‘We all greatly admire your topographical writing, Herr Heideck. You’d have room to … spread your wings.’

‘Topographical? It’s only a train ride from Vienna. I went to the local town once before. A few years ago. It was … forlorn.’

‘It’s a blank canvas. We could carry up to eight thousand words.’

‘That’s a lot of—’

‘Or as little as five.’

The editor mentioned a fee, which was many times what the Neue Freie Presse paid and said that all travel and living expenses for a month would be covered. While trying to make it sound as though he was doing Anton a favour, he was obviously desperate to get the article commissioned, to tick it off his list.

Anton took his feet off the desk. ‘Leave me a number and I’ll let you know this afternoon.’

After lunch, he went for a walk in the Stadtpark. He ought really to be doing something more worthwhile, he thought for the hundredth time as he crossed the street. Another book, for instance. But when he thought of the endeavour of holding 100,000 words and half a million thoughts in his head for however long it would take … The spirit always seemed to fail him.

In the alleys of the Stadtpark, by the captive water, the mothers and governesses with their prams were ‘taking the air’; the old people had done whatever it was they had done with their lives: they had no purpose now, any more than the drunks who slept on the benches.

Anton sighed. Many of his friends from school and university had died on the Eastern Front. Sometimes he felt it was absurd to make a living from simply asking questions and writing down the answers in a lucid way. At other times he felt he was lucky to have something he could still do and, more than that, fortunate to be alive at all.

The train journey from Vienna gave him a chance to read a file of newspaper cuttings about the Schloss Seeblick, borrowed from the library of the magazine. The clinic seemed to be a place haunted by misfortune, from the professional failings and disagreements of its founders, to the suicide of the owner’s brother and the death of his young son, who had survived the Battle of Passchendaele, fighting on the Allied side, only to die in the Italian mountains at Asiago in 1918. Anton put down the folder on the empty seat beside him.

It was late in the afternoon when the track entered a deep wooded valley. So. ‘Topographical’, the editor had said … Very well: there were shepherds’ huts and wooden chalets with red geranium window boxes scattered between undistinguished towns on the river; there was a distant castle on a crag, giving the landscape a medieval air. The train idled at Kapfenberg while they changed engine driver; a few minutes later, when they had stopped for a moment in wooded country, he glimpsed a wild boar at the edge of the forest …