‘No. She’s a … She’s a young woman who works here. Who came not from Rouen but from a town in Carinthia. A rather unusual and strong-minded girl. I like her. But I know she is herself.’ He coughed again. ‘Yet there’s still something about her. Something that they share. And it doesn’t matter that I can’t completely understand it. I think we have to be content sometimes to be in uncertainties, in doubts – not to be irritable about it and reach out for certainty, but to accept and as far as possible luxuriate in the experience of not knowing.’

‘And you say you’re not romantic!’

Anton smiled. ‘I’ve not made love to a woman for – let me see, three years at least. And I don’t mind at all. I still think of skin and touch and scent a little, but I’m not tormented any more. It’s quite easy now. I can concentrate on work and other things of a higher – or by the logic we agreed – possibly a lower nature. Work.’

‘What about the company of someone? Are you never lonely?’

‘Sometimes. Not in this place. I’ve loved being here. But as I was saying the other day – to Lena, in fact – I couldn’t ask someone to join my life now because it would be like asking them to climb into a car with no steering wheel.’

Outside, from the hall, they could hear the sound of patients gathering before lunch.

‘And the last time you made love?’ said Martha. ‘When the cure worked?’

‘I remember it only dimly. There was no sense at the time that I had finally cauterised the wound, or reached a magic number. It was just that in the following days I felt well again, as though after a long illness or fever. As I was walking in the Belvedere Gardens, I made a resolution to stop my night-time visits and I never went back on it.’

‘And the woman in question?’

‘She … It was rather dark in her room. It was on a top floor, I remember. Of a hotel, perhaps, though I don’t think she could have afforded a hotel room, so perhaps I’m wrong about that. But I seem to remember a number on the door. On a little china lozenge. The room was lit by candles, as though she didn’t want to be seen too clearly. Perhaps she was modest or quite new to it. She was happy to dress as Delphine, as I recall. Even in her hat. She seemed to enjoy the game. And to enjoy making love as well. I left her some more money. She said I could come back. “You wouldn’t have to pay,” she said. But I knew I shouldn’t. There was no need. And I would only have hurt her.’

5

When Anton had closed the door behind him, Martha turned her chair to look out of the window. This Delphine was clearly an estimable person, with her grasp of languages, her piano playing and her confidence to live in the way she chose – a cottage in Baden, rooms in town … It made a striking picture. But how had she acquired such confidence? Something in the way that Anton spoke about her made Martha wonder if he himself had fully known or understood this woman, the object of his passion.