The less she understood, the more she felt drawn in. To prevent herself from going, she had to find Anton at once and tell him who she was. And who he was.

She knew he usually walked in the gardens after lunch and often went down towards the lake. She could ask Johanna to cover for her while she went to speak to him. She’d take a picture with her, something to start the conversation. A sketch of him, perhaps. It was feeble, it was sad, he had seen her wretched drawings before, but in this emergency it was the best she could manage.

After his session with Martha, Anton had slept late and almost missed breakfast, though it would hardly have mattered since second breakfast started only an hour later. As it was, he was in time to take his coffee and his newspaper to a table in the window while Johanna brought him a boiled egg.

Much of the paper was still concerned with Germany’s withdrawal from the League of Nations after Herr Hitler had complained about the humiliating demands made of his country. Feeling in his jacket for a notebook to jot down a politician’s comment he wanted to remember, he came across the letter forwarded from the Neue Freie Presse.

This was still not the moment to find his accuracy questioned by a pedant or his good faith called into doubt, he thought. He’d read it when he had nothing else to read or to detain him.

The effect of the previous day’s appointment with Martha was not immediate. There was no catharsis. There were not even tears for him as there had been for her. He had spent the afternoon reading and planning his return to Vienna; it was his intention to take his finished article with him and hand it over in person because he had no carbon paper at the Schloss and he didn’t want to risk the post.

Walking in the garden after lunch, he was aware of a buoyancy, a sense that his ship was ready to set sail. How strange it was, he thought, that you noticed how tightly you had been tethered only when you started to be free.

He strode through the birch trees and made for a bench that overlooked the lake. Birds were singing in the air above him and a small steamer was going over the water, perhaps the last pleasure boat before the snow came.

It was tempting to risk the post with his article and book into the Schloss Seeblick until the new year. For as long as he could remember, he had not felt so at one with the natural world. He was even breathing more easily.

From inside his jacket, he took the letter and made up his mind not to be irritated by it.