Serious all of a sudden, Marvar said: ‘I have a story … not a love story exactly,’ and paused, as though meaning to go on, a comma not a full stop. But he was interrupted by the whistle for play to continue. After that, conversation was pointless. It was all about the match, which ended, with no further goals scored, in a draw.

The players shook hands and gave three cheers. The parents started to dribble off to the match tea before the scones were all devoured. Inside the Phoenix goal, Spassky lay on his back, rolling in the mud.

Chapter Eight

LEANDRO ASKS DYER TO CARRY the games bag with his dirty clothes. Leandro’s arms are full already with his satchel that’s bulging with textbooks and notes on the Battle of Trafalgar; he is to be tested on this in a few days.

They step through the gates and set off down Bardwell Road.

It always depressed Dyer on their walks back to Jericho to notice what Oxford had become: it seemed to have mimicked London, with 4×4s on the pavements, and scaffolding, which did not tally with his idea of it. This feeling extended to the dinner parties to which, as a single father, Dyer received plenty of invitations – at least early on.

He had never forgotten his first dinner party, in Summertown. The hostess was a Phoenix parent. A husband found at INSEAD, two children raised to be considerate, a kitchen that spilled out over white marble tops into the living room. The refurbished home of many a brittle, unattended North Oxford mother. Conversation, like a blurring fan, went round and round the same subjects; where you were going on holiday, where your child was going to school next, how very lucky everyone was to be living here, in Summertown.

Summertown. It could have been Luton, save for the prices of the pinched red-brick houses, the M & S food hall – said to boast the highest turnover of any branch in England – and the coffee shop, started up by a Phoenix father and his new organic girlfriend; everybody rolled their eyes about it, but you saw them in the queue, spending their £8 per ‘change your life’ latte. Smuggertown, its detractors called it.

The Smuggertown mothers reminded him of Nissa. They behaved like characters from the Globo soaps. He was familiar with their bickerings, the little piranha bites that stripped a marriage of its flesh. Had Dyer married one of them he might have lived here, in Stratfield Road or South Parade, an insider, calm in the eye of a storm that was blind to its own rampages. Watching life jog by from the windows of the Bon Croissant. Working out at the St Edwards Sports Club. Dying day by grey cold day of tumeric chai lattes and artichoke ice cream.