‘When are you going to retire? You and Daisy?’

‘We can’t all leave at once. We’ll go back to England. We’ve got a little house there, you know. It’s let out. Martha says we can’t go till we’ve got a new superintendent. That should be next year.’

‘And will you take Mary with you?’

‘Mary has a room in our house if she wants it. She knows that. But I think her home is here. She knows each cobble, every blade of grass. This is where her life began, you see.’

‘She could come to you for a holiday each year.’

‘It’s a long way for a blind lady to travel.’

‘Maybe I’d go with her.’

‘Well, we’d put you up, too. We’re not far from the sea. Lincolnshire, it’s called. It’s where Daisy grew up.’

‘I’ll look forward to it. I’d better get back to work now.’

In her room, she wrote: ‘Dear Rudolf, I will come to Vienna as I said, in two weeks from now.’

Then she began a second letter, to Anton. When she had finished, she put it in the envelope and wrote Anton’s address on the front. She would know when the moment came to send it.

3

Anton was surprised to receive an invitation from the Schloss Seeblick to its Christmas party in ten days’ time. ‘Do come – M.M.’ was scrawled across the bottom right-hand corner. He looked at Martha’s initials and wondered. It was hard to tell. Did she want him to come because she felt something for him? He had, after all, seen her weep into her handkerchief at the end of their last session. Or had she sent the same message across the bottom of dozens of cards?

It didn’t matter. The woman he loved was dead, having long ago decided not to see him again. He believed he had, over a period of years and using his own peculiar methods, inured himself against the pain of that loss. But now a visit to her place of exile had made him uncertain; an equanimity, a balance he believed was settled, had begun to look precarious.

Still, this was no reason to decline the invitation. He felt at home at the Schloss; he liked the people there; and in those spreading grounds he had come to understand something about himself. So, yes, he would be delighted to accept, he wrote. He also asked if he might stay in his old room for a couple of nights afterwards, paying his way, to make the journey worthwhile.

A week later, he was on the train. His suitcase on the rack above his head was packed with books, his new shirts and small gifts for Martha, Lena and Johanna. There was no one else in the compartment, so he took off his brown walking boots and put his feet up on the plush seat opposite, lighting a cigar. It had begun to snow in fat, settling flakes.

When the words in his book became hard to follow, he gazed out through the window. The roofs of the shepherds’ huts and wooden chalets were already white; the castle on its crag was almost lost in cloud with only the turret showing through, the topmast of a ship in fog. A flight of ducks was squawking low across the river as the train entered a tunnel with a bang of air.