For Anton, any talk of ‘molecules’ brought back the smell of sulphur in the school laboratory, where he had always been distracted by Friedrich’s muttered jokes; later, in the lecture hall, he had failed to distinguish himself in end-of-term papers.

‘And that was a personal point of difference between the founding fathers of this clinic, wasn’t it?’ he asked, moving on to territory where he felt more secure.

‘I was only a child at the time, but I know my father and my uncle did take different views, yes. To some extent it’s a matter of temperament, I think, not just of intellectual approach. If you take the view that the most serious anguish is caused by the malfunction of particles we can’t see or understand, then as a doctor you’re resigning yourself to a life of … of offering consolation at best. But if you tend to think that a mystery can be unfolded … I mean, think of germ theory and how much progress we made there … Then that search, that way of life, is likely to be more … uplifting.’

‘A cure for cancer.’

‘One day. Why not?’

Anton put down his pen. ‘I suppose you have quite a large archive here?’

‘Yes, we have all the papers from the beginning of the clinic. Which, as you know, started life in this building. But everything came back safely from the Wilhelmskogel, I think.’

‘Would I be able to see it?’

‘Of course. It’s in an old room upstairs. I’m not sure how well organised it is.’

Anton stood up. ‘Perhaps in return I can leave it tidier than I find it.’

‘Then we should have to pay you. And that wouldn’t do.’

It always surprised Anton how trusting people were of him when, as a journalist, he asked them questions or favours. Martha had given him permission to talk to anyone at the clinic and to go into the archive unsupervised. As for herself, she seemed quite open in her views, not obedient to any dogma, and willing to let him have as much time as he wanted. She was a child of the Schloss, the daughter of a patient and a founder, but showed little sense of protectiveness, let alone secrecy. Perhaps parts of her youth had been spent in England or France, so her attachment was not continuous. She certainly seemed broad-minded, and he might ask her how she had managed to reach a state of equanimity that one would normally associate with someone older. She also made little of having met one of Freud’s early patients, though he was fairly sure that Bertha Pappenheim was the real name of a subject of the most famous, or notorious, case study – that of Anna O, whose ‘cure’ was the cornerstone of the new treatment. The A for Anna came before B for Bertha in the alphabet, and O before P for Pappenheim – and by Freudian reasoning such a simple camouflage could only have been used by the doctors because they unconsciously ‘wanted’ their code to be uncovered and the identity of their patient to be revealed.