After forty minutes, Leandro waded ashore, moving further along the bank to where a drainpipe fed into the river. He stood on the grass ledge above the pipe and gave a speculative cast. At once he felt an imperceptible bite.

Something trembled.

The line started to vibrate and slide.

‘Dad!’

‘Keep the tension on the line.’

It was emptying his reel.

‘Hold the rod up.’

He stood by his son’s side.

‘Now bring it in.’

Leandro’s fingers gripped the cork handle. With his left hand, he began turning the reel. On his face, the involuntary expression a child makes when playing the cello.

‘That’s it.’

With tremendous concentration, Leandro wound it in.

Dyer, stumbling over a submerged tree trunk, crouched forward, extending the net. He scooped it over the tail, lifted it sharply up.

‘Got him!’

Not a salmon, but a wild brown trout. And a big one.

Straightening, Dyer stepped out of the water, placed the net on the ground, and reached into it. His fingers undercupped the fish, holding it in his palms as he had held Leandro. Bits of grass and water lily and the smell of protective mucus.

He laid it upside down on the bank to remove the fly. The trout seemed to have grown in the net. It was even larger than he had first thought – about three or four pounds, with a lovely gold belly.

Leandro leaned over. Dyer put an arm around his shoulder and hugged him, wishing that Leandro’s grandfather could have seen this moment. ‘That’s a good fish. You could go your whole life without catching a fish like that.’ He had no idea what he was saying, his voice came from another level of sound. He felt an exultation, for himself, for his eleven-year-old son. ‘I bet if we slit open its belly, you’ll find the rest of your parr inside.’

The expression on Leandro’s face, he doesn’t know whether to smile or burst into tears.

‘What should I do with it?’ he asks in a sheared voice. In Portuguese. His first fish.

‘You can take it back – have it for breakfast, if you like.’

‘What would you do?’

‘What would I do?’ Dyer remembered his father saying, without quite understanding at the time: ‘The first best fishing experience is catching a fish. The second best is letting a fish go free.’ He went on looking at the trout. It was spotted like a leopard, with its gold belly and fins. On the towpath he sometimes stopped and talked to the tench fishermen. Once he had wanted to catch anything. Then he had wanted to catch only the biggest. Now he was like his father. He wanted to release everything, as a proxy, perhaps, for himself.

He said after a pause, ‘What I’d do now is not what I’d have done at your age.’