‘Did she now?’

‘Please don’t be bitter.’

Dry-eyed, Anton looked round the room, at the faded print of a woman in blue robes with a halo behind her head; at the wooden carving on the mantelpiece of a man with nails through his hands and thorns in his hair.

‘What chance did I stand?’ he said. ‘Against … this?’

Claudia Hartung said nothing.

‘And then what happened?’ said Anton. ‘She’s not still here, I presume. She did eventually go home?’

‘I’m sorry, Herr Heideck.’

‘Sorry about what?’

‘I’m sorry to tell you that she died here. In the November that the war ended. We lost six people to the influenza. All of us were ill. In a way we were fortunate not to lose more in a place like this, with people living so close to one another.’

There was the sound of a door opening down the corridor, and of many footsteps.

‘And where was her god then?’ said Anton. ‘In her hour of need?’

‘She is with Him now. That’s what matters.’

‘I loved her.’

Hartung stood up from the desk. ‘I am sorry, Herr Heideck. We all loved her. I believe she was touched by grace.’

Standing up, Anton said, ‘No god could love her as much as I did.’

‘You mustn’t believe that. You must not allow yourself to believe that. The love of God is without limits.’

‘She settled for a second best.’

‘We must go to—’

‘I had thought better of her.’

The next morning, Anton walked back into the village, looking for something to eat. He had not wanted to have dinner or breakfast in the religious house that had stolen Delphine. In the square, he found a café of sorts, where he drank coffee with rolls and apricot jam. As he was finishing, a clock struck nine. Leaving some coins on the table, he went out and walked in the direction of a church spire on a hill above the river.

There was a humpback bridge over the water, after which the road bent round to the right, leaving a track going left up to the church. It was built of white stone, weathered to a yellowish grey, with an open bell tower. A line of untended yews stood along a low wall, on which was a noticeboard giving the times of Mass. It was called St Ulrich’s. Anton walked up a gravelled path, between headstones, lichened and leaning out of the hillside.

By the door into the church, he stopped and looked down on the village in the crook of the river’s elbow. Delphine in her new religious life would have come to this church; she must have stood where he was standing now and looked down on the view. And at one such moment – while he was fighting in Galicia, for instance – was she thinking about the house in Baden? Or the Döbling apartment where he’d first found her playing the piano? He remembered the steamy little post office in Colón and the elation he’d felt when he came out of it, grasping a letter from her. Did her words have such an uplifting effect on the god she prayed to?