Dyer spooled back to the offer made by his editor two decades before: ‘You’re the doyen of Latin American correspondents – everyone knows that. But the accountants have decreed: “Shut Latin America. Full stop.” You can have either Moscow or the Middle East. Which is it to be?’ After hesitating for a week, Dyer had chosen neither: South America was the fount of his stories, the world he cared about.

But sometimes you regret your choices. In moments of private commotion, Dyer couldn’t help speculating about the life he might have led. Maybe it wasn’t too late to pull Leandro out of the Phoenix and take him to Tehran, Dyer thought ruefully, on realising that he had walked past Bardwell Road.

He turned right into Linton Road, hopping over a crack in the pavement, and headed in brisk steps back towards the school.

On the corner, he waited beside an old-fashioned red pillar box for a large black Lexus to dislodge itself from the kerb. Dyer had been a boarder in the house behind, brick and stucco, the colours of cold sores and sticking plasters. On how many Sunday mornings after the service in Hall had he sat astride this lopsided Edwardian postbox, waiting for his parents’ mauve Singer Gazelle to chunter into sight? He preferred not to go there.

The wild-looking mother at the wheel of the Lexus scrambled out to assist her daughter with her cello. Once the vehicle had lurched off, Dyer crossed.

When the newspaper closed down the bureau in Rio, he had stayed on to finish his book about the cultural and social history of the Amazon basin. Published at an exorbitant price by the Oxford University Press, this was carefully reviewed in the TLS and in one or two anthropological quarterlies, and forgotten. Dyer had been kicking his heels when his aunt Vivien telephoned from her house in Lima and begged him to go and see a friend of hers who worked for a children’s charity in Rio.

Dyer never could resist his aunt, a former prima ballerina, married to a retired Peruvian diplomat, who had devoted the last quarter of her life to improving the conditions of street kids in Lima. The upshot was that he went and met Vivien’s friend, and by and by accepted a job with Ibeji, working in a favela perched on an emerald crevasse beneath the outstretched arms of Christ.

He continued to have inappropriate love affairs. His aunt had suggested that he needed someone ‘much rounder’ after Astrud. Dyer took his girlfriends to Lima to stay with Vivien in order that she might vet them over her home-baked gingerbread biscuits. But not, for some reason, Nissa.