Martha worried that Daniel had been cold, lying up there in the mountains, with the life leaking out of him. She wished she had been there to cover him with a blanket. He had never been robust, though not sickly either and always the bursting delight of his mother Sonia’s eye. What he had revealed in his short time in the army, in the slime at Ypres and on the plateau at Asiago, was an unexpected strength, expressed in soldier’s humour. God knew what he might have become, what a man was lost.

She shut the door on the consulting room that had once been her father’s; the latch bolt made a satisfying click as it sprang into the keep, exactly as it had closed on a thousand psychic dramas before.

It was her favourite time of the day, the lull before dinner, and she often heard her father’s voice teasing her. ‘Well, Martha-May, what have you done today to deserve a bowl of soup, let alone a glass of wine?’ ‘I don’t drink wine, Daddy.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because I’m only eight!’ ‘Oh, good, then I’ll have yours.’ She had learned that sentimentality, which might poison mature relationships, could sit next to pure and powerful emotion when it came to parent and child.

Quite often Thomas was late for dinner because he was shut in the cellar laboratory with Franz Bernthaler looking for lesions in sections of brain beneath the microscope. Then he’d come in smelling of the carbolic soap they used, and sometimes of wine as well, a glass of which he and Franz used to allow themselves after seven o’clock – Riesling from Franconia if they could get it.

Martha could hear Thomas’s voice almost at will, not in the auditory sense that almost deafened some of the schizophrenic patients, but in the way that the eyes hear words on a page, with or without the tongue moving.

‘Your Heideck is a typical Styrian, don’t you think?’ she heard Thomas say. ‘When are you going to ask him about his god? I think you may be right about the shame. But I scent a Roman Catholic, don’t you? Cherchez la croix.’

Crossing the hall, Martha climbed the main staircase, enjoying the spring of the oak steps, and made her way to her rooms, which had once been lived in by Jacques and Sonia. They were too large for a woman on her own, but she drew only a small salary from the clinic and viewed them as her reward for working seven days a week. They were furnished with pieces left at the Wilhelmskogel by her parents when they returned to England and a few items of her own that she had had shipped from London. The living room was a little dark, but the bedroom had a double aspect, with one window giving over the front gardens and the other looking down towards the lake, on whose water the sun was now sinking.

The reason Martha had loved Thomas so much was the effect that she and Charlotte had on him. It seemed a matter of colossal amusement to him that he could have fathered not one but two creatures of the opposite sex, simultaneously. When they were still small, he would grasp one under each arm and pretend that they were sacks of coal that had to be delivered down a chute on the double bed. Whether he was bent over the accounts or writing up notes of someone critically ill, his bearing changed if either girl came into the room, as though nothing else now mattered. When you could produce this effect on someone by merely opening a door, it was hard not to love them.