Chapter Forty-two
DOWN THE STRAIGHT NIGHT-TIME street in the cold, at the hour when curtains are still drawn and the only thing that tells you which decade it is are the posters on the windows saying ‘Brexit means Brexit!’ and ‘Stick to the Iran deal!’, Dyer had two hours earlier walked to Iffley.
He had followed the route they took as schoolboys when they wanted not to be noticed. Remarkable how it came back, the strategy they’d devised to enable them to melt into their surroundings. It had been learned in the playground as they chased each other around the Rink yelling: ‘Uh-uh-uh-uh,’ and enacting out war games derived from comic books in which there was a lot about Rommel in the desert, and all Germans went: ‘Aaagh …’ or ‘Achtung!’
Fork right at the bridge. Dash through the trees. A five-minute crouch between two barges to ascertain if anyone was on his heels. He had climbed out over Paula’s fence, and clung to the shadows as he crossed the deserted boatyard. Anyone watching him would be waiting in St Barnabas Street, on the other side of the big wooden gate.
Satisfied that he has not been seen and no one is following, Dyer stands up, steps back onto the tinder track.
His hard knuckle of obtuseness leads him along the towpath. His mind is focused and steady, he has stumbled out of his plasma. He’d been breathing on a mirror, and wasn’t able to see himself until Rougetel rubbed a thick book about the brain over this patch of mist and it was clear again.
After leaving Miranda’s house, Dyer had spent the afternoon searching the streets and libraries of Oxford. He had visited in turn the Vere Harmsworth Library, the Sackler Library, the Social Science Library. Rougetel wasn’t in any of the reading rooms. Dyer had poked his head into the Union library, but the sole dozing figure was a stoutish young undergraduate, blond, in a green tweed suit. He had checked the pavements outside Balliol and Blackfriars, the train station, McDonald’s, Tesco. Nowhere could he spot a lean, bearded figure in black jeans, like Atlas, carrying a Kathmandu rucksack.
The church at Iffley really was his last hope.
He needed to get to him quick. Like all nomads, Rougetel would strike camp in a flash. Fearful that he might even now be on his way to the Scottish isles, Dyer took such large steps that he was practically running.
In the motionless dark of the Oxford dawn, he thought of his honest-eyed friend. How he had followed his path, withstood blows, and acted with courage, perseverance, integrity. Rougetel contained multitudes. He was not sectarian, not an ideologue. He was so much more superior to Dyer. The road had taught him to discard as dross the wasteful emotions that continued to consume Dyer – impatience, anxiety, selfishness, self-doubt, fear, envy, lust.
Plus, hadn’t he said he was ripe for a new project, a fresh text?
It had struck Dyer in the Taylorian, as he was taking out Marvar’s post-it note with the firm resolve to destroy it, how similar at superficial glance was the process that Marvar had described to that experienced by Rougetel. The ever-expanding energy, the white light, the close connection between atoms in the brain and the nuclear forces in the sun.
Dyer had been looking for distraction at the painting – envying the couple in it, how they existed beyond the pressures of Dyer’s world in a landscape much like the Lake District, now he came to think of it; and how tempted he was to climb the red rolling library ladder to join them – when the idea burst on him.
Rougetel would make sense of it if anyone could. He was a free spirit, he had no dependants, no allegiances save to what his instinct told him was true. Marvar’s breakthrough wouldn’t be lost. It would be considered, assimilated, added to the synthesis of Rougetel’s worldly knowledge. And if his algorithm was everything that Marvar claimed, Rougetel, out of all the talented people Dyer had met in his life, could be trusted to make an objective decision about who to give it to in order for it to be exploited for good.
Dyer turns his head, checking again.
A further factor in Rougetel’s favour: he doesn’t possess a phone or a laptop, so no GPS will be able to track him. Beyond everything, there had to be no risk to his person; no one must know what Dyer is about to do.
Not a thing moves in the street, in the windows.
A light breeze blew up as Dyer approached the entrance to St Mary’s. Leaves from the trees overlooking the cemetery whirled across the paving stones. The porch lay in shadow. Dyer thought it was empty. Then his eyes readjusted to the shadows, and he made out a figure stretched on the bench.
In silence, Dyer stepped up to him. Rougetel lay on his back, asleep with a slight smile. His head rested on his rolled-up blue sleeping bag. He had wrapped himself in his Inca blanket, and his pigeon toes protruded from under it with their socks still on. In these surroundings, his hat like a sombrero, his white rod, his backpack seem excessive luxuries. The dawn light makes him Christ-like, but it gives to him other faces as well. A boy who lies on a riverbank with his eyes half-closed. A voyager from another world who will rise in a short while on the strand of a new continent.
Careful to make no noise, Dyer took the envelope from his coat pocket. It was the brown envelope that he had posted to Miranda, containing his detailed account of all that Marvar had told him on Port Meadow. Dyer had stuck Marvar’s post-it note to the first page, with an explanatory letter.
Rougetel scratches his ankle in sleep. As vulnerable and exposed as the corner of a book.
Dyer unfastens the rucksack, slips in the envelope, and does up the buckle.
He stands for a moment in a kind of benison. Then he takes a step back and turns and quietly leaves.
His earlier panic has left him. He feels reinvigorated, as if he has let a great fish go free. Walking home, the sound of birds, a roseate glow in the sky, suddenly all the irritations of Oxford seem precious.
Chapter Forty-three
ON SATURDAY MORNING, MR TANNER hoisted up the flagpole a square of yellow cloth stitched with the blue emblem of a phoenix.
That afternoon, the Phoenix were playing the Dragon. The schools had been rivals for years. A big turnout was expected.
Traditionally, both schools fielded their first and second XIs. The touchlines thronged with parents who had children in the teams. The largest group of spectators was made up of Phoenix parents and teachers. A victory against the Dragon had a taste of its own.
Dyer arrived in good time for once. He waved to Leandro as the teams filed out. The clock chimed two, and the games kicked off.
Leandro’s team very nearly conceded a goal in the opening minute. Only a desperate punch from Pierre Asselin diverted the ball. He saved two more strikes in quick succession, his teammates clustering into the goalmouth to congratulate him. They looked nervous, outclassed.
The Dragon continued to dominate. Time and again, the Phoenix defence failed to push the game into their opponents’ half. Leandro, at centre forward, was unemployed for long stretches. He burst unchecked into an empty space, called for the ball, and when it was intercepted ran back.
Pierre stopped a fourth near-goal with his knees. This unconventional save somehow galvanised the team, and the Phoenix started to rally. They played better, more fluently.
Leandro raced up and down. Dyer’s eyes followed his son until he wasn’t looking at him. He was watching him, but he wasn’t looking at him.
Dyer glanced, at last, over to the other pitch.
Katya stood talking to the father in the black beret. Her profile was haughty now. Entrenched in her superior passivity.
The two were watching the second XI. In the event, neither of their sons had been promoted to replace Samir. That honour had gone, instead, to Henry Puckey.
A baseball cap all of a sudden blocked Dyer’s view. Shuttling between both games, with his carroty hair and insatiable smile, Ralph Cubbage had no child playing in either team.
Already, Dyer had registered the coded manner in which the cellist’s father had greeted Updark. Not long after that, Cubbage had paused to speak to Gilles in earnest, nothing-to-
do-with-football tones. Now, he monitored Katya and her wild-haired companion, who, it had dawned on Dyer somewhat late in the day, was none other than Marvar’s professor at the Clarendon, Bruce Whitton.
Dyer’s eye was caught by a figure approaching in a fur hat and a long white-and-blue scarf. He looked like a Brazilian construction boss, stumpy and round-stomached, his leather jacket dark and shiny as the Chevrolet that Vasily boasted his father had imported from Havana. His shoes with chains across the toecap lent a dapper touch.
He was marching over the grass towards Katya. Cubbage, noticing him before she did, lowered his head and nonchalantly rotated his cap.
Gennady had appeared, late, like the ominous stranger Dyer once witnessed descend on a Brazilian film set. When Dyer had enquired who this was, he was informed that the man represented the film’s backers – invested with their absolute authority, should the production run over budget, to say: ‘OK, that’s a wrap.’
Cut free of Katya’s gravitational sway, Dyer created the details. He knew how it would be. In the apartment off Jamaica Road, after the match. She waits for him, he has come with a box of salmon for Vasily, a cashmere sweater for her; they go out to dinner at Gee’s. He touches her face, the lights glint on his leather jacket.
‘He doesn’t know,’ she says to Gennady. ‘For a while, I had this suspicion, but – truly – he doesn’t know anything, unless it is about some Brazilian tribe,’ and counterfeits his voice: ‘“My subject is sixteenth-century Brazil. The twenty-first century can go screw itself.”’
To Dyer’s relief, neither Gennady nor Katya nor Whitton nor Cubbage, nor even Hui’s bodyguard, who has popped up wearing a brand new Phoenix scarf, once turn their face in his direction. They display all the indifference of the Tupi to Afonso Ribeiro, after Ribeiro relinquished his one or two metal objects which had so mesmerised the tribe. They have looked into Dyer long and thoroughly enough to be satisfied that he doesn’t know anything useful. He’s been questioned, followed, intimidated, bribed, his house searched, his communications investigated, his research checked. They have run through all their options, and feel confident that he would have cracked by now. With nothing solid to connect him to Rustum Marvar, Dyer is not any longer a target of interest. He has reverted to what Updark always took him to be: an under-employed ex-journalist who likes to stir things up, perverse, stubborn, but not a troublemaker, not a dangerous subversive. A bit player caught, for the briefest of flashes, cringing in the headlights of a juggernaut that has since roared by.
A bark drew him back to the game. Beatrice Updark teetered on the touchline, doing her best to restrain Spassky.
The first time Dyer saw Spassky, he had thought of savage-eyed dogs snapping at him, the metal entrails of unfinished floors rusting upwards to a blue, vulture-specked sky. But Spassky was not like that, with his eyebrows like ‘caramel waterfalls’ as Leandro put it; he wanted to drool over Dyer’s hand, not tear it into shreds as Dyer until very recently had wanted to rip up Marvar’s post-it note.
Held back by his collar, Spassky craned to watch the Phoenix players dash forward. It was a moment before Dyer realised that the dog’s eyes – like Beatrice’s … and now his – were trained on one boy: arm in the air, long legs, sand-coloured hair. His part-Tupi son. He was gesturing to Puckey, who suddenly had possession.
Leandro spun, unmarked, into the Dragon half, and was again denied the ball. Control, pass, control, pass, the Dragon forwards kept it out of his stretch – thundering down on him when he did force an interception. He floated over one pass, wasted another.
Even now, Dyer was plotting his next progress report that he had undertaken to write to Nissa at the end of each term. He would tell her that their son had ended this term on a high. Dyer saw no gain in mentioning Vasily’s bullying earlier. Aside from being selected for the school football team, Leandro had improved in his academic work, history in particular. Commended for his test on Trafalgar, Leandro had climbed over Paula’s fence to thank her. He liked a bit of a fuss so that he could flaunt his modesty, admitting to his father only late in the day that he had received assistance as well from Beatrice. Who would have thought this at the start of term?
The whistle blew at half-time with neither side having scored.
While the teams changed ends, a group of Dragon parents standing beside Dyer moved away … exposing Gilles Asselin.
He was talking in a frantic voice on his phone.
‘I’m ringing totally the wrong number. It’s Gilles, I thought you were someone else. Sorry about that. Take care. Bye.’
He saw Dyer, and stiffened like someone about to be photographed.
‘Jean …’ crushing his gloves.
One look at his face.
No longer a pike sizing up a parr. No longer on any podium.
Out of his throat rumbled the words: ‘Do you have it?’
‘No.’
‘I thought you did,’ with a sad gulp. ‘I got you wrong.’
He had not believed Dyer. His hunches which, until now, had profited him so acutely had whispered into his over-receptive ear that Dyer was sitting on Marvar’s epoch-defining information – why else would Dyer have made that dedication in his book: To Rustum Marvar, who may have solved everything? Why else would the waiter in the St Giles Café have overheard Marvar rise abruptly from the table where he had been scribbling on his fourth paper napkin, muttering: ‘I’ve done it, I’ve done it …’ Why else would Marvar have texted his wife: Now I may have done something!
Calculating that even if Marvar didn’t capitalise on what it was that he had done, then Dyer was bound to, and therefore would need to act on it as soon as possible, Gilles had asked himself: ‘Who’s going to be affected by nuclear fusion? Let’s short them. Big governments that rely on hydrocarbonates. Companies like BP, Exxon. Venezuelan debt.’
Gambler that he was, Gilles had shorted everything that lay within his global financial compass to short, borrowing ‘right up my Wazoo’, he admitted to Dyer with a ruined smile. ‘I poured shitloads into speculation about where next.’ He had sold out of coal mines, bought up deserts … He was heading south fast.
He looked haggard.
Dyer stayed obstinately silent.
Arms crossed, with her back to them, Silvi squinted at the football game, which had resumed.
‘Pierre’s had a good first half,’ said Dyer, stepping out, he hoped, on a safe path.
There was something wrong and uncorrected in her posture, like a picture hung upside down.
‘Basil!’
His name was being called by a man in a faded yellow-and-blue striped scarf.
Further along the touchline were Lionel Updark and his wife.
Dyer had not spoken to Audrey Updark since her house-warming party in January. He kissed her on the cheek. This afternoon there was a change about her that he couldn’t put his finger on. Her hair? Then it came to him. She smelled different.
Something miraculous meanwhile had happened to Updark: his face had cleared up, and with it his outward hostility. He stood there spotless, not interested at all in discussing the game’s first half, but grinningly eager to talk about what had caused his skin to come out like a red cruzeiro banknote, and how the problem had been traced. It was his wife’s perfume!
‘They forgot to look at Audrey. No one thinks: “What’s the wife wearing?” Turns out I had an allergy to a scent she bought in Morocco.’ The cologne contained a psoriasitic chemical, musk ambrette, that was banned in the EU. Every time Updark walked into the bathroom after Audrey had sprayed herself, he had a facial reaction. “Allergic contact dermatisis” is what the cuckoos in Milton Keynes had diagnosed. He patted his cheeks as though applying aftershave. ‘The rashes disappeared seventy-two hours after they discovered the cause!’
Of course, Audrey had had to bin the perfume, but he’d bought her some Jo Malone Pomegranate Noir at Heathrow while on a reconnaissance trip to his next post. He wouldn’t tell Dyer where this was, although he did
say that Lorna, who had been appointed his successor in Eynsham, had enquired fondly after him.
Inevitably, it was Leandro who scored the winning goal with seven minutes to spare. His Pelé-like kick from inside his own half was unexpected, completely. A divinely aided bolt that made Dyer think straight away of Samir and Marvar and the trigger for Marvar’s spherical laser. Fusion, football, a sudden wind from the south … it had the temporary effect of stunning everyone on the pitch. The Dragon never recovered.
‘I had no intention of scoring,’ Leandro blurted after the final whistle when Dyer came over to embrace him. ‘It was a total accident. I wanted to clear it, to send it to someone else. I thought I was going to cross it forward, and … oh, my gosh, is it going towards the goal? … and I stopped for a second and I saw it go into the goal and I saw the Dragon goalie reach for it and I saw it hit the back of the net – what?!’
All around them, parents were leaving the pitch and heading across the playground to the dining room.
‘I’ll see you in there,’ he said to Leandro.
It would be unsporting not to join them for the match tea, Dyer decided. He would eat a scone for Rougetel, the wicket-keeper. And a custard cream.
He’d be on his way by now, walking out along the cinder towpath on his long loping legs, his pack on his bony shoulders, seeing what the universe would bring. Locked in his meditative trance from which he would return one day to fetch the souls of others into the light.
Chapter Forty-four
LOVE HAD MADE HIM A child again.
He slept much better
He had begun writing.
The New World acted as a Black Spot for the men who set eyes on it for the first time. Pêro Vaz de Caminha, after sending his account to Lisbon on a special ship, perished within months, killed in Calicut. Pedro Álvares Cabral, the leader of the expedition, died in obscurity, as did two of the three convicts left behind as breeding stock on the dazzling strand at Porto Seguro. Only Afonso Ribeiro of this initial landing party survived to learn the customs of the Tupi and to speak their language, starting a family whose descendants are today dotted over north-east Brazil.
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