Sprawled awkwardly on a hard chair, Marvar looked slowly about, like a passenger who lingers after the plane has landed. He was wearing a suit tailored for someone, if not for him then his father or grandfather; midnight blue, old-fashioned, turn-ups. The jacket strained over his stomach.

‘Sure,’ Marvar said vaguely, listening to the clangs. There were workmen in the next house. They had been putting up scaffolding.

He sat there while Dyer filled the kettle. His eyes moved over a photograph on the wall of Dyer in the favela with his class, to a drawing by one of the orphans, before landing on the notes scattered over the kitchen table.

‘What are you working on?’ after a pause. Without his coat, he breathed more evenly.

Dyer told him.

‘Are you a good writer?’

‘My English teacher at the Phoenix said if you want to be a good writer, you have to be a horrible person.’

At this, Marvar laughed. He was ready to laugh. He leaned forward, twisting his neck to decipher Dyer’s notes. ‘I’d like to read something you’ve written.’

Dyer knelt before the Ikea bookcase and picked out a book, sandwiched between a copy of Basil Bunting’s collected poems and an early novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, and handed it to him.

He inspected the spine. ‘J. W. Dyer. This is you?’

‘Not as often as I’d like it to be.’

Marvar fingered the book listlessly, not seeing. He was too fat and the walls were too thin. He might have been thinking of another book.

‘Have it,’ said Dyer. ‘It’s for you.’

It was his last copy. He could order another. The half-dozen that his publishers had sent him, he had wasted as dinner-party gifts.

Marvar flicked to the title page. ‘Then you must sign it,’ and stood respectfully up. The book lay open in his palms, drifting in the thermals.

Dyer patted his chest, pockets. From a broken-handled mug with a phoenix on it, he plucked a biro that didn’t work. ‘Why,’ he muttered, ‘do writers never ever have anything to write with?’

He unzipped the leather shoulder bag containing his laptop, and dug out a propelling pencil.

Marvar remained standing while Dyer took the book from him and sat down at the table and pondered an inscription. The sound of hammer against scaffolding came through the wall like a gong. The renovator’s wand hadn’t yet touched Paula’s house on the other side.

‘Your ex?’

Dyer looked up.

On top of the bookcase, the black-and-white photograph of Astrud loose in a maple frame.

‘One of them,’ he said.