Jocasta was telling a story that involved a man in Hong Kong who had treated her badly, and a speedboat. He gave up the attempt to listen.
He heard Gilles saying, ‘Only two people have had their name linked to a month: Augustus and Julius Caesar.’
Beside him, Jocasta played with the napkin ring as if it were a precious amulet.
‘Does this story amuse you?’ Her dull pale cheeks. The outrage of a star whose whims were suddenly denied. He could see her going for someone with her Vampire Vape flavoured e-cig.
Dyer, ignoring the sinister possibilities of tone, ‘Infinitely.’
The arrival of the main course interrupted them.
The person on his other side, in a short-sleeved aubergine dress, was saying something to the man on her left. She turned to Dyer.
‘Do you ever do that?’
It was the chestnut-haired woman.
‘Do what?’
‘Hide something in order that you know where it is only to forget where you’ve hidden it.’ Just before coming here tonight, she said, she had sat on her glasses – tucked for safekeeping behind a cushion. She looked at him dourly out of a warped bronze frame.
‘All the time,’ said Dyer. It was what his mother had done.
She had a slight lisp, like a dimple in her voice, and the irregular teeth of the English middle class. Straight shoulder-length hair, intelligent pale oval face. If Dyer had to describe his type, it wouldn’t be her.
Her name was Miranda. She lived in a house at the end of the road with her mother, who had dementia. ‘She’ll step out in the evening and hail a cab and tell it to take her anywhere.’ Once it took her to Malvern. ‘I had to write a cheque for two hundred and fifty pounds.’
An educated woman in her fifties, she was divorced, like so many of her friends. She was still unresolved about the precise sequence. ‘A lot of women marry what they can handle, not what they want.’
‘Who did you marry?’
‘Someone I couldn’t handle – who do you think?’
He was a psychologist who had gone off with an Indian nurse he’d been leading a double life with in Battersea. A separate family, a birth certificate found in the glove compartment. That was three years ago. She quoted, in an injured voice, ‘“Trust not the light that men call love; ’tis but a phantom gleam.”’
She confessed to feeling more exasperation than bitterness, furious at the careless waste, the cowardly act with which he had flicked aside her loyalty and love, and the streak of it salted her humour. ‘Imagine the mental effort to keep both lives in the air. Still, it kept him fit and alert – most of the time. He once bought me a bunch of flowers for my birthday, but it was her birthday.’
She paused to take in a mouthful of guinea fowl. ‘Have you come from London?’
He lived in Oxford, he had a boy at school here, he said.
‘The Phoenix, I suppose?’
‘Guilty.’
‘What do you do? You don’t look like a banker.’
‘I’m writing about a tribe in Brazil called the Tupi.’
‘Why, do you speak their language?’
‘A few words. But it’s virtually extinct now.’
‘I remember being taught that with eighty words you can say just about everything. You can practically discuss Wittgenstein.’
‘That may be true.’
‘I think I’d like to learn Tupi,’ smiling slightly and gazing into her glass. ‘I’ve always been interested in linguistics.’
He looked sideways at her. While she was not what Dyer would call beautiful – she resembled Cézanne’s wife in her short-sleeved dress – she had a marvellous smile.
‘I could recommend some books.’
‘Would you? I’d appreciate that.’ Then, as if she thought he was saying this to be polite: ‘I mean it. I would.’
The male voices were getting louder. Across the table, an American accent cut in. Ralph Cubbage in his tailored red jeans held up by an Argentine belt. Still gibbering about the Iran deal.
‘… ballistic missile tests … weapons factories in Lebanon … harassment of our navy in the Gulf …’
‘The US has been in violation of the deal from day one,’ protested a burly man in a suit who sat across the table – a Hamburg banker who had inherited the family firm. ‘Yet you can’t tell me a single one of the agreements Iran is supposed to have broken.’ He wore an Hermès tie, green, patterned with two yellow parrots facing each other on a branch.
‘Of course I can,’ said Cubbage, tearing at a roll. ‘But I didn’t come here prepared.’
‘Give that man a nice tall glass of shut-the-fuck-up,’ whispered Miranda.
‘Do you know him?’
‘Yes, I know Ralph Cubbage. He recently moved in opposite.’
He was mouthing ‘More bread’ to the waitress.
Dyer looked around to see that no one was listening.
‘All right, eighty words on him,’ he said.
Her glance skimmed back over the table, rising to the challenge. ‘Nuclear physicist. Berkeley – i.e. Livermore, the US weapons laboratory in California. Arrived here at Christmas to take up a post at the Clarendon. Married to the oh-sopious woman sitting on Gilles’s left. Bonnie is a prominent member of the Church of the Open Door. They have a daughter at the Phoenix who plays the cello and whom they treat as the next Jaqueline du Pré.’
‘A nuclear physicist,’ said Dyer slowly, to let the reality of this take shape. ‘You have fifteen words left. Go for it.’
She re-examined Cubbage through her squashed glasses.
‘I don’t know you well enough for another fifteen. How about always disagrees with the last person he has spoken to. And an artesian bore. I will throw in for free that cubbitch means “greedy” in Jamaican.’
‘Well, that’s him in his nutshell, almost,’ said Dyer.
Her forthright nature was a blood transfusion. He recognised the lack of filter that others flinched from in him.
‘Gilles?’
‘Our resident predator? Easy peasy,’ said Miranda, and swivelled her gaze to the end of the table.
He waited while she refocused. He was beginning to enjoy himself.
Their host was talking to a thin little man with gloomy eyes who was in the middle of a divorce.
‘They’re looking at one third for you, one third for your wife and one third for them. The worst word in their dictionary is “agreement”.’
Her index finger pressed her misshapen glasses further up her nose. ‘Gilles is a parasite ant. He bites the legs off other members of his species and turns them into living silos. His victims grow exceedingly fat and blubbery, and in winter he eats them. He may be Canadian, but don’t let that mislead you. He may be tall. Don’t let that mislead you either. He has the faults of all men under five feet three. And also, let me tell you, he takes pleasure in pain.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I tell you, I know these things.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Haven’t I used up my allocation?’
‘But I’m getting to know you better. Go on. Take another eighty.’
With an air of collusion, she said: ‘He doesn’t have a personality, but that’s him. He’s not a people person, he never will be. He sees the world as a system geared to optimise revenue for his company. He’s constantly tipping me “the next big thing” to invest in, although I have no savings to speak of. I do honestly like to think it’s because a tiny bit of him wants to help me out. One day it’s genetic and data science, the next day it’s bio-synthesis and the creation of proteins. If you want my opinion, he’s right now on the prowl for a new mission.’
‘A mission to do what?’
‘Oh, run the universe, I expect, as everyone tries to do who makes a lot of money and then uses philanthropy to cover up the original sin.’
‘Will he succeed?’
‘I vastly doubt it.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because whatev
er was once good in his character has been gangrenated – if that’s a word – by prosperity. He has paid for everything and he wants a free pass. He wants us to cut corners with the truth. But there are people who won’t let him do that.’
‘People like you?’
‘And you perhaps?’
‘Don’t you like him?’
‘I like Gilles about as much as a cat loves a crow.’
‘Then you hate him?’
‘No, no, not hate. But something close to it, yes.’
‘So why are you here?’
‘Someone dropped out at the very last moment, didn’t you hear? Someone called Updark. Subject to Better Offer, I have a feeling. He’s having dinner tonight with the Foreign Secretary, apparently. Silvi rang me, furious. I’m the spare gooseberry who is always on tap. Otherwise there would have been thirteen round this table, and you may be surprised how superstitious Silvi is. I don’t mind, I have no pride. Very occasionally, you do meet somebody interesting. And it makes a change from scrambled eggs with Mum.’
‘Who keeps Mum from haring off tonight to Malvern?’
‘A nice maths student at Magdalen to whom I pay ten pounds an hour.’
Gilles, with a full decanter, suddenly loomed over them like a fighter pilot. ‘To hell with the expense, give the canaries another seed,’ replenishing their glasses. He bent closer. ‘Just don’t believe a word she tells you,’ his voice lazy and larval and powered by riches acquired too easily. ‘Do not believe a word.’
After the port had circulated a second time, they went upstairs.
The waitress pointed the way to the loo. On the walls were photographs of Gilles in his speed-skating days. An Olympic silver medal at Nagano. Taking the corner at a world championship in Montreal, leaning sideways with his gloved hand touching the ice.
The man who came and sat on the cherry-red chesterfield beside Dyer still had the huge square knees of a skater. His trousers strained at the seams.
‘Tell me, Jean,’ Gilles said genially, slowly swirling a honey-coloured liquid around a large glass. ‘Rustum Marvar.’
‘What about him?’
‘I saw you talking to him this afternoon. He was behaving in an unusually ecstatic way. What was that about?’
‘His son scored an amazing goal. Didn’t you see?’
‘Is that all?’ still swirling. ‘It seemed rather more than that.’
‘I don’t know him well,’ said Dyer guardedly, judging the direction of the question. ‘I’ve only met him once before.’
‘Just wondered what you make of him, that’s all.’
‘I like him. Why?’
Gilles laughed, disappointed. ‘I don’t know, he strikes me as a little … well, incoherent. A few days ago, he was in a flap about letting his son come here for a sleepover. Now all of a sudden he couldn’t be more relaxed.’
‘He’s a scientist, Gilles. Up and down.’
‘I suppose so,’ said Gilles, staring into his glass. ‘I suppose so.’
Everyone got to their feet. Only Cubbage lingered for the rum which Gilles had purchased from Hemingway’s cellar in Cuba.
Headlights in the rain. Sable coat. An overly wrapped figure with a night-case – Jocasta – stood in the open doorway thanking Silvi for a wonderful evening. Out in the street, engine running, a taxi was waiting. She tripped towards it on her high yellow heels like a seagull that has gorged so much it can hardly fly.
‘It’s been fun, I must say,’ said Dyer, kissing Silvi on the cheek.
Over her shoulder, the gravel glinted in the security light.
‘I’ll ring you about Saturday,’ she promised, already looking ahead to Pierre’s birthday party. ‘You must tell me if there’s anything Leandro doesn’t eat. Oh, and thanks for the book.’
Chapter Nine
THE FOOTBALL MATCH ON THE following Saturday was against Winchester House, in Brackley, twenty-two miles away. To celebrate his birthday, which fell next day, Pierre Asselin had invited the Phoenix team home for a sleepover after the game. Leandro never wanted to go to the house of anyone who didn’t have a father, preferring to be with friends whose dads were very visible, but he liked Gilles, and was somewhat in awe of his speed-skating past, having seen a photograph of him crossing the line in Japan that Gilles carried on his phone and had shown to Leandro after a practice.
Dyer would have the house to himself for the weekend to work on his book.
Late on Saturday morning, Dyer tore himself from the Taylorian. His research had suddenly become a lot more interesting, sparked by the monograph that he had ordered up the week before.
Dyer was investigating the first European settlers in Brazil: among them, three weeping convicts left behind in May 1500 on a beach south of the future city of Bahia. The Portuguese chronicler, Pêro Vaz de Caminha, who witnessed their distress from the deck of his admiral’s flagship, reported that the men’s death sentences had been commuted in exchange for their learning about the customs and language of the naked Tupi.
Not much was known concerning two of the convicts, but an historian at Coimbra University had traced descendants of the third – ‘a banished youth’ called Afonso Ribeiro – to Belém on the mouth of the Amazon, a thousand miles north; new documents had led to the discovery of a family of Ribeiros living in the port area.
Belém was a city which resonated for Dyer. It was where one humid evening in an otherwise deserted riverfront restaurant he had stumbled across the police colonel who had arrested Ezequiel. The only other person in the Cantina da Lua was the waiter, Emilio Ribeiro, a lugubrious fellow who hurried for no one. A connection with Afonso Ribeiro, the first European to speak a native Latin American language, seemed highly improbable. Almost everyone in Bahia was called da Silva; most likely, the same held true for the Ribeiros of Belém. Yet it was a sign which the superstitious ex-journalist was reluctant to ignore. For Dyer, as for another ex-journo he admired, Graham Greene, coincidences were not merely spiritual puns, they ‘beset our past like the traps set for leopards in the jungle’. For most of his life, Dyer had considered extraordinary coincidences to be the lazy novelist’s gambit. Only since returning to Oxford had he started to recognise that it took an historian to set leopard’s traps.
Dyer perceived the waiter’s surname as an omen. For the first time in months, his life had taken on a new rhythm. He felt like the Portuguese admiral Pedro Cabral on the deck of his four-master, tossed upon boiling seas, his spanker sails buxom with a sudden wind from the south.
Shortly before 1 p.m. Dyer returned Professor Madrugada’s book to the stacks. Before unplugging his laptop, he checked the headlines. A mass extinction of antelope herds in the Russian steppes, allegedly linked to climate change … an Australian mathematician missing on a bush walk …
Dyer’s attention glided to the Middle East. The Iranians were protesting about the US president’s visit to Saudi Arabia and the Saudis’ purchase of $100 billion of US arms. Meanwhile, the latest US Defence Secretary was defining the three gravest threats facing America as Iran, Iran, Iran. Dyer wondered how Marvar would receive this news.
Outside struck the full winter chill of Oxford. There had been a frost in the night. The windscreens of the cars parked beside St Barnabas school stared blindly at him, opaque beneath membranes of ice. Dyer meandered back to Jericho through patches of mist, trying to recollect where he had parked his frog-green Beetle.
In the mist with his coat he was a bluster of dust. Dyer was halfway down Great Clarendon Street when he recognised Marvar leaning against the wall inside the entrance to the Oxford University Press. During the week, this was where smokers congregated – editors and managers discussing redundancies and bonuses, and – who knew? – Dyer’s book. This morning only three people stood sucking on their cigarettes, printers and shift-workers most likely, plus one solitary large flabby figure.
‘Rustum?’
You are what you are when no one is looking. He turned and blinked at Dyer as if he hardly recognis
ed him. His hair seemed more matted, his eyes duller. He had the face of a derelict, one of the homeless men on the pavement outside Blackfriars whom Dyer passed every morning, invariably staring at a book upside down in the hope that Dyer would mistake them for a former student whom life had unfairly elbowed into the gutter.
‘It’s me,’ Dyer had to remind him. ‘Leandro’s father.’
Marvar scratched his arm. His coat was on tight, he had done up every button.
‘John Dyer …’
His breath, visible, mingled with the smoke leaving his nose. He was not himself. It was as if something dreadful had happened to him.
‘Are you coming to the football match?’ said Dyer. ‘I can give you a lift.’
Marvar threw away his cigarette and clutched Dyer’s arm.
‘No, no, I can’t.’ He looked directly at him. Behind his glasses, there was a dancing flicker in his eyes. ‘Dyer … have you a second?’
It occurred to Dyer that Marvar’s behaviour might be connected with the news about Iran. He checked his watch. The match began in forty minutes.
‘Listen …’ he decided. ‘My place is around that corner, literally. We can go there.’
He would hear what Marvar had to say. If he drove fast, he could still arrive in time.
With an odd sudden tilt of his face, Marvar glanced both ways up Great Clarendon Street. There was a silver Golf parked on the other side, its windows fogged up. He gave it a nervy look.
‘Yes, yes. All right.’
He walked in quick strides beside Dyer, breathing in gulps.
Dyer showed him in. It was the house where he had lived for a year and a half: tiled floors, the pâté-coloured staircarpet. From the window in the small sitting room, you could see the canal. The landlord lived in Wolvercote, and favoured round white doorknobs from Homebase and white crockery.
Converted from a garage, the place was not to everyone’s taste, with its creaking furniture and single-glazed windows that rattled in a hard wind, letting in the sound of trains. The upstairs smelled of new carpet, and the radiators emitted a sharp gurgling noise when the heating came on. At the rear, French windows opened onto a courtyard with a wooden tub containing a magnolia.
The Sandpit Page 7
