It was discovered, though Lena didn’t follow how, that Mary was good at massage, as if her hands could see the knots beneath the skin. In the early days, this had been an essential part of the treatment, and Mary had been fully employed for almost forty years, at which point her fingers had become too weak. Now she was kept in modest retirement, deferred to by Martha as a connection to a bygone era. Lena was shocked by the bare little room where she lived, but Mary told her she was happy there, so long as Hans or Joseph brought her coal. She had no idea how old she was, because, like Lena, she had no record of a birthday, but thought she must be seventy at least.

Although Mary was hard to understand, with a strong English accent, her stories made Lena laugh, especially those about Daisy, Frau Eckert. It was clear that Daisy had been besotted by Thomas Midwinter, her saviour – a feeling that had grown, according to Mary, into an adoration that only marrying Hans Eckert, the odd-job man, had stopped from driving her mad.

On her afternoons off, Lena would sometimes borrow a bicycle and go into town with Johanna. She introduced her to Herr Thaller, who was on the point of retiring and handing over the shop to his son. Once they saw Herr Gustav in the street, in his long overcoat with a parcel of books in his hand.

‘Any news from your father, Lena?’ he asked.

‘No … Nothing yet.’

‘Like Ulysses, still on his long wanderings? You must keep the suitors at bay.’

She smiled uncertainly and took Johanna’s arm. Although they walked down as far as St Theresa’s infant school, they never crossed the bridge or went near the wharf.

Lena wondered if she might see Rudolf – the young Rudolf with the broken leg. If she saw him here, on the street or on the steps of St Thomas’s, he might be himself again and they could forget what had happened in Vienna. A small paragraph in the newspaper said that the Rebirth party was in talks about a merger with the Social Democrats, so presumably Rudolf was too busy to come back to his home town.

In her time at the Schloss, Lena had at first pretended to herself that the Vienna interlude had been a dream and that she had arrived at the Schloss Seeblick straight from Herr Thaller’s shop. But the repetition of the routine and the sense that Martha was a reliable elder sister, available if needed, allowed her to feel less threatened and eventually to remember things in her own way.

It was not so terrible. According to a survey she had seen in a newspaper, three quarters of Austrian men had had their first experience of sex by paying for it; a few had done it with a maid or waitress and only a handful with a friend of the family or someone they would marry. The things she had done were natural and the men had paid for the pleasure voluntarily. She had enjoyed most of it. And Rudolf loved her, or so she had believed.