He reproached their inertia, broke up the party. It didn’t matter if they changed places anyway, because home was temporarily a rented flat in a palazzo in Cannaregio opposite a convent, overlooking a quiet canal – its rooms furnished in that Continental-archaic style so exotic to British sensibility, antiques mingled with modern horrors, embroidered lace-edged curtains, narrow beds with bolsters, tall locked linen cupboards, austerely functional tiled kitchen and bathrooms. Leaning on the stone balustrade of the balcony grown over with pink jasmine, they could watch green water chop against the canal walls, its reflections liquid on the stucco, or listen out for the gondolas approaching through the warm peace of the afternoon or evening, or the motor boats carrying cement mixers or crates of bottled water or someone’s new fridge. The gondoliers’ ritual call, stogando io, warning as they neared the corner, was like a message from another age: the past flickered at the edge of vision, as if for an instant a portal opened through to it. Gondoliers stood up in the stern like centaurs, their labour half magnificent – superbly difficult, and ancient, and strange – and half absurd, because of the tourists stuffed self-consciously inside the boat going nowhere, taking photographs of each other.

Eighteen months ago, Alex had been made headmaster at his school. Not many men went into primary education, and those who did rose quickly to positions of power. This new role of his at the school seemed like his reconciliation with the world: his friends realised that he was surprised he was good at it, and relieved. It turned out that Alex wasn’t only visionary, he was competent: knew how to get money out of the local authority or the Department of Education or high-minded charities, to pay for extra music services, one-to-one support for troubled children, painting the walls of the playground with lines of poetry in fifteen languages. If he couldn’t play games with the conditions, then who could? The school would be rated outstanding in inspections; he would get the children to perform well in their SATS. And meanwhile he would also read to them from the Odyssey in the school hall every morning, and they would turn its stories into paintings, music, plays for shadow puppets.