If there had to be bloodshed, he would have wanted it to be in a fight against the German Nazi party; failing that, against the British or French empires. Instead, he would be throwing bricks at fellow Austrians. He would tussle with anti-Semitic thugs, though he was not himself Jewish; his blood would be spilled on a factory floor by a Heimwehr volunteer. Even the Great War – in which a million of his compatriots had died in the name of curbing Bosnian separatism, or whatever pretext they had finally agreed on – seemed noble by comparison.

And maybe he would die. In an electricity substation on the far side of the Danube. He would lie unidentified for weeks in a mortuary and would be remembered only as one of ‘a number of anti-government protesters’.

He took a piece of paper and wrote a letter to Lena at the Schloss Seeblick.

When Martha handed her the envelope, Lena didn’t open it at once. She recognised Rudolf’s handwriting and knew that he’d be trying to persuade her to join him. She felt his words ought to be less effective on paper, without the urging of his voice and his bright eyes; but she feared they might be even more compelling, like the sums on Herr Kaufmann’s old blackboard: ‘facts’ she didn’t really understand, so couldn’t contradict.

It was Wednesday, one of the days she liked, when her afternoons were spent in the kitchen garden with Young Joseph. She cut cabbages and cauliflowers, dug up beetroot and carried in baskets of stored apples for Frau Eberl’s speciality, which she called Apple Frost and which no one was allowed to see her make. Egg whites and cream were beaten, apples stewed with cinnamon, lemon peel and a secret liqueur before everything was folded in and made sparkling cold in cut glass. The staff were allowed to eat what was left over.

Working outside, pushing the apple baskets on a barrow to the scullery door, where Norbert was waiting to unload them, Lena was thinking all the time about Anton. Although she was still exhilarated, she had begun to feel anxious. She didn’t like the speed with which, when Martha’s name came up, Anton had called her ‘remarkable’. True, he hadn’t actually said, ‘She’s beautiful’ or ‘I love her’, but he might at least have hesitated.

Naturally, she had no chance of competing with Martha, who was the right age for Anton and a thousand times more educated and more in tune with his world. But was Martha also the kind of woman that men fell for? She was slim and well dressed, but maybe men liked women to be plumper. And did they even notice clothes? Anton seemed not to care about his own at all. Martha had ears like pretty seashells and lots of earrings in different shades to show them off. Would that count? Her hair seemed a lovely colour to Lena, but maybe men preferred a darker shade, like those of the American actresses she’d seen in the cinema.