Now to him in early middle age, it seemed null. The slap of the water against the edge of the lake and the sound of an invisible breeze among leaves seemed less like a comfort than an absence that mocked his little brain and its conscious striving. Lying in the bloodied snow of Galicia, where the leaf mould was mingled with the flesh of men, had made it difficult to see the earth in the same light.

He walked round the room, tired of trying to solve his difficulties by thought alone. Why not push them to one side by focusing on something else? Perhaps when he returned they might have taken on a less intimidating shape.

He took out a pad of paper and a pen and began to write his article:

The town was once the subject of a painting by Egon Schiele, who, after a brief visit here before the war, showed its streets in overhanging tiers, the roofs of the buildings at angles, their tiles in umber and asylum green. The picture was not well received locally. True, the snow is often deep, the winters foggy, but not with the sense of apocalypse the artist scratched into his foaming sky. There is a slope in the south that rises towards the foothills of the Karawanken, but this doesn’t mean the houses there are piled on top of one another, as if on the point of collapse.

In its guildhall, opera house and St Thomas’s commanding church the town aspires to the dignity of a lesser Salzburg; but in the market square on Saturday, the Catholic women with their shopping baskets mingle with Muslim travellers from the East; there are Slovenes from across the border and peasant women from Moravia selling herbal cures.

An hour’s brisk walk from the town is the Schloss Seeblick. With its tiled roofs, whitewashed walls and sunny courtyard where a fountain plays into a stone basin, it’s a rather beautiful building, a visitor would have to concede. Yet within the long corridors, behind its closed doors, it has always been a place in turmoil.

Nominally in charge is Dr Franz Bernthaler, aged seventy this year; but the pulse of the clinic is to be found in the person of Fräulein Martha Midwinter, aged thirty-six, the part-English, part-German daughter of one of the founders, who moves about the premises with the lively but distracted air of the junior teacher who has unexpectedly been made headmistress.

It was a bit wordy, but he could thin it out later; and he felt the editor would like the way it hinted at graver things to come. All he had to do now was make sure to include all the most remarkable facts and quotations from his notebooks, stitching them together in a way that seemed natural. The main connective argument would with any luck reveal itself to him as he went along.

6

Lena was taking a basket full of sheets to the laundry when she saw Martha and Charlotte walking towards her, both dressed in dirndls with broderie anglaise blouses, though Martha wore a black jacket and Charlotte a grass-green cardigan.