‘I’ve been living abroad – like you,’ Dyer pointed out. It was a bit too early for such cocktail-party banter. He had gone out of his way to avoid Updark at the gathering in January, because this was just the kind of conversation they might have had.

‘I did go to the last reunion,’ Updark said. It was where he’d met Parkhouse. His face had a scorer’s concentration as he recollected the gathering at the In and Out Club. ‘Funny how we all recognised the strong impact the school made on us, how vividly we recall it even now, and how difficult it is to communicate much of what we experienced then to our wives.’

Dyer had declined the invitation; this club was where his newspaper editor had taken him for lunch when recruiting him. But he could picture the get-together. The long polished table like the deck of his uncle Hugo’s yacht, the partridge with bread sauce, the club claret, the white heads in black tie, the souffléd features of accountants, lawyers, civil servants, bankers, teachers, all scrambling to recall each other’s nicknames for the chance to voice them once again. What fates had they found, Splash and Boggy and Wiggy? Leaving the gate, up Bardwell Road, with their Latin and Greek, their not-bad maths and indeterminate ambitions. Did they unify themselves, or fall on the trail? Did they find their Guineveres?

‘Who else was there?’ Dyer asked dutifully. ‘Finnock, I suppose.’ The former head boy who was eternally coming back.

‘Finnock died. Poor Finnock. Forty-six. Cancer.’

Dyer thought of the others in his dorm. ‘Garridge?’

‘Garridge is in Perth.’

‘Doing?’

‘I think he makes outdoor garden furniture.’

‘Rougetel?’ said Dyer impulsively. Once you started, how hard to stop.

‘No idea. Though I can’t say I knew him well, being as he was in the year below.’ His eyes narrowed at a recollection. ‘Friend of yours, wasn’t he?’

‘He was a friend.’ One who possessed what Dyer, aged twelve, had only read about in Jane Eyre: the attribute of stainless truth.

‘Didn’t he live in South America?’

‘That’s right. Bolivia.’

‘I remember him running away …’

Where was he now? All of a sudden, Dyer wanted to rescue Rougetel from time, before Updark got to him first. His pale freckled face swam back. Halfway through his first term, Rougetel had asked his grandparents to collect him at a given hour from the postbox outside the boarding house, and when they didn’t, he caught a train to London where he was picked up by the police, who were waiting on the platform.

‘… It caused a great impression. A rebellion!’ Updark laughed uncomfortably, shaking his head. He himself had never rebelled. He had followed the path laid by his parents and grandparents. ‘Ever see him, do you, Rougetel?’