Plainly, it was tormenting him, the lack of a solution.
They soon finished the bottle. Dyer opened another. It was a New Zealand sauvignon from the Co-op.
‘Do you want a pizza?’
‘A pizza?’ said Marvar.
‘I can ring for one.’
‘Why not? The last pizza,’ he waved his hand merrily, like a conductor.
‘I hope not,’ said Dyer. He got up and dialled the number from the post-it note on the fridge, ordering a quattro staggione for himself, a margarita for Marvar.
‘Twenty minutes,’ said a foreign-sounding male voice.
He refilled their glasses.
Marvar took another large swallow and stared across the room.
‘Yes, maybe you, J. W. Dyer, can imagine it,’ he said, and swivelled his eyes from the bookshelf back to Dyer, and then to Dyer’s open book on the table. ‘You write a book, you put years into it, your life … and no one publishes it. All that hard work, you don’t have one single reader.’ He drained his glass and took the bottle and poured more wine into it. ‘I had a teacher too. Lovely old woman. Piano. “Music unheard has no value,” she used to say. And it’s true, it’s true.’
Dyer looked at him. ‘Oughtn’t we to see how our sons are getting on?’
‘Yes,’ said Marvar, suppressing a burp, ‘let’s do that.’
Dyer found Silvi’s number and dialled it. ‘Hi, Silvi, John here. I’ve got Rustum with me. That’s right, Samir’s dad. We were wondering how the boys are doing?’
Following a brief conversation with Silvi – they were fine, Gilles had made cheeseburgers, everyone now was in the games room playing Fifa – Dyer was passed on to his son.
Leandro didn’t seem to hear him, gaming no doubt. After extracting from his son the earlier score – 3–1, to Winchester House – Dyer asked: ‘Is Samir there? His dad wants a word.’
He handed his mobile to Marvar.
Dyer started to tidy away his notes on the Tupi while father and son spoke. Even so, it was hard not to overhear when Marvar’s voice became concerned. ‘But Samir …’ he said, holding on to the table. He scraped back his chair and rose unsteadily to his feet. ‘It didn’t stop you playing?’ He was frowning. ‘Huh, don’t I know the type …’ patting the top of his head. ‘No, I’m with Leandro’s dad,’ and then a few words in Farsi, rather as Dyer spoke to Leandro in Portuguese when they talked about people in front of them. At last, Marvar said: ‘What time am I collecting you? Six? That late? Oh, there’s a party … Yes, yes, Ward Road, I have the address. Bye, darling … Love you too.’ He kissed into the phone and put it to his ear to listen, but Samir had rung off.
‘Anything wrong?’ Dyer asked.
‘Samir’s hurt himself,’ grimaced Marvar, returning the phone. ‘There’s some big boy at Winchester House. He called him The Pubic. Does he mean precocious puberty?’
Dyer laughed. ‘They usually have one boy who’s six foot two and clearly shaves. But he’s OK?’
‘He is good. It’s only his shin. It is nothing to worry about. We will still be able to go walking,’ he said with forced cheerfulness. Then in the way that people redundantly repeat what has been overheard, ‘I said I’ll collect him at six tomorrow afternoon.’
The buzzer went. And again. Longer this time.
Marvar shot a look at Dyer. The muscles tightened around his eyes.
‘The pizzas,’ clarified Dyer.
An Albanian boy on a motorbike handed them over. Dyer unpacked the pizzas from their boxes onto plates. Marvar nibbled dejectedly at his margarita.
It was no longer light outside. The darkness was crushing him.
‘Where’s the loo?’
‘Down there, on the right.’
His shadow, magnified, cartwheeled across the wall.
‘I know she’s dead,’ he hiccupped, when he returned.
He lay back in the chair. The pulse was racing in his temple.
‘You have no proof,’ said Dyer.
Marvar was leaping ahead, chasing the worst again. His conversation with Samir had startled something. He was like a sheep who had scented the slaughterhouse.
He hiccupped again. His wife was in Tehran, in a tiled room, behind a locked door. She had cramp in her legs, her lips were swollen.
‘No, no, she’s dead, or she might as well be. What she loved in me is gone – because she will take it with her. I feel a large piece of me is no longer there. But as long as I live – and Samir lives – then she is not gone. While we live, she will not be completely dead.’
It sounded like a speech that he’d rehearsed in the loo.
‘You don’t know,’ Dyer insisted. Marvar was saying this just to see how it would feel. He wanted to test his capacity to survive his wife’s death. But they wouldn’t kill her till they’d got hold of Marvar.
Across the table, his hard corroding smile. ‘I do. I do know.’
He stopped speaking. The room was without a sound in it, quieter than the Taylorian. When the church bell struck, the chime was unnaturally loud.
Then he burst into tears. He had lost his footing. Up until now, God himself couldn’t have made a coward out of him. But he was cracking, there was no doubt. His confession hadn’t given him succour. He had been looking to Dyer for absolution. Or for Dyer to tell him what to do, maybe.
Dyer went to the loo.
When he came back, he was surprised to see Marvar’s chair empty.
Marvar stood by the fridge. Strangely calm, he seemed to be peering at the Pelé fridge-magnet which Vivien had given Leandro, and – clipped to it – a yellow post-it note scribbled with telephone numbers for pizzerias, cleaners, doctors, plumbers … the kitchen of Dyer’s life.
At the sight of Dyer, Marvar stepped away. He resumed his seat and pushed Dyer’s book across the table. It was as if all his nervousness had been replaced by resolution.
‘You never wrote a dedication,’ and handed to Dyer the propelling pencil that he was holding. ‘Go on. Write something. For me.’
Dyer accepted the pencil and looked at the title page. He still hadn’t worked out what to write. He was aware of Marvar sizing him up through his round wire spectacles. It was always like this, he thought, sitting down.
The last words Dyer remembered him saying: ‘Ah, yes. You had a wife and daughter,’ as he picked up the photograph of Astrud, stared at it, and put it tipsily back.
That night, Marvar slept in Leandro’s bed. He was in no state to walk home to Merton Street. And although he didn’t say so, obviously worried about who might be waiting for him there.
He had gone when Dyer woke in the morning. He had taken the book, but not his overcoat. It was hanging with its collar up next to Dyer’s tackle in the cupboard under the stairs. Marvar must have searched for it and not finding it he must have left.
Chapter Sixteen
IN THE NIGHT, DYER DREAMED a line of poetry which seemed so true, so wonderful that he had to bring it to the surface to be preserved when he woke. He dragged the line through the vertical meadow of his sleep and having kept it warm and tender in his mouth like a gun-dog with a bird, he dropped it before his waking self.
After writing it down, he went back to sleep. In the morning, he picked up the sheet of paper that he had put on his bedside table between the photos, books and possessions, and read: ‘Ordinarily he took the train.’
Groggily, he belted on his dressing gown.
In the meagre light, the chill vacancy of Leandro’s room. On the draining board downstairs: two empty wine glasses, a white mug three-quarters full with cold coffee, Marvar’s barely touched pizza.
In Brazil, ‘pizza’ was slang for a crime which suffered no legal consequences. Marvar had committed no crime – so far as Dyer could tell. He must have shambled back to his digs in Merton Street.
Dyer drew the curtains, peered through the French window. The mist reeked out of the canal and shrouded the buildings. Over the neighbour’s fence and the grey tiled rooftops, the clang of
bells. It could have been Belém – the narrow roads off the square and little two-storey houses painted in pastel colours, with front doors onto the pavement. But it was the energetic vicar of St Barnabas tolling him to morning service. Marvar yesterday had been on his way there, Dyer now recalled. He was dressed up for church, dressed to pray, and had paused with the smokers outside the OUP for a cigarette when Dyer strolled out of the fog.
The bells stopped, tossing Dyer back ashore in Jericho. Should he call someone? But who? He’d cross that bridge after breakfast. Once he had set down all that he could remember of his conversation with Marvar.
Despite his aching hangover, Dyer forced himself to the kitchen table, and, with a full pot of coffee beside him, started to write out the story before the details vanished into the mist. His return to England had coincided with the revelation that Microsoft, thirty years before, had inserted into every programme a device which allowed the US intelligence services access to your computer. It hadn’t required Marvar to remind him that the best way of safeguarding a secret was with pencil and paper.
Much of what Marvar had told him was too technical, and Dyer left out a lot; as well, he may have misremembered certain things. Still, it was a relief to be exercising his reporter’s muscles, to be writing, back in the flow. Over the past months, his mind had lost itself in the Cherwell’s weeds, but now it was on fire with what Marvar had said. By transcribing this onto sheets of A4 in shorthand, Dyer was making it real. Exactly what he would do with it, he had no idea. All he knew: Marvar’s story was unlike any he had heard.
Flooded with coffee, Dyer raked back through their few encounters. Marvar’s abrupt disappearance during the Summer Fields game – that must have happened after Samir’s corner kick set the ball rolling, as it were. When Dyer first met him beside the sandpit, Marvar was scribbling mathematical formulas in the sand, tantalisingly close to a solution. Their excited embrace on the touchline following Samir’s goal against Horris Hill would have occurred within hours of Marvar’s successful experiment. Small wonder his ecstatic reaction.
Yet Marvar’s face last night was drained. He had talked like a man under attack from every direction, who didn’t know which way to turn. In the lucidity of his despair he chose to confide in Dyer.
Both their sons had been bullied by the same boy. Was that the reason, though?
Something about Marvar’s behaviour at the Horris Hill match had stayed, unexamined, in Dyer’s mind. How he raised the subject of Rejas and kept returning to him. The policeman’s story fascinated Marvar. But not so pressingly as Dyer’s reasons for keeping the story to himself, refusing to publish.
Dyer could only guess that Marvar had longed for an honourable way to be relieved of his responsibility. His options were narrowing with each moment, he didn’t have much time. He was passionate in wanting to save Shula, but the one means that he could think of to achieve this was out of the question. He had to look for his answer elsewhere.
In his paralysed state, it was easy then to understand why Marvar should have sought the help of his mother’s God, a god he had hitherto not believed in. What he had been on his way to pray for in St Barnabas, when forestalled by Dyer, was to have the decision wrested from him.
In those circumstances, who do you trust to give you release? You can’t trust your government – or any government. You can’t trust your professor at the Clarendon, who has but the haziest notion of who you are. You can’t trust your wife, because she’s lying semi-conscious in a prison cell in Tehran. All you’re left with is a superannuated ex-journo you met at a school sandpit and once stood beside on a touchline. You have to trust someone like John William Dyer, author of A Social and Cultural History of the Lower Amazon Basin (OUP, 2001), a man who had nailed himself so stubbornly to the mast of his high principles that he sank a reasonably promising career by keeping mum.
Shortly after 6 p.m. Dyer drove to the Asselins’ to pick up Leandro.
Over the car radio, he caught the last item of news: about the Australian mathematician Todd Angle who’d gone missing on a bush walk in Tasmania’s south-west. Dyer was about to turn it off, but the phrase ‘So the whole world can know’ stopped him. A friend had received a letter from Angle two days after he disappeared, beginning with these words written boldly across the top, and containing Angle’s philosophy on reality and a mathematical theory explaining the ideal tax system. ‘I wondered if Todd had committed suicide, but came to the conclusion he had changed a lot since I last saw him.’
Meanwhile, the main news concerned the worsening situation in the Middle East. The American president was promising to ‘dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran’. In response, Iran was ratcheting up the rhetoric. ‘Israel is no longer needed to exist near us.’ Any further provocation, said a spokesman in Tehran, and Iran was prepared to restart its nuclear programme ‘within hours’.
Chapter Seventeen
THIRTY HOURS ON, DYER’S MIND remained congested with everything Marvar had told him. Dyer had lived more on that day than in the last seventeen months; who would have predicted that it would have been so after they ran into each other outside the Oxford University Press?
Yet when Dyer went over it again, he wondered whether Marvar was not being violently overdramatic. Was it possible that no one had laid a finger on Shula, and Marvar’s fears were the product of his disturbed imagination?
The truth has its own smell. There was nothing feigned about Marvar. Even so, Dyer worried that a long period of inactivity had made his own judgement defective. ‘Never put a wet car in a garage,’ his father used to say. ‘It goes rusty.’ Had this happened to Dyer?
He looked forward to a few hours of not having to think about nuclear fusion, for which he had anyway no spontaneous talent; to losing himself, instead, on the coast of sixteenth-century Brazil. The bay below Monte Pascoal. The crump of waves on a high-banked shore. The Portuguese fleet is at anchor.
A cold breeze had blown up, an Oxford breeze, knife sharp, with dead leaves in it, and empty paper cups. Dyer wrapped his scarf tighter. Emerging from Little Clarendon Street, he walked past St Bennett’s, past the Eagle and Child where Tolkien used to meet C. S. Lewis for a beer, past the newly refurbished St Giles’s Café, once upon a time a greasy-spoon where he and his best friend Rougetel escaped from school on Saturday afternoons to eat an illicit egg on toast.
The breeze heightened his senses. Passing the Oxfam bookshop, Dyer caught a smell of body odour and urine. Ahead, he recognised a Phoenix parent. A donnish-looking man in a black beret, unbrushed grey hair growing in every direction: the father of the second boy demoted from the football team, whose name had slipped Dyer’s mind. He was giving wide berth to a dishevelled accordionist seated cross-legged on the pavement.
Blue tracksuit with pale stains on it, scabs on the backs of his hands, sharp teeth blackened around the stumps, and his eyes wincing as if it wasn’t music he was squeezing out of his box, but smoke. The tune was always the same one.
The face staring up had the bitter, porcine features of someone who had never been taken seriously, who had had to fight for every scrap. A thick paperback was open, upside down, pages stained, on a sleeping bag beside him, together with a half-bottle of rum.
He stopped playing. His left hand stretched out, clutching a McDonald’s coffee cup filled with coins, and jingled it.
Dyer was about to enter the Taylorian when he heard a muffled voice call his name. He looked around. A sleek black Audi was parked in the bus lane parallel to the entrance. Knuckles rapped at the tinted rear window, which lowered further to reveal the blotched features of Lionel Updark, who fastidiously dislodged his Apple headphones.
‘John, do you have a mo’?’
Dyer wanted to turn away. He gestured at the Ionic facade behind him. ‘I was about to go in there.’
The driver sprang out and seamlessly opened the far-side door.
‘I’m the last person you want to see, I know,’ said Updark, with a crimped smile, makin
g a little Boy Scout salute with three fingers, and then wrapping the white cable around them and putting it into his pocket. ‘But this shouldn’t take long.’
Dyer climbed into the back, in his mind cursing the red light that he had dutifully obeyed at the pedestrian crossing. The car glided off down the Woodstock Road.
‘Where are we going?’
‘Patience, John, patience.’
Beside him, Updark, in a black coat, sat with his hands in his lap, looking out of the window. The sun lay hidden, smothered by fast-moving banks of cloud, intense white, like the glaze on an iced bun. Lights were still on in some of the houses they passed.
The car slowed down by the speed camera opposite Lynam’s primary school, and after an interval it accelerated on. Over the roundabout. Onto the A40.
It was falling into place.
‘Anything to do with your new posting?’ asked Dyer in a dry, flippant tone. Instead of heading to the Faubourg St Honoré and the former palace of Napoleon’s sister, Updark was whispered to be on temporary secondment to an outreach of GCHQ.
‘All will become clear when we get there,’ Updark said. He brushed some hairs from his trouser leg. ‘What do you reckon, Peter?’
The driver answered twenty minutes. Dyer knows suddenly where they are going. Not to the Updark pile in Woodeaton, where he had tipsily complimented curly-headed Audrey – that was her name! – on her clinging scent. (‘That smells exotic, what is it?’
‘Oh, something I got in the souk in Rabat.’) But to an anonymous corrugated-iron warehouse in a business park outside Eynsham where he will be obliged to leave his shoulder bag in reception and submit to a close body search and, after a security wand waves him through, follow Updark up a perforated-metal staircase, through a steel-lined corridor and screened co-axial cables, into a large open-plan room with floor-to-ceiling windows.
The Sandpit Page 11
