It wasn’t until after World War II that Vincenzo set up the business that Francesca still ran. He remained an uncomplicated Americanophile, finally making it to the United States in the 1970s. A bleached-out photograph of an unrecognisable old man at the Washington Memorial was pinned to the wall on the ground floor of the shop.

‘In another life,’ Francesca told me, ‘he would have ended up in America, working as an inventor. That was really his dream.’ She didn’t seem to dwell on the implication that the life her father had ended up with was second best, that she and her siblings represented a dream deferred.

She showed me the ancient typewriters that Vincenzo had collected and restored in retirement: one had no keyboard and was operated by a dial on a drum. ‘Dad once had a customer who told him that no weapon had been invented more deadly than a typewriter,’ she said. ‘That became one of his sayings.’ Vincenzo had been fascinated by all sorts of machines, and alongside the pre-plastic objects were more modern relics: an old Atari console, a Sinclair Spectrum, a range of fax machines. What seemed at first like a coda to his life, the inevitable diminuendo of old age, was nothing of the sort. This had been his most important work. He had been building a kind of ceremonial tomb – a subterranean temple to the god Qwertyuiop.

Francesca had an idea that the objects might be worth a great deal of money one day and that they ought to form a bequest to a museum of office technology. There seemed no harm in encouraging this notion, but privately I was sceptical that anyone would pay to visit.

In an alcove at the rear of the basement stood four dusty mahogany cabinets. They were the last incarnation of nineteenth-century recording technology, rendered finally obsolete by the advent of magnetic tape. ‘From the old Victograph days when Dad sold dictation equipment,’ Francesca explained.

One was no more than a carcass; its insides had been ransacked for spare parts; the ancient cable of another terminated in fraying copper, but a third had been rewired and fitted with a three-pin plug. I held it up to the light and could see that it wasn’t recent work. The plastic had yellowed with age.

In a pile of boxes beside it lay the wax cylinders on which it recorded. I picked one up. It was the size and heft of a rolling pin. The putty-coloured wax beneath its paper sleeve was grooved with an almost imperceptible spiral. It seemed miraculous that some voice from the past, someone’s actual breath, had been preserved upon it.

*

ORDINARILY, AT THIS POINT, I would write a scene that culminates in one of those wax cylinders being played. If I invented lots of obstacles, I could squeeze a thousand words out of it, possibly more.