Outside in the garden, he picks the fat pods of the broad beans and passes them to Francesca.

He knows he needs to make amends.

Hatchards on Piccadilly is a ten-minute walk from the Scriptovox showroom. Vincenzo goes there one weekday in his lunch hour. A book is a good present for a writer. He looks at the table of staff picks by the entrance and reads: ‘I heart this eye-opening account of life at the bottom by one of our brightest young progressive writers!! Must read!’, written in passionate scrawl beside a new book called Down and Out in Paris and London. The title makes him smile. That might work. As long as Notovitch gets the joke. He picks up a copy. It’s a good-looking volume, but priced rather steeply at eight shillings and sixpence.

‘Can I help you?’

A man in brilliantined hair and shiny spectacles. As a fellow salesman, Vincenzo has reservations about the assistant’s method: he’s moved too early and too forcefully.

‘I’m looking for a gift.’

Vincenzo’s accent suddenly sounds as strong as Gorgonzola. The man hovers in an unfriendly way. Now and again this happens to Vincenzo, despite his smart clothes and affable manner – his foreignness inspires instinctive distrust in someone. He dips into the book and reads: Have I ever told you, mon ami, that in the old Russian army it was considered bad form to spit on a Jew? Yes, we thought a Russian officer’s spittle was too precious to be wasted on Jews … Another dip: in a corner by himself a Jew, muzzle down in the plate, was guiltily wolfing bacon. He puts the book back on the table and addresses the suspicious salesman. ‘Perhaps something less … political?’

*

THE TWO MEN MEET for the final time on a warm morning in May 1933.

Notovitch waits in the sunshine outside the house. Vincenzo and Pierre Thibaut, still alive, still more than a decade away from his death in France, arrive in the Scriptovox truck to take the Imperator and the cylinders to their temporary home in the warehouse. Notovitch will be in touch about having them sent on to Paris after the transcription.

‘What word from the British Museum, Mr Notovitch, about the expedition?’ Vincenzo asks, when the machine is wrapped in old blankets and roped tightly to the bed of the truck.

‘Nothing yet,’ the old man says. ‘But I live in hope.’

Pierre cranks the engine. The truck judders into life. He drives away alone. Vincenzo is seeing the old man off at the station. They travel together in a cab south through the city, past Lord’s cricket ground, where the first test match of the summer is being held, and through the leafiness of Regent’s Park.

‘Thank you for your scepticism and honesty, Mr Dittami. They have been very instructive to me.’

‘I was perhaps too sceptic, sir. If so, I meant no offence.’