Without a pause, they chanted in solemn unison as if it were a psalm: ‘“As I sat face to face across the table in Red Square with Kim Philby, the man who had brought Western intelligence to its knees, drinking, at his insistence, the most expensive vodka to be obtained in Moscow …”’

They looked at each other, then dissolved, shaking, into laughter, until rebuked by a glare from the receptionist.

Nat wiped the corner of his eye. His nose had broadened like his chest. He used to smoke thin cigars. He had the air of a man itching for a cheroot.

‘You’re looking young,’ contemplating Dyer over a cup of machine latte. ‘But you always did. Bastard.’

‘The sun helped.’

‘And no deadlines!’

‘That too.’

Nat came from a wind-nipped landscape of salmon-fishers and poachers. In the year that Dyer left for Brazil, he had inherited a pear orchard near Hereford; it was his pipedream, then, one day to give up journalism and make perry. Yet the courage or the right moment had eluded him; he had become snared in the mantrap of London.

Seeing Dyer again made him reminiscent. ‘When that job came up in Rio, not one of us understood why you took it.’

‘There was no special reason,’ Dyer reflected. ‘My favourite aunt lived in Lima, and I had a friend at school who grew up in South America. It sounded different, interesting. Heath’s government, rats in the rubbish, nurses on strike, power cuts – I didn’t want to be around if that came back.’ Plus, after his mother died, he had a craving to learn for himself, from experiences denied to his parents. They had come of age in post-war Britain, with rationing, whale meat, bedsits with gas meters; they could have brought nothing to the party that Dyer found going on in Brazil.

Nat had missed out on that party too. His carnival queen was Mrs Thatcher. The experience seemed to have soured him; he had not found the sun, the satisfactions of Corcovado, of tanned limbs. His face had browned like a pear.

‘You got out at the right moment,’ he told Dyer, his mouth turned down, ‘even if none of us thought so at the time.’

Everything they had felt about journalism, the conviction, the adrenaline thrill, the confidence that what they wrote was read by a majority of the people they knew – this belonged to a pre-Columbian era. Today, Nat’s op-ed pieces were dictated to him from Minorca. The paper carried the same masthead, but an incubus had sucked out its spirit as well as its circulation.