In Smuggertown, you did things para inglês ver – for the English to see; above board, in full view, keeping up appearances, and politically correct. Meanwhile, the real business was going on down the coast, in the quiet deserted streets off Norham Gardens.

Tonight, it was a dinner party in Ward Road. Guests from London. ‘You must come for a meal’ had been repeated many times over, and finally a date was given. Dyer had accepted weeks before, hoping somehow it might go away, but the evening had arrived.

He has booked his usual babysitter. Paula is a disabled navy widow from the council house next door who enjoys leading a proxy life through the Dyers. One of his favourite people in Oxford, Paula does not yell at the Jamaican family whose children everyone assumes are drug dealers. She does not shoo away those distributing flyers for Art Week, or the Labour councillor who comes knocking for her vote. She does not put up Brexit stickers in her window, run after rubbish men to persuade them to take her recyclables in the week when they collect household rubbish. Neighbours give her their keys. Delivery men give her Amazon parcels. Dyer would be happy to leave her with his secrets.

Before going out tonight, he asks Paula to superintend his son’s homework on Trafalgar, only after which is Leandro granted leave to watch television or go on his Xbox.

‘Yes, yes, now you go and have a lovely time,’ she commands Dyer, sounding like his aunt. ‘You never know who you’re going to meet.’ Although by now he does have an idea.

In the beginning, in Leandro’s first term, Dyer had clamped everyone by the shoulders, hugged them, and for a while was centre of the party. And then the vitality ebbed away. He stood there, but unless there was a glass of wine in his hand, he had nothing to say.

As the weeks in Oxford passed into months, he had drifted back out to the margin, feeling like the spy that at university he once was approached to become. He watched parents salute each other at the school gates. The minute gestures of recognition, like secret handshakes; the alteration in the voices. He saw how they worked hard, focused, entertained well; Davos at Easter, summer in the Muskokas, with seats at the opera, Ascot, Wimbledon, Wembley. But kindred spirits were punishingly few. He did not share the aspirations which bound most of these people, their masonic sense of kinship. He had not yielded to their world; it was outside anything that mattered to him. He was poorer, older; his experience was in subjects and countries that held neither curiosity for them, nor profit. They made him feel like the survivor of a tribe that was dying out.