He had the sensation of being on a toboggan going down a hill, unstoppably, into the life and being of another. Was it too fast? He found himself smiling. There was no snow in summer, no hill and no sledge. But the sense of hurtling remained.

His top-floor room was hot, even in the small hours of the morning. When Delphine had said all she needed to say and he was making love to her, he remembered a drop of sweat he had seen on her forehead the first day when she was playing, because now her breasts were slippery as they rolled against his chest and a strand of hair stuck to her temple, from which he pushed it back with his finger.

A few days later, Anton returned to his home town in Styria for his father’s funeral. The whitewashed church was full and the coffin handles gleamed. He tried not to look at the box at the head of the nave or to imagine his father inside, because it raised too many questions about washing and fixing and decomposition. The congregation was there to mourn or mark the end of something abstract – a life – and the presence of the body, as matter-of-fact as one of the dead pigs delivered to the door of the sausage factory, seemed an intrusion.

His father when alive had never shown much affection towards Anton, behaving instead as a kind of route supervisor: infant school, Gymnasium, Bible study; social duties, politeness to your mother, the university if you must and, above all, respectability. Anton felt little more for him than he would towards a tram conductor who had pointed out the stops along the way. He cast his mind back to his youngest days and thought he could remember his father playing with him once in the garden of their house when Gerhard had been at school. And there had been a picnic, perhaps, on a hot day, a walk in a wood, when for a moment his father had thrown off his years and himself behaved like a child. It seemed in retrospect to have been an empty game, when the end was written all along: the dead weight on the rickety bier.

At times during the service, for instance when Gerhard was reading from the Bible, he had to force himself to concentrate. If he was not careful, he found himself in a Delphine reverie. It was not that he was picturing anything sacrilegious; it was only that he felt insulated from normal life, because he had discovered something more urgent. At the gathering afterwards in his parents’ house, several old people asked him if he would now come home to run the business. His life in Vienna and his work as a journalist appeared to them a self-indulgence that would last only until the start of the real work, in sausages. He slid out of these conversations, saying that he needed to help Gerhard pour the drinks.