‘I’m so tired of being young,’ said Friedrich. ‘No one takes me seriously. I’m going to grow a beard and a large belly.’

‘That’s your fault for working in the ministry.’

‘In my department no one gets his own office till he’s fifty. But don’t tell me it’s not a problem for you, too.’

‘The only two editors who give me any work have no idea how old I am,’ said Anton. ‘I put on a grave voice on the telephone. I make my prose sound like an old man’s.’

‘What about your tutoring?’

‘Erich’s father was reluctant to hire me at first. But I was very cheap. Rich people like a bargain.’

As the waiter brought beer and schnitzel, they agreed that their upbringing had not prepared them for life in the city. Childhood had been enjoyable if dull; then the Gymnasium had crushed them. And while they had laboured in the schoolroom the only virtue praised by their parents at home was ‘solidity’ – a compound, it seemed, of age and decorum. They wondered what they were meant to do with the next two decades, how they were supposed to spend their reserves of energy and humour until society was ready for them.

Friedrich had decided to live a double life. Having studied law, he had not alienated his parents; three years after graduation, he still received an allowance from his father, on top of his salary. He had somehow got to know the sort of people he had been warned against – actresses and painters’ models. Anton wanted to tell Friedrich about the French ‘companion’ he had met that day, but what was there to say? A pianist who seemed original yet familiar … Someone he had asked to a concert he couldn’t afford … It was hardly the sort of drama to detain his old friend.

When Anton was a child, neither his mother nor his father, nor for that matter Gerhard, had ever spoken to him about sex. At the Gymnasium there had been a lecture that explained how amphibians reproduced. There were some suggestions in the Bible – including the story of Potiphar’s wife, which had made him feel sympathy for Joseph, the object of her advances. At the age of sixteen, when he and Friedrich were on their way home from school one afternoon, they were stopped by a man in the park who offered to sell them postcards of naked women with ankle boots and body hair so abundant he thought they must be from a circus.

Anton concluded that something powerful was being withheld from him and his friends. It still felt unresolved when he arrived in Vienna, where women flaunted themselves on the street. At first he wasn’t sure what they were offering; but something in their manner, cooing yet hard, soon made it clear. He discovered they were known as ‘line girls’ because of an agreement with the police that they would stay close to the buildings, behind an imaginary line drawn down the pavement. They were found not only near old plague pits and cemeteries, but in the best streets off the Ringstrasse. Anton was once tempted enough to fall into conversation with a girl, but only because she looked so forlorn. She quickly made it clear that she could look after herself.