THE SPEAKER HAD APPROACHED FROM behind, unannounced. It shocked Dyer to recognise the dog-owner, who walked right past him and snapped on a lead. Beneath thick dark hair combed back and jetty eyebrows, his handsome face was blotched as though from eczema or sunburn.

Dyer had last seen Lionel Updark on a January evening six weeks before, at a cocktail party thrown to mark his return to England. Dyer didn’t recall his cheeks and forehead looking like a stickered trunk then.

The man with the shiny disturbances on his skin was a diplomat, based until December in Rabat, and currently awaiting news of his next posting in an oat-coloured manor house near Woodeaton. At the Phoenix, they had sat in the same class. Forty or more years went by before their next encounter, at Updark’s party: an occasion when the host did not hide that he had pulled away in the race which mattered. Dyer couldn’t remember who that evening had told him that Updark had been promised Paris. Feeling patronised and a failure, Dyer had drunk too much duty-free claret and flirted unsuccessfully with Updark’s over-perfumed wife.

This is the first time he has noticed Updark at a football match. That Updark might have chosen to avoid public appearances was understandable. Closer to, his mottled face looked as though red chilli had been pounded into it. The unwholesome effect was emphasised by the neatness of his clothes. Polished brogues, blue corduroy trousers sharply creased, well-fitting tweed jacket with a burgundy V-neck jersey beneath.

The ends of a faded yellow-and-blue scarf trail down over his padded coat, and it takes Dyer a further second to register that the scarf is striped in the Phoenix colours.

‘Hello, Lionel. I didn’t know you were a football dad.’

An autumn father like Dyer, Updark has a daughter at the school who does not, to Dyer’s knowledge, play team sports.

‘Oh, I always like to see who’s in the first eleven.’

He stands scrutinising the Phoenix players. ‘Dyer, L. And Marvar, S. to boot. I say, they’ve done well to be in the team. You, I recall, were captain of the second cricket eleven.’

Dyer can’t put his finger on it, but there is something artificial in Updark’s behaviour, like a man pretending to have a limp.

‘Who’s winning?’ asks Updark, distracted. He was late because his dog had run off.

‘Horris Hill.’

‘By how much?’ scratching his maculate cheek, his attention no longer on the players but on the parents congregated beside the touchline.

‘Two–one.’

Dyer is tempted to ask Updark about his ugly rash, but his wait-I’m-watching-the-football expression puts him off.