Now you take care with this Duval chap.’

‘He may not call.’

‘I bet he will. Why else bother you in the first place? Especially after all these years.’

But Duval didn’t call that day, or the day after. Robert’s new job, which had brought him back to Chicago after years away, was still novel enough to preoccupy him utterly during the day – and, as Anna and Sophie sometimes complained, occasionally at weekends as well. So by the end of the week, thoughts of Duval had receded, if not quite disappeared altogether.

He came out of the Friday staff meeting in a good mood. Dorothy Taylor, his publishing director, who was stroppy and combative and seemed to have trouble accepting him as her new boss, was away on holiday, so it had been relaxed. He found Vicky, his assistant, waiting for him outside his office. ‘Your lunch appointment rang to ask if you could meet him at twelve thirty,’ she said.

‘Anything else?’

She followed him into his office, a high-ceilinged corner room with a view of a small playground, which filled up in the afternoon with mothers, nannies and their upper-middle class charges. Robert liked hearing the children’s shouts and make-believe screams, since the only other external noise audible above the hum of the office air conditioning was an occasional horn blast from a driver on Lake Shore Drive.

‘You’ve got Andy Stephens here at three.’

The accountant from the university, to review the quarterly results. They’d been good so that would be easy enough.

‘And that’s it?’ he asked. He’d learned to check: Vicky was a young graduate from Michigan, an English major who wanted to be an editor and didn’t seem to think the secretarial parts of her job were going to help get her there. She wore the international uniform of publishing youth: black trousers, black top, black sneakers – it was a wonder to Robert that she hadn’t dyed her big mop of golden hair black as well. She had a slight overbite that made her seem even younger to Robert, though men her age seemed to find her very attractive – Hari, the Indian graduate student who doubled as mailroom boy and receptionist, would find any excuse to hover around her desk. Robert shared her with Dorothy Taylor, who had plumped for Vicky’s CV out of the enormous pile of applicants.

‘Oh,’ she said, happy to have remembered, ‘somebody else called. A man.’

‘Did he manage to say who he was?’

She shook her head; obviously it had been too much to ask. ‘He wouldn’t leave a name or a number. Said he’d call back.’

‘What did he sound like?’

She looked at him with mild disbelief. ‘He was just some guy. Sorry,’ she added tartly. ‘But he did say he’d call again.’

‘Was he old or young? Caucasian or a person of colour?’ He didn’t know why he was pressing her – actually, he did. This might be Duval.

Vicky pursed her lips. ‘You mean African-American?’ He felt embarrassed and she looked cross.

The press was part of a university, and Robert had lunch downtown with one of its trustees, a banker near retirement age named Everton. He seemed more interested in talking about his own visits to London than discussing Robert’s publishing plans. Each time Robert tried to discuss ways to raise the profile of the press, Everton would deflect the conversation onto the wonders of the British Museum and the lunch he’d once been given in the Athenaeum.

Afterwards, Robert walked back along Michigan Avenue, stopping at the river to look down at its small greased coils as it passed under the bridge. The river ran famously backward, long ago reversed to send water from the lake down its thin channel. It was the least impressive river of any city of Robert’s acquaintance – he thought fleetingly of London and Paris. Yet it had enjoyed a curious revival thanks to the boats conducting architectural tours of the city’s downtown; even in London, prospective visitors to Chicago were told to ‘take the river boat tour’, which corresponded to the stereotype of the place. A city of man-made heights, preoccupied throughout the last century with skyscrapers, as if vertical lift could somehow make its mark against the drear spread of so much zero-elevation soil. There was no natural drama to the habitat here, only the blankness of the prairies edged onto a lake with an unvarying shore.

He moved on, the avenue sloping straight and professionally downhill as it spread north towards its newest congregation of expensive stores – Saks, Neiman Marcus, Lord & Taylor – which had displaced the old shopping centre of the city in the Loop. The shoppers here were overwhelmingly white, unspoken reason for the emigration northwards.

Here too the city opened up, with lower buildings, and plazas and small parks, though further down the avenue the Hancock Tower loomed like a charcoal monolith, a hundred tapering steel storeys of offices and apartments. There was a bar on the ninety-fifth floor; Robert remembered going there as a teenager one night with his brother Mike, a week before his brother’s marriage.