He was surprised how much he liked his bedsit room. It had nothing much in it apart from a bed and a table and chair, and looked out onto a back garden whose shrubs had overgrown into trees, and where tenants had dumped curiosities – a broken trailer for pulling a boat, a trampoline with rusty springs. Foxes sauntered through at dusk, their hindquarters insolently drooping, inspecting their terrain. Alex chose carefully the books he brought from home, a few at a time, and liked waking in the room in moonlight – he never drew the curtains against the dark – to see their pale promise solid on his table. He was reading anthropology, thinking that after all this should have been his subject – with its long view, its doubt in relation to human universals, its foundation in the idea of cultural difference.

He marked the children’s work and prepared his classes at his table in the window, then walked out among the elongated late summer shadows on Parliament Hill. The trees’ darkened foliage hung dully and the grass was trodden hard, or was boggy and yellow in patches; the air was stale and blue, its emptiness limp from all the city crowds who’d been and gone. Stopping for the inevitable pastel view of the city, innocuous and miniature at its safe distance, he was ambushed by how close he felt to his lost boyhood and youth – he’d forgotten this pungent taste of anticipation, this leaping up of his heart in fearful excitement, looking around himself at solitary others dog-walking under the spreading trees in the late light. Then he might drive over to Garret’s Lane, perhaps not until midnight. Lydia never came to him in Gospel Oak, he hadn’t given her his new address and she didn’t question him over where he was or how he spent his time. Images of their intimacy suffused his thoughts, but he wanted for the moment to preserve this distance between them. He had a horror of filling Zachary’s place, going out every morning from Garret’s Lane to fetch the newspaper for Lydia, or buy milk for her coffee.