Dyer’s life in Oxford had developed into a ramshackle structure based on the Taylorian. At the fringes was the Café Bon Croissant on Oakthorpe Road, watering hole of the polished-marble-worktop Summertown brigade. But there was also the traditional, self-absorbed Oxford of the Turl and Ducker’s shoe shop, which had closed down in Leandro’s first term; and, at the end of the lane, the Mitre, where Dyer’s grandmother from Clitheroe would treat him to a roast beef Sunday lunch when he was Leandro’s age.

Dyer inhabited this Oxford like a well-cut old suit. He was at school and university here, and he had his goat paths. He took his son to the Phoenix along the same wide streets, on foot or in the Beetle; at other times, Leandro bicycled on his own. At nine, Dyer had a cup of tea and a rice cake at the Café Lisboa before heading to the library. At twelve-thirty, a bowl of soup and a bread roll in the King’s Arms. In the afternoon, before collecting Leandro, a quick shop for dinner in the Covered Market. The pheasants hanging, the white plastic buckets of whelks, the smell of fresh ground coffee. There was an aroma about Cardew’s that he loved best in the world. Then later on, he had to be at home to prepare a meal for Leandro and to help with his homework, if that was demanded. In the evening, sometimes, at a dinner party in Summertown or at High Table – Merton, Trinity, Exeter – as the guest of academics who toiled in esoteric fields not so dissimilar from Dyer’s.

You feel your ugliness when you walk past beautiful buildings, how quick your life is, and insignificant, and sometimes you feel uplifted. His was a rarefied Oxford, its chapels and halls each like a caravel in its own dock; an impoverished, friendless city lay outside, its pavements home to people who had nothing, as in the favela. Gradually, he had re-ascended to a panorama of it all, from windows, college rooms, church towers – he climbed the staircases, worn stone and creaking wood, to rooftop terraces. Oxford lay below in its quads and separatenesses, cordoned off. The afternoon is over and he stands looking down at the faces beginning to stream home.

The home match on Saturday against Horris Hill took place on an afternoon of cold sunshine.

Dyer was late in leaving the Taylorian. Until now, he had found his research a slog, and never much minded breaking off to watch Leandro play: it compensated for the matches that his parents had missed. All at once engrossed in Professor Madrugada’s recently published monograph on the ‘accidental arrival’ in Brazil by the Calicut-bound fleet of Pedro Cabral, Dyer reached the Phoenix shortly before 2.30 p.m. The game had begun.

Horris Hill were racing forward. There was a long kick.

The air was split with cries, cheers, the muted beat of gloved hands clapping.