The Sandpit

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Astonishing to Dyer was how many times a face could change in an hour. It animated Rougetel to recall his months in the north, the hours he spent crouched over the ice, searching for a seal’s hidden breathing hole. He half-rose out of his chair, his face filled with glee. His right hand was the sled he had pushed across the frozen sea, his left was the moving wave he had watched petrify into a scroll, and the uneaten rice cake was a whirling wall of snow in which his feet stood invisible. By the glow of a seal-oil lamp inside his fetid igloo, he worked his way, page by page, through a dictionary spotted with fat – the white steel rod – in which, recognising the condition to which he aspired, he had underlined the Netsilik word for polar bear, tara-i-tua-luk = he who is without shadow.

  From the clean white crucible of Nunavut, his true features emerged. He reflected: ‘To be adult at such a young age, it splits you open.’ After fourteen months, he was ready to strike out on his own, make sense of the world for himself.

  In the spring the ice melted. He left the snow and the seals, headed south. Summer found him in Cochin studying the Upanishads. To his Spanish and his smatterings of Aymara and Inuktitut, he now added Sanskrit. The research suited him. He discovered that he loved it. Languages led to linguistics, linguistics to artificial intelligence. The more he read, the more he hungered to read. ‘I wanted to know everything.’

  The effort he might have dedicated to a thesis, had he stayed on at Cambridge, he ploughed into his life’s project: a careful study and sustained meditation on the meaning of the texts to which intuition, curiosity or blind chance would lead him.

  His practice was to take one subject at a time and master it. He sought out the acknowledged authorities, read their works with stubborn interest, clarified his thoughts. He devoted his next winter to the Theosophists; the winter after that to the rise and fall of the Nabateans. Since then, he had immersed himself in – counted on his crushed fingers – philosophy, history, science, biology, mathematics, economics, medicine, psychology, astronomy, anatomy, archaeology, politics, physiology. Seeking the interconnectedness that lay in everything, he meandered from subject to subject, one fertilising another, to investigate how it fitted into the universal puzzle.

  He swallowed his rice cake in quick gulps. He was grinning now. For the first time, he was telling someone who had known him, who might possibly understand, the extent of his journey.

  To cram nearly forty years into a conversation over lunch is not easy. Dyer’s sense of Rougetel’s life was riddled with gaps. What did he do for money, sex? Had he been in love? What did he regret? Most of all, was he ill, on drugs?

  These were questions Dyer kept to himself. He hoped they didn’t show on his face.

  But his thoughts were all tangled. Rougetel’s story hardly seemed possible. Dyer would have found so much of it difficult to believe if he hadn’t known what Rougetel was capable of.

  He wondered about ‘crashing points’. There was Rougetel’s grief after the death of his parents. Had there been other crises? If so, they didn’t feature in his ‘Ladybird’ autobiography.

  Dyer took in that Rougetel had passed his twenties and thirties abroad. He had not returned to Latin America. He avoided big cities. All the time that Dyer had worked as a journalist in Rio, Rougetel’s incessant reading was guiding him, in intense bursts of travel, to oblique parts. In book-lined rooms – dusty, deserted – he had steadily augmented his knowledge.

  At Dyer’s encouragement, Rougetel traced a map with his forefinger on the tablecloth, moving between places where he had halted in order to study. Djibouti, Ceuta, Niamey, Al-Ula, Tromsø, Royal George, Akureyri, Darovoye, Jotogh, Sihanoukville.

  But he hadn’t always stayed abroad. For more than twenty years he had been in England, and for the past two years in Oxford. His new focus of interest, what had brought him back here, was the human brain, and the differing world views of the left and the right hemispheres. He had been inspired by a 608-page book, the fruit of two decades of research, written by a Prize Fellow of All Souls, a scholar in English Literature who had returned to the college to retrain in medicine.

  Excited, Rougetel unfastened the straps of his backpack and brandished the thumbed volume for Dyer to see. It looked waterlogged, as if he had dropped it in the Cherwell – until Dyer realised why the pages appeared so bulged-out and yellow: because of all the post-it notes that Rougetel had inserted.

  Rougetel had almost finished digesting the book, the implications of which he found inordinately interesting. He had obtained a Reader card for the Bodleian, and had used the library for his background reading, steadily making his way through the author’s bibliography. In a day or so, he would be leaving Oxford.

  He glanced across at Dyer, who was still looking at the yellow markers, and gave him a sympathetic smile. ‘It’s lucky we bumped into each other. Next week, I might not have been here.’

  Mutely, Dyer watched him tuck the book back. All these months, he and Rougetel had been living in the same city. How many times had Dyer stepped past him?

  A line of Horace came to Dyer. Never be amazed by anything.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  DYER’S FIRST WILD THOUGHTS were tinged with pity. Rougetel’s story could be ascribed to one word: cannabis. Dyer had known several casualties among his university contemporaries, and plenty more in Rio. Freelance mendicants were a common sight up and down the back trails of Latin America. It’s one of the things you can do if you’re damaged or if you’ve experienced heartbreak: you can roam.

  He had a quick vision of a wandering singer who haunted the bus stop below the favela, delivering serenades to the queue in a despairing or ecstatic tenor. Rougetel offered up harmonious snatches of knowledge: he was an intellectual and spiritual nomad, reclusive, who had renounced the ordinary agitations of life to live in libraries and books.

  But Rougetel didn’t have the manner of an addict, or the air of someone whose experiences had broken him. If he was on drugs or suffering a breakdown, there was no outward sign of it. On the contrary, he seemed, to Dyer, unnaturally coherent. He could smile at himself. At Dyer. He had the lucidity of someone with a clear conscience. He seemed incisive, open, aware. Not out of his wits at all.

  Dyer asked for the bill. He had lost his time sense. They’d been talking for more than two hours. ‘I have to collect my son.’

  ‘You have a son?’

  ‘Come with me, why don’t you? He’s at the Phoenix.’

  Rougetel’s deep-set eyes with their dark brown irises looked at him. ‘All right.’ He reached for his hat and his rod. ‘I’d like that.’

  Across the café, his coat on a chair, was a research fellow from Lincoln. Dyer couldn’t remember his name. He eyed Rougetel in a curious way that made Dyer feel protective.

  Dyer, after paying Miguel, picked up the backpack for Rougetel to put on. It surprised him how little it weighed.

  He opened the door for his old friend and they stepped out into Market Street.

  Inside the Lisboa, Dyer had been a silent listener. Here in the street, his questions tumbled out. It fascinated him to know where Rougetel ate, slept, how he funded himself, filled the day.

  They walked down Cornmarket into St Giles, as Rougetel described his circuit.

  ‘It would only take you a week to get used to,’ he said in his sincere, serious voice.

  His morning today had begun in Iffley. He had caught a few hours’ sleep inside the porch of St Mary the Virgin. He had risen at 4 a.m. before the lights in the vicarage switched on, brushed his teeth, picked out what to wear. He kept in his backpack, wrapping the one or two sacred texts on the subjects he was winnowing: a pair of Primark swimming trunks with a net layer that was easy to wash, three pairs of socks, a shirt, a pullover, plus a toothbrush/toothpaste, a comb, a water bottle, a torch, a penknife, and a bar of L’Occitane verbena-scented soap.

  After completing his exercises on the grass, he had jogged, backpack on, along the towpath to the train station, which opened at 4
.30 a.m., and sat on a bench. No one threw him out ever, or talked to him; he had no conversations with anyone – ‘I try not to draw attention to myself.’ Dyer wouldn’t have noticed him, necessarily. In his parallel dimension, he fitted like a trout into his surroundings.

  At 6 a.m. he walked from the station to McDonald’s in Cornmarket. There he ate an egg and cheese McMuffin.

  At 9 a.m., he entered one of the university libraries, producing his Bodleian Reader card. He had yet to climb the art-deco staircase to the Taylorian. His three favourites: the Vere Harmsworth Library in Parks Road, the Sackler Library in St John’s Street, and the Social Science Library in Manor Road.

  Invariably, he spent his day in one of these reading rooms, studying or napping. Twice a week for several months he would wash his clothes in the men’s toilet of the Social Science Library, hanging his socks and pants out of the window to dry, or on sunny days spreading them on the hedge beneath, while taking his lunch on the grass strip beside St Catherine’s. But George, the doorman, had recently grown suspicious. He had approached Rougetel while he was reading a biography of Max Weber, and warned: ‘We’ve been watching you for some time.’ Rougetel had since found an alternative wash basin, in a steam-room on the top floor of the Westgate shopping centre; the door was locked, but he could prise it open with his penknife.

  The pattern of his life emerged like a brass rubbing with each loping step.

  In the afternoons, he slept for an hour or two in a leather armchair in the Oxford Union – his radical grandmother had given him a lifetime’s membership. His eyes became glinty when Dyer asked what he did to stay afloat, as if the subject bored him. ‘Money? That’s just numbers.’

  For his daily expenses, he stretched out on the pavement outside Balliol or Blackfriars, and dozed or read while waiting for money to collect in his hat. On a good day, he funnelled £30 worth of coins into his trouser pocket, concealing any notes in his trainers. A lifetime on the road had taught him how to economise. At lunchtime, he bought a ‘meal deal’ at Tesco for £4.50; on alternate afternoons, a latte from the stall beneath the Saxon Tower for £2.60. If it was raining hard, he forked out £22.50 to spend the night in a shelter for the homeless. Generally, though, he shunned hostels; the inmates were drug addicts or alcoholics who perceived Rougetel in terms of what materially could be begged, borrowed or filched off him.

  Most nights, he walked back along the canal to St Mary’s, Iffley, after eating a second egg bap before McDonald’s closed at 2 a.m.

  He lay down beneath the dog-tooth arch, sometimes on the bench in the porch, sometimes on the stone step – ‘surprisingly comfortable’ – and always a little nervous in case the vicar should discover him. It calmed something in Rougetel to know that an anchoress had lived here in the thirteenth century, Annora of Iffley, a widow who had holed herself up for nine years beside the church, in a timbered cell with a curtained window, surrounded only by religious books and writing materials, never stepping out into the world. On cold nights, under his tattered Bolivian blanket, reclining against his rucksack, Rougetel recalled his experiences on the road, and felt unexpectedly close to her.

  The sun had come out. They crossed Norham Gardens at the entrance to the Parks. Flat bandages of cloud stretched over the trees. Near here a week before, Updark’s car had stopped to pick up Dyer.

  The sob of a siren sucked Dyer back into the present. He wanted to ask Rougetel his opinion of America and Iran, but then recalled the bafflement in his eyes when Dyer had mentioned the nuclear deal. Dyer predicted that Rougetel would perceive the latest stand-off as not all that important in the great scheme: merely part of a continuity that stretched back, before Annora of Iffley even, to a period when Iran was the Achaemenid Empire and ruled the world – in its way so much larger than now – as the American president strove to dominate today.

  Dyer’s bewilderment had increased on discovering how Rougetel occupied his days in Oxford. His abnegation was something that Dyer didn’t pretend to understand. It was as if they stood facing each other on opposite banks, and there floated between them a dark canal that was unbridgeable.

  While it was hard for Dyer, walking on the broad pavement beside him, to think of Rougetel as a neurotic fantasist, his story was so picaresque and unusual that it crossed over into the implausible. He had the childish traits of someone who had sat far too long among books, for whom reading had become a stand-in for life.

  Dyer pressed Rougetel further as they walked down Bradmore Road. What was he looking for? What had he found? Had his life travelled the questions he had asked of it into a resolution? In the boundless expanse of his reading and meditating had he come across one entry point, like a seal’s breathing hole in the ice, which led him to the core?

  Rougetel’s response was a shy smile. He had not yet synchronised his experiences into something tangible, a fusion of his knowledge in which he saw everything together and all at once – at least, not in a way that Dyer might easily understand. He was carrying it in his head, references, footnotes, conclusions, until he was ready to write it down. He was close to that point, but in no hurry. It didn’t need to be finished by a particular date, it was not an article for a newspaper or a linear journey; it was open-ended, ongoing.

  ‘Do you get depressed ever?’ Dyer wanted to know.

  Rougetel looked steadily at him. The skin around his eyes had the transparency of an ascetic. ‘No.’

  ‘Do you never feel self-pitying in the rain under the porch?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So it’s been a success then, your life?’

  He couldn’t say it had been a waste. To think in these terms didn’t fit in with his philosophy. Justifications were for others. For Rougetel, there was no such a thing as a false trail, a dead end, a phoney prophet, a bad book. It was all learning. At the same time, his life, the purpose of it, still awaited an explanation.

  Meanwhile, only the present moment exists, is what he’d learned.

  His steady, self-contained gaze intimidated Dyer who, being one himself, recognised the solipsism of an only child. Rougetel had had none of the counterbalance of a sibling to hold up a corrective mirror, or a son like Leandro. He had lived, emotionally and intellectually, on his own resources, without the encumbrance of family or belongings, so that to all intents he might have come from Pluto. He had no partner, dependants, domicile, job, yet something mysterious had taken their place, a spiritual life stripped of egoism, full of revelations that he sensed but had yet to articulate, and it was childish of Dyer to want Rougetel to join him on the same bank.

  Rougetel, it penetrated Dyer, as they entered Phoenix Lane, was not looking to be rescued or understood; he was too involved in trying to understand. He was content with his life, its arrangement suited him. Not for an empire would he be in Dyer’s trainers.

  Every instinct in Dyer had prompted compassion for this poor creature, but it was Rougetel who pitied him, who saw Dyer as benighted.

  Dyer said quickly in a new voice, overtaking any note of disbelief: ‘At least you had a real go, probably the only one of us who did. You took a journey none of us dared to do.’

  After all that, they had arrived early at the Phoenix. There was no one else in the playground. Side by side, like brothers who have never quarrelled, they walked towards the Rink.

  Rougetel looked up to the bell on the roof.

  ‘I remember ringing that,’ in a slow voice.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know, I was head of something.’

  ‘School?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  He lowered his eyes to the team notices. Leandro’s name was posted for the final match of term, against the Dragon School.

  ‘Your son?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Rougetel went on staring. ‘“Parents are welcome to the match tea …”’ His mouth was open. ‘Do they serve scones still?’

  ‘They do.’

  ‘Custard creams?’ The tip of his to
ngue. Seeking the taste.

  ‘As well.’

  More memories resurfaced. He had been wicket-keeper for the first XI. Also, captain of swimming – although this hadn’t stopped Slimy from beating him.

  Dyer turned. He was still processing the image of Rougetel keeping wicket. ‘Slimy beat you? Whatever for?’

  Rougetel screwed up his eyes to the window above the white clock – Slimy’s study.

  ‘I’d gone to the barge …’

  The graininess of memory. The scene unreeled in his mind with the haphazard continuity of the films they would watch in Hall on Sunday nights. The rain belting down. A notice with the words: ‘Fields out of bounds’. Behind the window, a man with thin lips adjusts a lens.

  On certain wet afternoons, Slimy spied on boys who trespassed onto the waterlogged pitches. ‘He wrote down our names,’ said Rougetel, as if he could see the outline of a telescope afloat on the glass, ‘then summoned us to his room one by one.’

  If anything, the punishment – ten whacks with a gym-shoe of Rougetel’s choice, and much less painful than symbolic – had served to make the barge a destination yet more tantalising. Not long afterwards, Rougetel had spent the night in its hold. In defiance of every rule, he had stolen out of his dormitory carrying a punnet of raspberries, hoarded over from Sunday tea, in case he got hungry, and a towel to dry himself following a midnight dip.

  Visible from the playground until its demolition, the blue oblong hull had loomed on Rougetel’s boyhood horizon as the archetypal frontier post, like the two or three cafés in town that it thrilled him to visit with Dyer. A quarterdeck from which to espy, not merely the far riverbank, but, with that divine intoxication Emily Dickinson had flagged in their English class, ‘the first league out from land’.

  He was looking across the playing fields. Without speaking, he stepped away from the Rink and took some of his lolloping strides out over the Hard Court. Dyer caught up with him on the football pitch, and they continued walking towards the river.