After her first Friday, Rudolf was waiting for her outside.

‘I’m taking you to dinner,’ he said.

‘I have to get back to my mother.’

‘I won’t keep you long. I promise. Just this once. What do you like to eat?’

‘Cakes. And fruit.’

‘Which fruit?’

‘Blackcurrants are my favourite.’

‘What about the first course?

‘Schnitzel. Spinach.’

‘Do you like wine?’

‘I’ve never had it.’

‘All right. I know the place to go. It’s five minutes’ walk.’ He took her arm. ‘Come on. I’ll explain to your mother. I’ll walk you home afterwards.’

Lena found she liked wine.

‘Don’t drink any more,’ said Rudolf. ‘It might give you a headache.’

‘I like the taste. And it makes me feel … blurred.’

The restaurant was full of noisy students. It seemed to Lena that each table was in a competition to be seen to be enjoying themselves more than the others, by talking louder.

She felt Rudolf’s eye on her, and collected herself. ‘When will you go back to Vienna?’ she said.

‘I’m staying here for a time, working for my father’s firm. I’ll soon complete my training.’

‘I’d like to go to Vienna one day.’

‘I could see if I can find you a job there. If you like.’

‘That’s very kind of you. But my mother … Maybe when she’s better.’

Rudolf took her out to dinner every Friday after the art class and began to talk to her about politics.

‘You’re grown up now, Lena,’ he said. ‘You should know about these things.’

Lena, who was starting to feel more confident with him, said, ‘Why?’

‘Because you’ll have a vote soon. And for the world to get better everyone alive must play a part. You can’t live a life of isolation.’

He explained how Austria had lost half its young men dead or wounded in the war. And the world’s greatest empire, Austria-Hungary … gone to dust, like Carthage or Rome. Now was the time for the people of the factories and the farms to have their say. They had given their young men to the slaughter; they were owed something in return.

Lena was distracted by the flush of his cheeks and the light in his eyes, which at one point seemed to fill with tears.

‘The group I belong to,’ he said, ‘has socialist principles. But the difference is, we have a spiritual belief as well. We believe in a god, very like the Christian god you know from school. The New Testament.’

‘Jesus. Yes. And his apostles.’

‘I also believe there is a universal economy of good and evil, so that what you mete out in one life will return to your ledger in the next.’

‘I see,’ said Lena.

‘Think of a great lake that’s drained and refilled over many years. The water evaporates and the rain falls, but the level of the lake remains the same.’

‘I see. Though the river we live near is sometimes in flood and sometimes it’s so low that a man stands in the bow with a long stick shouting out to the pilot behind him.’