Lotte was silent. They passed the Third Café and continued walking, crunching the gravel beneath their feet. It must have been about half past nine. Thea and Dr Astel turned around and came to meet them, and Dr Astel invited them all to come home with him and have a drink. The invitation was accepted, and they took the next tram back to the city centre.

13

13

Dr Mark Astel was in partnership with his elder brother, who had a reputation as an excellent lawyer. For over a year now his name, too, had appeared on the bronze plaque on the door of Wollzeile 7: Dr Richard and Dr Mark Astel, Certified Lawyers, Criminal and Mercantile Law, etc. He had been born and brought up in Vienna in a bourgeois family. His education had proceeded smoothly from high school to university, and at the age of twenty-two he had received his diploma without any particular difficulties or outstanding academic achievements. His future was mapped out in accordance with his family traditions and his own steady character: so his father (who was also a lawyer) had lived, so his brother lived, and so Dr Mark Astel, too, would live; a comfortable, affluent, bourgeois life, without any upsets or scandals. In the war, too, he had been lucky. He had been taken prisoner a few weeks after enlisting, and spent the duration in a POW camp in France. He had been working for his brother for six years, from the day of his discharge from the army, and everything was going well apart from his affair with Lotte Bondheim, who led him on and rejected him in turn, according to the whims of her volatile moods, and made it impossible to get anything settled.

He had an apartment of his own in Karlsgasse with three spacious and tastefully furnished rooms, a kitchen, and a hall — he had received it two years ago from his brother, when the latter married and moved into a bigger place.

The visitors were shown into the drawing room, where they were immediately greeted by the slightly stale, chilly air characteristic of unused rooms.

Glancing about her as if to emphasise that she had never been there before, Thea cried, ‘What a lovely apartment, Doktor! If it were in my nature to be envious, I would envy you for this place.’

‘Which would not prevent me, of course, from feeling as comfortable in it as before,’ said their host with a laugh.

He placed a pot-bellied bottle of Benedictine liqueur and two bottles of muscatel wine, which he took out of a glass-fronted cabinet, on the table. Then he fetched polished, dark-blue goblets, with stems as long and slender as those of flowers, a box full of cigarettes, and an assortment of snacks from the supply that he always kept handy.

‘We can have tea or coffee too, if you wish,’ he said, and sat down at the table.