‘Which is the best shop for men’s clothes?’ said Martha.

‘There are three in the same street,’ said Lena. ‘I don’t know which is the best. I could ask for advice at Herr Thaller’s.’

Martha left the van in the market square and they began to walk. Anton found himself a few paces behind the two women, his mind still on the experiences of Jacques in America. It was odd that Jacques, out in the wilderness of Wyoming, had himself had strong feelings of having lived before. But there was an important difference between being able to imagine, or project sympathetically into the experience of others, and the conviction that you had actually undergone something yourself. Anton wondered if people under extreme stress as Jacques had clearly been – alone, exiled and in professional disgrace – lost the boundaries of themselves because they had nothing to rub up or measure against, no one whose habitual response would remind them of how they normally behaved or spoke. Thus undefined, they could inhabit the experience of others to an abnormal or even unnatural degree. It was quite easy to see how this faculty, if that was the word for it, would have conferred advantages on its possessors at some early stages of evolution. It would have made them more intuitive than others, less limited by self. And that usefulness would have led to sexual success and the spreading of the trait, so that it became widespread. That was a vaguely plausible explanation, though it did nothing to rebut the conviction he and Jacques had shared – that this was no useful delusion, but a fact: that they had in some way lived before. The difficulty lay in the harmless little phrase ‘in some way’ …

Lost in these thoughts, Anton was distracted from the shopping expedition. When he looked up again from the pavement, he could see neither Martha nor Lena. He hurried along the street, looking into the windows of any shop that sold clothes. Something similar had often happened to him as a child when, unable to bear the tedium of his mother’s half-hour visit to the china shop, he had wandered off alone.

After ten minutes, it was clear that he had lost them. Perhaps they were waiting at the outfitter’s whose name Lena had mentioned earlier but which he had now forgotten.

He found himself near the bridge where he had stopped himself from following his obsession a few days earlier. Resigned to the fact that the purchase of new shirts would have to wait, he thought he could make his trip worthwhile by trying his luck at the house in the backstreet where he had seen Lena and Johanna call.

The door was opened by a tall, gaunt man in his sixties. Anton’s life as a journalist had made him good at interrupting people and explaining himself rapidly. Herr Gustav stood back to let him in.

A narrow hall gave onto a low-ceilinged room whose walls were entirely covered by books, both upright and sideways on bowing shelves. There were rugs on the tiled floor and a desk with a lamp where Herr Gustav had obviously been working. Anton sat in an old armchair until his host returned with a coffee pot and cups.