They both spotted him at once. Leandro’s instinct was to slide down in his seat, so that when Vasily looked over he saw only Dyer – who was thinking: Where’s your mother?
‘Hey, I thought you guys were getting on better,’ said Dyer, after they had driven past.
‘We are,’ from his reclining position.
‘Leandro—’
‘Scrape out.’
‘Scrape?’
Leandro laughed at Dyer’s expression. ‘You don’t understand, do you?’ sitting up. ‘Everything’s fine, Dad.’
Dyer had hoped the bullying incident was behind them. The airing of it had brought the matter to a head and popped it, yet the possibility of re-infection was always there. But maybe that defined parenthood. Dyer couldn’t protect his son from everything, and at this moment Vasily ranked low on the list of imminent threats.
About Vasily’s mother, Dyer felt a haphazard contrition.
His remorse was merely lust’s dessert, his aunt would have joined Updark in reminding him. He was able to recognise that now. Whatever had fogged up his view of Katya Petroshenko was gone.
Even so, Katya had exerted a sort of hold on Dyer. When he saw her next day, he didn’t have much time to go through complicated contortions to avoid her. She was shepherding Vasily from the playground. He looked at her in her lavender cashmere (did she wear any other kind of jersey?) and recalled with a shudder how she had potentially tried to poison him. She showed no curiosity on recognising Dyer. She gave him a quenched look, then opened wide her large grey eyes at Mr Tanner, ostensibly fascinated by his plans for the upcoming long weekend.
PART THREE
* * *
Chapter Thirty-one
A SPRAWLING COUNTRY HOUSE IN Lancashire outside the village of Browsholme. Posters of the Great Northern Railway on striped wallpaper. Logs burning inside a marble fireplace, and the River Hodder murmuring over stones in the darkness below.
Tonight’s dinner is smoked trout, lamb and Argentine merlot, and a lemonade for Leandro.
A cancellation has brought them to this warm dining room. Dyer had borrowed Paula’s mobile to make the booking. To begin with, he was told that the hotel was full for a wedding party. Then, on Thursday afternoon, Paula rang his doorbell. ‘They’ve called back.’ A room had come free. Plus she had four Amazon packages for him.
He was careful not to inform anyone. Updark had never said to him that he couldn’t leave Oxford. Dyer had trusted Paula alone with the secret of where he was taking Leandro in fulfilment of a long-standing promise made on a yellow sandy beach nearly six thousand miles way.
They departed on Friday afternoon, four hours up the M6 and over the fells through the Trough of Bowland, between unfenced green hillsides and sheep grazing beside a stream. Dyer worried that the Beetle might not complete the journey after an orange light beneath the mileometer started flashing. Leandro leafed in vain through the manual, but the light went off after Dunsop Bridge, and shortly before eight they arrived at the Inn at Browsholme.
He had to be patient, and the fishing would be good for that. The Hodder was one of the rivers on which Dyer had learned to cast a fly – when two years older than Leandro. As well, he was familiar with the inn.
Dyer’s surge of relief mingled with nostalgia lasts through the meal. Gold flames dance in the grate as though the fire has never gone out.
Thirty years before, on one of their last outings together, Dyer had sat in this dining room opposite his grief-stricken father, in an unspoken truce not to talk about his mother – who had been born near here, in Clitheroe, and a portion of whose cremated remains they had brought with them in a marmalade jar. The atmosphere, like the decor, had not changed. Blink and it could be the same tea arriving in a heavy silver pot with a scalding handle. Only the absence of an ashtray would have made his chain-smoking father twist in his seat.
No other anglers are staying. Aside from Dyer and Leandro, a subdued group at the far end are the only ones dining.
After finishing his tea, Dyer sees his son to their riverside room on the second floor, and then comes back downstairs for a nightcap.
In the bar, a grizzled local with a brackeny beard was talking to one of the group – distracted-looking, clean-shaven, from his accent an American – about how to preserve the grouse moor against hen harriers.
In memory of his father, Dyer ordered an Armagnac. The young barman who poured it had washed his hands, and the ends of his cuffs were dark with dampness.
Dyer took his glass into the deserted dining room and sat by the fire. An unrecognisable odour that was familiar came off the walls and blended with the woodsmoke and the smell of Armagnac. Being here with Leandro returned him to boyhood. He stared into the flames.
A light rain was falling when they set out next morning, covering with a grey veil the sun that was shining that moment over Rio. The meadow hadn’t been mown and was a struggle to walk through in new wellingtons. Butterbur like dock leaves, and tall grass on the bank.
Their destination was the weir – a calm elbow of river in a dip, with a flat shore of brown pebbles narrowing into a patch of ruffled water, and stepping stones beyond.
‘We’ll start you off on grayling,’ he told Leandro. The Hodder was a good river for grayling.
Earlier in the rain, they had practised casting on the narrow front lawn. Along with his new boots, Dyer had forked out to buy Leandro a two-piece monofilament rod. Leandro was boyishly delighted with it, but for his induction Dyer insisted that Leandro try out his father’s longer split cane.
He stood in the top of the pool at Leandro’s side and reminded him to treat the rod as a lever. ‘See how there’s a sweetness to it, the way the line blossoms back …’ It was a load off his mind that Marvar had not damaged the seventy-year-old bamboo when tripping over it.
Once Leandro had attempted a few casts, Dyer tied on a Kite’s Imperial size 14.
‘To catch a grayling, you use a small fly and bend it out.’ Dyer heard his father’s tobacco-scented voice in his as he explained to Leandro how grayling had their own way of feeding. ‘They come up from the river bed and seize the fly in a different motion to trout, who attack it parallel and turn their head.’ He handed the rod to his son.
Leandro made a number of false casts before letting the line out with a splash. He snagged his next cast in weeds. Dyer waded out to retrieve it. ‘Don’t despair, be patient, you can’t learn it all in a day,’ and reminded Leandro of the tangles he’d got into on the rugby pitch.
‘Try over there at forty-five degrees. Remember to strip in fast – and strike as soon as you feel something.’
Hours passed. By the time the rain had stopped, Leandro was casting better. He was fairly positive that he had felt two tugs.
They ate a late lunch on the bank, sandwiches provided by the hotel. It was already mid-afternoon, a breeze was stirring the tall damp grass. A flock of doves settled on the top of a tree and flew off, flapping like pages in the wind.
Lunch over, Leandro leaped to his feet – impatient to try out his carbon rod. Dyer set this up. Then, after watching his son, he left him by the stepping stones and walked upstream with the split cane, to a long beat in shadow under the trees, just far enough away to still have Leandro in sight. He wanted to be on his own for a while, take stock.
After a morning on the river, Dyer no longer had the insidious sense of being watched which had oppressed him continually since Rustum Marvar stayed the night. Leandro, too, seemed calmer. Mr Tanner had acted fast in letting him choose a new password to access the school’s computer system; on Dyer’s advice, Leandro took a line from “The Prelude”, and the menacing emails had immediately stopped.
Away from Oxford, Dyer was able to focus with greater clarity – in a manner not possible before – and think about what to do with Marvar’s post-it note.
Three more days, was the deadline he had set himself. The library book was reserved until the following Tuesday, and then Dyer needed to make a d
ecision. Did he leave the algorithm folded inside the last chapter for an unknown researcher to find – and inevitably throw away? Did he choose a new book to slip Marvar’s information into, and then another, until he ran out of books? Or did he find some other person and press it into their palm?
The deadline was utterly subjective, of course, a contrived zero hour of no more significance than one of the cracks in the pavement that Dyer hopped over, yet that superstitious side of him was treating it as one of the most vital assignments of his life.
Dyer looked to the Hodder to provide an answer.
Trapped behind rocks and fallen branches on the water’s edge was a band of detritus and foam. Dyer shifted his gaze to the middle of the wide stream and followed it towards the hills. The river had wound through this valley for as long as there were people in it. From its bank, he and his father had tumbled his mother’s ashes into the ripples. For an intense moment, he experienced the thrill of being absorbed into this landscape, tethered.
A goosander exploded from the reeds, dripping water onto the surface. Dyer waited, deciding what lure to tie on. More of his father’s words came back as he leafed through his fly book that one of Updark’s men had turned upside down. ‘All you need is a piece of pheasant’s tail and some copper wire, preferably plum brown in colour from an old transistor radio, and some ochre strands of wool.’ His father hadn’t been living in the days of laptops and mobile phones, or data sniffers.
Anywhere else, he can’t picture his father so clearly. Only on the riverbank does he return, in the dogdays after his mother’s death, cross-legged in the grass in a blue felt hat, smoking a cigarette lit with another, his watery green eyes and index finger raised at the sound of martins swooping in the clear sky above, talking in a rheumy voice about male songbirds.
From his father, Dyer had discovered how to fish. How to tie a knot and lick the line, what fly to use, where to look. The trick of how to cast by tucking a bible under his arm. On the Hodder and then on other rivers and lakes – the Itchen, Ullswater, the Lune, the Nadder – his father taught him patience and respect, and that the only way to succeed in the water was to be unnoticeable. To have any chance of catching a fish so alarmable as the trout, his father had impressed on him, you had to blend in with your surroundings, take on their pace, distil yourself into a still and silent shadow until you were indistinguishable from the trout.
It was a lesson that Dyer had tried to apply to his present situation in order to throw his hunters off his scent.
Catching the trout was only part of it, though. Fishing sharpened your memory and perception, and allowed you to see connections that might otherwise have drifted by unnoticed. Later, Dyer carried its lessons into journalism. As a cub reporter, he discovered that almost everything about fly fishing, from his selection of a fly to his method of casting the line, had this in common with a line of prose: it could not hide his character – although, paradoxically, everything condensed towards trying to suppress that character.
Above all, he learned that even the smallest grayling lifted flashing from the water could stand as a true image, a true sentence, the scrap, as it were, of a greater truth. A muscle of light and agitated life that connected the angler to the universe.
Athough he kept his father’s rod in the hall as a standing reminder of something he intended to do, Dyer had not fished in England for years. He had fished the Piabanha near Petrópolis, the Paraná further north, and the Amazon – from sturgeon-sized peixe, whose each pearly scale was the size of a woman’s purse, to tiny blue hatchet fish, as if a kingfisher had dived underwater and shattered. But he had hardly picked up a rod since Astrud’s death, and not once to fish with a fly.
He hesitated over an elk-hair caddis before selecting a white Klinkhammer, and tied it on. As on his last outing to the Hodder, he squirmed along the bank: this impatient, messy, blind, noisy form a crushing argument in his own person against the qualities needed to catch a fish. His aim this afternoon was simple, as when he first came here as a teenager. To untangle himself into becoming what normally he was not. And so achieve that meditative state in which his mind was carried forward by the flow of the stream – until it was both cleansed and primed to make connections; to strike, to hook.
He stood on a rock and cast upstream. It was difficult to distinguish his white Klinkhammer from the bubbles and foam. He had to raise the rod and drag the fly back so that it lay on the surface. ‘The secret is concentration. Brain, muscle, ear, eye have to have coordination. You can’t teach that.’ Among the superstitions that his father had passed down was his belief that fishing was about concentrating on the fly until it took you into another world.
Dyer cast again, like a prayer. With every cast he was dropping a line into the unknown in order to reach out and connect. Until the moment arrived when, instead of a white dot bobbing between chevrons of rippling water, he is conscious of an eye measuring him.
He stares back. This eye – impassive, matter-of-fact – evaluates him for what he is, and not for any secret he might have concealed in a library book. Rougetel lifts the candle to her face.
Dyer goes on staring as one memory lights up another.
The Greek island of Kythera. His first long vacation. Their meeting outside Molesey Boat Club is still a year in the future.
This encounter takes place in the cobbled town square at Banda Landra, and has been planned in advance on discovering that both of them will be in Greece that August.
Dyer hears his name and turns to see a motorcylist waving. The helmet lifts to reveal a freckled white face with a dented chin. Rougetel.
He’s in his gap year, teaching at the local school, and on his way to visit a small chapel, ordinarily locked, which contains Byzantine frescoes. The priest – his niece is one of Rougetel’s pupils – has lent him the key. ‘Why don’t you hop on the back?’ he says to Dyer.
A short ride through rocky scrub brings them down a bumpy track to a jumble of mushroom-coloured roofs. Inside, low barrel-vaulted ceilings and blistered walls with saints painted in faded reds and blues. Rougetel lights a candle to examine their crumbling features. Irresistibly, he is drawn to a mildewed fresco of the Madonna. This strikes Dyer as disconcertingly crude, little more than flat patches of colour arranged in the simplistic form of a young woman. But Rougetel views her differently. Dyer is approaching the Madonna in quite the wrong way, he needs to cast himself back into the mind of a thirteenth-century John Dyer, a young man who would not have perceived the Virgin purely as a figurative representation; rather, as a two-way mirror – with her eyes operating as a peephole into, but also from, another dimension. Inside that chapel, Rougetel is telling him in a reverent voice from which he cannot keep his excitement, he and Dyer are as much the watched as the watchers. ‘You might think you’re looking at her. Actually,’ holding the flame higher, to show how the whites in her eyes – a compound of crushed chicken bones and purified fish glue – are raised to catch the light, ‘she’s also looking at you.’
The wind was walking on his line. He drew it in. Six hours on the riverbank have rinsed everything out of his head. What he most loved about fishing was another property that it shared with reading and writing: it concentrated the mind, while at the same time liberating it. It was much less about catching a fish than releasing the fisherman.
On this stretch of the Hodder, no one was watching him. Here, he was the hunter. For the first time in several days, Dyer felt in his own dimension.
He cast again, and a trout went for his lure, but he had been grayling-fishing, and struck too early.
At last he caught a small brown trout blotched with fungus, as if he had got his hook in the bony mouth and stiff upper lip of Updark.
He let it go and was preparing to rejoin Leandro when the farmer came by and chatted: toothy like a fairy-tale witch, but friendly. He had observed Dyer teaching his boy. ‘Yer catchin’ ’im in gude time,’ he grinned. He had watched kingfishers on those steps training their young to ca
tch fish and bash their heads out on the stones.
Leandro had felt a further three tugs, but caught nothing. Dyer was pleased to see that the experience had not made him downhearted, the opposite in fact. They ate an early dinner in the bar and went out again.
In the vanishing light Dyer led his son to a large basin of water below the inn. They heard a fish splash back into the pool, creating ripples in the shape of a widening eye, and leaving bubbles on the surface.
Sea trout didn’t run until May or June. It was probably a salmon kelt, or a slob trout that had not swum to sea, he told Leandro in a low voice. They stood still, listening out for another splash, the shivering noise that a fish makes when it jumps, not speaking.
Between the steep banks the Hodder, flowing with dark water like cold black coffee, resembled a river from which a hand might emerge to catch a sword.
Not seeing any more disturbance, they waded across and walked one behind the other along the far bank, holding their rods behind them parallel to the ground. The sounds were amplified at night, the pad of feet, the rustle of a water vole emerging from its burrow. Upstream, a silver flash and spladoosh! was the same fish erupting and crashing back into the pool.
Leandro instantly wanted to cast for it, but Dyer cautioned him. ‘When you hear that splash of a sea trout, you need to wait five minutes. You won’t catch it if you cast too soon.’
Once again, they stood in the river not moving. In the middle of the basin, rocks rose up above the surface, shimmering with the water that swirled over and around them. After an interval, Dyer nodded. Step by slow step, they inched closer to where they had observed the splash.
Ever so careful, Leandro waded further in. Dyer whispered to him how to fish at night. ‘You don’t need to move from there. Just be patient.’
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