‘Not since I was twenty,’ Dyer calculated. On a rainy summer afternoon beside the Thames near Hampton Court. A slim figure stood on the riverbank, watching Dyer and his crew lift their boat out of the water. ‘Hello, Basil.’ Dyer, glancing up, recognised the person in black jeans with a backpack. The two of them had talked in an awkward way over the upturned shell, but by the time Dyer had finished loading the boat on the rack and returned to the river, the towpath stretched up and down, blank, like an old telephone number. ‘I’ve no idea what became of him.’

Not quite true. There’d been one other sighting, bizarre and unsatisfactory, in a letter from Trundle who had started a business selling outboard motors in Benin. ‘You won’t believe this, but guess who I spied in a voodoo procession in the centre of Ouidah?’ Trundle had shouted his name and the man had looked up and hurried on. ‘I’m positive it was Rougetel.’ That was eighteen years ago.

Updark was still at the reunion dinner. ‘Funny how someone you thought was a complete dunce becomes head of Unilever, yet the one you’d put your money on to do well …’ He examined Dyer. ‘But you’ve done well. In your field.’

‘Quite a small field it was.’

‘Yes,’ nodded Updark with that indulgent tone he had, ‘but a field is a field is a field. Now who was I talking to about you …?’ He picked another hair off his trouser leg. ‘Whoever it was reminded me of something I’ve been meaning to ask. Why were you called Basil? You’re so not a Basil.’

The driver’s eyes were listening in the mirror. Dyer gave a defeated smile. How many years since he had heard that name? Not, probably, since his encounter with Rougetel outside the Molesey Boat Club. He could still see his black jeans and the side of his head.

Dyer began to tell the story. ‘It was that physics master.’

‘… Jumbo?’

Dyer nodded. ‘He asked us a question in class. I stuck up my hand. “Yes, you, Basil.” “Sir, my name’s not Basil.” “Well, it is now!”

‘For a long while I used to wonder why he chose to call me that. I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now.’ By the end of that term everyone was addressing him as Basil – even the headmaster. Dyer mused: ‘It was probably Jumbo’s way of striking back – for the nickname we’d given him.’

‘I don’t believe I ever had a nickname,’ Updark said after a pause. He looked out of the tinted rear window. The light falling on his cheeks emphasised the shiny nodules on his skin, the red welts, swollen and scaly with damp patches, like Ezequiel’s psoriasis. ‘But it’s funny how things stick. I still think of you as Basil.’

They were turning into Eynsham.