Up two flights of stairs and down a long dim passage, he paused to check the names on the doors as his feet tapped on the floor, polished by years of academics pacing the halls, and with centuries of intellectual sweat and toil steeped into the wood. He knocked on a closed door and waited, but all was silent. Pushing it ajar, he peeked in to see a thin young man hunched over a computer terminal, eyes fixed on the screen, furiously typing.

‘Mr Rahimi?’

The man jumped like a scalded cat.

Gessen stepped inside and introduced himself. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you.’

Mr Rahimi pushed the hair off his forehead and blinked. ‘Not at all.’ He rose from the chair and studied Gessen with his dark, intelligent eyes. ‘I was lost in my work.’

Gessen smiled. ‘Of course you were.’ He took in Mr Rahimi’s slight form and the bluish tinge under his eyes. Didn’t they feed them at the college? Or perhaps his meagre bursary obliged him to live on tea and stale buns. His mind rushed ahead to fill in the blanks. A bad habit, difficult to break, of assigning an imagined life to someone that probably had little to do with their real one.

‘It’s no problem, I knew you were coming. And please call me Farzan.’

An international student, hailing from Iran, his perfectly enunciated English was tinged with an Edwardian lilt.

‘Shall we go to a cafe?’ Farzan grabbed his jacket from a hook on the wall. ‘Much nicer than sitting in this stuffy room.’

Indeed, the little office was cramped and dark. This wasn’t a social call, but it would be a shame to waste the mild weather. ‘Lead the way.’

Their footsteps echoed as they clattered down the stairs and into the sunshine. Gessen had never been to Cambridge, and everywhere he looked he saw something to please the eye. The autumnal sun glazed the magnificent stonework, and the neatly clipped lawns, an enchanting emerald green, appealed to his sense of beauty and order. He could understand why Vidor had chosen to spend his entire academic career here. Undergraduate, graduate, lecturer, professor. It would be difficult to move away from hallowed grounds such as these, with their hidden quads and sacred halls, steeped in history. Though an unwavering commitment to a single place, Gessen reminded himself, could also be a sign of rigidity or fear of change.