‘For everyone else, the interest and controversy of my discovery is barely a memory,’ says Notovitch. ‘The general excitement, the incredulity, the vituperation and mockery that followed it – all faded into silence now. I was surprised to come upon a mention of it a few days before our first meeting while leafing through the pages of National Geographic magazine at the dentist’s. It was an aside in an article about a recent find of Scythian treasure. The allusion was in the context of great archaeological hopes that prove finally false. I was particularly amused to read its description of me as a “mysterious Russian nobleman”. How pleasing to be thought mysterious! And how much that ennoblement would have tickled my father!’ The curtain rail utters a sharp rattle as Notovitch pulls the drapes shut. ‘In that very same issue, I read an advertisement for your company, Dictascribe.’

‘Scriptovox.’

‘As you say. I’m a great admirer of Anglo-Saxon ingenuity. Verne and Robida may have dreamed the future, but Manchester and Birmingham have built it.’

As an Italian, Vincenzo doesn’t feel like the intended object of this flattery.

‘The coincidence crystallised an intention I have been carrying with me for some time. I feel an obligation to leave my own testimony. Events in Germany have given my task fresh urgency. Its new chancellor is a great champion of the Protocols. Despite the cowlick and improbable moustache, he’s the manifestation of something that we ought to be taking very seriously.’

The brass lever of the door dips and the housekeeper enters with the tea things. Vincenzo takes the tray from her and places it on a footstool by the fire to steep.

A silence falls which neither man is keen to break. The ghosts slip from the room: Bessie, Skobelev, Volchkov, Alexander, Leonard. The last to leave are Notovitch’s other selves: Naum, Kolya, Nicolas; the named and the unnamed, the ones that have clamoured to be heard, the ones that have chosen not to speak at all.

Finally: ‘It’s to be expected that a man my age should look back at his life and ask what question it has posed, and whether he has answered it.’ The old man sighs. ‘I have to own up to a dereliction of duty. I was entrusted with a task by the lama. Instead of disseminating that gospel, I was distracted, I was too easily disheartened. I shirked my destiny. In the time that remains to me, I intend to correct that error. I will share the hope promised in the Pali gospel – the hope of a spiritual life beyond the dogmatic assumptions of any single creed.’

Vincenzo rotates the teapot in the way his wife has shown him and pours. There is the near music of two ascending notes as the cups fill and the clouds of fragrant steam rise.