, lived down the street. It suddenly registered that Ralph was the person in the ‘Cal’ baseball cap who Dyer had seen that afternoon talking to Gilles on the touchline.

  In obedience to Paula’s command, Dyer glanced around, ready to surrender himself to the evening. Silvi, whose pride in her talent for bringing people together was reflected in the trouble that she took over her placements, had whispered on their way downstairs: ‘I’ve put you between two single ladies.’ Dyer intended to start with the dark-haired woman on his right; he had followed her to the table slightly mesmerised by her two-inch yellow heels.

  He has had love affairs since Nissa. Women like him. He listens to them and makes them laugh. They know he has a sense of humour about himself and pokes fun at his own puritanism. They are touched by the stripe of sadness in him which it’s easy to mistake for something smooth, round, solid and, if not necessarily complete, then centred – without recognising that it’s his ledge out onto the void.

  But nothing since coming to Oxford.

  ‘Jocasta,’ dropping her iPhone into her lap and holding out a hand.

  ‘John.’

  She was slender, in her dissatisfied forties, in a translucent flesh-coloured blouse. Her short dark hair stronger and healthier than her face, which was rather plain. One of those faces, his aunt would have said, that looks as though it’s been spat on and polished.

  ‘Haven’t we met before?’ she asked, giving him a sociable look.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Funny, I was sure I recognised you. You’re a writer, Silvi was saying.’

  ‘She’s being generous. I have written one book.’

  ‘I’m all athrob. Has it been bought for the movies? What’s it about?’

  ‘The indigenous tribes of the lower Amazon basin.’

  She gazed at him as if at an empty fuel gauge.

  ‘Now it’s coming back to me … ‘Her eyes flicked down to her lap. ‘You’re the one who’s lived in South America.’

  ‘Do you like South American writers?’ to help her out.

  She lifted her head. She pretended she was studying the paintings. She looked at the wall and its dreadful potential.

  ‘I’ve not really read them.’

  She was more a people person. She had met everyone. David Beckham. David Cameron. Charles Worthington. ‘Sorry, I have to get this. It might be my bed for the night.’

  Her face went dead as she read her texts.

  Raising her eyes back above the table, it took Jocasta a second or two to remember where she had mislaid their conversation.

  ‘What’s South America like? I’ve always sort of wanted to go there.’

  Dyer opened his mouth and then closed it.

  She looked at him encouragingly. Her charms were trying to come out, her coral lips, her glinting eyes.

  But he could no longer do this. After seventeen months in Oxford, he could no longer describe the continent to her, the rivers, mountains, deserts. He couldn’t tell her how it was his aunt who had been responsible for introducing Dyer to South America – after his mother died, Vivien had sent a plane ticket, pressing him to come and stay. How he saw the shadow of palms on the tiled wall, the yellow bunches of small plantains, and a spell was cast. He couldn’t tell her about the limitless horizons and the lapwings’ shrieks. Or the cities, Buenos Aires, Iquitos, Belém, the favelas in Rio, the pueblos jóvenes outside Lima. He couldn’t tell her of obscure places like Rio Pico, Hortensia, Tres Cruces, Corbett, Satipo, or the village in the Peruvian jungle where he had passed five days in a sweat-drenched delirium. He couldn’t tell her about the excitable fellow journalist he had known who went to interview Sendero prisoners in Lurigancho gaol – a scoop, Jaime kept saying, a real scoop – and was released with his tongue cut out. He couldn’t tell her of the tropical night when he lay in a makeshift gondola beside a canoeira, a girl plying her trade in Iquitos’s Venezia district, a pink birthday candle in the milk-tin, and the wizened paddler, his back to Dyer, rowing in steady, heart-shaped strokes out into the Amazon, unswerving as Charon. The fresh body in the grass under the flyover. The name on the church door scrawled in the blood of the priest. The bar–café in Joaquim Nabuco where he liked to go to read. He couldn’t tell her of the samba that pulsed through the river mist, the buzzards that drifted down from the mountains like open bibles, the jolt of freedom as he cantered along an avenue of eucalypts, out onto the straight dirt road, the smoke of burnt hay, the horseradishy smell of the wild grass, the pricked back ears of the horse.

  ‘South America,’ he said carefully, ‘is great if you like butterflies.’

  ‘I adore butterflies.’

  A waitress
in a short black skirt with black stockings served them. The plates were blue Limoges and warm.

  ‘Silvi, this is really good,’ Jocasta called out.

  ‘Gilles brought it back from Brussels.’ Her pale, boss-eyed face drifted over them.

  Soon they had finished their foie gras.

  ‘Amigo, mind if I smoke?’ she said to him.

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s all right, you won’t get cancer. It’s an e-cig. Not as good as tobacco, but better than nothing.’

  ‘I don’t mind. Really.’ He sat with his arms to his side, like a man dining at High Table.

  ‘You’re a good amigo. That’s the only Spanish I know.’

  ‘They don’t speak Spanish in Brazil.’

  Jocasta inhaled, absorbing this. ‘Yes, of course, I knew that. Portuguese. But do they have fortune tellers there?’

  ‘They’re called pais de santo.’

  She exhaled. ‘Pais de santo,’ she repeated, rolling the words around. ‘I’ll tell you something, when you hear it you’re going to laugh. I was once told by a fortune teller –’ and she pushed back her chair – ‘that my sense of humour is really very, very amusing.’

  He drank his wine. The claret, at least, was good. ‘This,’ Gilles had promised when pouring it, ‘would loosen the morals of ancient Greece.’

  Over her voice, fragments of male conversation.

  ‘It’s his vulgarity that is so goose-pimpling, the little vagina shapes he makes with his hands, the phallic ignorance.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ve still got my marbles. Despite what Athens would like!’

  ‘The region was sliding into war until that deal was signed.’