Our department was a temple, ruled by the formidable camel-riding personage Marco had dubbed Lady L. Lady Jane would have been a more appropriate title: she was born into the minor nobility but had never married, and would not have been addressed as Lady Lambert. In the hallowed halls of Middle Eastern Studies she was known as The Professor and reputed to be a martinet, or, at her less than benign best, an academic Mary Poppins. She was tall, thin and hollow-cheeked; she scraped back her steel-wire hair into a little bun. She wore masculine tweed jackets over severely tailored skirts. But her accent when she spoke Persian was soft, and sometimes she pinned an agate brooch above a breast. Marco said I was her ‘fiore all’occhiello’, or, as we say in Urdu, ‘the star of her eye’, because I managed to get my verbs right in the first weeks of term. He had not, I gathered, been very happy in her class.

There was a rumour in the corridor, carried to me as usual by Marco, that Lady L had once loved an Iranian, probably of a lower class than she was, to whom she had almost certainly and secretly been married. She had left him, chosen never to go back to Iran (or Persia, as she called it), but kept her faith with the foreign land she knew in her youth by teaching verbs, clauses and nouns to one generation after another in the language she might have learned for her lover who knew no English. And he – who knows? – he may have given her the agate, which was the kind of stone people often wore, set in rings and lockets, with prayers in Arabic letters carved into its deep orange.

It was a time when Europeans were drawn to oriental studies, and London was the centre for eastern languages. I met Riccarda Gris Santini, who was half-Italian (or half-Roman, as she said) in my Persian grammar class. She had reddish-brown hair, cat eyes, a tigress’s body, a creeping feline allure. Her voice was soft, her diction clear, her English only slightly accented. We became friends within a week: neither of us went down to the noisy, grubby cafeteria for lunch, preferring to sit in the comfortable chairs in the vestibule at the end of the corridor and eat our sandwiches there. We began talking when she offered me espresso from a flask and I thanked her in Italian. At the end of the first week, she was addressing me with the familiar ‘tu’. We always sat next to each other during lessons.