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.