‘Yes,’ Dyer insisted, ‘what on earth happened to you?’ His surprise was there in his question, as pointed and sharp as the white steel rod. How Rougetel had changed, how he had adapted himself to a different life, and lost the canon of his background and class, and discovered other aspirations and beliefs, perhaps.

Thrust into seeing himself through Dyer’s eyes, Rougetel said nothing. He was having to unthaw memories that he had put into cold storage, and it wasn’t comfortable. The table, his empty plate, the chat of Miguel behind them – these seemed to be answering for him.

He scratched his thin ankle. He opened his mouth. He tried to speak, stopped, then tried to speak again.

Rougetel began so hesitantly that Dyer had to crane forward. At first, he sounded like someone braced for the majority voice to stamp on his wrists and laugh at him with derision. He wasn’t so self-absorbed that he couldn’t see how his story might strike the ear of a former foreign correspondent. But once he observed the intent way that Dyer was drinking in his every quiet word, he spoke with less reticence, no longer like a man trying to read without his glasses.

He had always been honest, and nothing had changed. They had known one another before their characters solidified. It was to this person – trustworthy, unjudgemental, his first real friend – that Dyer listened with total concentration.

The years were gone and they were back at the same table, as Rougetel explained what had launched him on a path that diverged in such a radical way from Dyer’s, and from the trajectories of virtually everyone else with whom they’d been at school.

This time he didn’t stop.

Chapter Thirty-eight

IN SUBSTANCE, IF NOT IN these words, this was the story that Rougetel told:

‘If you were to take a Ladybird Book look at my life, you’d start on December the 3rd, 1980.’

Rougetel was in his first term at Cambridge when there arrived in his cubbyhole a telegram from his father’s telephone company in La Paz to say that his parents had died in a road accident. Driving at night from Cochabamba along a narrow mountain pass, their car had rounded a corner and met a local bus with a defective headlight. It had begun to rain. The dirt track was not cantilevered. The valley lay five thousand feet below. Rougetel’s father pumped his foot on the brake, but his white Range Rover continued on its inexorable slide. The police laid a felt blanket over the couple’s faces. Rougetel had been their only child.