Inside the house, Lena’s daily duties included arranging cut flowers in the vase on the circular table by the stairs. The display was now mostly winter foliage from the grounds, though a few hothouse blooms had been delivered from town. As she struggled to arrange them, she made up her mind. It was no use expecting Anton to remember. She had told him that she used to work in Vienna. She had stood close to him when she showed him her drawings by the lake and looked into his eyes; she had even leaned across in the hope that the scent of her skin might remind him.

The good thing was that since the episode in the clothes shop they had become friends, of a kind. He knew her name. He seemed to like her. And she had learned more about him. He didn’t seem to be the sort of man who would fake some indignation because, God bless him, he seemed to live differently from other men. He wouldn’t care about the rules and the conventional ways of doing things. Why else had he found himself in a candlelit room with a naked girl he’d never met before?

When his sessions with Martha came to an end and his article was finished, Anton would return to Vienna and she would never see him again. She would therefore need to find one more excuse to be alone with him and then she would simply dare to tell him – tell him that he had made love to her one evening by candlelight and coughed and moaned until she’d thought he might die there in her room. And that years later, hearing him try to be interested in the colour of some shirts in an old-fashioned outfitters, she had fallen so in love with him that she wanted to wrap him in her arms each night for the rest of his life.

In the same post that brought Lena the letter from Rudolf, there was one for Anton that had been forwarded from the offices of the Neue Freie Presse to his apartment in Vienna and thence, along with half a dozen others, to the Schloss by the caretaker of his building. Assuming it would be a question or correction from a reader, he put it in an inside jacket pocket, his usual place for things he couldn’t quite face, and went down for his final session with Martha.

‘Shall I sit here?’

‘Wherever feels comfortable.’

‘Perhaps today I’ll sit opposite you across the desk.’

‘That’s perfectly all right. Feel free.’

‘Is this where you ask the staff to sit when you’re telling them off?’

‘I don’t need to. Daisy does that. Or Hans.’

‘Does anything throw you, Fräulein?’

‘Oh, yes. Many things. But we’re not here to talk about me.’

‘Have you ever been married?’

‘Good heavens, no!’

‘Close to it?’

‘Not especially. What about you?’

‘I had thought I would when I was young. It was expected.’

‘But you were a rebel. Fleeing from the sausages, you told me.’