Lena epitomised the frustrations he felt. He had recoiled from her in the little hotel room where she lived, but in the months and then the years that followed, he had thought often of her body and the way she’d offered it. He had come to believe that the warring parts of him, religious and material, could be unified in Lena. He could make amends; he could be redeemed. He could share his family’s good fortune with her. And there was something about the way she lived – not quite an understanding, more a natural way of going about things – that he wanted to draw on whenever he might feel the need of it.

Lena meanwhile did not regret having been so firm with Rudolf when he came to her room. By offering to sleep with him that one night in Vienna, she had hoped to help him; she had sensed a conflict in him they might solve together. She wished now that she had thought more about her own feelings and less about his. In her dismay during the days that followed, she wondered if his erotic feelings were really stirred by women. He seemed to enjoy the company of men much more, barely noticing the female hangers-on at Rebirth meetings, but throwing his arm round the shoulders of the men as they went off to smoke and drink in noisy bars … But no. Rudolf had not been deterred by the fact that she was female, but by her inexperience, her lack of beauty or nice manners. These things, Lena told herself, were enough to make any man think again. Brief couplings happened all the time in Vienna and meant nothing. Yet still she found it difficult to relinquish finally the hope that had sprung up on the first day she met him at the hospital.

A few days after Rudolf had returned to Vienna, Lena found herself sitting on the floating wooden platform in the middle of the lake, to which she had rowed out with Mary.

When she had settled Mary on a wooden seat, she began to make a sketch of the Schloss. The place had a sinister atmosphere at night, there was no doubt about that, and she for one was scared to go down the cloister on her own after bedtime. She was not frightened that one of the more unpredictable patients might accost her because the doors of the Emil Kraepelin building were barred at all times; it was more the suggestion of ghosts and shadows on the wall.

Yet in the morning, when Johanna came into the dining room in a clean white cap and Fräulein Midwinter appeared in the hall, it was a place of hope and order. How could she express these things in her drawing? With a face, you could show doubt in the eyes, but it was hard to imbue roofs and windows with a nameless fear.

‘Mary,’ she said, ‘tell me what it was like when you first came here. Were you scared?’