‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think it would be rather nice.’

To her relief, Martha only smiled. ‘You could be right, Lena. You might well be. But please try not to find out. Not until he’s written his article anyway.’

There was a knock at the door and Johanna came in to take away the tea things. She looked from Lena to Martha and back to Lena. ‘Well,’ she said, putting a cup on the tray, ‘is someone going to let me in on the joke?’

Allowed two hours off before she was needed at dinner, Lena went up to her room with a copy of the newspaper. She forced herself to read the news, and the comments on it. ‘Vienna is a socialist island,’ a columnist wrote, ‘where Jewish atheists are in control. The working classes, voting for the first time ten years ago, procured themselves a standard of living higher than that in any other capital in Europe. Nothing better sums this up than the construction of the huge public housing estate, the Karl-Marx-Hof, one of a series of worker fortresses around the city.

‘But all around this little red island is a great black ocean of rural Catholicism, where the people are poor and pious and tired of the privileges and pretensions of their big-headed capital. Traditional Austrians are prepared to make the best of their country’s defeat in the War and of their empire’s dissolution; but their patience with the self-important Viennese and their free medicines is not endless.’

Lena wished she had been aware of these entitlements. The city might have provided some ointment for the eczema brought on by the hospital laundry at home. She was not sure about this German, Karl Marx. She knew his work had inspired a revolution in Russia, her country’s former enemy, but didn’t know if it was considered successful, or if she wanted it to be. A part of her was drawn to the thought of pious farmworkers. Weren’t they the soul of Carinthia? And what would Rudolf say? He was on the side of the Social Democrats and their low rents and free baby clothes, but he also wanted what he called a ‘spiritual renewal’. Wouldn’t that align him more with the shepherd and his family going to the village church on Sunday?

She put down the paper, washed her face and hands in the enamel bowl and changed from her day uniform into the dress she wore for waitress duties in the evening. She pinned back her hair, making it as tidy as she could, checking in the small mirror she had bought from her wages and wedged on the shelf above the chest. She often thought of her mother at this moment; it was the time of day when Carina would decide whether to stay at home with her schnapps or vanish without explanation into the night.

Entering the main house through the servants’ area, Lena found herself in the hall, where drinks were already being served.