The Sandpit

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  ‘Hello?’ came a voice from upstairs. ‘Hello?’

  Just the dialling tone. Marvar?

  ‘It’s all right, it’s me, Magda,’ he shouted.

  She said something he couldn’t make out over the noise of the hoover.

  He called ring-back. The number was ex-directory. Updark? The journalist? Someone else?

  Magda appeared, a tubby blonde whose hangdog expression reminded him of his college scout.

  ‘It’s been ringing and ringing,’ she puffed. ‘I didn’t think you’d want me to answer.’

  ‘No, you were right,’ he said, and disconnected the handset. He felt some reason to do this that he could not define.

  ‘I’ve made up your bed,’ she went on. ‘Oh, and a fresh duvet cover for Leandro,’ tuning her voice to a more pleasant note. But she was very behindhand, she said, having taken her boyfriend to the bus station for a job interview in Bicester. She still had to empty the washing machine, hang out Leandro’s damp football kit to dry, iron two of Dyer’s white shirts, sew on a button, hoover downstairs. She might have been reciting a crime sheet.

  A fly was buzzing against the windowpane. Dyer checked his watch. Twelve fifty. ‘Then I’ll get out of your way.’ He was hungry all of a sudden.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  THE OLD BOOKBINDERS HAD BECOME more popular since Dyer’s arrival in Oxford, and at lunchtimes it was packed. A French couple had bought the pub the previous spring. In lieu of pickled eggs and the local malt, plus, on certain days, a disreputable-looking unnamed battered fish, a blackboard advertised moules marinières, croque-monsieurs, steak frites and, all this week, a prizewinning wheat beer.

  He glanced warily at the faces. The usual customers: French and Italian students in knee-length coats; middle-aged Brexit voters from the council houses and barges; on stools at the bar, a local divorcée and a retired professor of Spanish, one looking dreamily up in the air at the paper banknotes, denominations from foreign countries, that a previous landlord had pasted to the ceiling, the other at the TLS open on his brown corduroy lap.

  Dyer pushed his way to the counter and ordered half a pint of bitter and a ham-and-cheese baguette from a narrow-faced woman drying glasses.

  ‘I’ll be through there,’ he told her, accepting his change.

  Taking his beer, Dyer ducked his head under the beam and passed into the lower-ceilinged room at the back. A rectangle of daylight slanted through the open door, pointing the way to an unoccupied table.

  He put down his glass and, leaving his scarf to guard the seat, walked back through the pub, to the loo.

  On his return five minutes later, he smelled something familiar.

  Dyer had sat down before he noticed a figure in the corner. Her blonde hair bound up, she looked around like a girl in a foreign town, smiling.

  ‘Hi.’

  Bone-coloured jacket. Slim green jersey pulled tight. His face became different when he recognised her.

  Now he was able to place it, that giddying odour.

  His voice said the name whose lips, he realised, he had not stopped thinking of.

  ‘Katya.’

  She accepted his kiss, cheek forward, not moving.

  ‘This is unexpected – what are you doing here?’

  She seemed to be thinking.

  ‘I wanted to see …’

  He waited. ‘What?’

  She shivered and shook her shoulders, like someone resisting a caress. ‘Where we were going to have our “bitter” …’

  He glanced down at her empty table. ‘You’re not drinking?’

  She looked quickly at him. ‘Whatever you are drinking,’ she said.

  Soon he was back.

  ‘Long overdue,’ clinking glasses.

  She took a sip. It was a half-pint of Marston’s Old Empire. ‘Not bad,’ in a neutral tone.

  ‘You’re being polite.’

  ‘I am not so,’ she said in her strange accent. ‘But I like it. Quite,’ scrunching up her small nose. ‘I think.’

  A smell of garlic came from the kitchen. Her green jersey was the colour of billiard cloth.

  He dropped his eyes, and made circles on the beermat with his glass. ‘How’s Vasily?’ he risked.

  On a leather cord around her neck was a silver leaf. Katya touched it now and then, as, without going too deep into the subject, she told him about her son. He was studying for Common Entrance. He hoped to get into Harrow. The transition from Moscow to Oxford had not been smooth, but Vasily was happier now, she said: ‘Although he is finding English history hard. The “Rocket” of Stephenson …’

  Dyer laughed. ‘Leandro has the same problem with Trafalgar.’

  She searched his face. She had such a broad naked smile when he talked about his son.

  Grateful to Katya for not alluding to the incident which had sabotaged their flirtation, he told her how it took Leandro three terms to find his footing, despite Dyer’s connections with the school.

  ‘I was rung up in the first week to say Leandro didn’t have the correct black shoes – trainers wouldn’t do.’

  Not even in his trainers must Katya run away with the idea that Leandro always excelled on the sports field. In his inaugural rugby game, Dyer said, never having played rugby, Leandro failed to observe the boundary lines and was shouted at by the coach.

  ‘He kept running right off the pitch and into the crowd. Mr Tanner yelled at him in such a mean way.’ He picked up his glass. ‘If I’d been Leandro’s mother, I’d have given him a very expensive Lamy pen to make up for it.’

  ‘Why didn’t she?’

  ‘His mother lives in Brazil,’ said Dyer quickly. ‘She doesn’t communicate much. And to be fair to her, nor do I.’ He hadn’t told Nissa when Leandro had nits.

  ‘Brazil is long way,’ she reflected. ‘Longer than Moscow.’

  ‘It is far.’

  ‘And Leandro – he misses her?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Dyer. ‘Well, I say that, but I think he realises she’s not there for him. She’s remarried, has other children.’

  ‘Do you miss her?’

  ‘Leandro’s mother? No. Yes. I don’t know.’

  ‘You feel about her what I feel about this?’ She picked up her beer and shutting her eyes took another sip. Her eyes when they opened had a sterner expression. ‘What happened?’

  ‘To me and Nissa?’ He reached for his glass as if it contained an explanation. Spelled out in the rising bubbles was an orgy of misconception. A couple who knew nothing of each other’s past, who had foreseen a future together that neither of them could hope to possess. ‘She fell out of love,’ Dyer said at last, and took another sip. The beer had a different flavour, as if it was reacting to his memories.

  Katya put her glass down. ‘And you?’

  He said thickly: ‘Oh, she’d tell you I was never in love in the first place.’

  She looked at him, all attention.

  ‘Then why did you marry?’

  ‘We didn’t marry. We got engaged, but we never quite pulled the noose.’

  ‘Noose?’

  He made a motion around his neck. ‘What the hangman does.’ After a pause, he said: ‘That was a joke.’

  ‘You English,’ she mused, shaking her head. ‘I only believe when you are joking.’

  ‘Really, only then?’

  ‘Yes,’ with a jolting smile. ‘Only then.’

  Before she could go on, he said in a parrying voice: ‘What about you and Gennady? It’s not easy, living in separate countries.’

  He thought she was fastening an earring, but she was touching a mark on her neck.

  ‘How did you both meet?’ he pressed.

  Her eyes gleaming, she stared at the glass, its brown unrefrigerated contents. They were at university together in Moscow. He had been an accountant, that was how he had begun, she said.

  ‘But you’re from Murmansk, I thought …’

  ‘Murmansk?’

  ‘You were a beauty queen in Murmansk, is
what I heard.’

  ‘Who told you?’ frowning.

  ‘Someone in Summertown, I forget.’

  She lowered her face. ‘I wasn’t beauty queen.’ She came from Muranovo, thirty miles north of Moscow. ‘I was born on estate of great nineteenth-century Russian poet Fyodor Tyutchev.’

  ‘Did you study accountancy, too?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Poetry?’

  ‘Physics.’

  He sat back in his chair.

  She smiled, slightly sorrowful. ‘I’m my father—’

  She was interrupted by a young woman with short blue-streaked hair holding a plate, who he knew was slightly deaf, which was why it sounded almost like a shout: ‘Who ordered the baguette?’

  ‘Me,’ raising his glass. And to Katya: ‘Are you hungry? Why don’t we share this?’

  ‘I can—’ reaching for her square red handbag.

  ‘No, no, I’ve paid already. Let this be on me.’

  He broke the baguette in two and gave her half. They ate in a silence that neither seemed willing to break. Voices could be heard in the other room. Someone was saying: ‘He lives in a bungalow and has a beard and all the rest of it.’

  Dyer waited for her to finish eating. ‘Gennady works for GAZPROM, he told me.’

  ‘If Gennady says so, it must be true,’ with dulled eyes, pushing the plate away. She tried to smile.

  He said carefully: ‘Do you not believe your husband’s every word?’

  She raised her eyebrows as if complimented, and looked past him through the open door. She kept her gaze there, lifting and dropping her glass onto the beermat in between sips, and talked about her marriage.

  It was no secret in Moscow, why should it be in Oxford? She and her husband were estranged. Gennady was a beneficiary of the asset grab that characterised Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Her own words seemed to bore her as she explained how he was close to Putin’s inner circle, but in the process of becoming connected and wealthy he and Katya had grown apart. They rubbed along, but it was clear, from her sad expression – and from her solemn admission in an embarrassed voice that they hadn’t made ‘any love’ in six months – that the cartilage between the bones had worn away. The sole bond keeping them together was Vasily.

  Her husband, an ardent Chelsea supporter (‘he has many shares’), had not been happy with how Katya had handled Vasily’s demotion from the first XI. She still had a mark on the side of her neck where Gennady had expressed his frustration.

  She turned her face to the lozenge of daylight pouring into the room, and now Dyer saw it.

  He had thought it was a small birthmark. He felt his tongue with no saliva press against his teeth.

  She bent her head and sat there, waiting.

  He stares at her and feels diminished. He is aware that he is blushing. Words rise to his mouth. ‘Do you want to come back for coffee?’

  On her face is the stern look which means she is mulling it over. Her breasts lifted under her jersey.

  ‘Sure.’

  Chapter Twenty-six

  IN THE KITCHEN, HE SWITCHED on the grinder.

  Magda had left. A note beside the sink in her large childlike hand asked him to buy more Ariel washing capsules. ‘Not the liquid!’

  Katya had walked out this morning not wearing a coat. She stood still in the middle of the kitchen with her arms crossed, her eyes darting from the bookshelves, the photographs and pictures on the walls, the landlord’s impersonal, creaking furniture, out into the patio. The magnolia tree in its half-barrel tub. On the washing line were Leandro’s football socks and shirts that Magda had pegged out to dry.

  The kettle boiled. She uncrossed her arms and glanced at Marvar’s overcoat, which Magda had taken it upon herself to liberate from Leandro’s games bag and drape over a chair, and shuddered. ‘It’s cold,’ she murmured in her low raspy voice.

  She left him pouring out the mugs, and went upstairs.

  ‘Katya?’ he called after her. ‘If you’re looking for the bathroom, it’s down here.’

  Then: ‘Your coffee’s ready.’

  No answer.

  Heart drumming against his ribcage, he climbs the brown staircarpet.

  She stood in his bedroom, her back to Dyer. She had removed her jacket and put it on the bed. Hearing him enter, she lifted her hand to behind her head, unbound her hair. Shook it loose.

  Taut as a bough, he said: ‘Katya?’

  She turned to him without a word and stepped forward – he could smell her breath, the faint whiff of pale ale – looked at him, then opened her mouth and pressed it against his.

  There were fresh sheets on the bed. There had been a report on the news. The Americans were suspending themselves from the nuclear treaty, the Iranians were going mad. A boy on the towpath was talking to a skinny man with a backpack. The mist, as if it had drifted in from the nearby cemetery, was disintegrating the branches of the trees. She bent over to take off her shoes. The jersey tightened on her shoulders, and then she was pulling it up over her head.

  His heart stumbled. Stretched out on her back. The shape of her breasts. Long legs apart on the sheet, the small dark-blonde triangle of hair between them. All that she had on was the silver leaf on the cord around her neck. The innocence of this people is such that that of Adam could not have been greater. Her mouth is hypnotic. She knows she is attractive, her effect.

  She was thirty-six. Her son was listening to his history teacher, brows knitted. When she reaches up to put her hands on his chest, her breasts throw a shadow on the pillow.

  Feelings don’t have manners. They roll over and over. Dazedly, he sees her spread out beneath him. Her splendid behind raised, her buttocks glossy and firm, like conkers. Her throat half-turned, exciting him on. As he enters her, he knows the code to the universe, he sees it flash before him, dazzling and shining, and then fade and disappear.

  She held him from behind, her pubic hair soft against his buttocks. In spite of the beer, he could smell her perfume. He turned to ask what it was. She looked at him and smiled. ‘Perfume? No, I’m not wearing perfume. You must mean me …’ glancing down. ‘Oh, I know, it’s my BB cream.’

  He kissed her neck, now covered with a shimmer of perspiration, and tasted a sudden oily residue in the back of his throat, the aggressive bleachy taste of a laundry tablet. Then he realises that it’s the cream, and she has applied it to camouflage the dark bruise that lies beneath her skin in the shape of a fish under water.

  She shifts underneath him and runs her fingers over his back, in between his buttocks, delving. His hardness returns. She licks the tips of two fingers and slides her hand down. Gravely, he opens her legs. He is hard inside her, back on the pitch, no longer watching but playing. Soon he is kicking the ball into the sky, into the sun, her mouth against his ear: ‘Now.’ He kisses her shoulder, her lips. He holds her in his arms and falls abruptly asleep to the sound of bells and trains. In his history lesson, Ma Burgeon has finished telling Vasily about the first victim of the railway, the MP William Huskisson, run over in 1830 by Stephenson’s steam engine.

  Dyer woke to see Katya getting up from the bed. She walked on tiptoe like a ballerina, straight-backed. He listened to the tread of her bare feet down the stairs, and raised himself on one elbow.

  Her underwear on the floor. A thin white slip, the colour of mist. Swallowing every light in the room.

  His head feels strange, as though he’s slept for some time, even though his watch says it’s only three o’clock. He falls back to sleep for a bit.

  Downstairs, the sound of flushing. When she reappears, she is wearing Marvar’s coat like a dressing gown, with her arms thrust into its pockets.

  ‘You have taken off phone,’ she observes.

  ‘Someone kept ringing and hanging up,’ he says.

  ‘What if it is Marvar?’ she asks.

  He looks at her. Her white breasts, marked in red blushes where his tongue and teeth have travelled, stand out against the green silk lining.


  ‘You know that’s his coat?’ he says after a while.

  ‘I know, I recognise,’ looking down. Framed by the camel-haired lapels, her collar bones are quotation marks.

  ‘He left it behind.’

  ‘Maybe he wants it back.’ Her eyes are misleadingly calm and clear.

  ‘I wish.’

  ‘You were friend of his?’

  ‘Not really.’

  She removes her hands from the pockets and sits down at the end of the bed. ‘I saw you speaking to him,’ caressing his ankle through the sheet.

  ‘When was that?’ He was weighing her motive.

  The grey in her eyes looked darker, the same shade as her bruise, full of hidden flashing thoughts.

  ‘That night. By the sandpit. Remember?’

  ‘Oh, yes. We were discussing Vasily.’ He said it quite decisively.

  A frown screwed up her face. She turned and looked at him sharply.

  ‘Marvar was working on fusion, no?’

  He felt himself tilting. ‘So I gather. I don’t know much about fusion. Do you know about fusion?’

  She was silent, tense; it was as if they had stepped together into a cave.

  ‘It was my father’s subject.’ She made a dispersing gesture with her hand. ‘It is said he was doing good work,’ something rounding the earlier hard edges of her voice.

  ‘Your father?’

  ‘Rustum Marvar,’ slightly huffed.

  ‘Who told you that?’

  Her eyes met his and in the light of that room he could see the strain in them. ‘His professor.’

  He lay back on the pillow and crossed his hands behind his head. ‘I really don’t know. Right now my subject is sixteenth-century Brazil. The twenty-first century can go screw itself.’

  She said nothing. On her face again, that stern expression – when a noise startled her. Her breasts quivered as she twisted around. ‘What’s that?’

  Sitting up, he listened to the snarling radiator. ‘Oh, that,’ and lay back. ‘The heating must have come on.’

  She turned her head to the wall, and he was not prepared for what she said next. ‘It must be expensive, the Phoenix. For a writer.’