Mr Crotty was busy criss-crossing the globe to entice pupils from the very countries which Dyer had been taught were once Britain’s most steadfast enemies, or else which Britain had cut down the middle. Dyer counted them out on his fingers. Germany, Russia, China, Japan, Italy, France, Holland, Spain, Turkey, Argentina, India …

‘And Iran,’ Marvar said, with smiling deliberation. ‘You have forgotten Iran.’

So it was out of the bottle. ‘You are Iranian?’ He nearly added: the Axis of Evil.

Marvar made a speechless gesture, not denying it.

Dyer had thought he might have been from Morocco or the Lebanon.

‘You say that Summertown knows nothing of Brazil,’ reflected Marvar, his mouth compressing. ‘Try telling these people you are from Tehran!’

Dyer sat up. Iran. He had been reading about it only an hour earlier. He was intrigued to find out more, but there was a dispersive quality to Marvar’s conversation which made him hard to follow.

From the few details that Marvar divulged, Dyer gathered that he worked at the Clarendon laboratory as a junior physicist. He was indeed a single father like Dyer. His ex-wife lived in Tehran, where he had studied. Dyer heard the longing in his voice as he spoke of Tehran. But when Dyer asked about the current situation there, he looked detached, diminished.

He glanced up with impatience at the clock.

‘Four-forty. They are taking their time.’ He reached down to brush some grains of sand from his shoe.

‘Then they may be treating our complaint seriously,’ said Dyer.

‘They have followed protocol. They have been too literal. They do not realise it’s a systemic problem. It’s not going to get fixed without a lot of work.’

‘They’ll keep an eye on him, though.’

Marvar said nothing. He sat staring at the sand that he had disturbed as though he was still working out his problem.

At last, he turned to Dyer. ‘Was there bullying when you were here?’

‘Christ, yes.’

‘Were you bullied?’

Dyer had not thought about it until the moment Marvar asked, and had not prepared his answer.

‘I suppose so.’

He was aware of Marvar’s brown, nervous eyes measuring him. Once more, he felt a chemistry between them; two single fathers sitting here, on this cold February afternoon, waiting beside the school sandpit for sons who had been bullied, who kept asking themselves: ‘Why didn’t I see it earlier?’

Dyer’s turn to stare over the darkening fields. The football pitch had disappeared, replaced by a black screen speckled with a few orange lights.

Funny how the mind was good at pocketing some things while keeping the glow on others. He thought that he had left his childhood behind him, but it was there in the dusk.