Rougetel’s fingers closed around his glass. ‘What kind of stuff did you write?’

‘News items, features.’

‘About?’

‘Politicians, revolutionaries, current affairs. Their impact on people.’

A man at the table next to them yawned.

‘And what makes an impact … in your opinion?’

‘Well, no doubt if I was to do a story right now, you’d be reading me on the Iran nuclear deal.’

Rougetel looked puzzled, as if he had been told his jersey was on back to front. Dyer could immediately see in his expression that he wasn’t involved or concerned about Iran.

‘This nuclear deal … you’re not writing about it then?’

‘I gave up journalism long ago.’

‘Why?’

‘Oh, there was a story – my best, I feel – which I decided not to file.’

Rougetel nodded. He didn’t ask why Dyer might have spiked it or what the story had been about. Instead, he wanted to know, ‘Was that a crashing point for you?’

Dyer considered before answering. The last person who made him reflect in this way was Rustum Marvar. ‘One of them, I suppose.’

The door opened, bringing in a smell of fresh-ground coffee from Cardew’s. It triggered an instinctive memory. And another and another. Dyer in Rio in a newspaper office, Dyer in the favela, Dyer the husband, the widower, the father, the author.

He glanced once again at Rougetel. His reappearance, wildly unexpected, but also natural somehow, even inevitable, had come as a colossal relief. Rougetel was so much more than a distraction from what preoccupied Dyer. He was a lightning rod that took Dyer back to his schooldays, and also, by dint of Rougetel’s upbringing in Latin America, to the years in between.

Dyer had an urge to tell Rougetel about Astrud. How if their daughter had lived, they’d have called her Xuxa. He longed to tell him about Nissa, Leandro, the book he was writing, Marvar and the post-it note – he kept thinking of Marvar, although he would rather not – but it was too soon to begin that sort of conversation, and anyway nothing insisted on being talked about more than the crashing points, as he had called them, of the person seated opposite.

He hadn’t heard anything of Rougetel, not since Trundle’s putative sighting in Benin.

‘And you, what became of you?’ Dyer asked. ‘When I met you in Greece, you were about to go up to Cambridge.’

There was a tension in the hand which picked up his glass.

‘What became of me?’ his voice tightening. Something was frostbitten in the numbed way his throat closed on the words. He wiped his mouth with the back of his other hand and gulped his apple juice.

Until that moment, Dyer had failed to appreciate how disturbing it was for Rougetel to be recognised or asked about himself. It was only with a deliberate effort that he had enquired into Dyer’s life. Already, his eyes were blurred with the memories stirred up.