On more than one occasion Gilles had told Dyer, or ‘Jean’, as he called him, ‘You put too great a faith in Christ’s promise that the meek shall inherit the earth.’ Meekness was absent from Gilles’s make-up. Control was what he sought. He had reached the stage where nobody questioned his financial clout, his blatant wealth, his global contacts. Yet were anyone to penetrate Gilles’s urbane exterior they would soon learn that he sat on a volcanic temper, his natural irritability constantly darting to the surface to inspect a lure. That was how he first had appeared to Dyer at the Headmaster’s Breakfast.

At this ‘Fathers Only’ gathering beside the Cherwell, it was not Mr Crotty who kept the fathers’ spellbound eyes on him, laughing when he laughed, frowning when he frowned, even coughing when he coughed, as if he controlled the river and the trees, but Gilles. When he raised his breakfast bap to speak, no one could move; his eyes were fixed on them the whole time, holding their attention – all, that is, save for Leandro’s father. Perhaps Dyer had interviewed too many presidential candidates. At any rate, something in his expression piqued Gilles enough to seek him out, win him over. But whatever Gilles hoped to achieve that morning, he failed. His brain whirred on, not dwelling on what he was saying, flicking his fingers, impatient, dissatisfied. He knew that he was boring Dyer.

So it came as a surprise when Silvi announced how much her husband had enjoyed talking to him. Gilles Asselin, it seemed, had taken a shine to Dyer in the knowledge that he could not afford him. Dyer’s poverty was a condition as unassailable as the bells of St Barnabas. He was poor, but free in a way that meant he paid not a penny of attention to Gilles’s luxuries or dominance, and in that unaccustomed freedom Gilles appeared to find a vicarious ease.

‘I don’t read books,’ Gilles said to Dyer, adjusting the napkin around the magnum. ‘My life is a book.’

‘I never loved your looks. What I loved was your mind,’ said Silvi. Her thoughts were always two notes away from a pop song.

‘Darling, he said books not looks,’ came a tart voice. It belonged to a chestnut-haired woman in odd-shaped glasses who had entered after Dyer.

‘I don’t read anything any more,’ Gilles harped on, ‘except Silvi’s bank statements.’

Blurry pastels of snowscapes with chevrons of birds. A decanter on the sideboard like the glass chamberpot under his mother’s bed. Silvi has arranged the flowers. She’s left Gilles in charge of the wine.