In preparation for his visit, he had read the early case histories of these girls with their aches and tics and stammerings and had been thrilled by the detective stories they contained. The patients were possessed of this invisible, protean malady called hysteria which could co-opt parts of the body to represent past emotion, as in a puppet play or charade. Sometimes the symbolism was direct, as when a pain in the finger stood for too much masturbation while fantasising the attentions of a forbidden lover. Sometimes hysteria came cloaked in paradox, presenting as its opposite. Only the magus could say for sure if a dreamed wolf on a branch represented the act of sexual congress or its pathological absence.

His enjoyment of the tales was as great as his relish of the Sherlock Holmes stories that Maxwell had lent him in Panama. In both, the great detective had to unriddle how the bizarre symptoms of a body in the library of a house in Esher had their origins in a steamy part of the tropical subconscious, or British Empire. And with the hysterical Viennese girls there was the happy ending of a cure, with no one dead.

Freud, in an unusually modest moment, had described himself as less a man of science than a short-story writer. What Anton hoped to do in his time at the Schloss Seeblick was to answer the question Martha had hinted at: why ‘some doctors have tried to apply methods from one discipline to another’. Or, to put it more robustly for his magazine readers, why some doctors thought the permanently self-verifying basis of Freud’s short stories could be used in the treatment of people whose brains had inherited defects. What on earth could have possessed them to believe that?

2

Like her mother before her, Lena had decided to be normal. By the time Anton arrived at the Schloss, she had been there almost three years and had found a rhythm in life that she had never known before. She remained nervous when she spoke to Martha, who was thirty-six now but still had the mixture of authority and youth that had daunted Lena on the day they met. She had secured herself in Lena’s affections when, the previous autumn, she told her she must take a proper holiday.

‘A week in the summer and the odd half-day is not enough. You must get away completely,’ said Martha.

‘All right,’ said Lena. ‘I’ll go to Trieste.’

She set out from the same station as she had with Carina, on what she thought could well be the same train. If Stefan would not answer the letters she still occasionally sent him, he would have to acknowledge her in the flesh.

She looked at the farmland through the window, remembering her first sight of cows and horses. It had become clear from the few details Carina let slip that she had not actually got into a passenger coach after drinking herself to a standstill but had climbed onto a goods wagon to sleep it off, which explained why no ticket inspector had woken her before they arrived in Italy. Carina had at once gone into a bar, where else, and it was there she had met Stefan.