This aching for help existed alongside a conviction that she had by her impetuosity already lost Rudolf, the one who was meant to be her saviour.

At night, emboldened by the wine she drank in her room, she went into bars where there were singers and where men and women disappeared into back rooms. A young German offered her powder to sniff from a tabletop. She took him back to her own lodging, where she did as he instructed, stopping short of making love to him. He seemed pleased enough, and left some money. A friend of his, given her address, came and knocked on her door a few days later. She became known in a small circle as someone who was discreet and pleasant to be with, unlike the grasping line girls.

When she knew someone was coming, she washed and put on clean clothes. She prepared the room by placing candles at intervals around it and turning off the electric light. This made it seem romantic, she thought, and it helped preserve what modesty she had left, a diffidence about being seen.

One night she opened the door to a man with a thick moustache. He had clearly been drinking but was being careful to control himself. From the start, there was something in his manner that Lena warmed to. He had brought flowers and an envelope with money that he put on the chest of drawers before he took off his coat. He chatted about the effects of the war, the inflation that had taken hold in Austria but which now seemed to be over.

‘The street lights are dim, though,’ he said, taking off his jacket. He was wheezing a little from his climb to the top floor.

‘Are they?’

‘They’re still saving coal. They used to be brighter before the war.’

‘I’ve only been in Vienna … a short time.’

‘They’ll burn bright again one day. We all will.’

He smiled at her with dull eyes. His politeness seemed hard won, as though from a battle he was fighting with exhaustion. He sat on the bed.

‘I don’t want you to do anything that doesn’t feel right,’ he said, lifting his head as though it were a weight. ‘You’ll tell me if you don’t want to. Do you promise?’

He was older than the students who had visited, but younger than the grey-haired ones who came hoping to regain some lost excitement.

‘Will you take your clothes off?’ he said. ‘And put on these?’ He handed her some stockings and underwear he had taken from a leather bag. ‘And then this dress?’

He didn’t watch as she took off her clothes, though she would have liked him to. The dress was good quality, but not a new one; it was a foreign style, she thought, French perhaps, a few years old. It fitted her quite well. She smiled at him as she smoothed it down over her hips.

She pushed back her hair. ‘Now what?’