While it was hard for Dyer, walking on the broad pavement beside him, to think of Rougetel as a neurotic fantasist, his story was so picaresque and unusual that it crossed over into the implausible. He had the childish traits of someone who had sat far too long among books, for whom reading had become a stand-in for life.

Dyer pressed Rougetel further as they walked down Bradmore Road. What was he looking for? What had he found? Had his life travelled the questions he had asked of it into a resolution? In the boundless expanse of his reading and meditating had he come across one entry point, like a seal’s breathing hole in the ice, which led him to the core?

Rougetel’s response was a shy smile. He had not yet synchronised his experiences into something tangible, a fusion of his knowledge in which he saw everything together and all at once – at least, not in a way that Dyer might easily understand. He was carrying it in his head, references, footnotes, conclusions, until he was ready to write it down. He was close to that point, but in no hurry. It didn’t need to be finished by a particular date, it was not an article for a newspaper or a linear journey; it was open-ended, ongoing.

‘Do you get depressed ever?’ Dyer wanted to know.

Rougetel looked steadily at him. The skin around his eyes had the transparency of an ascetic. ‘No.’

‘Do you never feel self-pitying in the rain under the porch?’

‘No.’

‘So it’s been a success then, your life?’

He couldn’t say it had been a waste. To think in these terms didn’t fit in with his philosophy. Justifications were for others. For Rougetel, there was no such a thing as a false trail, a dead end, a phoney prophet, a bad book. It was all learning. At the same time, his life, the purpose of it, still awaited an explanation.

Meanwhile, only the present moment exists, is what he’d learned.

His steady, self-contained gaze intimidated Dyer who, being one himself, recognised the solipsism of an only child. Rougetel had had none of the counterbalance of a sibling to hold up a corrective mirror, or a son like Leandro. He had lived, emotionally and intellectually, on his own resources, without the encumbrance of family or belongings, so that to all intents he might have come from Pluto. He had no partner, dependants, domicile, job, yet something mysterious had taken their place, a spiritual life stripped of egoism, full of revelations that he sensed but had yet to articulate, and it was childish of Dyer to want Rougetel to join him on the same bank.