‘I’ve no idea what it consists of.’

‘Nor had I, but there are plenty of Chinese there – in a couple of streets, anyway, mostly selling cigars, as far as I could see. But they have their little kitchen cafés. In the name of journalistic truth, I had to try it.’

‘And?’

‘It doesn’t matter. Bean sprouts. What I wanted to get at was what was going on underneath. The gangs, the fighting, the cruelty. I began to wonder if there was just something in us. Something wrong.’

‘Original sin?’

‘Christians would say so. Karl Marx called it capitalism. That was what led to refugees. Poor people looking for work. Emigrating from hunger in their own country only to be used by other cruel capitalists when they reached their destination. It’s Darwin as well. At any rate, it’s Malthus. The struggle to survive.’

‘I haven’t read Malthus,’ said Martha.

‘Nor have I. But Darwin read him, and the idea of populations waxing or waning according to the survival of who was best able to adapt … I think that was important.’

‘How did you squeeze all this into your book?’

‘I took a chance. I wondered whether all aspects of irrationality might be connected. Including sex and love. I do think Marx describes very well how an economy works to the benefit of the few. But it’s an explanation of a system – one that works like a motor. It does give momentum. But the politics have never been able to solve the injustices that the motor generates.’

‘Because politicians are wicked?’

‘Some are. But I also wanted to suggest something else in the nature of human beings. In the Caillaux case, for instance. Maybe it was not a little sex comedy while a tragic war history waited in the wings. I wanted to see if the two follies were connected. Part of the same flaw.’

Martha sat back in the desk chair again. ‘Eros and Thanatos. All that flurry in Vienna before the war. So many books!’

Anton coughed. ‘I suppose I was influenced by what was coming out then. It was pretty interesting, after all. There was some suggestion that if you denied the sex instinct it would send you mad. I’m simplifying, of course.’

‘Not much. Not according to Christian von Ehrenfels.’

‘Who?’

‘He made a splash at that time. I read it later. He thought that for young men the choice was neurosis if you didn’t, syphilis if you did.’

‘What was his solution?’ said Anton.

‘That all men should have many girlfriends. Though he had a long Greek word for it.’

‘This was all going on when I arrived in Vienna to go to university,’ said Anton. ‘And very shocking it was. But the whole city was shocking to a boy from Styria. Girls were lined up on the street and the books we were reading suggested that women were naturally … insatiable. That they embodied animal sexuality. Yet society told them they were supposed to marry as virgins and then be faithful. We had found no way at all of dealing with the central urge in nature. So what price Mahler’s Fifth?’