Dyer had not spoken to anyone else in Oxford like this. He hadn’t had a drink. This was coming from an earnest place, and looking down on himself he didn’t entirely trust it. He continued with a half-smile, not wishing to be overheard, not wanting to sound like his old headmaster making a sales pitch. ‘In my case, it was probably more of an instinct that I discovered than a talent. I learned that every action is a decision between good and bad. What it’s about is living as good a life as you can. I left here wanting, every time I was faced with a choice, to do the right thing – if that were possible. But don’t we all?’

‘I don’t know, do we?’ asked Marvar, and answered his own question with another, as if afraid of the answer. ‘What about now, what is the lesson our boys are getting now, would you say?’

Dyer’s reply had taken seventeen months to mature. How the school had changed was a source of unavoidable fascination. As the father of a day boy there – a third-generation Phoenician – he had, on this topic, a long perspective.

The modern tribe of Phoenix parent belonged, in Dyer’s view, to a powerful and pervasive freemasonry which extended into the deepest crannies of international finance, law and politics. Invariably, these parents were buying into an old-fashioned luxury brand like Burberry. If you put on a Burberry mac, you wore it – and immediately you were times ten. Plus, what it enabled you to cover up was limitless. In this respect, the school, despite reputation, had evolved to offer a highly efficient detergent service. It dangled the unspoken lure of rinsing away where you came from – impurities which lurked in your background and wealth – to emerge, rebranded, as wholesome exemplars of the Phoenix’s three much-trumpeted rules: ‘Be considerate, be considerate, be considerate.’ People were never suddenly rich, any more than they were suddenly good. For a number of foreign parents in possession of what Balzac had called ‘great fortunes without apparent cause’, the Phoenix was where they laundered their children.

In Dyer’s time, a majority of the boys, and the dozen or so girls, had not travelled outside the Midlands, let alone beyond the United Kingdom. They were the sons and daughters of the professional middle classes, the children of doctors, teachers, civil servants, diplomats, stockbrokers, solicitors. A small number took their summer holidays in France. But Abroad was as foreign a concept to most of them as modern notions of wealth would have been; it was not the catchment area it since had become.

‘My headmaster used to teach geography,’ Dyer recalled. ‘This one never sees inside a classroom.’