‘That’s good. I didn’t mean to suggest that—’

‘It was only recently I got good at it. Reading letters from … the young man.’

For some reason she had wanted to be honest with this woman and not to imply that she was better educated than she was. Not that Martha would really care, thought Lena, when she obviously had so many other things to deal with.

Part Three

1

One morning in the summer of 1933, as he was sitting in his apartment in Vienna, smoking a cigar and staring out of the window with his boots up on the desk, Anton received a telephone call from the editor of a magazine he privately despised.

‘I was wondering if I could interest you in writing for us. I saw a piece of yours in the Neue Freie Presse only a couple of weeks ago.’

‘I’m trying to do less journalism.’

‘I see,’ said the editor after a pause. ‘So what are your plans? Another book perhaps? It’s been a while since your last.’

‘My only.’

‘Can I tell you what my idea is?’

‘All right.’ Anton settled back in his chair. The magazine had a large circulation and presumably paid accordingly.

‘Have you heard of the Schloss Seeblick in Carinthia?’

‘The madhouse? Yes. I remember some scandal years ago. They moved to the top of a mountain, didn’t they?’

‘That’s right. But there were various … difficulties. Engineering problems with the cable car, I think. And then financial issues. The patients didn’t like being so high up.’

‘Didn’t someone commit suicide? Throw himself off?’

‘The superintendent’s brother. There were other difficulties. Lectures that misfired … Anyway. The point is this. They were offered a large sum by a hotel company for the Wilhelmskogel, the place on the mountain, and they used some of it to buy a new lease from the owners of their old sanatorium on the lake. It’s rather an intriguing place. Quite beautiful, I believe.’

‘It belonged to two Frenchmen, didn’t it?’

‘A Frenchman and an Englishman.’

‘Ah, yes. I remember.’ The whole thing had had the air of a fable: two ambitious young men come from abroad to set up their practice in the closing years of the last century, with little acknowledgement of the Viennese School or Dr Freud; then the move to a purpose-built sanatorium on a mountaintop, as though they had scaled the peaks of human knowledge: the hubris and the fall.

‘It’s their fortieth anniversary,’ the editor was saying. ‘Near enough anyway. We can fudge it. We’d like to mark the occasion with an article about the place. And the question of where psychological medicine stands today. There’s a feeling that as a country we’ve rather lost our pre-eminence. To America perhaps.’

‘I see.’ Anton was envisaging train rides and the frontier province looking down over Italy; the mountains in their summer covering. The guts of the thing would reveal themselves as he went along.