A moment later, a sonorous male voice is addressing us. It is grave and deep, with trilled r s and unplaceably alien vowels.

There is, frankly, relief all round. We seem to be through the interminable throat-clearing, the exasperating hesitancy. Finally, we are going to meet someone who knows how to tell a story.

*

IT’S A CRISP MORNING in early February 1933. Light snow falls out of a grey sky. Vincenzo Dittami sits in the cab of a delivery truck, heading to an address off the Finchley Road in north-west London. He generally makes his calls alone; however, today he is delivering one of his newest and heaviest machines, a Scriptovox Imperator, which requires at least two men to move safely. Alongside him in the cab of the truck is a man called Pierre Thibaut, a red-headed Frenchman of about twenty, who not many years later will receive a posthumous commendation for gallantry on his ancestral beaches in Normandy.

Pierre wonders aloud if the address on the invoice is correct as the truck turns into a residential street. Neither man has ever made a delivery to a private house.

The client answers the door himself. He nods to confirm that he is indeed Mr Nicolas Notovitch.

Mr Notovitch is wearing an extraordinary blue robe that gives him the appearance of a dervish or a conjuror. It is made of quilted velvet, worn and heavily patched, with voluminous sleeves and a hem that scrapes the floor. Vincenzo will later learn from Notovitch that it is an Uzbek chapan from Namangan in the Fergana Valley and was once the property of an old acquaintance. For now, such secrets belong to an unimaginable future. The old man has a fastidiously trimmed white beard, waxily smooth skin, and grey eyes whose gaze is severe, mistrustful and wounded.

It takes all of Vincenzo and Pierre’s strength to manhandle the Imperator from the truck to the spot Mr Notovitch indicates in the parlour, a north-east-facing room which, thanks to mahogany furniture and heavy drapes, seems nocturnally sombre even in sunshine. Vincenzo wipes their fingerprints off the Imperator with a handkerchief. The low flames of the coal fire glow dully in the cherry-wood cabinetry of the machine. Vincenzo is already one of the more senior men in the company, and takes the novelty of most of the machines for granted, but he is curious about the new Imperator – to our eyes a ludicrous antique, then the most sophisticated device of its kind.

Once the machine is in position, Vincenzo begins the induction. This is a short demonstration of the Imperator’s features that is, for Vincenzo at least, the most enjoyable part of his job.

By the end of his career at Scriptovox, Vincenzo will have performed this induction close to a thousand times. All except one of those demonstrations follow the same pattern: a brief introduction to the machine, the insertion of the wax cylinder, the reading by a volunteer of the Gettysburg Address from a typed sheet Vincenzo carries with him, and then the extraordinary moment of its reproduction.