'But not yet, please!' Dr Weiss held up his hand.
'Vienna is not a place one should choose to visit at present.'
'Are things still so bad?'
'Bad enough. Expressed in our currency, the modest fees I am receiving for these lectures will seem like a fortune.' The doctor smiled wryly. 'An illusory one.
They say soon it will take a suitcase of banknotes to buy a loaf of bread.'
'Oh, Franz!'
'Still, we learn through suffering — isn't that what the Greeks have taught us?' He became animated.
'Last winter we had to burn some of our furniture to keep warm. When patients came to the house I would wrap them in blankets and lay them out on the couch.
Professor Freud, as you may know, has developed a technique of free association in analysis,' he bent towards Madden again, 'but it's hard for a patient to concentrate on retrieving some memory from the past when all he is wondering is whether he can reach the end of the session without turning into an icicle!'
Helen Blackwell's laughter brought Madden the memory of a grassy bank and the sound of a blackbird's call.
'So here I am, earning a crust as they say.' He glanced about him. 'The Society feels it would be of benefit to introduce psychoanalysis to a wider public in Britain. Well and good, I say. Unfortunately, to most outsiders psychiatry equals Freud equals sex.' He looked droll. 'One has only to mention his name in front of a roomful of Englishmen and half a dozen of them turn red with embarrassment.'
A figure was hovering behind him. Dr Weiss looked round. 'Yes, of course — forgive me. I shall only be a moment longer.' He addressed Helen. 'I leave for Manchester tomorrow. Then Edinburgh. But I shall return to London in a week and I will get in touch with you. Perhaps we could have lunch together? Yes?'
'Of course, Franz. But you must come down to Highfield and see Father again.'
He took her hands and kissed them as before. He bowed to Madden — 'Inspector.' With a smile at them both, he turned and joined a group of men waiting behind him.
Helen took Madden's arm and they moved off down the aisle between the chairs.
'Are you one of those half-dozen, John Madden?'
'Certainly not.'
'Yes, I believe you're blushing.'
They went down the stairs and out into the soft evening light. The plane trees in the square were bowed under the weight of summer foliage. The air was warm and heavy with the dust of the city.
'Would you like to hear about Sophy? She started talking again a week ago. I spoke to Dr Mackay in Edinburgh. So far she hasn't mentioned that night, and when Dr Mackay asked her about it she went silent for another two days. It was a warning — "Keep off!" But she hasn't asked for her mother, and Dr Mackay thinks she knows and accepts that she won't see her again.'
He told her about the drawings. 'We believe the man who broke in was wearing a gas mask. I don't know if you've ever seen one. They're quite hideous. A child would have been terrified.'
They continued slowly around the square. She kept hold of his arm, walking close beside him, her body brushing against his.
'Would you like to have dinner?' he asked, unsure how to proceed. He didn't want her to think he was taking anything for granted.
'Yes, please. I haven't eaten all day.' She looked directly at him. 'Then could we go back to your place?
I'm staying with a girlfriend in Kensington. I'd like to take you there, but she's terribly strait-laced and I simply haven't the courage.'
She smiled into his eyes and he smiled back, his heart lifting. He found it hard to believe there was anything in the world for which she did not have the courage.
They sat across from each other in the restaurant.
Candlelight brought out the glint of gold in her hair.
She told him about her marriage.
'I met Guy when we were students, but he gave up medicine and decided to read law instead. He was still doing that when the war began. Each time he came home on leave it was harder. I had to try to remember why I'd married him, why I'd loved him. When he was killed, all I could think was that I'd failed him and now I'd never have a chance to make it right.'
Madden's wife had been a schoolteacher. They had been shy with each other, still strangers after two years of marriage. He had difficulty now recalling her features, or those of their baby daughter who had died at the age of six months, within days of her mother.
During the war he had come almost to forget them, as though their deaths had ceased to matter in the great slaughter going on around him. Later he had tried to recover his feelings, to mourn afresh, but they remained dim in his memory and he never spoke of them now.
Instead, he talked to her about the case. He told her about the murder of the farmer's wife at Bentham.
'We haven't put it out, but we think it was done by the same man. We don't understand his reasons for killing. We can't find a motive that makes sense.'
She wanted to know what had happened to him and Will Stackpole in the woods at Highfield. Lord Stratton had told them little about the ambush and she was shocked when she heard the details. 'You could have been killed, both of you. Was it terrifying, being trapped like that? Were you very afraid?'
'Not really. Not enough-' He stopped, conscious of what he had said. When he didn't go on, she asked, 'Was that how you felt in the war?'
He nodded. He found it hard to speak. 'Towards the end, yes. There seemed no point in being afraid any more. Either you survived or you didn't. But when I felt the same thing up in the woods, it was as though I'd never escaped from it — that feeling that nothing mattered any longer.'
She took his hand in hers.
The past two weeks had not been easy ones for Helen Blackwell. The problem of fitting an affair into her busy, tightly structured life had occupied her mind at length. But she had also found herself wondering whether she was wise, after all, to involve herself with a man so clearly suffering from inner torments.
Her wartime work had taught her much about the effects of prolonged exposure to trench warfare. Everywhere in the land there were men who woke each morning unable to control their trembling limbs and eyelids, who started at the sound of a door being slammed and dived for cover when a car backfired. She knew what mental efforts were required by those who remained active and in command of their lives.
Returning to London, she had not been surprised to feel a renewal of physical desire when they met. The mysterious bonds of sexual attraction drew her to this silent man. There was no wishing them away. What she was unprepared for was the sudden rush of tenderness that had filled her when she glanced over her shoulder and found his anxious, troubled eyes searching for hers.
Later, he took her to his rooms off the Bayswater Road. To rhe shame of peeling paint and stained wallpaper and the sour smell of rented furniture. Here was a truth he could not hide from her: that he had ceased to care how he lived. A photograph of his dead wife and child, standing on a side table, was all he had salvaged from his past. She asked him their names and he told her. Alice and Margaret. Margaret after his mother, who had died when he was a boy.
When he began to speak, to make some apology for the place he had brought her to, she stopped his lips with hers. 'Come.' She took his hand and led him into the bedroom.
At the sight of her naked body, white and gold and rose-tipped, he started to tremble, and when they lay down together he continued to shake helplessly. She held him in her strong arms, saying nothing, pressing his body to hers, her cheek to his. After a while she began to kiss him, first on his face and throat, then on his chest, her breath warm on his skin. His body was marked by wounds: one shaped like a star under his breastbone, the legacy of a bullet that had passed clean through him, somehow missing his heart, the other a jagged ridge of tissue on his hip from the same shrapnel blast that had torn his arm. Her lips moved freely over his scarred body, until he could bear it no longer. When he reached for her she was ready.