She had enjoyed herself in the Café Mahler more than on her first visit and urged Martha to drive them both home afterwards. ‘Now I know which are the good men’s shops, I can just give him their names,’ she said. They had almost reached the van in the market square when Martha, seeing Anton, put her hand on Lena’s arm.

So they had retraced their steps, past the brewery where Herr Thaller had gone for his lunch every day, past the famous confectionery shop, through the courtyard of an old building and into the narrow street where the recommended men’s outfitters stood almost next door to one another.

Lena hung back as far as she could. Yet her fear of being recognised and denounced by Anton was balanced by a passionate new wish: to be known. It was only when Mary had been unable to say which of the visitors to the Schloss was the one whose tone altered when he spoke to her that Lena understood the power of her desire – beyond any doubt and whatever it might cost her: that the man with the changing voice should not be the handsome one who had loved her and then made a mess of showing it. No, not the one who was now trying to lure her back to his apartment in Vienna and who was the right age for her – not him. It must be, it had to be, the older one with the cough and the unruly moustache who seemed not to recognise her, though he had once tasted each part of her body as though it were the sacrament.

‘Let us know if you need any advice,’ Martha was saying to Anton, ‘otherwise we can just wait here in the women’s section while you make your choices.’

Presumably, Lena thought, he was, in addition to shirts, buying what was known in the laundry as ‘linen’. Thinking of it, she had no recollection of what he had worn beneath his shirt that night; she remembered only the white scar on his back – and his gasps as the air was torn out of his wasted lung. It had been as though in those moments his life depended on her: on her alone of all people, on her – whom no one else had noticed. And she remembered, too, the fatigue that made it hard for him even to raise his head when he had sat on the edge of the bed afterwards.

Until that instant in the draper’s, her life had been little more than a war with need: keeping herself alive while relying on the whim of others – those others who, since the days of Lukas and Emma at school, she had distrusted. And more than distrusted because she had had the childish, but persistent, suspicion that other people were not real in the inescapable way that she was, that their battles to survive were not as pressing as her own.

As a result, her innate compassion had had no outlet, any more than her affection; it had instead built up inside her for almost a quarter of a century. But now, hearing Anton’s voice from the other room, polite yet weary, disengaged from what he was doing, she felt the swelling of an unstoppable emotion.