It was lucky that Dyer had saved for a rainy day, of which Oxford proved to be drearily full. With what remained of his severance package from the newspaper, a small inheritance from his father, and a larger, unanticipated one from Vivien, he would educate his son as he had been educated.

In his late fifties, Dyer had no property to pass on, but he could give to his only child the indisputable kick-start of a middle-class British education – which was all that England had to offer these days, as Vivien reminded him in one of their final telephone conversations; she would die in her bed at the age of eighty-eight in her clifftop house in Barranco, a blazing torch to the morning of her last breath. ‘Why not take Leandro to Oxford?’ was her question that Dyer had repeated to himself in a moment of beer-fuelled desperation. Both Vivien and his mother, Vivien’s older sister, had been at the Phoenix, and the memories of their schooldays were unusually positive. Going to Oxford would be a good decision, Vivien said. Plus, he could research his next book there. ‘And think of the fly fishing – you’re always grousing there aren’t chalk streams in Brazil.’

Once vocalised, the idea stuck, impossible to pour back into the frosted glass. Nigel was all for it. He had been at Summer Fields up the road, was even thinking of putting the twins down … Nissa was renovating their weekend bungalow in Búzios, and too distracted to worry about her son moving so far away. ‘As long as you write to me every term what he has been doing. I used to love getting your letters.’ She had come across a bundle of them recently, inside a large envelope with ‘João’ on it. ‘I see that spidery handwriting and immediately I know why we’re not together.’ But she had been happy to find them, she didn’t want the letters not there, she said.

A week after Brazil lost 7–1 to Germany in the World Cup, Dyer booked two flights to London. In early September, having found a small house to rent in Jericho behind St Barnabas church, overlooking a deserted boatyard and the canal, he brought Leandro to Oxford. His main worry when he carried their four suitcases inside and thought about the quiet life that he had signed up for by making this move was that he might get bored.

Oxford was not a place to go barefoot. The huge wide unfriendly streets, the cold wind that whipped at his ankles, the food which tasted like his aunt’s leftovers, the language. ‘Daddy, what’s a bosom?’ asked Leandro after they had been there a fortnight, hoping for a reaction. Compared with Rio, there were not many pressing invitations to Dyer’s gaze or touch.