The Sandpit Read online

  Dyer had met Katya the previous autumn. He was standing outside the Rink when a light hand stopped him. He turned and saw a very beautiful woman. His height, slim. Her straight blonde hair was tied up. She seemed to recognise Dyer.

  ‘Are you Leandro’s father?’ The voice is deep, but feminine.

  Dyer cracks a smile.

  She is wearing flat shoes and no make-up. Her face looks as if it has been washed in a cold stream. She has high cheekbones and a faint gossamer moustache, like peach fur.

  ‘Katya Petroshenko,’ she says. ‘My son Vasily is in A block.’

  He meets her gaze without conceding much curiosity. After Nissa, he has resisted beautiful faces. Her eyes are the grey of an Arctic wolf. They look like eyes that can see a long way in the dark.

  Katya compliments Dyer on Leandro’s running achievements on Sports Day, back in July.

  He feels himself relaxing at once. Having a son who runs fast – that gives him a gravitas he can take pride in.

  Their conversation over the next ten minutes touches on Leandro, who had jogged every morning on Ipanema; on Vasily, also a keen runner with an obsession for football – ‘He is hoping next term to be school captain’; on Katya’s absent husband Gennady, a Ukrainian oil executive. As she begins to explain his job, Dyer realises that he has met Gennady already, at the headmaster’s annual Fathers’ Breakfast beside the Cherwell; Dyer had recognised him in a flash as one of those noticeably short men who pack out first class in long-haul flights, with a wide black moustache, large square teeth, and tinted glasses, although it was overcast.

  As to Katya, Dyer formed the impression of a nice, evasive, professional wife, who was aware that she stood out because of her natural good looks.

  The composition of the teams had long been settled by the time of their next encounter, after the February half-term. Katya bustled and smiled when she collided into Dyer on the Woodstock Road. It had rained for two days; now the sun was out. She was dressed well, expensively. Pearl-grey jacket, a bit early for spring, brown cashmere jersey. Her pleated blue skirt was the colour of the airmail envelopes that Dyer would post his father from Brazil.

  Dyer was awkwardly relieved that she did not bring up the subject of football. Both of them heading in that direction, the Phoenix School was what she wanted to discuss. Dyer seemed to fascinate Katya when she discovered that he had been a pupil there.

  She was light-hearted in her attitude towards him. ‘Excuse me, but why are all female teachers called Ma?’

  The school’s customs and rules perplexed her. What was this thing Minus? What did it mean, ‘out of bounds’? And why, unvarnished nails on slender hips, did she have to make an emergency taxi-drive to Boswell’s to buy her son a diabolo!

  Sex. The furnace which smelts mud into gold. With no effort, she made him giddy. He felt his hardness, and tried to diffuse it by very earnestly answering her questions.

  Dyer knew what it was to be a foreigner. Prey to a potent blend of obligation and history, he untangled for Katya the expressions and traditions of which the ultra-spin diabolo was but the latest phenomenon – and already being superseded by gel pens that smelled of apples.

  When she looked at his lips as he spoke, as if it would help her to follow, his groin tingled.

  So they walked together down Canterbury Road, through Park Town towards the Phoenix School, with Dyer telling her in his most contraceptive voice about marbles, jacks, conkers (‘I like the way you say conkers’), Airfix kits, Action Men, stilts, superballs, Frisbees, fidget-spinners – all trends requiring stock, with pressure to purchase from shopkeepers who knew exactly how to supply Phoenix mothers like Katya with the appropriate currency.

  ‘I’m heading over there,’ said Dyer, on their arrival at the school gates. He gestured towards where the first XI were limbering up, although he couldn’t spot Leandro.

  Her grey eyes lingered on him. ‘Thank you,’ was all she said. Her teeth white as mint.

  Dyer had done most of the talking. About Katya, he had learned nothing, except that her husband was away quite a lot. Her face was luminous, but her depth uncertain. His eye fell helplessly to her upper lip.

  ‘I live just round the corner. Would you like to go to the Bookbinders one night?’

  ‘What, for “a pint of bitter”?’ She was regarding him.

  ‘Or if it’s vodka you prefer, there’s that cocktail bar on Walton Street.’ In heels she would be taller. In her flat red shoes, he could look her straight in the eye.

  ‘I prefer to try English beer.’

  ‘It would be a pint and a half at the most. While our sons do their homework.’

  She gave him a slow, reluctant smile. Not the smile of a free woman, but the broadening smile of someone who wanted to be free, perhaps. ‘All right.’

  Diaries were consulted, telephone numbers exchanged. A plan was hatched for the following Tuesday, even as her son was thumping on the sides of a football locker with Leandro trapped inside.

  … the women exposed their parts with such innocence there was no shame. They laughed and enjoyed themselves greatly.

  He thought of Katya next day in the Taylorian while transcribing the encounter of Pedro Álvares Cabral’s sailors with the Tupi Indians on the Brazilian coast. Her grey eyes twisting to look up at him. The faint golden down on her upper lip. She was married, but he had a fantasy of possessing her. Her fingers were gripping the pillow, he was soaring, the whalebone of her naked back, hoarse sounds coming from his throat, her throat.

  This was before he went to collect Leandro and encountered him in tears bolting from the Hard Court, and discovered how Katya’s son had been victimising him.

  There are things you cannot say to someone face to face. You are a coward. You have taken the wrong path. Your son is a bully.

  Katya telephoned Dyer after he had sent his email to Mr Tanner. Not at all warmly she said: ‘It sounds like the boys are having problems.’

  ‘I know they’re going to be meeting – let’s see how everything evolves.’

  Inevitably, she was no longer free on Tuesday to join Dyer at the Bookbinders. Her husband was flying in from Moscow to discuss the situation with Mr Tanner. He would be staying on in Oxford for a few days.

  Chapter Five

  SEATED BY THE SANDPIT NEXT to Marvar, Dyer did not mention Vasily’s mother. He talked, instead, of the difficulty of explaining Brazil to North Oxford; the uncertainty of life in Rio; Vivien’s legacy – barely enough to cover Leandro’s time at the Phoenix; and how, as a christening present, Dyer’s father had paid Leandro’s enrolment fee, or else Leandro might not have gained a place.

  ‘Has the school changed much?’ Marvar wanted to know.

  ‘It’s the same, and yet not the same.’

  ‘How is it different?’

  Dyer thought. ‘We swam in the river. There was no security. We didn’t have telephones – we wrote home once a week.’ He still made Leandro write thank-you letters, he said. ‘And it wasn’t nearly so international.’

  At the time, Dyer had felt unusually secure. He had a sense of fellowship with his peers, a feeling that because his mother and aunt had been through the school, it was somehow to be trusted. Yet after his parents died, taking away the answers they could have given, Dyer had come across his own letters home and was struck by a sadness that never found words, the bleakness of the weekly reporting of film titles and sporting outcomes and I-hope-you-are-wells. He had suddenly felt sorry for that boy waiting on the red pillar box, the wartime wounds and imperial aspiration which meant that his teachers and his parents could only ever supply their inadequate best … leaving him to muddle through with some sort of grace, delighting in marbles and conkers and crazes to make do.

  ‘What about the education?’

  ‘There were some decent values,’ said Dyer, with his tongue a little bit in his cheek.

  ‘Yes, but what did you really learn? What were you taught that helps you in your life today?’

  T
here was a strange quality to Marvar’s probing. It stimulated Dyer to take more care in how he answered. It was as if Marvar was struggling to resolve a parallel issue, and Dyer could help him.

  ‘We were taught that everyone has a talent,’ realising even as he said this how banal it sounded. ‘It may be hidden to the world, but dig deep enough – you’ll find it.’

  ‘What is your talent?’

  ‘Oh, I’m still digging.’

  ‘Seriously.’

  Dyer had not spoken to anyone else in Oxford like this. He hadn’t had a drink. This was coming from an earnest place, and looking down on himself he didn’t entirely trust it. He continued with a half-smile, not wishing to be overheard, not wanting to sound like his old headmaster making a sales pitch. ‘In my case, it was probably more of an instinct that I discovered than a talent. I learned that every action is a decision between good and bad. What it’s about is living as good a life as you can. I left here wanting, every time I was faced with a choice, to do the right thing – if that were possible. But don’t we all?’

  ‘I don’t know, do we?’ asked Marvar, and answered his own question with another, as if afraid of the answer. ‘What about now, what is the lesson our boys are getting now, would you say?’

  Dyer’s reply had taken seventeen months to mature. How the school had changed was a source of unavoidable fascination. As the father of a day boy there – a third-generation Phoenician – he had, on this topic, a long perspective.

  The modern tribe of Phoenix parent belonged, in Dyer’s view, to a powerful and pervasive freemasonry which extended into the deepest crannies of international finance, law and politics. Invariably, these parents were buying into an old-fashioned luxury brand like Burberry. If you put on a Burberry mac, you wore it – and immediately you were times ten. Plus, what it enabled you to cover up was limitless. In this respect, the school, despite reputation, had evolved to offer a highly efficient detergent service. It dangled the unspoken lure of rinsing away where you came from – impurities which lurked in your background and wealth – to emerge, rebranded, as wholesome exemplars of the Phoenix’s three much-trumpeted rules: ‘Be considerate, be considerate, be considerate.’ People were never suddenly rich, any more than they were suddenly good. For a number of foreign parents in possession of what Balzac had called ‘great fortunes without apparent cause’, the Phoenix was where they laundered their children.

  In Dyer’s time, a majority of the boys, and the dozen or so girls, had not travelled outside the Midlands, let alone beyond the United Kingdom. They were the sons and daughters of the professional middle classes, the children of doctors, teachers, civil servants, diplomats, stockbrokers, solicitors. A small number took their summer holidays in France. But Abroad was as foreign a concept to most of them as modern notions of wealth would have been; it was not the catchment area it since had become.

  ‘My headmaster used to teach geography,’ Dyer recalled. ‘This one never sees inside a classroom.’

  Mr Crotty was busy criss-crossing the globe to entice pupils from the very countries which Dyer had been taught were once Britain’s most steadfast enemies, or else which Britain had cut down the middle. Dyer counted them out on his fingers. Germany, Russia, China, Japan, Italy, France, Holland, Spain, Turkey, Argentina, India …

  ‘And Iran,’ Marvar said, with smiling deliberation. ‘You have forgotten Iran.’

  So it was out of the bottle. ‘You are Iranian?’ He nearly added: the Axis of Evil.

  Marvar made a speechless gesture, not denying it.

  Dyer had thought he might have been from Morocco or the Lebanon.

  ‘You say that Summertown knows nothing of Brazil,’ reflected Marvar, his mouth compressing. ‘Try telling these people you are from Tehran!’

  Dyer sat up. Iran. He had been reading about it only an hour earlier. He was intrigued to find out more, but there was a dispersive quality to Marvar’s conversation which made him hard to follow.

  From the few details that Marvar divulged, Dyer gathered that he worked at the Clarendon laboratory as a junior physicist. He was indeed a single father like Dyer. His ex-wife lived in Tehran, where he had studied. Dyer heard the longing in his voice as he spoke of Tehran. But when Dyer asked about the current situation there, he looked detached, diminished.

  He glanced up with impatience at the clock.

  ‘Four-forty. They are taking their time.’ He reached down to brush some grains of sand from his shoe.

  ‘Then they may be treating our complaint seriously,’ said Dyer.

  ‘They have followed protocol. They have been too literal. They do not realise it’s a systemic problem. It’s not going to get fixed without a lot of work.’

  ‘They’ll keep an eye on him, though.’

  Marvar said nothing. He sat staring at the sand that he had disturbed as though he was still working out his problem.

  At last, he turned to Dyer. ‘Was there bullying when you were here?’

  ‘Christ, yes.’

  ‘Were you bullied?’

  Dyer had not thought about it until the moment Marvar asked, and had not prepared his answer.

  ‘I suppose so.’

  He was aware of Marvar’s brown, nervous eyes measuring him. Once more, he felt a chemistry between them; two single fathers sitting here, on this cold February afternoon, waiting beside the school sandpit for sons who had been bullied, who kept asking themselves: ‘Why didn’t I see it earlier?’

  Dyer’s turn to stare over the darkening fields. The football pitch had disappeared, replaced by a black screen speckled with a few orange lights.

  Funny how the mind was good at pocketing some things while keeping the glow on others. He thought that he had left his childhood behind him, but it was there in the dusk.

  It had happened towards the end of his second year. Then, the craze was not diabolos or apple-scented gel pens, but model aeroplanes from World War Two – a memory still relatively fresh. The words that Dyer assembled to salvage the incident were impregnated with astringent smells, of Araldite, turpentine, paints in miniature tin pots.

  For his eleventh birthday, he told Marvar, his parents had given him, at his whining insistence, an Airfix kit. The cardboard box contained three rails of grey plastic components which had to be twisted off, painstakingly glued together, then painted with appropriate camouflage and markings to denote whether the aircraft belonged to the Allied or Axis forces. When he stuck on the last transfer, it filled Dyer with a sense of accomplishment that he could conjure even now, to balance on his fingertips this three-dimensional object, the first which he had created all by himself. He hangared the plane in his bedside locker on top of his stamp album, to bring out and dive, handheld, through the air – bursting from the clouds on an unsuspecting, imaginary enemy.

  One morning he opened the locker and found the plane gone.

  For the next forty-eight hours, nothing seemed emptier. He kept coming back to look inside. Distraught, he challenged the other boys in his dorm – Finnock, Garridge, Trundle, Stook, Croach – and was met with blank or smirking denials. The matter of a missing model aircraft was too minor to take up with his housemaster, a remote and preoccupied figure who had been held prisoner by the Japanese in Singapore. Dyer’s parents were far away. He tried to cry himself to sleep without making a noise.

  Two nights later, he stood in the bathroom brushing his teeth when a boy entered wearing a red tartan dressing gown. In the mirror there appeared the freckled rather pale face of Rougetel, a shy ‘newbug’ from the dorm on the next landing. An unusually gifted pupil, and already ‘a ledge’, in Leandro’s word, for completing his maths prep in minutes, Rougetel had suffered terribly in his first term from homesickness – his parents lived abroad – and Dyer had gone out of his way to comfort him after he ran away one day. This had developed into a friendship. Rougetel helped Dyer to solve Slimy’s more difficult fractions. When Dyer’s grandmother took him to the Mitre for lunch, Dyer invited Rougetel along. During
the last hols they had independently sent each other polite Christmas cards.

  Swallowing hard, Rougetel stepped up to the basin. After a furtive glance around, he bent forward with his face nearly touching the mirror, like Dyer’s mother, so close that Dyer could see the indentation in his chin, as if a pencil had been pressed to it – and he whispered to Dyer’s reflection: ‘Look in the sandpit.’ The need to keep his voice down made it sound like the putter of a distant propeller.

  Dyer told Marvar: ‘I waited until everyone was asleep. Then I sneaked out in my pyjamas, down the road – the doors weren’t locked – and I dug around for a bit.’

  Marvar, captive, said: ‘You mean here? In this pit?’

  ‘Somewhere here.’

  ‘And – did you find it?’

  Dyer remembered the night, a little faded maybe, like a restaurant bill in an old blazer. The cool freshness of the air after the bathroom – the tiled floor had reeked of disinfectant. The dark deserted street, the low fence, the sandpit. And the moment when his fingers encountered a hard outline and, brushing away the sand, exposed the curved tip of a plastic wing coloured with Dark Green and Dark Earth markings.

  ‘It might even have been there,’ pointing to where Marvar had rubbed out his marks. He gazed at the mounds and furrows emphasised in the street light. ‘But as I said, this is many years ago.’

  One digs up the past to pay for the future. Climbing the fence to look for something precious in a place where he wasn’t supposed to be – hadn’t this been his initiation as a foreign correspondent?

  Marvar watched him with a curious smile. ‘What was the plane?’

  Dyer heard himself recite, like a long-forgotten verse learned by heart: ‘An Australian fighter called a Boomerang, made by the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation between 1942 and 1945.’