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have walked to Budapest, wringing my hands, and no one would have turned his head.
    ‘You should get help,’ Alice said to me when she found me once curled up in a darkened room. ‘There are so many doctors who understand these things. Vienna is full of them.’
    That’s true but I don’t want any help. My attacks are not mysterious or causeless afflictions like Job’s boils. I deserve them. They are entirely just.
    I was born in the Wachau, in the shadow – or rather in the sunshine of the rococo monastery of Leek. Glorious Leek with its famous library, its green and gilt and strawberry pink church, its serene arcaded courtyards; its devout and scholarly monks.
    My Leek though was different. A small cluster of ochre houses shaded by linden trees; little gardens in front, a hayfield behind. The people who lived there were servants of the monastery: the groundsmen and masons and gravediggers whose wives and daughters, when the monks had visitors, were called up to polish the inlaid floors or work in the kitchens.
    It was a stable community and a contented one. My father was a master carpenter: the monks thought highly of him; he earned good money and my mother could stay at home and tend the garden and the goats and hens. We had a trellis on the front of the house with apricots and peaches, then came the little garden: zinnias and sunflowers grew in ours, and raspberries and neat vegetables in careful rows. The garden ended in a green kept grazed and springy by the geese, with a small stream crossed by wooden planks – and when you looked up there was the splendid, curling, glittering building like a magic mountain built for God.
    My father was stern, fair; very much a man concerned with his work and the work of other men up at the abbey. But my mother…!
    My mother believed in God and I believed in my mother. She was fat and fair and smelled of beeswax and vanilla, and she was the only person I can remember who thought it was absolutely all right to be happy.
    ‘There now, look at that!’ she would say of the speckles on a bird’s egg, the splendid swirling pattern made by the apricot jam as we poured it over the nuts and breadcrumbs to make our strudels. When she washed my hair, rubbing egg yolk into the scalp and drying it off” in the sun, she would brush the tendrils round my fingers so that I could feel the spring in the curls and tell me how lucky she was to have such a pretty daughter and that I would certainly grow up to be good because being pretty and good went hand in hand.
    (Up at the monastery an old lay brother who worked in the library told me once about Sappho who long ago lived on the island of Lesbos in a valley filled with hyacinths and roses, and made up songs. She had a daughter, Kleis, with hair as yellow as torchlight.
    I wouldn’t change her for all the gold in Lydia
, Sappho wrote about her, and she tried to find her an embroidered head band from Sardis, and chided her when she felt sad. He was an innocent monk and I was an innocent child and it seemed to me that he was describing my mother and myself. And also -I promise there is no hindsight here - that he was describing the daughter that I would one day have and love in just this way.)
    Well, I had a long time really. Almost twelve years of baking bread and picking fruit and sewing by lamplight. And of laughing – goodness how we laughed at our idiotic jokes, my mother and I.
    She died suddenly of a stroke. I came in from school and the doctor was there and she was dead.
    It sounds strange but after the first months of shattering grief I managed quite well. She’d endowed me so richly, you see. I knew how to cook and bake and care for the animals; the monks sent gifts, I was proud to look after my father.
    Then Aunt Lina came from Geneva to look after us.
    She was my father’s half-sister and she was a Calvinist. I’ve met people of the same faith since and many of them were gentle and kind, but she was a fanatic. My mother lived