Anton looked into the far distance. ‘It was like nothing. An experience from a different life. The hard thing was coming out alive. Then trying to find a place for it in your head. To keep it apart and not let it flood you with its blood and poison into thinking all life before and after was meaningless and absurd.’

‘I understand.’

‘Do you really?’

‘I think so. From what you said.’

‘My sense of what life was about had so utterly changed. I saw that the idea of planning and a shape and providing for the future as though some order underlay everything – some providence – was ridiculous. And I didn’t want to rope anyone else into my aimless journey. Like asking someone to get into a car with you when there’s no steering wheel.’

Lena did not reply, but took out the second painting. ‘This is something I’ve been working at for a long time. I never get it right. It’s meant to be the Schloss seen from the middle of the lake. Like the first morning I was here, when it was all frozen. I felt I’d found not just a new place but a new world. And I was like Eve, the first person in it.’

Anton looked at the painting, which had been scratched in places with a knife and worked over. ‘That’s a difficult feeling to get into paint, I should think.’

‘More than difficult.’ Lena laughed. ‘For me anyway.’

Neither of them spoke for a time as they looked over the lake towards the scattered houses on the far side and the mountains behind them.

Anton felt an unusual serenity, though wasn’t sure if it was from the lake view or from what had been transacted in Martha’s consulting room.

The presence of Lena did not disturb him. He was coming to accept that she was not Delphine, at least not in any sense that could be made comprehensible. In some way (those words again, he thought) the two of them might be coterminous, or overlapping; they might be spiritually or physically one; but Lena was another woman, a second person, and in that individuality there was life and hope: her life and his hope. He looked closely at her face in the autumn light that reflected from the water.

She turned her head to meet his gaze, and smiled. ‘I have to go,’ she said. ‘I’ll get your whisky ready, Herr Heideck.’

The next morning, Anton found a blue envelope had been pushed under his door. It contained his weekly bill, which he opened at the desk. He calculated that it was costing him the same as a room at the Imperial. In addition, there were charges for laundry and wine and for a day in the hydro. The pre-dinner drinks were free. A list of optional extras ran in a column down the left-hand side of the page. Only one was circled: ‘Private Psychotherapeutic Treatment’; and this accounted for the largest part of the bill after accommodation.