‘There are friends. And occasionally someone asks me to the theatre, but it doesn’t seem to develop. I always have to rush back for Harriet. What about you?’

‘I never meet anyone here. At least, only patients and that’s obviously forbidden.’

‘Herr Heideck?’

‘I think I know too much about him,’ said Martha. ‘And he’s fixated on someone else. He wants to take responsibility for his actions, morally, but he feels they’re beyond his control. I think he fears being just a consciousness, a whirlpool of impersonal energy. A toy of history with no will of his own.’

‘Like the man in that book. By Musil, was it?’ said Charlotte. ‘But I think Lena likes him. I see her when she takes him his drink before dinner and he chats with her for a while. She can hardly tear herself away.’

‘Well, maybe he’ll turn his attention to her. Though he may be too damaged. Anyway, I imagine he’ll be going back to Vienna when we finish our sessions together.’

‘Aren’t your patients meant to fall in love with you? “Transference” or something?’

‘If they have, they do a good job of hiding it.’

‘Perhaps it’s your steel-rimmed specs.’

‘Silver, if you don’t mind.’

‘So are you going to stay a one-man girl? The dashing Maximilian, the one who got away?’

‘Oh, I don’t know about that. I’m open to whatever comes along. And it wasn’t just Max. There were others.’

‘Were there? Really?’

‘You don’t know everything about me, darling.’

‘Well, who then?’ said Charlotte.

‘That man from the Chelsea Arts Club.’

‘Not Tony Tucker!’

‘God no. A Hungarian. With lovely hands. I’m not sure you met him.’

‘And did you … sleep with him?’

‘Mind your own business! And then there was that young army officer. You did meet him.’

‘Philip Someone. Yes. He was beautiful, I admit. And that bedroomy voice.’

They were silent for a time, looking down towards the water.

‘You know what it reminds me of sometimes, here?’ said Charlotte. ‘That place in Cumberland where we were sent to escape the Spanish flu.’

‘God, I was furious. The only time I was ever cross with our parents, I think. It was not as though we were children. I’d started teaching by then.’

‘I know. And I had a job with that printing company.’

‘Those long empty days on the farm. Do you remember?’ said Martha. ‘Trying not to touch anything. Or breathe. I did read a lot, though. The lending library at Keswick.’

‘And that silence. I remember walking on the fells one day over Coniston, I think it was. There was no one else there and it was too high even for the birds. It was that funny weather, do you remember? Sunny but with cold air. I stopped by a rough cairn and listened. There was nothing. Less than nothing. It was like hearing the beginning of time.’

They got up from the bench and went down to the lake, where they continued to talk. Martha felt spinsterish in her provincial life, carrying on their father’s work; she tended to sound a racy note when talking to her sister, to show she wasn’t trapped. Charlotte felt guilty about the latitude she had in London and not sure she had made the right choices; she could never tell if Martha disapproved or envied her for being a mother. Eventually the common memories of girlhood on a mountaintop, the cableway down to school in the valley and the extended family of staff and patients, both sane and delusional, was enough to make differences evaporate. You wouldn’t need to be genetically identical, as Charlotte had once pointed out, to find a bond in such beginnings.