‘Nice,’ the man said.

‘It’s good,’ said the woman, ‘but it’s not great.’

She went on her way and the man followed her, so Norah was able to have a better look at the painting. She had to get very close indeed to see that this piece of reality, plucked out of the world like a ripe fruit, was made up of paint on canvas and not waves and spray and night air. If the other visitors hadn’t kept distracting her with their conversations, she felt that it might have soaked her to the skin and tumbled her ashore with seaweed in her hair.

‘Did you know that Valeska boycotts her own private viewings on principle?’ said a young man behind her. She pricked up her ears; Valeska was the name of the artist.

‘I know,’ a woman replied. ‘Incredibly pretentious. Really, of course, she’s the biggest attention whore of them all. Jerome says she’s impossible to work with.’

They spoke like actors, as if they weren’t talking to each other, but in order to display their knowledge of the artworld to as many people as possible.

‘Oh my God,’ the man said. ‘I can believe it. Although Jerome isn’t in my good books just now. He took me to see a performance of that ridiculous Belgian woman last week.’

‘Bride de Jong? Isn’t she Dutch?’

‘Who gives a fuck? The point is, she does performance art that was out of date in the seventies.’

Norah moved away from the picture to get a better look at the pair of them.

He was tall and rangy in skinny jeans, an apricot-coloured T-shirt, a striped blazer and horn-rimmed glasses, while she wore slacks with braces over a shirt and had hair dyed a matt pale grey.

They drifted away from the picture towards the waiter with the champagne glasses.

‘Are you going to Big B’s private view?’ Horn-rims asked.

‘Oh my God,’ the woman shrieked. ‘Are you kidding? Of course!’

‘I thought maybe action art wasn’t really your thing…’

‘That’s hardly relevant. Compared with him, Nitsch is a nobody.’

Norah suddenly didn’t feel like looking at paintings any more. Where was the cloakroom? She scanned the room, looking for the gallerist who had taken her coat and then stopped in stunned shock when she saw the last picture of the exhibition. It was another oil—white and every shade of blue beneath a strip of black. Norah shuddered.

A frozen lake under a starry night sky.

24

After the private viewing, Norah knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep, so she set off towards the thirty-euro address which was supposedly Dorotea Lechner’s, wondering whether the money wouldn’t have been better invested in cigarettes or a few drinks.

The city was surprisingly quiet. There was no one in Norah’s carriage except a stubbornly silent couple of about sixty and a group of young men talking to each other in a language Norah couldn’t understand. The train stopped and spat her out and she paused to get her bearings. No one had got out with her; she was alone in an area where—apart from the station—there didn’t seem to be a great deal. A high-rise block was visible in the distance and the water of the canal glistened beneath the steps leading down from the station. Norah had never been to this part of Vienna before. She opened Google Maps, entered the address she’d been given and followed the instructions on her phone. Asphalt, darkness, dirt and emptiness—only the fluorescent light of the station flickering behind her. Ahead, the extinguished neon sign of a discount store and, in the distance, houses strung out along the water.