‘Not at all.’ Dyer’s care to conceal his curiosity has only made Gilles more confessional. ‘So what went wrong?’

Gilles grins. ‘Ding-dong. Enter Sudanese room-cleaner. Monsieur is nonplussed. Not what he expected, quite. Nonetheless … he pounces. She resists. The harder she resists, the more he assumes this is part of the game. He gets more violent. He chokes her, slaps her. She hits back. This excites him further, naturellement … Moments later, ding-dong. Standing there, white leather boots to her thighs – the correct woman …!’

‘How do you know all this?’

Gilles taps his watch. ‘Same thing that allows Apple to monitor my step count.’ And when Dyer goes on looking blank: ‘Data sniffers, bots, cameras. They know exactly where he’s been, what he’s done … If you have the money, you can buy a history of anyone. You can buy a history of yourself! A good Moldavian techie will call up the data for you. Where you were at dinner last night, your conversation, text messages, images of you walking home. He could piece together your life better than you ever could. Oh, bien fait, Phoenix!’

The ball had curved in a high, unlikely arc from the halfway line, over the players’ heads, into the Horris Hill goal. Dyer, still absorbing Gilles’s information – a history of himself, nothing appealed less – had failed to register the scorer.

‘Did you see that?’ said Gilles, turning. ‘Did you see what your son just did?’

‘Well done, Leandro!’ Dyer shouted.

It was why he was in the team. He had the soccer style of Brazil: surprise, craftiness, balance, spontaneity.

‘That was some kick,’ said Gilles. He couldn’t let it go. ‘I hope those bloody scouts are watching.’ It was no secret – Gilles’s fierce ambition that amounted almost to an obsession for his son Pierre to be selected for the Oxford Schools XI.

‘Your boy is devastating,’ observed Gilles’s wife Silvi, joining them.

‘All from his mother,’ Dyer assured her. He was accustomed to joking that Leandro had Nissa’s eyes, but her legs, too.

‘And from you?’ Gilles was curious to know.

Dyer considered it. ‘His obtuseness.’

‘Are you obtuse?’ asked Silvi. ‘I don’t think of you as obtuse.’ She was still looking at Leandro.

‘Oh, yes.’ Dyer was stubbornly saving himself for something. What, he did not know. Perhaps it was why he gravitated towards parents like Gilles and Silvi. Their stories were beads for a rosary that he elaborated while he waited for it to show itself, as he performed his daily circuit from Jericho to the Taylorian and back.

‘He’s so alive,’ she murmured, ‘so himself,’ and turned her pale face to Dyer.