In Summertown, the freshest bread from the rumour mill was that Gilles Asselin had lost his shirt.
‘I hear their house may soon be on the market.’
‘All the contents, too, Silvi told me.’
‘The private jet will have to go …’
‘And the chateau in France.’
‘Poor Silvi. She’s just joined our reading club.’
Conversation turned to Beatrice Updark’s father. He had been appointed Ambassador to Portugal. ‘He says that Lisbon is not Paris, but it’s still a most desirable post. There’s an excellent chance of a royal visit, and with that a knighthood.’
In charge of a collection to buy the headmaster a leaving present, Samantha Puckey had raised £92.
In the Café Lisboa, the faces absorbed in the newspapers were a little less grave. Iran and America had reached a stalemate. The American president had taken a hard look at war in the Middle East, and, like something you are anxious to have and a moment later decide you don’t want, had turned his attention back to Canada.
In a bay on Tasmania’s west coast, the mathematician Todd Angle had been found alive, having lived on berries for forty-seven days.
About the fate of a missing Iranian scientist, his family, nothing.
Dyer glimpsed Marvar in scraps of conversation. At High Table in Trinity, from a Fellow who was a brain surgeon, Dyer heard the story of a terribly sick man who had been delivered unconscious in a military ambulance to the John Radcliffe, and carried to his own room in the John Warin ward, where he was guarded by two armed soldiers who conveyed to doctors and nurses that they must not comment on or remember anything the man might say in his ravings. Not one of his friends or relatives was allowed to be with him during his last hours. The surgeon had seen the body. He started to describe someone bearing no resemblance to Marvar – short, slight, grey hair – and was surprised when Dyer laughed suddenly.
In a story of ‘rickety authority’ – i.e. Cubbage – Updark had heard that ‘oil men’ might be involved, and that operatives working for Exxon or Chevron had abducted Marvar. ‘The rumour is – and I underline rumour – he may be in Houston.’
Hissop, meanwhile, was following a lead that the weapons industry lay behind Marvar’s disappearance.
Dyer detested these scenarios. Against the vacuum of hard, verifiable fact, he elaborated another theory, one that his most superstitious and stubborn self held to be no more rickety: from his safe place of refuge near Howtown, Marvar had contacted General Damghani of the Revolutionary Guard, and they had hammered out a deal – as once upon a time Rejas had made a pact with Calderón in order to see Yolanda again.
In Dyer’s alternative fictional version, Marvar had said to himself something like this. The whole universe came into being by fusion, built up from a pea soup of hydrogen, with a cosmic explosion; its moment had arrived, no army in the world could stop it; whatever human beings were capable of, nuclear fusion was a factor we were all going to have to live with, for good or bad, and if that was the case then what did it matter who had it first, whether it was the Iranians or the Americans or the British, because everyone would have it in the end, and that included Israelis, Saudis, Chinese, North Koreans, even tribes on the Amazon; but personally Marvar could not, in the end, exist one further moment without Shula.
‘There’s always a woman.’
Dyer had a persistent vision of Marvar peering down at a narrow country lane, straining his eyes.
It was already afternoon, the wind was stirring the grass. Dyer could see them on the skyline, near the grazed peak. The wind was flogging Marvar’s hair into his eyes. He was still climbing.
Again, he turns. The view to the lake. The conifers outlined against Martindale church. But not a stir in the valley below.
Then he spots it, a white dot moving through the bracken.
The van trundles up the winding lane, over a cattle grid, coming to a halt in a passing point beside a cairn. There’s a moment of stillness. The doors open. Two men step out, then a dark-haired woman. They stand, looking up. The woman is cradling something.
‘Shula!’ he calls. ‘Samir! Look! It’s Shula – and Jamileh.’
He is hopping from hillock to hillock – shouting aloud – in a dirge.
‘Shula!’ through the hair that flops over his face. ‘Jamileh!’
It was the last day of term. Tripping out of the Taylorian to collect Leandro, Dyer realised that winter was over. He had come to life. His focus was abnormally sharp, as if he’d slept on his arm and the blood was flowing into it again. Suddenly, he saw blue in the sky.
He wanted to roll on his back in the mud. He wanted to chase pigeons and bark at swans.
They would get a dog, even though his son was admitting to second thoughts about a cockadoodle. ‘I like Spassky …’
‘But what?’
‘What if it’s not like Spassky? And doodles are their thing. Anyway, they’re a bit too curly.’
‘What would you say to a border collie crossed with a mutt?’
He had longed for his loss to recede, until with a gentle last push, he could say goodbye to it, and face a desired future, alive.
There were complications, like her mother, like the fact that they had not kissed even, like the fact that Leandro had not met her, that Dyer had yet to speak his flame; but these were the loose strands out of which any life was stitched.
He still had left in his wallet one blank post-it note of Marvar’s. To write on it what complicated equation he, John William Dyer, chose.
Spring was not far off. Everything seemed to be aware of it. The branches trembled, the sun appeared for longer. On the other side of the canal, bicyclists tinkled their bells. In the patio, in the tub, a snail crept further up the magnolia. A bird had pecked at its shell.
Gilberto Gil is playing. The cool of the evening. The sky red above the terrace.
Acknowledgements
THIS NOVEL MAY BE READ on its own or as a sequel to The Dancer Upstairs. It is a work of fiction, no one is drawn from anyone in life. Although it shares a superficial geographical proximity to another prep school in Oxford, where I spent five happy years, the Phoenix School is an imagined place.
I am indebted to the following for their help: Charles Alexander, Clare Alexander, Jonathan Beswick, Charlie Bowman, Justin and Jane Byam-Shaw, Mary Chamberlain, Jonathan Colchester, Steven Cowley, John Davies, Matthew Dodd, Mark Evans, Miguel Farias, Vernon Flynn, Liz Foley, Mike Forrest, Peter and Jessica Frankopan, Sheru George, Barry Green, John Hatt, Gillian and Jo-Ann Johnson, Peter and Juliet Johnson, Ian Kellas, Craig Kendall, Matthew Kidd, David Kingham, Piers Litherland, Nigel McGilchrist, Kate McIlwain, Brian Menell, Alain and Max Michaelis, Philip Norman, Jean and Marie de Portales, Henry Porter, Harry F. Robey, Nick Robinson, Ben and Max Shakespeare, Christopher and Francesca Shakespeare, Kasia Starega, Yiannis Takitos; the staff of the Taylorian Library.
I would like to pay tribute to A Death in Brazil, by Peter Robb (Bloomsbury, 2004); Brighter than a Thousand Suns, by Robert Jungk (Harcourt, 1970); The Master and His Emissary, by Iain McGilchrist (Yale, 2009); The Old Man and the Sand Eel, by Will Millard (Viking, 2018); Losing an Enemy, by Trita Parsi (Yale, 2017); Kabloona, by Gontran De Poncins (Reynal & Hitchcock, 1941); the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center.
The lines ‘Trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble/Trouble been dogging my soul since the day I was born’ are taken from the album ‘Trouble’, by Ray LaMontagne, 2004.
The lines from ‘Chomei at Toyama’ are from Basil Bunting’s Complete Poems ed. Richard Caddell © Bloodaxe Books 2000. Reproduced by kind permission of Bloodaxe Books.
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First published by Harvill Secker in 2020
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