If Dyer’s impression of other Phoenix parents was delible, the same could not be said of the opinions of a dominant section of English parents about Dyer. Their initial rush to embrace him had been coloured by an expectation that he was bound to share the opinions of his former newspaper. This, they discovered, was not so.

It wasn’t merely Dyer’s different attitudes towards Europe, America and the dispossessed which destabilised them. Written on his face was the drear history of a messy private life and imprecise employment in a far-flung backwater. When they bloviated about their careers in the planet’s commercial hotspots, he sensed their insecurity, a concern that in his response Dyer was likely to cross the boundary between wit and rudeness. What they ended up seeing was an abrasive, arrogant character who was the complete opposite of the person he concealed.

For the most part, his compatriots in Oxford were the archivists and cataloguers, the Portuguese medievalist in the house opposite, the young Polish woman in the porter’s lodge who had been spat at in the bus on the day after the Brexit referendum.

Plus there were ridiculously wealthy exceptions like Gilles and Silvi Asselin.

A bayoneting wind had set in as he walked up Ward Road clutching a copy of his book. He thought of February in Rio, the yellow sand, the warm tessellated pavements beneath his bare feet, a bar–café in the eighties just along from where Joaquim Nabuco met Ipanema, Astrud’s converted maid’s room with a ceiling fan.

The grey light fell on a detached modern house the size of a large rectory. A man in a tight dark suit opened the security gate and pointed the way across the pale gravel. The lights are on in the tall rooms where people move between gilt-framed portraits.

Silvi greeted him in the hallway. Her figure compressed into a shiny jacket, liquorice black. She was wearing her latest lipstick (‘burnt rhubarb’) and, around her graceful neck, a string of green jade beads.

‘This is for you,’ said Dyer.

‘Did you write this?’ a beringed hand flying to her face, as if he had handed her a menu.

A pot plant looked monstrously at him out of the jardinière.

‘Oh, darling,’ said Gilles, appearing suddenly with an open magnum of Jacquesson, and peering at the cover, ‘that’s the kind of book you love. You should do it for your reading group.’ And to Dyer, ‘You know Silvi went out with a writer.’

‘Gilles.’

‘Who was the writer?’ asked Dyer.

‘He wasn’t a proper writer, Gilles. That was just a silly thing about scarves.’

‘She likes to argue,’ he said.

‘I love to argue,’ she smiled.

‘He wrote that history of Hermès,’ said Gilles, filling a crystal flute which he handed to Dyer. ‘Here. Try this. If you don’t like it, fuck off.’