Janis blew her nose and said after a pause, ‘I couldn’t live in Vienna, Marianne, that’s what’s gone wrong. When Jeremy and A.P. got back from their trip, they told me that being in Germany didn’t have the effect upon them they’d expected it to. It probably wouldn’t on me, either. But it’s a different matter to live somewhere than just to visit, isn’t it? Uncertain of the people around you.’

Had Janis but known it she was voicing Laura’s private fears for her in that respect, when it became plain that Janis might one day marry Kurt.

‘Uncertainty breeds apprehension, doesn’t it?’ Janis went on. ‘As you know, Kurt and I were staying with his parents in the spring, when the fiftieth anniversary of the Anschluss was commemorated. There was Nazi graffiti everywhere, though the official commemoration was designed to display quite the opposite. And slogans we used to think long dead were shouted amid some of the scuffles resulting from police intervention.’

Janis drank some tea and paused again. ‘Kurt has since heard from his parents that an exhibition chronicling the history of the Viennese Jewish community, mounted with the co-operation of the city authorities, was patrolled by armed guards, and everyone had to deposit bags if they were carrying them, coats too, I think, with the attendant before entering.’

‘Security has to be maintained all over the world, nowadays, Janis. I had to deposit my briefcase when I once spent an hour at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, between appointments.’

‘But anti-Semitism wasn’t involved in that. The attendant at the exhibition I mentioned apologized to Kurt’s mother for her having to leave her bag with him. She was reluctant to do so, some notes concerning one of her patients were in it. He said that it was just for that particular exhibition the precautions were considered necessary.

‘Kurt was as sickened as I was by it. But I knew long before then that I couldn’t live in Vienna, when on a previous visit Kurt’s parents weren’t able to meet our plane and we took a taxi. The driver spoke English. I was my usual talkative self, making conversation about what a beautiful city Vienna is.

‘The route to Kurt’s home took us past the Hotel Imperial and the driver pointed to it and told me proudly that Adolf Hitler had slept there. He must have seen my reaction to that through his mirror, and hastily added a list of royalty and the like who had slept there too. I think it was that that finally did it, Marianne. An ordinary middle-aged man driving a taxi saying what he had to me in the adulatory tone impossible to mistake.’

‘OK, Janis. I now know how you feel and why. What I don’t understand is why you afterwards got engaged to Kurt.’