‘Let me try to explain.’

‘You’re an important lawyer in Vienna. I’m just a maid here. That’s all.’

Rudolf sat down next to her and put his hand on hers. ‘All right. Let me tell you. I’ve always been a romantic. Oh, God, yes. I first fell in love when I was seven. It was a mortal agony.’

‘Seven?’ Lena bit her lip to hide a smile.

‘Yes. I longed for her and worshipped her as much as I have any grown woman. When I was ten I fell in love again. A hopeless case! But don’t think of me as one of those awful licentious men who lusts over photographs of women and—’

‘I don’t.’

‘It’s just that I’m a romantic. It’s an illness, it’s incurable.’

‘And how many of these goddesses have there been?’ Had the Belvedere Gardens woman been one of them – a goddess with a tight grip and an empty laugh.

‘I don’t know. Five, eight, ten, twelve. I think it’s perhaps wrapped up in the spiritual side of me. A desire for purity. I first made that connection when I was lying in the hospital with the broken leg. You remember.’

Lena felt herself weaken a little. ‘I remember.’ He had shown such good humour despite his injury and was so friendly to her, for no reason.

‘It’s complicated,’ said Rudolf. ‘I’m not like other men. Some of them treat all women like … like prostitutes. Or possessions. You should hear the way they talk in the bars. The descriptions. They describe them and leer over them. I’m not like that. Vienna is a cesspit in some ways. All those poor line girls.’

‘Not so many now, I’ve heard.’

‘My point is that there are two sorts of men. The sensualist and the romantic. I’m the latter. And I have a spiritual life, too. Perhaps that makes me harder to understand and if so, I apologise.’

Lena freed her hand. ‘I expect there are more than two types of man.’

‘You mean—’

‘That’s one thing I’ve learned here, in this place. Everyone’s different. I think that’s maybe why I like it. Everyone’s accepted here, before they can be helped.’

Rudolf smiled. ‘You’ve grown very wise.’

‘No, I haven’t.’ She didn’t want Rudolf’s praise, especially when what she was thinking of was the hour she had spent with Anton and whether the pleasure she had taken from it made him – and her – a ‘sensualist’, with no higher life.

Rudolf became more sombre. ‘I think about the future all the time, of course. How we can rebuild a better world after all that was lost in the war. I sometimes wish I’d been old enough to fight. I could have found out what I was made of in that storm of steel. I might have been purified. Or killed, I suppose.’

Lena said nothing. She was picturing a raised white scar.

‘But I also think a lot about the past,’ Rudolf continued. ‘And I question whether my behaviour has always been as good as it should be.’