The Sandpit

by Nicholas Shakespeare

The most obvious immediate hiding place – until he reached a settled decision about what to do with it – was another book.

  He returned to the main reading room.

  Never more had the identical galleries beneath the dome reminded him of one of Borges’s infinite libraries. A story came back to Dyer of a librarian in dark glasses who had grown blind looking for God in one of the letters on one of the pages of one of the four hundred thousand volumes.

  Of course, anyone could come in and search the stacks, but they would have to know what title they were looking for.

  Surreptitiously, before sliding the note inside, Dyer opened a volume lower down on his pile; a calf-bound facsimile of manuscripts written by seven eyewitnesses who had accompanied the admiral in charge of the Portuguese fleet, Pedro Álvares Cabral, on his voyage to Brazil.

  Dyer had no difficulty in reserving this for a further week.

  He was passing the front counter on his way out, having left both books in the stacks, when he caught the librarian’s eye, and stopped to ask if she might check the availability of one other title.

  She called it up, seeing his face. ‘J. W. Dyer, did you say? Here we are. A Social and Cultural History of the Lower Amazon Basin.’

  His shoes on the grey stone steps have the sound of someone in an empty hall slowly clapping. He hadn’t grasped how on edge he has been since returning from Browsholme, uncertain if Gilles had swallowed his denial. What the librarian tells him: no one is swallowing it.

  Lips pressed tightly: ‘I’m sorry, that’s also been requested.’

  Jolted by the anonymous requests, all Dyer’s fears writhe up like maggots in a bait tin. He walks down the stairs as if each step is taking him nearer to an incomprehensible menace.

  Leaving the Taylorian behind him, Dyer made his way up St Giles. As if carried there by an invisible thread, he crossed Parks Road into Norham Gardens and turned right, into Ward Road, past the Asselins’ imposing house, to the end of the street, and unlatched the low wooden gate to number 8, and rang the doorbell. Once again, no answer. He peered through the curtained front window. Where was she?

  Three-forty. Leandro would be at a football training session. Dyer had promised to collect him at six.

  On the way to the Co-op to buy dinner, Dyer stopped off in a cocktail bar to taste the cachaça in a bad caipirinha. Barico was the place’s name. He had never noticed it before. He recognised the barman from his stall in the Broad: it was the purveyor of panama hats.

  There were newspapers on the zinc counter. Dyer’s eyes picked out a report on Iran. The BBC office was being shut down for ‘conspiracy against national security’. He thought of how Basil Bunting was expelled as Tehran correspondent for The Times in 1952, and how he had joined the masses ululating for his own extinction. ‘I walked into the crowd and stood amongst them and shouted DEATH TO MR BUNTING! with the best of them, and nobody took the slightest notice of me.’ Dyer hadn’t needed to go to the Middle East to find himself in the same pickle. He’d first been drawn to Bunting because of his name – to come across a bracingly good poet also called Basil was a huge comfort. But there was this crucial difference between them: Dyer had been noticed.

  No mention of Rustum Marvar, or his wife.

  He drank his over-sugared caipirinha, feeling a renewed sense of isolation. Who had ordered those two books? Conscious of being under surveillance, and now of being read, he felt as if he was being crowded simultaneously from all sides by men of different skin colours, religions, politics, a scrum of Phoenix fathers hunting after the same information who had more than a sneaking suspicion that Dyer was in possession of this, and were charging hell for leather down the pitch to tackle him.

  It shocked Dyer to realise how connected these people were. Gilles Asselin had a box at Chelsea because – of course! – Katya’s husband was a shareholder of the club. Ralph Cubbage and Lionel Updark were clients of Gilles – and Gilles had boasted to Dyer of his links with high flyers in foreign intelligence services. (‘The intelligence community is a broad church that worships different gods.’) They probably had children at the Phoenix, too.

  He ordered another caipirinha with the panic of a man on a foreign shore, surrounded by once-welcoming tribes who had turned hostile. His only salvation, a post-it note covered with impenetrable scribbles. Eight days since it first came into his possession, and he still hadn’t been able to decide whether Marvar had written nonsense on it – like Dyer’s dream – or the answer to everything, like the ‘total book’ in Borges’s story, which was ‘the formula and perfect compendium of all the rest’. Dyer saw no nuances, he was bad at nuances, he was bad at so many things.

  He liked to think he had become wiser, but how little his character had matured. Nosce te ipsum. That was the wisdom he had been educated to seek at Leandro’s age. Nearly half a century on, he was a world away from understanding himself. Nuclear fusion was an easier nut to crack.

  Even so, the problem remained. What to do with the small square of paper currently sandwiched inside the back flap of Os sete únicos documents de 1500, conservados em Lisboa, referentes a viagem de Pedro Álvares Cabral (Lisbon, 1940). That part of his brain which should have solved it wasn’t working.

  He had rehearsed all the options: Updark, Cubbage, Euratom, Wikileaks, his old newspaper. But these were Marvar’s thoughts, not his. He had to come up with ideas of his own. He had tumbled it over and over till he was weary, and he couldn’t put an answer together. What if there is no right person?

  And what the hell had happened to Marvar?

  His head felt as though it was buried in sand. Tumultuous thoughts coursed through it. He went on playing the scenarios in his mind. They hadn’t changed. Nearly a fortnight after Marvar’s disappearance, nothing had changed. But dead or alive or wherever he was, it didn’t matter. Marvar had wanted Dyer to decide for him.

  Initially, Dyer had relished the challenge. His self-esteem had rotted and he saw a chance to earn it back. But the past days had educated him, he recognised that he wasn’t the right person. He was a conduit, a middle man, a quondam journalist with yet another story that he couldn’t tell and had no idea what to do with.

  Edit yourself out of the story, the caipirinha is telling him. Spike your interview. Rub the blue pencil over anything connecting you to Marvar. Remember Bunting: ‘Notes are a confession of failure.’

  Before Dyer went to collect Leandro, he made another detour to Ward Road. Still, the house lay in darkness. The drawn curtains reminded him of the flat above Yolanda’s dance studio in the Surquillo district of Lima, in which Ezequiel had hidden out even as he choreographed his world revolution. Gilles was pursuing the same kind of dream, and with no less ruthlessness. For the first time, Dyer worried about Miranda. What danger had he placed her in by sending her his notes? Gilles was aware that Dyer was connected with Miranda, from the knowing way that he had referred to her in Browsholme – did this now mean that Gilles connected Miranda with Marvar?

  Oxford in the evening and Dyer’s face lit by the windows along North Parade. Gaudy lights from Gee’s restaurant, the night-neon of florists. He walked as if an old dog was following him, his heels clacking on the pavement like the slow tok of a berimbau.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  LATE NEXT MORNING, DYER PRESSED the buzzer outside number 8 Ward Road and inclined his head to the perforated speaker. This time a female voice answered.

  He waited for her to open the door.

  She wore an apron over a pale yellow linen dress.

  ‘I’ll be scrubbed!’ She pushed her hair back, a twinkle in her eyes. They assessed him through a new pair of polka-dot-framed glasses. ‘God, your face.’

  He had forgotten her slight lisp. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You look like a moping cod fed on phytoplankton.’

  Before he could answer: ‘I know what you’re here for. Come.’

  She led the way, limping slightly, down a passage and into a drawing room. The room is large and u
ntidy, with high ceilings and tall windows onto a garden – and at once feels well-heated compared with Dyer’s in Jericho. On the right, beside the entrance to a conservatory, is a long comfortable-looking sofa with a torn arm. Photograph albums are scattered, open, on the lumpy cushions. There is a green baize-covered card table with a silver hand mirror and books on it, and a tapestry and paintings on the wall. To the left, the room opens into a kitchen area. A radio on the counter is playing classical music, and a long-haired black-and-white dog bounds about, a streak of mud on one of its ears.

  ‘Apologies for the mess, I only got back last night.’

  From a package holiday to Paguera, reduced, at the last minute, to one third of the original price – ‘a hideous resort with quite a nice view from my balcony’.

  She always became depressed in Oxford in February, she said.

  Having sat under a Mediterranean sky and read for four days, Miranda had returned home tanned, with dappled brushstrokes on her cheeks from where the sun had coloured her face through a straw hat. The hat – battered-looking, with a yellow-and-red college band – hung on an antler above a wooden armchair on which she gestured for him to leave his shoulder bag.

  ‘You got my parcel?’ he said.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Thanks for keeping mum.’

  ‘Who’s that?’ came a voice from the conservatory.

  ‘Speaking of which …’ she laughed.

  A white-haired old woman with grey eyes pushed into the light, her hands gripping a metal frame on wheels. Her round cross face had the texture of an abalone shell, with smooth pink patches between wrinkles.

  ‘Mummy, this is John.’

  ‘Of course it is. Nothing wrong with me,’ and fixed him. Her eyes were two glasses that needed to be rinsed. She held out her arms. ‘Is Miranda treating you well?’

  ‘Very well.’

  ‘She’s a good girl at heart.’ Her hold was clammy for such thin hands.

  ‘Mum, why don’t you go and sit down, and I’ll bring it to you.’

  He had interrupted Miranda as she was making an omelette.

  ‘Wait till I’ve done this,’ she said to him as her mother shuffled and squeaked towards the card table, ‘then I’ll find your envelope.’

  A pan was heating on the stove. She turned the gas back up. ‘I must say, it was exciting to be treated as a poste restante. It’s something earth-shattering, I hope.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, failing to smile.

  ‘I was grateful for your reading list, incidentally.’

  Dyer looked blank, before he remembered. ‘That was no trouble.’

  ‘Unlike the rest, you mean?’ Then quickly: ‘Shut up, mouth. Sorry, but I was always taught that the wise read a letter backwards.’

  He smiled. ‘I haven’t heard that phrase since …’

  ‘University?’ She was breaking an egg into a bowl.

  ‘I expect.’

  ‘Were you at this place?’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘Studying?’

  ‘English.’

  ‘Ditto.’ She had stayed on to do a doctorate, on English Linguistics from 1900 to 1940.

  ‘I stayed on, too,’ he said, ‘for a while.’

  She licked her finger. ‘Talk to me – if I start I won’t stop.’

  It was only for a year, before he joined the newspaper. He tells her about it as she prepares the omelette (‘one of my specialities’). His dissertation on the one hundred and nine claimants to the authorship of the plays in the First Folio. He had used Francis Bacon’s code to prove that P. G. Wodehouse had written Love’s Labour’s Lost.

  He said: ‘You can prove anyone is anyone. Is what I learned.’

  She laughed. ‘Marriage taught me that. No, what am I talking about. I’m talking bollocks. Hey, Thor, down from there!’

  She shooed the dog off the photographs which her young nieces had jumbled up when they came by last night; she had deposited her mother for the time she was away with her sister in Streatley, Thor with a neighbour up the road.

  Photographs had spilled onto the carpet. Dyer stooped to retrieve them. One showed Miranda in a white gauze dress with a not very tall sturdy man in a suit.

  ‘Is that him?’

  ‘You monster of curiosity. Yes.’ She looked over his shoulder to refresh her memory.

  Dark receding hairline, strong jaw, direct crinkly gaze. ‘He was a great flirt. He had superb eyes, they came out of his head whenever he saw a pretty woman. He left a lot of long faces when he married me.’ She hobbled back into the kitchen area. Earlier, she had kicked her suitcase under a bed, splintering a toenail.

  ‘Pinot?’ lifting a bottle.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. I don’t trust people who don’t drink red wine.’ She unscrewed the cap and looked for two glasses.

  For seventeen years, she had ironed his shirts and made sure no dandruff was on his collar. ‘After he left, I thought I’d never be happy, but sometimes I realise when I read a book or see a sunset or hear music I am absolutely content.’

  She poured the omelette mix into the heated pan. ‘Ah, that is a nice sound, that’s how it should sound, and we’ll have to eat it right away. You will stay for a bite, won’t you?’

  She apologised for eating at a nursery hour. She leaned forward to sample the omelette so that it wouldn’t dribble over her dress. Something in her eyes was bright and full of life as she bustled around.

  She asked him to smell whether a dressing she had opened last night was off – ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  She urged him to help himself from a bowl filled with small tomatoes.

  ‘Tomaters!’ erupted a voice from the card table. ‘Ain’t seen a tomater since pussy pulled the fevvers out o’ the frush’s froat.’

  Miranda rolled her eyes. ‘Thank you, Mother.’

  She told him in a new voice, running a spatula around the rim of the pan: ‘She’s eighty-seven and has been like this for two years. She listens all day to the radio and then regurgitates some of the things she’s heard. My sister stomps off furious, trailing vapours.’

  Last night, her small nieces had insisted on looking at Miranda’s wedding photographs. Her mother had flicked through them and then asked: ‘Who’s the woman in white?’

  ‘You just wonder what world she’s in,’ she said rather hoarsely. ‘I used to say “Basingstoke” when she repeated a story, but the train’s got stuck in the station. After not seeing Thor for a week, she didn’t remember him, and the odd thing is, nor did Thor recognise her. I’m worried she’s just circling the plughole.’

  Dyer grimaced. ‘I’m sorry.’ The old lady’s reaction was similar to those his mother would give, he said.

  ‘Did your mother have dementia?’

  ‘If not, something like it.’

  It had started out as Charles Bonnet syndrome, affecting her peripheral vision. ‘She’d see little fairies in the corners of her eyes, little wee people all running around through the air, and tell them to go away.’ Near the end, she behaved like this towards Dyer.

  He had images of his mother, opening drawers and leaving the contents on the floor. Her lengthening ash. The glass potty under her bed. Her memories divided by flimsy partitions through which they eavesdropped on each other. She eventually was given electroconvulsive shock therapy for her depression. Close after that trotted cancer and chemo. They had kept her in hospital; Dyer visited twice a week with his father. He thought of the last occasion he saw her. Shapeless like a chair covered with a dustsheet. There were burns on her leg from a cigarette that his father had lit and which she had forgotten she was smoking. Make-up had run over her dress. She had taught French and German for twenty-seven years, and Dyer to teach himself.

  Afterwards, Dyer watched his father wordlessly climb into the car. He knew that he was going home straight to his study. Dyer followed him in his mind through the veil of Turkish cigarette smoke. He opens the whisky bottle, pours the glass to the top, drains it,
pours another, drains, covers his forehead with his arm. His father was a naval historian, an expert on seventeenth-century Dutch shipping laws. He had told Dyer: ‘I can’t teach you anything.’

  Her father had been a philosopher. He had left them this house in Ward Road. It was where she’d grown up.

  She was flipping the omelette. ‘I hope you like it runny.’

  They carried their plates over to the card table.

  ‘You’ve got long legs, so sit there.’

  Miranda’s mother was lost in her thoughts. Thor avoided her, instead slinking under the table to Dyer’s chair. He looked plaintively at Dyer’s omelette, and pawed his knee.

  ‘Thor! Off! I’m sorry, he’s more promiscuous than my ex. Just smack his nose.’

  ‘He’s gorgeous. What is he?’

  Miranda laughed, a kind and appreciative laugh, full of pride and affection. ‘A Welsh border collie crossed with whatever mutt his mother ran into on the Malvern Hills. But before you get carried away, he wags his tail like that to Ralph Cubbage – even, Lord love a duck, to Gilles Asselin.’

  Her giggle: ‘Oh, you’d have relished the scene this morning! There I was in the Parks, minding my own, when Gilles jogs past, in the middle of a conference call which I have to say does sound awfully urgent, and Thor – I don’t think he can have been exercised enough – shoots off after him, barking merrily. I follow in super-hot pursuit, blowing the dog whistle, and finally catch up with them by the bridge, where I find Gilles battling to shoo away my slobbering hound, all the while clearly frantic to continue his conversation, which as far as I could tell – and this is so off the record – was nothing less than Gilles trying, in between excited barks, to organise a massive buying spree. I knew that if I hung around long enough he’d tell me what to do with my ISAs, but this is where Thor and I are not on the same page. Gilles gives me the creeps, he reminds me of one of those golems in the Pitt Rivers sculpted from mud. I always feel talking to him is like being whipped by dervishes, or something. So I dragged Thor away by his ear and gave you a sound ticking-off, didn’t I?’