Fork right at the bridge. Dash through the trees. A five-minute crouch between two barges to ascertain if anyone was on his heels. He had climbed out over Paula’s fence, and clung to the shadows as he crossed the deserted boatyard. Anyone watching him would be waiting in St Barnabas Street, on the other side of the big wooden gate.

Satisfied that he has not been seen and no one is following, Dyer stands up, steps back onto the tinder track.

His hard knuckle of obtuseness leads him along the towpath. His mind is focused and steady, he has stumbled out of his plasma. He’d been breathing on a mirror, and wasn’t able to see himself until Rougetel rubbed a thick book about the brain over this patch of mist and it was clear again.

After leaving Miranda’s house, Dyer had spent the afternoon searching the streets and libraries of Oxford. He had visited in turn the Vere Harmsworth Library, the Sackler Library, the Social Science Library. Rougetel wasn’t in any of the reading rooms. Dyer had poked his head into the Union library, but the sole dozing figure was a stoutish young undergraduate, blond, in a green tweed suit. He had checked the pavements outside Balliol and Blackfriars, the train station, McDonald’s, Tesco. Nowhere could he spot a lean, bearded figure in black jeans, like Atlas, carrying a Kathmandu rucksack.

The church at Iffley really was his last hope.

He needed to get to him quick. Like all nomads, Rougetel would strike camp in a flash. Fearful that he might even now be on his way to the Scottish isles, Dyer took such large steps that he was practically running.

In the motionless dark of the Oxford dawn, he thought of his honest-eyed friend. How he had followed his path, withstood blows, and acted with courage, perseverance, integrity. Rougetel contained multitudes. He was not sectarian, not an ideologue. He was so much more superior to Dyer. The road had taught him to discard as dross the wasteful emotions that continued to consume Dyer – impatience, anxiety, selfishness, self-doubt, fear, envy, lust.

Plus, hadn’t he said he was ripe for a new project, a fresh text?

It had struck Dyer in the Taylorian, as he was taking out Marvar’s post-it note with the firm resolve to destroy it, how similar at superficial glance was the process that Marvar had described to that experienced by Rougetel. The ever-expanding energy, the white light, the close connection between atoms in the brain and the nuclear forces in the sun.

Dyer had been looking for distraction at the painting – envying the couple in it, how they existed beyond the pressures of Dyer’s world in a landscape much like the Lake District, now he came to think of it; and how tempted he was to climb the red rolling library ladder to join them – when the idea burst on him.