Yet in other ways she was like a young girl. She ate when she was hungry, apple tarts and roast chickens and litres of coffee. She might drink no wine for days, then a whole bottle at lunch. It was hard for her to hide it if she was bored, though she did her best, for the sake of his work. And when she wanted to make love to him, she made it clear that now would be a good time, Culebra Cut or no. She had a green hat that she wore with a long, pearl-headed pin. It made her look formidable when they went out into the town together, she like a governess, he like an overgrown charge who, if he behaved himself, would be granted liberties on their return.

Anton had had friends at school and at the university and found it easy to get on with people quite different from himself, like Maxwell or Emerald; with Friedrich he had a bond based on the way they laughed at their confessed inadequacies. But with Gerhard so much older and seldom at home and Friedrich going back to his own family after school then working elsewhere when they were older, he had never had the thrill of a confidante who was there all the time. It was only now he could see what he had been missing all these years – someone who understood his point, even before he made it, then might add a twist of her own.

His weaknesses – feelings he had never seen as weaknesses, merely aspects of the way he was, everyday irritants – seemed less shameful once they were admitted. He invented names to indulge her, as though she were a favourite child; he had never known before that he had a paternal bent. She appeared also to reawaken some impetuous aspect of him that he’d been forced, by the gloom of the papered-over windows of the Gymnasium, to shut away before its time. There seemed no end to the versions of himself that Delphine brought to life, and no need to settle on a particular one. Sometimes it was agreed that if they were going into town she might pretend to be a prudish friend of his mother’s whom he was obliged to show the sights – before inveigling home; at others she was a second cousin in her first summer after leaving school, abandoned by her parents for a weekend in his care.

It didn’t occur to Anton that he was laying himself open in a way he might come to regret, because the process felt both natural and predestined. He was aware that, for the time being at least, he no longer felt superfluous. In disclosure there was an intimacy that all his life up to this point had lacked; and in each new intimacy there were discoveries.

As the weather grew warmer, it seemed a pity to return to Vienna, so Anton extended the lease for the months of June and July. Once a week he took the train back to Vienna, delivered his copy to the magazine and did a round of other papers to see if there was anything on offer. The Panama Canal was due to open in August, and the first of his long articles ran in mid-June.