The Sandpit Read online

  ‘A Boomerang!’ said Marvar, with another smile, full of irony and humour. ‘After the stick you throw and it comes back? Oh, I like that,’ and he repeated the word with feeling. ‘Boomerang …’

  Just at that moment a light went off in a window. There was a movement in the playground, and three figures emerged from the doorway to Mr Tanner’s office.

  Vasily, the tallest, peeled off when he caught sight of his parents. Katya detached herself from her husband, running forward to place an arm across Vasily’s shoulder.

  Leandro walked on towards the Rink with Samir, a slim, good-looking, dark-haired boy who skirted around the embracing mother and son with the loose grace of a young deer.

  Marvar, waving, heaved his big body up. ‘Samir! Over here!’

  If he hadn’t stayed in neon-lit labs in a cold unyielding climate, and not gone hunchbacked and plump thanks to years of sitting on a stool, this is what he would have looked like, thought Dyer, following.

  Under the Rink light, their two sons wore the expressions of boys who had taken an important step. They exuded the sense of being grown up that only children can feel.

  Dyer smiled at Leandro. ‘Got all your prep?’

  Katya came by, holding Vasily to her. Gripping his son’s other arm, Vasily’s father talked to him urgently, in Russian. He lifted his head, and his face hardened when he saw Dyer. Katya’s eyes turned, finding his. She looked at him and then looked away.

  Mr Tanner telephoned that evening. ‘They’ve had a smashing meeting. In fact, Vasily doesn’t dislike Leandro. He thinks he’s a very good footballer.’

  ‘I’m glad to see he’s well-trained,’ said Dyer in his driest voice.

  Fluently, Mr Tanner continued: ‘I’ll keep a watchful eye on things. I’m grateful you drew it to our attention. Accounts like this are very troubling to us and need to be addressed.’

  Not for one second had his son believed Vasily, it was plain to Dyer. Leandro knew that he’d been bullshitted, and he would go along with it. Still, secretly he seemed relieved that it was now out in the open. To hear Vasily utter the words ‘Oh, I’ve always admired you’ in front of Mr Tanner and Samir, it lanced something. It got his father off his back about being bullied, it got the bully off his back, and the experience served to bond him with Samir. By the time of the match on Saturday, Leandro’s ear had cleared up, he was talking as he used to, he looked like himself again.

  Chapter Six

  THE END OF FEBRUARY. THE days short and cold and dark. The low grey light of winter.

  Dyer went to the Taylorian early. In life you need something to do and something to undo, in his case a Brazilian way of existing that had obeyed no hours or rules. He now had a project which forced his days into a new routine and took him to the same corner of a reading room overlooking the Randolph Hotel. Silk-shaded lamps like pith helmets. Long tables of bleached oak. On the wall opposite, above shelves of red-bound French bibliographies, an unrestored painting of two figures in a classical landscape. He liked the silence and the jungly smell of old books, the undergraduates who hungered to learn, young women who lived in digs in St Clement’s with clothes on the floor and the poster of the Cézanne exhibition.

  Sometimes, coming down the stone staircase, the glance of an attractive face met his and he could tell what she was thinking. A middle-aged man on his own. Not someone who paid attention to his clothes – jeans, trainers, a pima cotton shirt beneath the pullover. Experienced. Fit. Reasonably intelligent, but not an academic. Distracted, imbalanced, intense, possibly interesting. In the cold air his skin was pale. He was always forgetting his gloves.

  ‘You look so glum.’ In a surprising exchange early on, a single Phoenix mother, whose novel Dyer had agreed to read, said to him with cappuccino foam on her lips: ‘Tell me three things that have made you happy.’

  ‘When my son laughs—’

  ‘Oh, you’re such a sop.’

  After he left the Bon Croissant, he thought of two others.

  The euphoria that ambushed him when one of his street children read for the first time. The twisting face of a woman, the tanned legs spread wide on the sheet, the hand in his hair. It counted for something.

  The last woman he had slept with, eighteen months before, was a divorced teacher from Leme with braided black hair and a passion for the novels of Clarice Lispector; they had tumbled into bed in the knowledge that his departure from Brazil was imminent. In Jericho, Dyer intuited that Leandro would welcome a fond maternal presence, after observing his father’s daily struggles with a clothes hanger, the washing, the cooking, but also with trying to make their quiet evenings together more fun. But when Dyer tried to conjure that female Other who might share their home, he couldn’t.

  Several times, he saw a face in profile or caught an outline from behind, a laugh, a smile, a movement that promised to unlock his stasis, and felt that he had found her. He wasn’t aiming for a mythical creature, but for a positive, straightforward woman whose contours might fit, without abrasions, into the life that he had built for himself and his son. He might as well have been looking for a goddess. He had searched a thousand faces, there was never an answering gleam.

  But he knew that he didn’t want a repetition of Nissa. Each time, it was what held him back. His fear of marking one more decent person through his feelings for someone else, like the impressions left scratched on a writing pad beneath a letter to another woman.

  Above all, he didn’t want the recriminations. The twist in his gut as she sought to justify her behaviour with Nigel, who had been every bit as helpless in his desire for Nissa as Dyer. The tremolo in her voice as she told Dyer: ‘That’s why I loved you, your sensitivity, your wish to make me understand what you felt, your wish to explain, the way you moved your hands, the way you looked at me and held my hands, so that if I couldn’t believe what you said, I could believe the way you held me.’

  Even a casual affair was hard to envisage. In Oxford, the enemy of carnality was the bicycle in the hall. In the sawdusty Portuguese prose of Sergio Madrugada, associate professor of colonial history at the University of Coimbra, he suppressed his lascivious thoughts of Katya Petroshenko.

  Dyer’s life in Oxford had developed into a ramshackle structure based on the Taylorian. At the fringes was the Café Bon Croissant on Oakthorpe Road, watering hole of the polished-marble-worktop Summertown brigade. But there was also the traditional, self-absorbed Oxford of the Turl and Ducker’s shoe shop, which had closed down in Leandro’s first term; and, at the end of the lane, the Mitre, where Dyer’s grandmother from Clitheroe would treat him to a roast beef Sunday lunch when he was Leandro’s age.

  Dyer inhabited this Oxford like a well-cut old suit. He was at school and university here, and he had his goat paths. He took his son to the Phoenix along the same wide streets, on foot or in the Beetle; at other times, Leandro bicycled on his own. At nine, Dyer had a cup of tea and a rice cake at the Café Lisboa before heading to the library. At twelve-thirty, a bowl of soup and a bread roll in the King’s Arms. In the afternoon, before collecting Leandro, a quick shop for dinner in the Covered Market. The pheasants hanging, the white plastic buckets of whelks, the smell of fresh ground coffee. There was an aroma about Cardew’s that he loved best in the world. Then later on, he had to be at home to prepare a meal for Leandro and to help with his homework, if that was demanded. In the evening, sometimes, at a dinner party in Summertown or at High Table – Merton, Trinity, Exeter – as the guest of academics who toiled in esoteric fields not so dissimilar from Dyer’s.

  You feel your ugliness when you walk past beautiful buildings, how quick your life is, and insignificant, and sometimes you feel uplifted. His was a rarefied Oxford, its chapels and halls each like a caravel in its own dock; an impoverished, friendless city lay outside, its pavements home to people who had nothing, as in the favela. Gradually, he had re-ascended to a panorama of it all, from windows, college rooms, church towers – he climbed the staircases, worn stone and creaking wood
, to rooftop terraces. Oxford lay below in its quads and separatenesses, cordoned off. The afternoon is over and he stands looking down at the faces beginning to stream home.

  The home match on Saturday against Horris Hill took place on an afternoon of cold sunshine.

  Dyer was late in leaving the Taylorian. Until now, he had found his research a slog, and never much minded breaking off to watch Leandro play: it compensated for the matches that his parents had missed. All at once engrossed in Professor Madrugada’s recently published monograph on the ‘accidental arrival’ in Brazil by the Calicut-bound fleet of Pedro Cabral, Dyer reached the Phoenix shortly before 2.30 p.m. The game had begun.

  Horris Hill were racing forward. There was a long kick.

  The air was split with cries, cheers, the muted beat of gloved hands clapping.

  He passed behind men in Barbours and scarves, women in ski jackets and woollen hats, until he found a gap.

  The parents stood around the pitch, Phoenix on one side, Horris Hill on the other.

  Impatient to know the score, Dyer noticed, standing on his own, the father of the Phoenix striker, a Namibian-based bullion dealer whom he had talked to at the Summer Fields game, and walked over to him.

  Dyer looked forward to his touchline chats. Somewhat to his amazement, the edge of the pitch had turned out to be an incomparable forum for discovering what was going on in the world.

  Leandro’s promotion to the first XI had introduced Dyer to a higher level of achieving parent. The Hong Kong-based mother of the centre forward was heiress to a chain of clothes factories in Cambodia; not only that, her second husband owned a large uranium mine in Niger. The left winger’s father was foreign secretary of his West African republic. As for the father of the full back, he was No. 2 in the Chechen parliament, and, according to Leandro, wanted by Interpol – a fact that emerged after Ma Crotty requested a routine criminal record check so that Mr Abdurashid might join his son on the school skiing trip to Davos …

  Dyer had gained through Leandro not merely entrance to a number of arenas where entry in ordinary circumstances was thrillingly forbidden, but a ringside seat.

  He had no illusion that what he picked up were titbits. Plutonium grade. But titbits. All the same, it was in his blood to tease these stories out, with their entrails.

  It never ceased to fascinate Dyer, how indiscreet people can be when they don’t think you are going to use the information. Everybody loves to talk about what they do, who they are. Phoenix parents who would cross the world twice to avoid publicity behaved incautiously out of character when removed from their security staff and safe bases. Relegated to the touchline – often at a time, if the game was midweek, when most other parents were at work – they became uncalculated, porous. Finding it suddenly intolerable to be standing on a drizzly afternoon beside a prep-school football pitch next to someone who had no idea who they were, they snatched the slightest opportunity to tell him, on the presumption that he was bound to be like them.

  Saturday’s match against Horris Hill is a textbook example.

  ‘How are they doing?’ Dyer asks.

  ‘They’re losing,’ grumps the striker’s father. ‘Two nil.’

  He follows the game with a dutiful expression, no longer like a person expecting to be recognised, until he cannot hide that the score is of far less moment to him than his responsibilities as the proprietor of an open-pit gold mine near Windhoek.

  Breathing on his fingertips, he starts to tell Dyer in a confiding tone how not long ago he was approached by the Iranian government to smelt an immense quantity of bullion.

  ‘I sent out one of my people. He came back. It was gold all right – the bars were stacked to the rafters of a warehouse in Tehran. Only one problem, though.’

  Dyer encouraged him to go on. His gathering of information was instinctive, what he had been trained to do, even if there was no outlet. It was another compensatory act, a deflection from his hitherto unexciting research. Now and then he might experience a transitory pang that he wasn’t any longer a journalist, but to date not one of the stories that he heard while watching Leandro play football had made him wish to pick up a pen. Fourteen years since he had last filed an article, and he was perversely content for his storytelling muscle to remain dormant.

  ‘On each and every bar was the stamp of the Central Bank of Kuwait. These were the Kuwaiti gold reserves, stolen by Saddam Hussein!’

  ‘So what did you do?’ he prompted, reminded suddenly of Marvar.

  ‘The CIA were keen for me to go ahead, but the Iranians never returned my calls.’

  Dyer nodded, poker-faced, as fifteen minutes later he nodded out of the same continuing habit when the father of the Phoenix goalkeeper, a French-Canadian hedge-fund manager who for some obscure reason had developed what his wife teasingly called ‘a man crush’ on Dyer, used the half-time interval to tell him the background to a story that had seized the headlines.

  Days earlier, the runaway favourite to be the next head of FIFA had been arrested in Switzerland for assaulting a chambermaid.

  Intense speculation in the world’s media revealed no one to be in possession of the facts – save, that is, for Gilles Asselin, whose company, he let slip to Dyer, as their sons changed ends, owned the hotel in Geneva where the assault allegedly had taken place.

  ‘It’s a story, nobody can prove it except me, but I’m telling you the story.’

  Gilles Asselin, thinning grey hair with a jutting bony nose and an amused slur to his accent, was forty-one, but looked older. He was a former speed-skate champion who was known to jog five miles every day – Dyer might benefit from copying his regime, Leandro felt. Gilles had worked for Goldman’s and then for Paribas until he decided to create his own company. He owned a chateau near Liège, and kept a private jet at Kidlington and his long white athlete’s fingers in an awful lot of pies.

  Impermeable when it came to business, Gilles was gleeful in relaying to Dyer the genuine reason behind the arrest. ‘It was a case of mistaken identity!’

  The FIFA candidate, ‘a connoisseur of rough sex’, had called up his madame to request his favourite girl, who not being available, it was arranged to have her place taken by someone au fait with Monsieur’s forceful tastes. So the madame assured.

  ‘Am I going too fast?’ Gilles says, at Dyer’s expression.

  ‘Not at all.’ Dyer’s care to conceal his curiosity has only made Gilles more confessional. ‘So what went wrong?’

  Gilles grins. ‘Ding-dong. Enter Sudanese room-cleaner. Monsieur is nonplussed. Not what he expected, quite. Nonetheless … he pounces. She resists. The harder she resists, the more he assumes this is part of the game. He gets more violent. He chokes her, slaps her. She hits back. This excites him further, naturellement … Moments later, ding-dong. Standing there, white leather boots to her thighs – the correct woman …!’

  ‘How do you know all this?’

  Gilles taps his watch. ‘Same thing that allows Apple to monitor my step count.’ And when Dyer goes on looking blank: ‘Data sniffers, bots, cameras. They know exactly where he’s been, what he’s done … If you have the money, you can buy a history of anyone. You can buy a history of yourself! A good Moldavian techie will call up the data for you. Where you were at dinner last night, your conversation, text messages, images of you walking home. He could piece together your life better than you ever could. Oh, bien fait, Phoenix!’

  The ball had curved in a high, unlikely arc from the halfway line, over the players’ heads, into the Horris Hill goal. Dyer, still absorbing Gilles’s information – a history of himself, nothing appealed less – had failed to register the scorer.

  ‘Did you see that?’ said Gilles, turning. ‘Did you see what your son just did?’

  ‘Well done, Leandro!’ Dyer shouted.

  It was why he was in the team. He had the soccer style of Brazil: surprise, craftiness, balance, spontaneity.

  ‘That was some kick,’ said Gilles. He couldn’t let it go.
‘I hope those bloody scouts are watching.’ It was no secret – Gilles’s fierce ambition that amounted almost to an obsession for his son Pierre to be selected for the Oxford Schools XI.

  ‘Your boy is devastating,’ observed Gilles’s wife Silvi, joining them.

  ‘All from his mother,’ Dyer assured her. He was accustomed to joking that Leandro had Nissa’s eyes, but her legs, too.

  ‘And from you?’ Gilles was curious to know.

  Dyer considered it. ‘His obtuseness.’

  ‘Are you obtuse?’ asked Silvi. ‘I don’t think of you as obtuse.’ She was still looking at Leandro.

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Dyer was stubbornly saving himself for something. What, he did not know. Perhaps it was why he gravitated towards parents like Gilles and Silvi. Their stories were beads for a rosary that he elaborated while he waited for it to show itself, as he performed his daily circuit from Jericho to the Taylorian and back.

  ‘He’s so alive,’ she murmured, ‘so himself,’ and turned her pale face to Dyer.

  Silvi Asselin – she was born Silvi Kareva in Estonia – has a squint, not unattractive. She comes from a small town west of Tartu, but speaks of it little. Her father was a Stalinist who killed himself when the Communists lost power. Her narrow green eyes give the impression of being always slightly trained on the road out of town, to the world beyond Lake Võrtsjärv and its broken-down carriages, the stained brick, the three-legged cat; possibly beyond Oxford, even.

  Having caught her husband, Silvi stands on permanent vigil against anyone who might resemble herself. Those careless enough to treat Silvi as a mere conduit to Gilles are not invited to their impressive house in Ward Road, with its malachite bathrooms, butler called Brian, large modern paintings hung next to smaller old masters. (‘Sometimes upside down,’ bitched one football dad.) Here, Silvi is chief executive, not Gilles.

  Silvi likes Dyer because he listens, and because the small-town Estonian girl in her responds to the notion of playing patroness and matchmaker to impoverished single artists.