The news stopped Lena for a moment, but it didn’t make her feel less alone.

‘You don’t understand, Fräulein. I’ve been paid to do things. With men.’

‘Stand up, Lena.’

Lifting her head, Lena saw that Martha was holding her arms open to her. To feel the arms of someone else around her was a new experience. And the feeling of Martha’s cotton blouse on her cheek and the hard ridge of the collarbone beneath; a vague scent of lily of the valley; Martha’s shoulders and the spine between them so solid under her own hands; a sense of the other not as distinct or alien but as almost a part of herself as she was enfolded.

‘It’s all right, Lena. It’s all right.’ Martha repeated the words many times as she stroked Lena’s hair.

After a few minutes, and with some reluctance, Lena pulled her head away and took a step back.

‘Are you all right?’ said Martha.

‘No one has ever done that to me before,’ she said.

‘In all your life?’

Lena shook her head.

‘Dear God,’ said Martha. ‘No wonder.’

‘No wonder what?’

‘Everything.’

4

In the early evening, Anton made his way to the lake and sat on the jetty, smoking a cigar.

The idle days were going by slowly. He had finished his article, but had still not sent it to the magazine on the pretext that there was further research to do; the editor had accepted a delay. He had cut back much of what he had written about the Viennese School. It was clear to him that in any properly administered jurisdiction Dr Freud would have been struck off for misdiagnosing his early patients and discharging them ‘cured’ of an illness from which they were not suffering. His self-justifying logic, selective recourse to paradox, his plagiarism, opportunism and lack of scientific integrity were appalling. On the other hand, his later writings, the psychological ones, untainted by his obsession with ‘hysteria’ and tea-leaf dream reading, were not just well-written but persuasive. Anton could imagine that an understanding of them could help someone like Martha in her work.

What the magazine had asked for was an idea of ‘where psychological medicine stands today’. Had Austria lost its pre-eminence to America?

He kept the answer brief. To the delight of its European founders, New York had embraced psychoanalysis. Freud had been especially pleased that his teachings had been adopted by American Gentiles and not remained a Jewish concern, as he had feared. But it had gone further. In their enthusiasm, some credulous Americans had built the teachings into a sort of fundamentalist church in which the followers were obliged to swallow the whole canon, including the embarrassments, or risk being excommunicated from the faith. Freud, alas, had not demurred.

The problem came when his theories of dreams and infant desires had been co-opted by doctors treating people with inherited neurological conditions, where they could be of no help. They had in fact intensified the suffering of families by telling the mother that her son’s delusions were her fault – as though a father were to blame if his daughter developed Parkinson’s disease.