The van trundles up the winding lane, over a cattle grid, coming to a halt in a passing point beside a cairn. There’s a moment of stillness. The doors open. Two men step out, then a dark-haired woman. They stand, looking up. The woman is cradling something.

‘Shula!’ he calls. ‘Samir! Look! It’s Shula – and Jamileh.’

He is hopping from hillock to hillock – shouting aloud – in a dirge.

‘Shula!’ through the hair that flops over his face. ‘Jamileh!’

It was the last day of term. Tripping out of the Taylorian to collect Leandro, Dyer realised that winter was over. He had come to life. His focus was abnormally sharp, as if he’d slept on his arm and the blood was flowing into it again. Suddenly, he saw blue in the sky.

He wanted to roll on his back in the mud. He wanted to chase pigeons and bark at swans.

They would get a dog, even though his son was admitting to second thoughts about a cockadoodle. ‘I like Spassky …’

‘But what?’

‘What if it’s not like Spassky? And doodles are their thing. Anyway, they’re a bit too curly.’

‘What would you say to a border collie crossed with a mutt?’

He had longed for his loss to recede, until with a gentle last push, he could say goodbye to it, and face a desired future, alive.

There were complications, like her mother, like the fact that they had not kissed even, like the fact that Leandro had not met her, that Dyer had yet to speak his flame; but these were the loose strands out of which any life was stitched.

He still had left in his wallet one blank post-it note of Marvar’s. To write on it what complicated equation he, John William Dyer, chose.

Spring was not far off. Everything seemed to be aware of it. The branches trembled, the sun appeared for longer. On the other side of the canal, bicyclists tinkled their bells. In the patio, in the tub, a snail crept further up the magnolia. A bird had pecked at its shell.

Gilberto Gil is playing. The cool of the evening. The sky red above the terrace.

Acknowledgements

THIS NOVEL MAY BE READ on its own or as a sequel to The Dancer Upstairs. It is a work of fiction, no one is drawn from anyone in life. Although it shares a superficial geographical proximity to another prep school in Oxford, where I spent five happy years, the Phoenix School is an imagined place.