Johanna and Lena emerged at last and walked arm in arm down the street. Anton was touched by their laughter as they turned to one another because he had never felt that either of them seemed happy when he saw them in the Schloss, heaving buckets or carrying laundry baskets. But what, really, did he know? What troubled him was that with her arm through Johanna’s, Lena no longer had the swing to her walk that embodied Delphine. He wanted the Hungarian girl to visit a different shop, disappear on an errand of her own or, better still, head for the railway station and buy a ticket back to Budapest.

Instead, they walked down past St Theresa’s school, where they paused for a moment as Lena pointed and explained, and over a bridge towards a gloomy area where the river looped back on itself and the streets were narrow. They were no longer arm in arm, but were almost touching, especially when they turned to share some joke. They seemed so absorbed in one another that Anton felt no fear of being seen.

He stopped for a moment on the bridge and rested his hand on the parapet. This pain was self-inflicted. No one was making him turn the knife in himself. It would have hurt less and been more seemly to leave them alone, to stop wishing.

Instead, he hurried on past a timber mill and was just in time to see Lena and Johanna go through the front door of a house in a back street. He would remember that door, he thought, and knock on it himself one day.

Then he dragged himself away from the dark street, crossed the bridge and made his way back, defeated, to where he had left his bicycle. He took his time pumping up the tyres.

Back at the small table in his room, Anton stared over the lawns, beginning to look bare at the end of a dry summer, past the horse chestnut and on through the silver birches where the ground fell away towards the lake. He wondered if the candles of the chestnut tree were white in spring. He hoped so, as the alternative, an icing-sugar pink, reminded him of cakes and long afternoons at Friedrich’s house when he was young. He remembered Delphine’s horror of pink magnolia.

Often, he had tried to draw reassurance from the natural world – with his eyes to dredge comfort from leaf and water. It had worked well enough when he was a boy. On walking holidays with Friedrich in the Alps he had gazed over the scenery when they had stopped beside a stream. He was no botanist and a poor painter in the art class, but the hard earth on which they sat, the grass and the spring flowers with the jagged mountains behind had made him feel part of something large and proper, to do with his grandparents and history and other things that were not his to question. He and Friedrich had had little enough to worry them anyway, when their worst enemy was the tedium of the schoolroom; but he liked the natural world to be there, in the background, as it should be.