Mr Tanner telephoned that evening. ‘They’ve had a smashing meeting. In fact, Vasily doesn’t dislike Leandro. He thinks he’s a very good footballer.’

‘I’m glad to see he’s well-trained,’ said Dyer in his driest voice.

Fluently, Mr Tanner continued: ‘I’ll keep a watchful eye on things. I’m grateful you drew it to our attention. Accounts like this are very troubling to us and need to be addressed.’

Not for one second had his son believed Vasily, it was plain to Dyer. Leandro knew that he’d been bullshitted, and he would go along with it. Still, secretly he seemed relieved that it was now out in the open. To hear Vasily utter the words ‘Oh, I’ve always admired you’ in front of Mr Tanner and Samir, it lanced something. It got his father off his back about being bullied, it got the bully off his back, and the experience served to bond him with Samir. By the time of the match on Saturday, Leandro’s ear had cleared up, he was talking as he used to, he looked like himself again.

Chapter Six

THE END OF FEBRUARY. THE days short and cold and dark. The low grey light of winter.

Dyer went to the Taylorian early. In life you need something to do and something to undo, in his case a Brazilian way of existing that had obeyed no hours or rules. He now had a project which forced his days into a new routine and took him to the same corner of a reading room overlooking the Randolph Hotel. Silk-shaded lamps like pith helmets. Long tables of bleached oak. On the wall opposite, above shelves of red-bound French bibliographies, an unrestored painting of two figures in a classical landscape. He liked the silence and the jungly smell of old books, the undergraduates who hungered to learn, young women who lived in digs in St Clement’s with clothes on the floor and the poster of the Cézanne exhibition.

Sometimes, coming down the stone staircase, the glance of an attractive face met his and he could tell what she was thinking. A middle-aged man on his own. Not someone who paid attention to his clothes – jeans, trainers, a pima cotton shirt beneath the pullover. Experienced. Fit. Reasonably intelligent, but not an academic. Distracted, imbalanced, intense, possibly interesting. In the cold air his skin was pale. He was always forgetting his gloves.

‘You look so glum.’ In a surprising exchange early on, a single Phoenix mother, whose novel Dyer had agreed to read, said to him with cappuccino foam on her lips: ‘Tell me three things that have made you happy.’

‘When my son laughs—’

‘Oh, you’re such a sop.’

After he left the Bon Croissant, he thought of two others.