Martha wondered what it was like to be desired so intensely. Would it colour your idea of yourself, make you puffed up and vain? Would it make you self-conscious – anxious that you might lose this power, not knowing how you’d acquired it in the first place … Did you need to cultivate the aspects of your appearance that he worshipped? And suppose it wasn’t something that stayed the same, not a breast or a knee, but something that changed, like a look in the eye, a band of glimpsed silk or a trick of the light? Would you after a time consider such fierce desire to be a quirk – the sickness of a singular man? And then what would it be worth? And what price your hold over him?

Taking up her pad, Martha flipped back through the notes of earlier sessions. She still hadn’t questioned Anton about his religion. She was inclined to believe that what didn’t arise spontaneously could be left to one side; the only exception was that she liked to leave something half-finished, a loose stitch, in the hope that it might develop in the patient’s mind and be picked up at the next session.

She had not been able to do that today because time had run out; though when she looked back she saw that Anton had perhaps done the job himself. The last thing he had said was something like: ‘She said I could come back and I wouldn’t even have to pay. But I knew there was no need and I knew it would only hurt her if I did.’ Here was a woman with whom he had at once established an erotic connection and who had clearly liked him very much; so why had he assumed that if he went back he would end up inflicting pain on her? It seemed to be against the idea of male vanity as she had understood it: to be the lover so adept that a line girl would let him do it free … surely that was the result that most men dreamed of. And even if his ego wasn’t touched, how could he resist the bargain?

She smiled. These were the moments of her work that she enjoyed the most: when a flash of humour for a moment lit up the seized paradoxes of the mind. She was still smiling when she arrived at the sideboard in the dining room and helped herself to some of Frau Eberl’s goulash. She was late for lunch, where most people were coming to the end of their main course. Some had finished second breakfast only an hour or so earlier; and that in itself was no snack, but a sideboard of ham, with dishes of sweetbreads as well as cheeses, pumpernickel, blackcurrant jam, oatmeal porridge and thick yoghurt with silver pots of tea or coffee and bottles of stout or Madeira to drink. Feeding people seemed an easy way of giving them value for money. Offal, oats and butter were cheap to buy from local farms; it was only Frau Eberl’s skill that cost a little, and she in return worked long hours, driving on her young assistants with obscene rebukes delivered in the local dialect, which she wrongly assumed Martha wouldn’t understand.