Dyer goes on staring as one memory lights up another.

The Greek island of Kythera. His first long vacation. Their meeting outside Molesey Boat Club is still a year in the future.

This encounter takes place in the cobbled town square at Banda Landra, and has been planned in advance on discovering that both of them will be in Greece that August.

Dyer hears his name and turns to see a motorcylist waving. The helmet lifts to reveal a freckled white face with a dented chin. Rougetel.

He’s in his gap year, teaching at the local school, and on his way to visit a small chapel, ordinarily locked, which contains Byzantine frescoes. The priest – his niece is one of Rougetel’s pupils – has lent him the key. ‘Why don’t you hop on the back?’ he says to Dyer.

A short ride through rocky scrub brings them down a bumpy track to a jumble of mushroom-coloured roofs. Inside, low barrel-vaulted ceilings and blistered walls with saints painted in faded reds and blues. Rougetel lights a candle to examine their crumbling features. Irresistibly, he is drawn to a mildewed fresco of the Madonna. This strikes Dyer as disconcertingly crude, little more than flat patches of colour arranged in the simplistic form of a young woman. But Rougetel views her differently. Dyer is approaching the Madonna in quite the wrong way, he needs to cast himself back into the mind of a thirteenth-century John Dyer, a young man who would not have perceived the Virgin purely as a figurative representation; rather, as a two-way mirror – with her eyes operating as a peephole into, but also from, another dimension. Inside that chapel, Rougetel is telling him in a reverent voice from which he cannot keep his excitement, he and Dyer are as much the watched as the watchers. ‘You might think you’re looking at her. Actually,’ holding the flame higher, to show how the whites in her eyes – a compound of crushed chicken bones and purified fish glue – are raised to catch the light, ‘she’s also looking at you.’

The wind was walking on his line. He drew it in. Six hours on the riverbank have rinsed everything out of his head. What he most loved about fishing was another property that it shared with reading and writing: it concentrated the mind, while at the same time liberating it. It was much less about catching a fish than releasing the fisherman.

On this stretch of the Hodder, no one was watching him. Here, he was the hunter. For the first time in several days, Dyer felt in his own dimension.

He cast again, and a trout went for his lure, but he had been grayling-fishing, and struck too early.

At last he caught a small brown trout blotched with fungus, as if he had got his hook in the bony mouth and stiff upper lip of Updark.