All around them, parents were leaving the pitch and heading across the playground to the dining room.

‘I’ll see you in there,’ he said to Leandro.

It would be unsporting not to join them for the match tea, Dyer decided. He would eat a scone for Rougetel, the wicket-keeper. And a custard cream.

He’d be on his way by now, walking out along the cinder towpath on his long loping legs, his pack on his bony shoulders, seeing what the universe would bring. Locked in his meditative trance from which he would return one day to fetch the souls of others into the light.

Chapter Forty-four

LOVE HAD MADE HIM A child again.

He slept much better

He had begun writing.

The New World acted as a Black Spot for the men who set eyes on it for the first time. Pêro Vaz de Caminha, after sending his account to Lisbon on a special ship, perished within months, killed in Calicut. Pedro Álvares Cabral, the leader of the expedition, died in obscurity, as did two of the three convicts left behind as breeding stock on the dazzling strand at Porto Seguro. Only Afonso Ribeiro of this initial landing party survived to learn the customs of the Tupi and to speak their language, starting a family whose descendants are today dotted over north-east Brazil.

In Summertown, the freshest bread from the rumour mill was that Gilles Asselin had lost his shirt.

‘I hear their house may soon be on the market.’

‘All the contents, too, Silvi told me.’

‘The private jet will have to go …’

‘And the chateau in France.’

‘Poor Silvi. She’s just joined our reading club.’

Conversation turned to Beatrice Updark’s father. He had been appointed Ambassador to Portugal. ‘He says that Lisbon is not Paris, but it’s still a most desirable post. There’s an excellent chance of a royal visit, and with that a knighthood.’

In charge of a collection to buy the headmaster a leaving present, Samantha Puckey had raised £92.

In the Café Lisboa, the faces absorbed in the newspapers were a little less grave. Iran and America had reached a stalemate. The American president had taken a hard look at war in the Middle East, and, like something you are anxious to have and a moment later decide you don’t want, had turned his attention back to Canada.

In a bay on Tasmania’s west coast, the mathematician Todd Angle had been found alive, having lived on berries for forty-seven days.

About the fate of a missing Iranian scientist, his family, nothing.