The Sandpit

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  The blue barge had been on Rougetel’s mind when he climbed over the fence on a cold September evening shortly after arriving in Oxford eighteen months earlier. Never before then had he returned to the Phoenix, but compelled by a desire to revisit the site, he spent that night on the riverbank where the barge used to be. Inside its converted hold during his last summer term, he had changed into his swimming trunks, hopping on one leg like a stork, before diving into the Cherwell to compete against local schools. Yet this time he had found it hard to sleep when he lay down on the wet grass and recalled his races back and forth across the muddy water. ‘I felt I was swimming through these strong dark currents, cold, warm, sometimes clear, and sometimes with my feet in the slime.’

  His serious brown eyes drifted to the far bank. They touched the rushes, then swept back over the War Memorial, the cricket pavilion, the playing fields, to the familiar brick buildings, the toothpick mast of the flagpole, and the playground where the two of them had stood but moments before. It had been blacker than tar on that chill September night, and Rougetel had crept away before sunrise.

  Now, for the first time as an adult, he was seeing the whole of the Phoenix set out before him in conditions of daylight. It was almost too big to absorb.

  ‘We followed the path laid by our parents, leaving home, feeling sick at having to come back to school, with no one to talk to about our feelings, not daring to utter them in case we were struck down or mocked …’

  A boy was speaking from the years before. The unaccompanied minor from La Paz being led away by the stewardess after kissing goodbye to his mother and father, neither of whom had ever sat Rougetel down and said to him: ‘This is what the deal is.’

  His gaze pulled back over the sandpit to the swimming pool erected in Dyer’s last year as a substitute for the Cherwell. His eyes sought the low Nissen hut where he and Dyer had nailed together their wooden weapons. He was hearing the war cries of boys in faded blue corduroys, the splutter of make-believe machine guns.

  He was still reflecting. ‘I felt we were being trained to go into battle like my grandparents, and now I’m nearly sixty and there’s been no battle, I wonder if actually the battle was fought here when I was eight, and that it was about learning to cope.’

  The bell was ringing. Mr Tanner could be observed in the distance, crossing the playground in purposeful strides to take up his newly adopted position by the gate. Parents had begun trickling through it, assembling in clots outside the Rink. Soon Katya would stand there, and Silvi, and Updark’s overscented wife.

  ‘Let’s go and find my son,’ said Dyer.

  Rougetel gave a last glance at the riverbank. He fell in step as they walked across the grass in the weakening sunlight. His gait much lighter somehow, as if a load had lifted.

  As they approached the Hard Court, a boy advanced towards them.

  Dyer called out: ‘Leandro, come and meet someone.’

  It was hard to talk against the sound of other conversations, with mothers and children hurrying past, and Dyer unable to give Leandro a background to the lean, bearded figure whom he introduced, other than to say: ‘We were at the Phoenix together.’

  Following a polite exchange – he didn’t say twenty words – Rougetel excused himself.

  The strange light in his eyes told Dyer that he was still on his path, and was impatient to be off again.

  Under the keen scrutiny of Mr Tanner, Dyer escorted him through the gate. It was clear from Rougetel’s hesitation, the way that his gaze roamed up and down the street, that he intended to leave in a direction opposite to Dyer. He had a mission to fulfil, more nets to set under the ice, and Dyer was not going to detain him.

  ‘Where will you go?’ Dyer asked.

  ‘The Hebrides, most likely.’ His grandmother had left him a croft – a good place to mull over his next subject. Already, his mind was turning to what he might study.

  He stood with his heels on the edge of the pavement, working out his farewell. He repeated how lucky it was that they had bumped into each other. Providence had put Dyer in his path. He was grateful for their catch-up. He took Dyer’s hands. ‘It’s done me good to see you, it’s refreshed me. I’m reminded of so many things, and I’ll be the stronger for it.’

  ‘It’s done me good too,’ said Dyer, and rarely had he meant words more.

  After a verbena-scented embrace, and a nod and a smile to Leandro, Rougetel set off down Bardwell Road. He had gone a few paces when he stopped and turned. He raised his arm in a half-completed gesture like a child reaching up to hold his mother’s hand. Then he continued walking, and this time he did not look back.

  Thinking afterwards of his wonderful old maniac of a friend, Dyer said to himself that he would be entitled to believe their whole afternoon together had been a dream. If he had been in the Andes, climbing Mount Ausangate, he would be asking himself if he had seen Rougetel, or was it the altitude?

  ‘Has he changed?’ Leandro wanted to know.

  In spite of everything that had happened in between, some vital part of him had remained untouched. He still wanted to get to the nub.

  ‘I’d say hardly at all.’

  Chapter Forty

  ‘A TROUT FLY CAN’T BE withdrawn the way it has entered,’ said his father. ‘It must be pushed right through.’

  So with Marvar’s post-it note. Dyer could not rebury it in the sandpit, he couldn’t leave it folded in limbo inside a library book. He had to pull it up, out, away.

  Next morning, Dyer resolved to finish what his encounter with Rougetel had interrupted. To avoid arousing any further suspicion, he had had to persuade himself that his solution lay in plucking out Marvar’s algorithm and destroying it. The sooner he accomplished this the better; no one must know it had existed. He no longer saw it in terms of the gains or dangers to humanity, only its impact on him. It had to be destroyed so that he did not die, and so that he and Leandro could live. He wasn’t brave. He wanted to be safe and his son to be safe. Simple.

  From near the bottom of his reserved pile, Dyer prised loose the calf-bound volume and took it next door. As soon as he opened the back cover and his eyes fell on the folded piece of paper floating around the map of Brazil, he felt the tension subside that had been growing as he climbed the staircase.

  He lifted his eyes to the wall opposite, and his obliterating impulse receded, and he was overtaken by a warm, inexplicable calm, as if a blue haze has enveloped him.

  He is back in the Café Lisboa. Rougetel is riffling through the book he has produced from his rucksack. Its pages flutter like a kaleidoscope of butterflies with yellow post-it notes to mark the passages which had captivated him.

  Even as Dyer detaches Marvar’s note, Rougetel’s voice is knocking on his thoughts.

  It’s almost the last thing Rougetel says to him. They’re standing at the school gate, Rougetel is talking about how close he is to wrapping up his research into the human brain, and looking forward to immersing himself in something quite new, although he has yet to decide what this will be.

  There’s a moment in the middle of a hangover when you have a sudden penetration and you see the world with complete clarity. You have it seldom, but when this flash comes it seems as if it’s calculated, like an oracle. Dyer had experienced it once or twice when he rowed. Instincts take charge and you see what is important, what not, and how to plunge ahead. The Buddhists probably had a word for it. Thinking too much was the problem. The answer came to him when he let his body and instincts do the reacting, with not too much brain.

  Like a man smoothing out something he had crumpled, Dyer saw what he must do.

  ‘That can go back,’ he said to the librarian. He handed her the collection of first-hand accounts describing Cabral’s voyage to Brazil.

  She took it without glancing up.

  ‘You don’t want to renew this?’

  He looked down at her white head. ‘No.’

  The way she diverted her gaze to hide that she’d been watching him.
She walked as though she wore velvet slippers, her dark hair in a Suebian knot.

  A sporty-looking woman he had not seen before descended in quick silent steps behind him. He reached the bottom of the staircase and pushed out into the street through the open glass door. Then something made Dyer turn and pull it shut.

  In the ferment of knowing how he was going to dispose of Marvar’s algorithm, Dyer had let go the danger of carrying it on his person. But he had learned to trust his presentiments. After a moment of imbalance, he was wide awake.

  At an unswerving pace he set off, as though heading in the direction of the Martyrs’ Memorial. Crossing the road at a diagonal, he waited for a taxi to go by, before cutting between it and a Waitrose van. As the van moved slowly forward, shielding him momentarily from the Taylorian, he ducked left behind it.

  Yards away – about to pull out – was a red double-decker Citysightseeing bus. Dyer ran towards it, keeping his head low. He jumped on board as the doors hissed shut, and then thrust his way past seats occupied by smiling Chinese tourists, taking cover behind a broad-faced man who stood in the aisle holding a microphone.

  Through the rear window, Dyer watched the woman hurry from the library. He shrank back, out of her line of vision. When he next risked a look, she had stopped on the pavement, and was searching up and down St Giles, peering intently at the van, the passing cars, the receding bus, before reaching into her tight-fitting anorak and, after a flicker of hesitation, jogging off in the opposite direction.

  ‘Well, hello, again,’ said the man, who wore a black blazer with brass buttons on it and a familiar striped tie. ‘Come to join my tour? Let me introduce you to this vibrant and cultured city.’

  Overcome with relief and gratitude, Dyer purchased a ticket.

  Minutes later, the guide’s educated voice poured out of the speakers in a soothing rhythm. ‘Our first stop is the University Parks. Many of you may have heard of Mesopotamia …’

  Dyer hopped off. To reach Ward Road, he took a strange route through the Parks until he could be sure that no one was on his trail. The bridge where Thor had slobbered over Gilles. The cricket pavilion that Updark had eyed with nostalgia. At one point in his circuit, Dyer left the path and stood for several moments concealed beneath the low-hanging branches of a conifer. The tree had grown since the afternoon when he climbed it with Rougetel, and where, high up, tucked in a cleft between the trunk and the bough on which they had managed to perch, they found, neatly folded, a page torn from a magazine, and opened it to see, ineradicable, their first naked woman.

  She opens the door and stares at him. ‘You’ve decided?’

  ‘I have.’

  Her face in the morning light. Already she is losing her tan. She pulls down her dress to get rid of the crease.

  ‘Go and wait in the drawing room, and I’ll fetch it. You can talk to my memory, she’ll be pleased to see you.’

  He walked to the end of the corridor, towards the sound of a Brahms clarinet quintet.

  Thor bounded off the sofa to greet him. There was the squeal of farm machinery, and then Miranda’s mother shuffled out of the conservatory on her walking frame. A sudden warmth filled her unsmiling face when she saw it was Dyer.

  ‘There you are!’

  He took her hands, her fingers grey and shiny like cake paper.

  She looked severely at him. ‘Why haven’t we seen you?’

  ‘I’ve been travelling,’ he said. It was only the previous day that they had stood in the middle of the room like this, the radio playing.

  She frowned at him, but changed her mind. ‘Miranda has missed you.’

  It was a novel feeling for Dyer to sense that someone cared for him. She must have known it would take him a second to answer, because she leaned across and fixed Dyer with one eye like a chicken. ‘She can be peppery as a single woman. Marriage made her the salt of the earth. Her life has been tasteless since he went.’

  ‘Talking about yourself, Mother?’ said Miranda, entering and turning the radio down. She laid Dyer’s envelope on the counter. It was the same colour as her dress. ‘Coffee?’

  What meaning was held in her glance, he couldn’t tell. ‘If it’s not any trouble …’

  ‘Trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble,’ tutted Miranda’s mother in a high raspy voice as if she had swallowed Thor’s whistle. ‘Trouble been doggin’ my soul since the day I was born,’ and began navigating her frame towards the card table.

  Miranda met his eyes and gave a see-what-I-put-up-with shrug. ‘This morning, she had all her suitcases stacked in the hall. I asked why on earth hadn’t she let me bring them downstairs, to which she replied: “I just chucked them down the stairs in front of me as I can’t possibly manage the steps carrying anything.” But it’s good to see her talking,’ she said bravely.

  Her mother had been ill, her voice had only just come back. Miranda very nearly had had to return early from Paguera.

  ‘She’s still complaining of the cold.’

  ‘She doesn’t look ill,’ observed Dyer.

  ‘When she gets unwell she looks very well because she gets these lovely rosy cheeks,’ and went to fill the kettle.

  It was no use thinking old age might be different, Miranda continued. However prepared you thought you were. One thing her mother had taught: ‘We learn nothing, it all has to be re-learned.’ Not even if you were an expert did it help. ‘Have you noticed? All hair surgeons are bald, no coach plays tennis, no critic can write.’

  ‘You sound like my aunt.’

  ‘What do you think, Mummy? Could we have done this better?’

  Seated at the card table, her mother was combing her hair in a silver hand mirror.

  ‘Mother?’

  No answer.

  He thought of his mother brushing her thinning hair, not out of vanity, but so as not to frighten others; not to see reflected in their faces the brown bloated features of chemo.

  ‘Let me plump some life into the old cushion. Stay there.’

  Miranda leaned over her, saying in a comforting voice: ‘I’ll keep the heating going. I won’t switch that off. You’re in a safe place, darling.’

  Dyer could not help admiring her, the concerned and patient way she treated the old lady. Her energy was unexpected, homely but with something grand about it, like an apron worn over a ballgown. He had a sudden vision of the fury of other women at the modest one who wins the prince.

  She came back to finish making their coffee.

  ‘How’s your toe?’ he asked.

  ‘Getting better, thank you.’ And flexed out her foot.

  There was a simple sensual confidence in the movement. Unhurried, she turned her slender neck, her face. It was a lovely face. Pale and oval. The face of a woman in a classical painting.

  He looks at her for a fraction of a second longer than is normal, not seeming to notice the dog that has come between them. She lowers her foot, raises her head. Their eyes meet over the counter in an unspoken recognition that he related afterwards to a shared sense of humour, an involuntary start at a beautiful view. She looked at him and she knew him.

  ‘Thor! Off!’

  Dyer stooped to stroke him and a soft muzzle brushed his heart.

  ‘I need some advice,’ he said, straightening.

  In the corner, Miranda’s mother was chanting to herself in the mirror: ‘She’s got hair on her pussy that sweep the floor, she’s got knobs on her titties that open the door.’

  Miranda, disregarding her, poured the hot water over the coffee. ‘My favourite sentence in the world is: “Can I ask your opinion on this?”’

  A while later, Dyer paused in the doorway. He stared at the envelope that he had addressed to himself, like one of those brown envelopes he opened at the last moment, and then up at her.

  ‘I must give you my new number.’

  He watched Miranda enter it into her phone, feeling the tight pull in his chest now that he had decided to trust her. ‘I know we’ve just begun to get to know each other. W
ould you … I don’t want …’

  She hears the catch in his voice, puts a finger to her lip. ‘Xasó putár neirúm.’

  The next time they meet, she will tell him: ‘My father taught me that beginning is more precious than money.’

  Chapter Forty-one

  THEY CAME OUT OF THE throat of the dawn, three of them, rearing up from behind a parked car as Dyer inserted his key in the lock. They were efficient, well trained, wearing balaclavas. They did not speak as they pinned him up against the boatyard’s wooden entrance and roughly searched him as he stood there. He couldn’t see their faces, they were like beings from another place. Their gloved fingers quickly picked through his coat, jacket, trousers, wallet. Then they pushed him onto the ground and took off his trainers and socks. They must have suspected him of having Marvar’s algorithm on his person after removing it from the library. They had already combed his house, and knew it wasn’t there. If it existed at all, then he must be carrying it. He wished he had a gun so that he could shoot them one by one between the eyes, instead of lying supinely recumbent on the pavement where Paula had spilled her tins of pineapple chunks. He lay there rigid, as if in a coffin the lid of which they were on the point of nailing down, not resisting, not moving, not saying a word, seeing in their black woollen faces the pointy features of Gilles Asselin streaked with warpaint, and for some reason recalling a story that Gilles had told at his dinner party before leading his guests downstairs to eat, how the African king of Kitara was fed by his cook with a fork, but if the fork accidentally touched the king’s teeth he was executed, until a noise disturbed them – Paula opening her front door – and they stood up, tossed his wallet back at him and calmly walked off, abandoning Dyer by the side of the road, his clothes strewn around him, with his heart thumping like a tennis ball, and feeling as if he had come to the end of his ordeal.