The Sandpit

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Marvar tripped over the two bicycles in the hallway, and sent Dyer’s fishing rod clattering. Balance regained, he stumbled into the kitchen area.

  Dyer propped the rod back up and waited for him to finish unbuttoning.

  ‘Have a seat.’ He took Marvar’s coat and went to hang it up in the cupboard under the stairs, next to his tackle.

  Re-entering the room, ‘Tea? Coffee? Something stronger?’ On the draining board was a glass with a red halo at the bottom.

  Sprawled awkwardly on a hard chair, Marvar looked slowly about, like a passenger who lingers after the plane has landed. He was wearing a suit tailored for someone, if not for him then his father or grandfather; midnight blue, old-fashioned, turn-ups. The jacket strained over his stomach.

  ‘Sure,’ Marvar said vaguely, listening to the clangs. There were workmen in the next house. They had been putting up scaffolding.

  He sat there while Dyer filled the kettle. His eyes moved over a photograph on the wall of Dyer in the favela with his class, to a drawing by one of the orphans, before landing on the notes scattered over the kitchen table.

  ‘What are you working on?’ after a pause. Without his coat, he breathed more evenly.

  Dyer told him.

  ‘Are you a good writer?’

  ‘My English teacher at the Phoenix said if you want to be a good writer, you have to be a horrible person.’

  At this, Marvar laughed. He was ready to laugh. He leaned forward, twisting his neck to decipher Dyer’s notes. ‘I’d like to read something you’ve written.’

  Dyer knelt before the Ikea bookcase and picked out a book, sandwiched between a copy of Basil Bunting’s collected poems and an early novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, and handed it to him.

  He inspected the spine. ‘J. W. Dyer. This is you?’

  ‘Not as often as I’d like it to be.’

  Marvar fingered the book listlessly, not seeing. He was too fat and the walls were too thin. He might have been thinking of another book.

  ‘Have it,’ said Dyer. ‘It’s for you.’

  It was his last copy. He could order another. The half-dozen that his publishers had sent him, he had wasted as dinner-party gifts.

  Marvar flicked to the title page. ‘Then you must sign it,’ and stood respectfully up. The book lay open in his palms, drifting in the thermals.

  Dyer patted his chest, pockets. From a broken-handled mug with a phoenix on it, he plucked a biro that didn’t work. ‘Why,’ he muttered, ‘do writers never ever have anything to write with?’

  He unzipped the leather shoulder bag containing his laptop, and dug out a propelling pencil.

  Marvar remained standing while Dyer took the book from him and sat down at the table and pondered an inscription. The sound of hammer against scaffolding came through the wall like a gong. The renovator’s wand hadn’t yet touched Paula’s house on the other side.

  ‘Your ex?’

  Dyer looked up.

  On top of the bookcase, the black-and-white photograph of Astrud loose in a maple frame.

  ‘One of them,’ he said.

  Nissa was upstairs, in colour, on a wall in Leandro’s bedroom – with a smile on her face that Dyer could imagine darting between their son’s ribs every time Leandro looked at it. Her beauty was not in doubt, only what it let her get away with. That she might be a stove that smoked whenever it blew, as his aunt tartly put it, Dyer had been slower to recognise than Vivien who, after at last meeting Nissa, observed to him while she thoughtfully adjusted the knitted cosy on her teapot, ‘I like her, John, I do. I just can’t help feeling that with Nissa the half seems always more interesting than the whole. It’s something Hugo’s noticed, too. Did I ever tell you what he said after our first meeting? “A great face always comes with a price tag,” and it’s perfectly true, my dear.’

  Had Nissa ignored Leandro altogether, it might have hurt less. For the first year, she was content with the progress reports that Dyer made a point of writing to her at the end of each term. Yet now that her twins were down for an English prep school, she had started to show more interest. A fresh demand plopped through the letter box every few weeks, along with the gas and electricity reminders. For Leandro’s school report, his team photograph, his waist and neck measurements, as if she was trying to reclaim him by reaching out through the arms and legs of the shirts and trousers that she wanted to send. The clothes arrived, but Leandro wouldn’t touch them. She would have made a perfect Phoenix mother, thought Dyer, who had not seen it coming. What he saw, he did not tell Leandro – who had never asked – was that the woman he believed he loved had escaped him for someone wealthier. Which wasn’t how Nissa saw things. ‘It’s not me you’re fucking.’ She wiped the tears from her eyes. ‘It’s Astrud.’

  Marvar was still looking at Astrud’s photo. It was taken on her parents’ terrace in Petrópolis, at dusk. She was leaning against the barley-sugar irons of the balustrade, staring at him. Not beautiful, not ugly. Her candour had nothing artificial about it. She was telling him to get a move on, she needed to turn down the gas on the moqueca. She was three months pregnant.

  ‘What’s her name?’ Marvar asked.

  Dyer’s mouth formed the word. He felt a phantom heartbeat just saying it. He remembered saying her name for so long. It wasn’t something you could talk away or find words to soothe; it was a part of himself which was empty and would never be filled. The same with their baby daughter. He could see her growing up, but she would never grow up.

  That hammering again. A barrister from Putney had bought the house. He had a boy and a girl going to the Phoenix in September.

  After Dyer told him how Astrud had died in childbirth, Marvar fished out a wallet and produced a photo. ‘My wife.’

  Dyer saw a face like Samir’s: large eyes, very dark brows, long thick black hair, a small straight nose, and slightly uneven front teeth that lent an elfin element to her smile.

  ‘And here – with my daughter.’

  The baby girl in her arms, she could have been only a few months old.

  ‘What’s your daughter called?’

  ‘Jamileh,’ in a small voice.

  ‘And your wife?’

  ‘Shula.’

  ‘She looks lovely.’

  ‘Oh, she is, she is a very brave, clever woman. My halfness.’ It was almost a whisper

  ‘You told me you were divorced.’

  Marvar inclined his head. ‘I lied.’

  Dyer looked up. ‘Any reason?’

  Marvar’s faint brown skin stretched over his skull exposed a small pulse that Dyer had not noticed before, showing the race of his thoughts.

  He pulled up a chair and sat down, making it creak. People always look around before they lie. He met Dyer’s gaze directly.

  ‘May I have a coffee?’ as if this was not the only decision he had reached. Lies weren’t going to get him anywhere.

  Chapter Ten

  EVERYTHING STARTS OVER A COFFEE, he remembered her laughing. Not that Marvar drank much of his. He kept getting up and wandering over to the window, speaking to the window as if to the sky. He belonged not in that room, but in a desert landscape the colour of his coat, rimmed by volcanic peaks, the dogs panting, the groan of the water-wheel, shutters closing, opening. Outside, coming off the canal, the Oxford mist suspended Marvar from normal times, from this red-brick house in Jericho where he stood, or sat noisily down, his lungs wheezing, trying to work out how to explain to Dyer what motivated him to behave in this strange jittery way. And all the while from next door that bang bang bang.

  It emerged in fragments between sips. He was afraid of saying too much. He hardly knew Dyer. They’d had – what? – two conversations. Even so, his instincts told him that Dyer was a person to trust, who might understand. Anyway, who else could he talk to? There wasn’t anyone.

  He spoke as if his mouth was dry. Yes, he was still married, and happily. But his wife Shula was a hostage in Tehran. They had not let her travel to Oxford. They would let h
im bring Samir, but not his wife.

  Marvar couldn’t deny that it had come as a surprise when the Clarendon laboratory invited him ‘in a spirit of reconciliation’ to spend three years at the Department of Physics in Oxford. He was a junior spectrometrist. Iran had plenty more experienced physicists – plus his mother had been a Christian.

  Subsequently, he learned that his name had been put forward by a Dutch scientist, a visiting fellow at Tehran University, who sometimes sat and talked to Marvar in the canteen.

  ‘You may accept.’ It was clear that many consultations had taken place before his head of department summoned Marvar and gave him this news in a calm, dispassionate voice, and then the conditions. His wife had to stay behind, he had to report back on his own research every month, he was to avoid making contacts outside his team at the Clarendon. If anyone questioned him, he was to represent himself as a single father. The West was full of them.

  It was Shula who had decided. An opportunity to work in Oxford – it was not likely to come again, and Samir would benefit; the government had consented to pay for his schooling.

  ‘She said to me: “No question, Rustum, you have to go.”’

  Father and son had arrived in England soon after the signing of the international treaty that suspended Iran’s nuclear programme in exchange for sanctions relief. A thirty-year stand-off – three decades of ‘mutual demonisation’ – had come to an end. Tensions relaxed further as Iran began again to export oil. Marvar received no more instructions. He lived with Samir in digs in Merton Street. He got on with his work. He ate takeaways; he never went to parties. Last summer, he’d flown with Samir to Tehran to visit Shula, by then six months pregnant. Marvar was back in Oxford when Jamileh was born three months later. He had been looking forward to seeing his baby daughter for the first time in March, at the annual meeting of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organisation.

  ‘But these last weeks – the atmosphere has changed utterly.’ America’s threat of sanctions had sent the Iranian authorities berserk, he said. ‘Every day, they issue new orders to those who have dealings with the West. At the same time, they are arresting people.’

  Marvar’s research at the Clarendon now obsessed them. They insisted that he report back not every month, but every week, in detail. That was not all.

  ‘I’m not a spy – no, no, you mustn’t think that. But my people are very suspicious, you cannot believe how suspicious. They have made other conditions. They want to make me into a spy.’

  He spoke in a low voice as if petrified of being overheard. ‘I have to report on the rest of the team. If they are not satisfied with … I can’t think straight.’

  His pace had faltered. He needed to swallow before he could go on. With an unexpected sob, he said: ‘I have heard from my cousin that Shula has been taken away.’

  In his large brown abstracted eyes was the horror of a man who might never see his wife again. Rejas had shown the same anguish when talking about Yolanda.

  Dyer would not have become a journalist if he had trusted people. He had been trained not to believe, it was a requirement. People lie the whole time, most of all to themselves. Thirty years in Brazil had taught him to approach Marvar’s story with caution.

  Obscure to Dyer was who ‘they’ were. His knowledge of Iranian politics came from what he read in the news. Was Marvar referring to the Iranian Atomic Energy Organisation? To his university faculty in Tehran? To the Revolutionary Guards? Or to a secret faction closer to the Ayatollah?

  He lifted the cup to his lips, waiting for Marvar to go on. When he sipped his coffee he felt clear, calm. In Rio that day. He had met her one dry lonely afternoon. She was like the first coffee of the morning. She made things come alive, which is also to make them come true.

  It was one of Marvar’s tics, when agitated, to raise his right hand from his sparse beard to the top of his head and pat down his hair until it fell over his eyes.

  ‘I don’t know what to do … I was going to church to … I feel everywhere I go …’ The rest of the sentence stayed in his mouth.

  ‘You feel you’re being watched?’ supplied Dyer.

  Marvar nodded. He had to clear his throat again.

  ‘By who?’

  ‘Cubbage, for one!’ exploding with resentment.

  Dyer put down his mug. ‘What, Amy’s father?’

  The very same. Ralph Cubbage, of the carroty hair and tailored red jeans, the large black Lexus and Berkeley baseball cap, who in January had been appointed deputy head of Marvar’s department. An Australian professor was nominally in charge, but Cubbage acted as the day-to-day supervisor. From the first morning when he bristled through the Clarendon’s pompous orange-brick entrance, up its wooden staircase and along the corridor to Professor Whitton’s room overlooking the Parks cricket pitch – two long white communal desktops surmounted by eight large screens – Dr Ralph Louis Cubbage Jr. had behaved as though he had an unwarranted claim on Marvar’s work.

  ‘If he’s not working for the CIA, then – what is your saying? – I’m a Dutch person.’

  Cubbage was not alone in his interest. Everywhere Marvar now glanced he saw a wolf-eared shadow. Aside from the Americans and the authorities in Tehran, Marvar seemed particularly fearful of the Israelis, who, between 2009 and 2012, he said, had assassinated seventeen Iranian nuclear scientists. Recently, Marvar’s professor at the Clarendon had received two visitors who purported to be plasma scientists from a lab in Tel Aviv. They gave him a severe inquisition about his work, but were noticeably evasive about their own establishment.

  Then, in no particular order, came the Saudis, the Russians, the Chinese, the British, the City, Wall Street, weapons manufacturers, Iranian dissidents – even the oil industry. Marvar muttered, ‘The thing is so big, they would have to be on top of any renewable revolution.’

  Dyer heard this without commenting, as a doctor listens to a hypochondriac rehearse their symptoms. Little mental effort was required to see that Marvar could be an eruptive, discomposed personality, with extreme reactions to people and situations.

  ‘The truth is, I never expected it …’

  His voice was disincarnate. His heart was in a state of considerable nervous excitement over the fate of his wife and daughter, but Dyer had the impression – once again – that it overspilled with other passions.

  ‘… I never expected to have results …’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Dyer said finally, after Marvar had jumped to his feet. ‘What are these results you’re talking about?’

  Marvar stood stooped by the window, white mug in hand, a faraway glaze in his eye. The dense mist, evocative and deceiving, drifted over the empty boatyard, now and then thinning to reveal the canal. The tinder path opposite, with barges tied up; along the near bank the backs of narrow lawns sloping up to Edwardian houses, and modern developments, gardenless, with balconies and sheer facades like Venetian palazzos.

  ‘Look, how lovely it is over there.’ He turned his lost face to Dyer, as if chasing his last chance for joy. ‘Let’s go out.’

  In between clangs from next door, the bells of St Barnabas chimed twice. On a frost-hardened field in Brackley, the whistle had gone and Leandro and Samir would have started playing – with neither of their fathers watching, it depressed Dyer to think, as he went to retrieve Marvar’s overcoat.

  Marvar stood abstractedly putting his coat back on while Dyer telephoned Silvi Asselin to tell her that he couldn’t, after all, make it to the match this afternoon, nor could Samir’s dad, and might she be able to give their two boys a lift home for tonight’s sleepover?

  Silvi was determinedly good-natured; Gilles was always cancelling at the last moment. ‘You’ll miss the tea,’ was all she said. The match teas at Winchester House were the best.

  They crossed the bridge and walked along the towpath, Marvar every now and then glancing back. The canal flowed slowly, darkly; twigs and bottles were trapped on the surface like tar. Nothing seemed reflected in it, no birds, no clouds, no s
treak of sunlight. Ducks submerged and rose, shaking their heads near the far bank. Smudged by the thinning mist, solitary men crouched beside black nets fishing for tench.

  As they walked, Marvar started to tell Dyer a curious – no, a fantastic – story. He would not have spoken so freely before coming to England. But in the more libertine atmosphere of Oxford, he had discovered that you can say what you like and the sky doesn’t fall in.

  They were passing a moored-up barge when Marvar turned to him. ‘What do you know about nuclear fusion?’

  Physics had eluded Dyer; after maths it was his weakest subject. Not even Rougetel, fluent in the sciences as he was in the arts, could help him make better sense of it. In fission, Dyer scrambled to recall, atoms were made to split; in fusion, they were forced to merge – producing potentially immeasurably greater power. He had learned all this at the Phoenix, from a young master who couldn’t have been more than a few months out of university.

  ‘Everything I know about fusion,’ he told Marvar apologetically, ‘could be written on a post-it note.’

  ‘A post-it note?’ said Marvar, smiling almost for the first time, and then throwing back his head and bursting into laughter, after Dyer had explained what, exactly, a ‘post-it note’ was. ‘Everything I know, too!’

  Marvar gestured at the grey afternoon sky. ‘To put it in one line, fusion is what is happening in the sun – if we could get to see it in Oxford – every second, every minute, every day. It’s why the stars sparkle. So why not here?’

  This had been the challenge facing scientists for eighty years, the holiest of grails. If we could replicate on earth the processes of the sun and the stars, then in a flash our energy problems, global warming, would be sorted. For ever!

  But how?

  He was looking at Dyer with incredibly tense eyes. ‘Well, it can be done,’ and gave a distressingly pinched laugh. ‘I have found a way.’

  It was Dyer’s turn to burst out laughing. But he corrected himself when he saw Marvar’s face, and he did not question a word of it by the time that Marvar had finished talking.