DYER HAD ARRIVED AT THE school gates at four o’clock on that bracing cold February afternoon, fed up. He had been back in England seventeen months. His research was leading down a blind alley. The Oxford weather, the conversation of parents, oppressed him.

On top of everything, this bullying incident with his son.

It brought Brazil back; the heat, the silver foil of the sea, his years as a foreign correspondent …

A journalist has to be at home with everyone, a terrorist or the policeman who hunts him down. But these middle-class rich, who were far from being idiots, were surprisingly indecipherable to Dyer. They conversed in his language. A good many of them shared his background and education: once upon a time they might have been his readers. But their take on the world dismayed him.

For the sake of his son, Dyer had curbed his instinct to judge and to flee. He was going to try, for once, to be uncomplicated about this; play hard, work hard, become a committed Phoenix parent. He would blind his inner eye, and gag his natural tendency to say what he thought.

Dyer reasoned to himself that he felt this way because he was older, having come relatively late to fatherhood. Plus in Oxford he was the native, as it were – it would have amazed him if half of his fellow parents at the Phoenix School were in possession of a British passport, unlike in what he shrank to call ‘his day’; as for the rest, although younger, they united in being much better employed than he was, and immeasurably better off. They worked in the City, the Far East, Asia, Africa, North America, for global corporations and governments. They jetted in from the earth’s round corners, from places which, at his son’s age, Dyer had known about only through his stamp collection. One or two even had bodyguards.

That afternoon, Dyer had finished work at the Taylorian at 3.30. Before leaving the library, he ordered up a book on Portugal’s accidental discovery of Brazil in 1500. Then out of habit he checked the BBC news on his laptop.

The big drama of the moment – relegating to second place a UN report on global warming – was a speech by the new incumbent in the White House. The American president had made it his mission to dismantle one by one each of the treaties signed by his predecessor. His latest target: the nuclear deal with Iran, more than four years old now. His shrill accusations that Iran was not abiding by its international agreement had scalded the government in Tehran to threaten to restart its nuclear programme. Israel was promising in that case to retaliate, as was Saudi Arabia.