When they finally arrived, he was met by an emissary from the sanatorium, who took his bag and, without speaking, threw it into the back of a motor van. He was shown to a room on the first floor of a building that overlooked a grass courtyard with a fountain. He wondered who had occupied it before him. There was a note on the table from Martha Midwinter, with whom he had already corresponded, inviting him to join her and others in the main house at half past seven.

Anton opened his case and hung up his clothes in the wardrobe. He had packed enough for a week and presumed that if he needed to stay longer they would at least do his laundry. In addition to the file of newspaper cuttings, he had some books by German and Austrian psychologists; a collection of essays on psychoanalysis that included contributions by one of the Seeblick’s founders, Jacques Rebière; and an English volume called Foundations of a Biological Psychiatry, with a long piece by Dr Thomas Midwinter entitled ‘The Worm in the Bud: Psychosis and the Price of Being Human’.

On top of these books he placed a framed photograph of Delphine, taken in the garden of the house in Baden, about a week before he had left for the Caillaux trial in Paris. It was not particularly flattering. She was wearing a straw hat and a cream dress with lace at the neck and cuffs. If you had known no better, you might have thought her a Salzburg choir mistress or a valued assistant to the chairman of a bank.

He had reconciled himself, he thought, to the fact that she was dead. Nothing else could explain her vanishing. Across Europe tens of thousands of civilians had disappeared into the soft margins of the slaughter. Jean Jaurès and Joseph Caillaux had been defeated in their attempt to persuade their countrymen that they needed no further test of their warrior mettle. And it was not only empires that had gone to dust; countries had ceased to exist and borders had been rubbed out. That was what history would record, he thought; and why should his life and Delphine’s not be part of such an implacable tide?

There were quite a few reasons, he believed. Because he could smell the particular scent of her neck and taste her skin on the tip of his tongue. Second, because he had a permanent ache caused by the loss of the core part of his being that had been removed. And because he thought that if he had not been misled into staying in Paris, putting ambition before love, he could have got home to Vienna in time to save her.

After washing in the basin in his room, he went along the corridor, downstairs, through the cloister and towards the main house, picking his way by the light of gas lamps along the walls. His shadow loomed and hurried on ahead, then shrank behind him as he turned. A stick came tapping down the colonnade from out of the darkness and an old blind woman went past him. ‘Good evening,’ she said, with a strange accent, leaving him to question how she knew he had been there. He had read that there were patients with severe delusional illness as well as nervous aristocrats and he wondered how securely they were housed, and whether some modern ideas meant he would shortly be dining with them.