Also by Elizabeth Buchan

The New Mrs Clifton

I Can’t Begin to Tell You

Daughters

Separate Beds

The Second Wife

That Certain Age

The Good Wife

Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman

Secrets of the Heart

Perfect Love

Beatrix Potter: The Story of the Creator of Peter Rabbit

Against Her Nature

Consider the Lily

Light of the Moon

Daughters of the Storm

For Annie and Duncan

‘I gradually came to realize that
there were two kinds of freedom,
internal and external’

Ivan Klíma, My Crazy Century

Austria, 1986

A TWENTY-YEAR-OLD GIRL WITH A BANDAGED HAND waits on an Austrian station platform with a suitcase at her feet inside which is stuffed a rucksack but nothing else because it is only there for pretence.

The platform is grey and so badly maintained that plants scramble through the cracked asphalt. It is the same story on the track where the weeds sprout lustily between the sleepers.

Her eyes slot right and left, searching for a watcher. One of the grubby but sometimes desperate people who keep afloat by reporting on others. She is becoming an expert on those.

She strains to see into the distance. Small and isolated, the station is surrounded by woods. Ash and pine, and beautiful silver birches. Through a break in the trees, she sees a cluster of red roofs from the centre of which rises an onion-domed baroque church. So typical of Middle Europe, she thinks, the breath catching in her chest. Of free Europe.

A couple walks onto the platform. The woman is carrying an overnight bag and he a larger suitcase which he sets down. The woman is thin and dressed in a camel-coloured coat. He is stockier and wears an Alpine hat with a feather in the hatband. They are prosperous and smug, and she hates them on sight. They can park their bottoms on the train seats and sit in perfect tranquillity all the way to Vienna.

The girl swings around in the direction from where the train will arrive. To the north and east is the border between Communist Czechoslovakia and the Austria where she now waits. Even though the rail route was established in the Hapsburgs’ heyday and is well mapped, it is not going to be, and never would have been, a simple journey.

If the schedules run true to form (not something on which one counts in Czechoslovakia) the tank-like, grimy Soviet Bloc engine with its red star on the smokebox should be pulling into Gmünd, which is the exchange station for the engines and on the border between Czechoslovakia and Austria. Having made the same journey from Prague to Vienna a week earlier, she knows there is a special platform fenced off by a wall and barbed wire where the passport and custom control officials wait.