The Sandpit

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  ‘Have you decided what kind of dog you want?’ hedged Dyer. He should have known that children hold adults to their promises.

  ‘Yes.’

  Dyer glanced at him. The pasta, his concentrated face. His blond hair had grown over his eye.

  ‘One like Beatrice Updark has.’

  Under Beatrice’s supervision, Leandro had walked Spassky on his bright-coloured lead around the Hard Court. Not once, Dyer now discovered, but several times.

  ‘I thought you didn’t like Beatrice.’

  ‘I like her dog,’ said Leandro defiantly.

  Dyer suppressed a smile. He remembered what Vivien had said about the Phoenix when encouraging him to send Leandro to the school. ‘Your mother and I were treated as equals. We were taught we were every bit as good as the boys when we were as good as them. We learned to be competitive and ambitious and also adventurous – it was the girls who dared each other to go into the boys’ dorms, not the other way round.’

  ‘I’m not sure about his eyebrows,’ Dyer frowned.

  ‘They’re called furnishings,’ Leandro corrected him with unusual authority.

  Dyer wasn’t going to rehearse all the arguments, but it prompted him to revive another of the offers that he had made to Leandro in Rio. ‘Why don’t I take you fly fishing, and we can discuss it?’

  The upcoming three-day exeat coincided this year with the start of the fishing season. Dyer’s proposal to look for a country inn, on a stretch of river where he might teach Leandro how to catch a trout, had a pacifying effect on his son. A little less downcast, Leandro cleaned out his fingernails with the tip of a pencil.

  Dinner over, Leandro had homework to do. When Dyer offered to look over this once he had finished it, Leandro declined. He didn’t need help, someone was already helping him.

  Leandro opened his satchel as Dyer cleared the plates and briefly speculated in a back room of his mind who this person might be – Beatrice? Leandro’s history teacher, Ma Burgeon? – before other thoughts – about his missing notes, Marvar, Updark – crowded in.

  ‘Oh, Dad, I’m sorry,’ pulling a face. ‘This morning … I packed these by mistake.’ With a penitent expression now, Leandro produced a sheaf of pages covered with Dyer’s shorthand.

  Dyer’s chest went cold. His hands shook as he grabbed them.

  ‘Thank God …’ and collapsed noisily into a chair. ‘Thank God.’

  Updark had nothing on him! There was no evidence to link Dyer with Marvar’s discovery – only these eleven sheets of A4.

  Leandro looked up, startled. ‘Dad, are you all right?’

  ‘Yes, yes …’ He was rereading the first page of his interview. He did not need Astrud’s photograph to warn him. He had to hide this – or destroy it. The information must not be found in the house.

  Dyer looked up from the page, white against the table, to his son. He didn’t want to infect Leandro with his relief, his fear.

  Leandro inspected him with touching tenderness. ‘I hope you haven’t caught my cold.’ He bit his lip. ‘I may have given it to Samir.’

  Dyer leaned forward. ‘You’ve seen Samir?’

  ‘No, no, not today, he didn’t come to school. Mr Tanner thought it was his injury, but Dad, it wasn’t, he was walking fine. I bet you anything it was that flu I had. He wasn’t feeling well at the sleepover, I could see.’

  After Leandro went to bed, Dyer made himself a cup of tea. He added milk, and as he closed the fridge he was arrested by a memory of Rustum Marvar standing in the exact spot where he himself now stood.

  Marvar had been staring at Leandro’s Pelé magnet, his face, everything about him, altered from a moment before.

  From two feet away, Dyer absorbed the image of the Brazilian footballer on the fridge door. Then the slow thought came to him. What if Marvar’s eyes were fastened not on Pelé, but on the square of yellow paper protruding from beneath?

  ‘So that’s what they’re called!’

  Marvar had stopped on the towpath and thrown back his head in laughter when Dyer told him.

  ‘Post it. You mean, like a letter. Me to you?’

  But in the very next moment Marvar appeared conflicted, as though he had committed an error. Dyer’s heart had reached out to him. He recognised the awkward emotion felt by someone who had suffered tragedy, when people caught them laughing.

  Dyer stepped closer to the fridge. There seemed to be an unfamiliarity about his handwriting on the post-it note. His eyes scanned the names and the numbers that he had jotted down – for Paula next door; Domino’s pizzeria; Magda, the Polish cleaner; the landlord’s management company in Summertown …

  Then he saw it.

  Squeezed in between the letters and figures that Dyer had written, a single word stood out. It had been scrawled in a strange hand using his propelling pencil. Each capital letter as bold as an initial branded on a tennis ball.

  ‘BOOMERANG’.

  An apparently insignificant thing can be of huge importance, life had taught Dyer. He waited until the last chime of midnight faded into the Oxford darkness. He checked once again that Leandro was asleep, and then he put on an extra jersey and a black wool balaclava that he never wore, and stepped outside.

  He had parked in St Barnabas Street next to the church tower. Before he climbed into his Beetle and started the ignition, he looked up and down the line of cars. No one followed him into Great Clarendon Street, or left along Walton Street, or right into St Margaret’s Road.

  It took Dyer five minutes to drive to the school. He drew up beside the pillar box and jumped out. Not waiting to lock the car, he walked fast along the pavement to the zebra crossing, and over the road. On the last occasion when he made this journey so late at night, after Rougetel had revealed the location to him in the bathroom mirror, bonding them for ever, Dyer had been wearing blue-and-white striped pyjamas and a paisley dressing gown.

  He punched in the numbers and came through the gate. He ran as if towards a phone ringing. The street light shed the same dim orange glow. He knelt in the sandpit directly opposite where Rustum had sat, and started sifting with his fingers. He felt a drench of pure terror, but he was also distant, as though looking down on himself from the top of a bedside locker.

  Almost immediately, his fingertips brushed against the outline of a solid object. This time, not the Airfix wing of an Australian fighter plane, but a Ziploc sandwich bag with a small hard-edged green folder inside, wrapped in wax-paper.

  The shipping forecast was coming to an end, driving home. St Barnabas Street was as peaceful when Dyer got back as when he left. But something had shifted. He did not recognise the city, he could have been crossing Rio.

  PART TWO

  * * *

  Chapter Twenty-one

  OXFORD WAKING IN THE DAWN, the cold sunlight numbing and clear as morphine, the corn-coloured stone, the blazers in the windows, the cyclists. Tom Tower is visible above the roof tiles, like a Kaiser helmet. On a tented stall in the Broad, a man with Andean features lays out columns of panama hats to the sound of pipe music. He glances at Dyer, wondering if he ought to recognise him, drawn to how fearful he seems of being noticed, and decides that he doesn’t.

  Dyer sees the slimmer figure of his youth slip down the Turl. He follows him up Market Street, into the Covered Market. The Portuguese café more or less as he remembered. Same oatmeal lino floor, pale blue formica tabletops. He could be pushing open the glass-panelled door and walking in here fifty years before.

  The Café Lisboa is where Dyer heads first thing, after dropping Leandro off at the Phoenix. More than anywhere else in Oxford, it reminds him of his childhood, but also of Brazil. For one thing, it’s a place where you can speak Portuguese.

  ‘Puxa! É você, João?’ says Miguel, his habitual mask of melancholy creasing into a smile. ‘Disculpe, não lhe reconheci com esse sobretudo.’

  Dyer looks down at the long overcoat he is wearing, and explains. ‘Pertence a um amigo.’

  Miguel, who was bo
rn in Madeira, is a plump man with two strands of white hair across his skull. After the ritual exchanges about the uncle in Funchal, the granddaughter at Phil & Jim, Dyer orders a cup of tea and a rice cake.

  A table is free by the pillar. Dyer takes off the heavy coat and hangs it over the back of the cane chair. A button is missing from the sleeve, and he thinks of Marvar’s fingers on Port Meadow, fretting.

  Settled in his chair, Dyer unzips his shoulder bag. First, he draws out the eleven pages of A4 which Leandro had returned to him, and sets these to one side. Then he pulls out the plastic Ziploc sandwich bag containing the corrugated green folder, lays it on the table and opens it.

  From the folder he extracts a square of yellow paper, two inches by two – which Marvar must have ripped off a pad, since adhered to the back are two further post-it notes, both blank.

  Dyer stares at this meteorite which has fallen into his scared hands. He holds it up, and struggles to make sense of what Marvar, in blue biro, has set down on both sides in meticulous, close-spaced, small writing.

  Light from a plastic-shaded lamp falls on a jumble of figures and letters, some Greek, others Roman, some capitalised, others not, and on the reverse, beneath more calculations – qualities and names of the minerals to be used as lasing materials? – a sentence on its own: Otto Hahn – ‘contrary to God’s will’?

  This terrible knowledge, which might set fire to the atmosphere, to water – or give us sun on earth. This is the original. There is no other copy. Buried in the sand for Dyer to find.

  It was inescapable and inevitable as biography that Dyer should be the recipient. Any pai de santo peering into his shallow basket of cowrie shells could have told him: it was not by accident that Marvar had brushed up against Dyer’s life. Marvar was like the surf which came in when he was running along the beach to Leblon, sometimes engulfing his legs, tugging him back, wet; a wave larger than all the others, unannounced, able to roll you over and over.

  Dyer pictured Marvar writing it carefully down, his taut face. He must have buried it on Sunday morning before collecting Samir from the Asselins. Marvar had remembered Dyer’s schoolboy story and had pinned his hopes on it.

  He hears the sound of seashells being sifted. ‘He has given you this knowledge for you to decide, because he was unable to decide himself.’

  The dread in Marvar’s eyes. Dyer had seen it again this morning when he threw a careless glance at the mirror. It pained him to look at the face that stared back. Marvar’s black spot had come into his hands, darker than anything that Blind Pew could have pressed into his palm, darker than anything he had a name for.

  Except that it wasn’t nameless, it wasn’t torn from a bible or the Koran or from the book of any religion, and it wasn’t black; it was banana yellow, composed of quite specific numbers and letters, and it came tagged with a quote from a German chemist.

  Did that fear in Marvar’s eyes explain his disappearance? Had the burden overwhelmed him?

  Ludicrous as he had made Hissop’s suggestion sound, Dyer wondered if it was conceivable that Marvar had stuck to his original plan and taken Samir hiking, and now was somewhere safe. Hissop had read out a list of physicists who at regular intervals escaped into the mountains to keep sane – Teller, Fermi, Bloch, Heisenberg. Marvar’s abrupt departure caused Dyer to think of the still-missing Australian mathematician Todd Angle who had vanished while on a bush walk in Tasmania.

  It made Dyer smile to imagine Marvar stumbling through rugged hill-country in mountain boots after he had buried his abstruse nuclear theory in the school sandpit. It was important to laugh. Otherwise it was all so damned unamusing.

  Dyer climbed with Marvar a little way in his imagination. He wanted so much to believe that Marvar had arrived early at the Asselins’ to take his son off walking. He wanted to picture him rising through the grassy fells above Howtown with Samir, looking down to Patterdale below. Then he broke off a piece of rice cake and put it in his mouth. No, it was too hard to conjure a coatless Marvar struggling up Fusedale with his son, stumbling and wheezing. As for the alternative scenarios which Hissop had posited, in their violence they too closely resembled the games on Leandro’s Xbox. They lay beyond Dyer’s willingness to believe. Easier to imagine that Marvar had melted into Oxford’s thin air. He had disappeared in a storm, as Gustav Mahler was said to have done. He had burned himself out like a comet.

  Yet if Marvar didn’t come back … if in some way he had been taken out of the equation … then that left Dyer sole custodian of his knowledge.

  About what to do with this knowledge, he has no script. He’s not going to make a copy; Marvar wouldn’t have wanted that. ‘You don’t need any other.’ And the algorithm is too long for Dyer to memorise.

  If he can’t copy or remember it, what other option does he have?

  So quick, normally, to make up his mind, Dyer cannot decide. The friend of the missing Australian mathematician had given the letter that he had received posthumously from him to the police. Obviously, the thing for Dyer to do, sipping his tea, was to get this post-it note to Lionel Updark. That was the first path he should take.

  But the prospect of handing over Marvar’s information to Updark makes Dyer dizzy, disoriented. The fact that Updark socialised with Cubbage, and was supposed to be at the dinner party with him, puts Dyer off, given all that he has heard from Lorna about the Americans.

  He stares again at what Marvar has written, and feels that he is being sucked backward in the current. These numbers and letters – like some abracadabra. E = mc2 gave us the atom bomb. But Marvar’s calculations? Is it possible to read too much into them? Could they be nothing more than clotted bilge, like Todd Angle’s bushwhacked philosophy – or one of Dyer’s maths preps for Slimy? ‘This is fit only,’ Slimy had said, ‘for toilet paper.’

  7, M, Q fus, nTτ … The muddle of figures, like the mistakes that the typesetters used to make. Dyer is tempted to view the whole thing as gobbledygook.

  What he has been searching for is a simple algorithm for how to live. What did he want the world to think of him, who did he love best in it? His life was a coded set of letters and figures awaiting a solution.

  Dyer thought back, as people in a crisis do, to where he had come from. A large part of him, too much, went back to Astrud.

  He saw her sometimes in another, crossing a chequered floor to touch a shoulder, her eyes, the stubborn curl over her left ear that she was always brushing down. The bar is full, the book is open on the table with a fresh pencil mark in the margin. ‘What are you reading?’

  And afterwards, the empty mornings and afternoons. In the evenings he sits at a table with a glass of cold beer and a book, watching the faces. A samba is playing. His face is wet. They were supposed to be his great days.

  Vivien had tried to comfort him. Following the funeral at Nossa Senhora da Candelária in Petrópolis – Astrud in the coffin, the hands that had touched his shoulder – his aunt rang every week, compelling him to talk. ‘It’s bad to remember, but it’s worse not to.’

  He had thrown his door keys at the doctor who brought him the news. In the sunlight of his first day of mourning, he was tearing at his own fur. He cut his hair. He couldn’t listen to music, read a book, eat moqueca.

  After she died, her dog didn’t go into their room.

  Even though a long while had passed since then, he could never stop it welling up. At what point had his mourning become pathological? When would he stop palming his hands against the memory, trying to warm himself? It seemed closer in time to him now than for many years. He was lashed to it like a convict. Healing from her loss would be the miracle.

  ‘Senhor João?’ It’s Miguel, wondering what smiles followed by sudden sobs can have got into his normally taciturn customer. ‘Another cup of tea?’

  He tries not to look up. ‘No, thanks, Miguel,’ and reaches through the blur for a paper napkin.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  DYER TUCKED THE FOLDER BACK into his bag, shrugged h
is arms into Marvar’s silk-lined sleeves, paid the bill and left. It was an odd sensation to walk through the Covered Market in another man’s overcoat. Already, his fingertips had encountered a cough-sweet that smelled of Marvar’s breath wrapped in tissue paper. He felt grains of sand in the pockets.

  Marvar didn’t have this coat when he revisited the sandpit on Sunday; it was hanging up in Dyer’s cupboard. Had Marvar left it deliberately as a parting gift, was he shedding his skin even then?

  Compelled to walk at a different gait – the coat was warm, but too big, and it hung on him like one of Vivien’s tea cosies – Dyer passed the fish counter, the shoe shop, the hairdresser, Ben’s Cookies, out into the High Street.

  A bell struck nine. He yearned for the day before yesterday, and for the day before that. If he hadn’t stopped to speak with Marvar outside the University Press. If he hadn’t driven at midnight to the Phoenix. The bag on his shoulder weighed as if it had a body in it.

  Dyer heard out the chimes and picked up his pace. He had walked slowly this morning to the Covered Market, as though Marvar would appear if he took his time. It was how he had walked before. He imagined that he would catch sight of her and then run and catch up, and they would walk on together.

  His steps now were nervous, shorter. The people he passed knew nothing of the load he carried. A slip of paper could be so heavy.

  Updark had given him his card – Dyer had left it on the bookcase beside the phone. He would overcome his reservations about the man and ring him when he got home. But the decision made, Dyer still felt uneasy. He stared down and jumped over a pavement crack.

  Who else had spotted Dyer speaking to Marvar in Great Clarendon Street, or an hour later on Port Meadow, immersed in a conversation that nobody could have interrupted, or returning with Marvar to Jericho? What faces behind frosted windscreens had tracked them? Had those same eyes combed Dyer’s house, or were they different ones? Even if Marvar hadn’t been abducted, it was possible that whoever was in pursuit of him had extended their attention to Dyer.