This smartly dressed Updark is at odds with the plump, ungainly boy who sat in Slimy Prentice’s Latin class flawlessly translating Horace. The mismatch is disturbing and it gets in the way of Dyer’s memory. They were not especially close at the Phoenix. Updark had been academic-minded, aloof, interested in the classics and cricket – he was scorer for the first XI. Highest tally of Cothill wickets taken by a Phoenix bowler? Most number of runs against the Dragon? Ask Updark. His knowledge allowed him to participate, to be a player himself.

Hard to recreate that studious introverted character from this compact man. Only the thick dark hair was the same. He could have been a farmer with his dog and corduroys, the sort of ruddy-face you’d see behind the wheel of a Range Rover, or unfolding a shooting stick at a point-to-point, not at a prep-school football match.

‘You must find this weather tedious,’ Dyer said to him, for something to say, ‘after Morocco.’

‘No more so than you,’ and spun around.

His dog now was barking at some swans.

‘Come here!’ Updark yanked at the turquoise lead. He wore an open-necked shirt, but moved up and down the touchline like a man in a tie.

‘What’s he called?’

‘Spassky,’ in the tone of someone who had not chosen the name.

He was a dog like a poodle with tight clumps of brown fur, the same tan colour as Marvar’s coat, and a white streak on the belly.

‘Hello, Spassky,’ bending down to tickle his chin.

Two eyes partially hidden beneath long brows seemed to take him in. Leandro was always asking for a dog. From the day of their arrival.

A wet tongue licked his fingers.

‘We’ve only just got him,’ said Updark, his face reddening all over at the effort to restrain him. When he reached out his hand, Spassky shunned it. ‘He’s a cockadoodle.’

Cockadoodles made good bird-dogs, Updark explained, and they didn’t shed hair. His daughter had allergies.

Did that explain the fiery patches on Updark’s cheeks which made Dyer think of the lobster on the Pitu bottle? Was it genetic?

Dyer stood up. ‘How is …’ He had forgotten the name as he had forgotten the name of her mother, and then remembered. ‘… Beatrice enjoying the Phoenix?’

Updark’s daughter – Leandro thought her odd – was in the year above Leandro.

The school was perfect for her, said Updark, enumerating why: she was captain of the chess team and head of the debating society. In all the top sets, too, with the exception of biology.

‘Have you decided where she’s going afterwards?’ was Dyer’s inevitable next question.

‘She’s set her heart on Wycombe Abbey,’ said Updark. ‘But she’s got to get in first,’ adding in an indulgent tone: ‘She wants to be a diplomat.’

‘Is that what you’d like?’

‘Oh, I think so. She’d be the fourth generation Updark in the Service.’