Whether this thing I call myself is real or not, whether it is the flickering wave of some electromagnetic field, or exists only as a whirlpool – as a dynamic movement made of other particles – please, God, let it be real: because a self that does not exist cannot be extinguished.

And if my consciousness is not sufficiently differentiated from those of all mankind, then something so close to it as to be indistinguishable from it is born again each moment in some poor city or village on earth; and I, or a being so like me as to make no difference, is bound to live again, for ever, caught up in some loop of eternal return. Dear God, may my consciousness be real, so that it may die at last.

Anton was too disturbed to carry on reading. It would be one thing to have your mind read sympathetically by a priest or a lover; but to be understood – more than understood, anticipated to the extent that your own life was rendered otiose, as if it had been lived already by a complete stranger …

He went downstairs, through the gardens and out towards the lake where there was a small boat moored to the jetty. He had never rowed before, but by imitating people he’d seen on the man-made pool in the Prater he found himself moving over the water easily enough.

Towards the middle of the lake was a floating wooden platform, designed for summer bathers. Anton tied the painter to an upright and sat back in the boat. The Schloss Seeblick on its raised slope was by far the largest building on the northern side, and from this distance and in the spring light could have passed for a grand hotel or a boarding school for the children of the Viennese gentry.

A female figure was coming down through the silver birch trees towards the water’s edge. Something in her walk caused him a pain in the space behind his lungs. He watched the swing of her arms and the slight locking of the opposite hip at the end of each pace, as though the joint were clicking, albeit painlessly, into place with every step. Yet overall the motion was, if not elegant, at least fluid and purposeful.

He knew that way of walking. He had seen it in the park at Baden, where the grassy trail went into the Vienna Woods; he had seen it going over the parquet of the music room and down the passage in a voluminous first-floor flat in Döbling. He had seen it come towards him in the rain after the Mahler and Schoenberg concert when he held the cab door open and checked his waistcoat pocket for her fare home.

Yet this woman wore the blue of the clinic’s uniform. And there was something more girlish, younger, in her figure than in Delphine’s.

He untied the rope, pushed the oars back through the rowlocks with a clatter and began to row. He needed to reassure himself that it was not Delphine. Or that, by some watery miracle, it was. He was facing the wrong way and had to strain his neck to see if she was still there. The blades splashed in the water and his shoulders ached.