‘I think most people hurried through the theoretical passages about the curse of self-awareness – your sprat story, as it were. And they skipped the attempt to bind sexuality and aggression together as part of some ingrained malfunction.’

‘So which parts did they read? What was left?’

‘I think they liked my account of fighting the Russians in 1917. But to judge from the letters that were forwarded by the publisher, the thing they liked best was the bit about Chinese restaurants.’

Martha bit her lip. ‘In New York?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I’d certainly like to go to America one day. Freud and Jung thought it was the new frontier. We could teach them something. And also learn, perhaps.’

Anton had a picture of Casper Kingsley with his cowboy hat and pointed beard explaining the law of the Wild West to a lonely French psychiatrist in a railroad house in Cheyenne, Wyoming in 1896.

‘Maybe we could,’ he said, smiling, as he rose to go.

Martha watched the door close behind him and put her feet up on the desk. She usually had five minutes before the next patient, but Anton was the last of the day.

She checked her notes. The first thing she had written was ‘Lawyer manqué’. Ridiculous, she thought. She crossed it out. The notes went on:

Stress on missing subtlety, nuance. Feels has sold himself short in his career? Busy reporter but not great essayist? War as sex urge gone wrong: high libido? Lost love, ‘Delphine’. French? ‘Line girls’: some history there? Presents self as man of his time: pushed by modern mores, what was he meant to do? Man without Qualities? Funny about writing. Dismissive of Interp of Dreams: Freud envy?

When she had thought for a minute or so, she wrote in a more measured hand:

I feel there is a sense of shame. He is knowledgeable about many things, but uses this to normalise himself. That seems to be his task: to be the unavoidable outcome of biology and the time in which he has lived. Oddly lacking in ego: v. few people want to be seen to be so hapless!

He was pretending to confess and was quite candid – shocking at times. But, despite the gazing into the middle distance, nothing cost him much today. Perhaps just winning my confidence. He hinted about revelations to come. But will they be cathartic when they do come? Or are they further screens to something he can’t yet see – or face?

She took a new pen and concluded: ‘Next step: To help him by not agreeing the weight he wants to give future revelations. To keep quiet and not talk about fish.’

After tidying her desk, Martha glanced at the photograph of her cousin Daniel in his oversize British Army uniform, which had made him look about fourteen years old. She remembered how much, when he had first learned to walk, Daniel had looked up to his girl cousins, trailing them round the Wilhelmskogel with a wicker basket of toys whose handle dug a pattern into the flesh of his bare arm. He had told Martha in a whisper so many times that she was his favourite, earnestly grasping her wrist as he did so; but somehow she was not surprised when, after his funeral, Charlotte revealed that he had frequently told her the same thing.