The euphoria that ambushed him when one of his street children read for the first time. The twisting face of a woman, the tanned legs spread wide on the sheet, the hand in his hair. It counted for something.

The last woman he had slept with, eighteen months before, was a divorced teacher from Leme with braided black hair and a passion for the novels of Clarice Lispector; they had tumbled into bed in the knowledge that his departure from Brazil was imminent. In Jericho, Dyer intuited that Leandro would welcome a fond maternal presence, after observing his father’s daily struggles with a clothes hanger, the washing, the cooking, but also with trying to make their quiet evenings together more fun. But when Dyer tried to conjure that female Other who might share their home, he couldn’t.

Several times, he saw a face in profile or caught an outline from behind, a laugh, a smile, a movement that promised to unlock his stasis, and felt that he had found her. He wasn’t aiming for a mythical creature, but for a positive, straightforward woman whose contours might fit, without abrasions, into the life that he had built for himself and his son. He might as well have been looking for a goddess. He had searched a thousand faces, there was never an answering gleam.

But he knew that he didn’t want a repetition of Nissa. Each time, it was what held him back. His fear of marking one more decent person through his feelings for someone else, like the impressions left scratched on a writing pad beneath a letter to another woman.

Above all, he didn’t want the recriminations. The twist in his gut as she sought to justify her behaviour with Nigel, who had been every bit as helpless in his desire for Nissa as Dyer. The tremolo in her voice as she told Dyer: ‘That’s why I loved you, your sensitivity, your wish to make me understand what you felt, your wish to explain, the way you moved your hands, the way you looked at me and held my hands, so that if I couldn’t believe what you said, I could believe the way you held me.’

Even a casual affair was hard to envisage. In Oxford, the enemy of carnality was the bicycle in the hall. In the sawdusty Portuguese prose of Sergio Madrugada, associate professor of colonial history at the University of Coimbra, he suppressed his lascivious thoughts of Katya Petroshenko.