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that sweet serious way he had, as if he were addressing an adult to whom one had to be especially kind, that the massive church with its two monumental steeples had been built on the very spot where Emperor Franz Josef had survived an assassination attempt by a rebellious Hungarian. Bruno heard himself repeating this piece of information to his daughter in the same tone of voice then adding: ‘And this bit of park is named after a one-time neighbour of ours.’
    ‘Sigmund Freud Park.’ Amelia read the street sign with emphatic disbelief. ‘You never told me he was a neighbour.’
    ‘The blow on the head must have brought it back,’ Bruno offered with a touch of mischief.
    ‘Is that a suggestion that I take up beating you?’
    ‘Don’t think so.’
    ‘You’re strange, you know. You always used to encourage me to look into the past, to find out more.’
    ‘That was different. You were different. You were curious. You wanted to know. I already know too much. And all of it is bad.’
    Without realizing it, his voice had dropped to a murmur.
    ‘But I like bad. Especially big bad men. Maybe that’s your doing. So I should be told why. And I’m curious about you. Now that I’m old enough to see that you really did manage to be alive before I appeared on the scene.’ Her self-mockery teased him.
    They crossed the busy Wahringerstrasse, and Bruno let his feet lead them. This was home ground. His school wasn’t very far away. Had they already taught him the rudiments of English there? No, no. There was a tutor at home, and his mother would sit in on lessons because she too wanted to learn and as she said, her little
Schatzen
, her little treasure of a boy, couldn’t be allowed to be cleverer than her. Not yet, not yet. So they had repeated the names of objects together as an Englishman in a tweed jacket that sported strange brown patches on the sleeves had leaped about the room pointing with a ruler to everything that could bear a tap, including Bruno’s legs and arms.
    ‘My mother was a very pretty woman,’ Bruno said.
    ‘I wish you had photographs of her. And your father.’
    ‘So do I.’
    It was difficult to remember the faces of childhood. Perhaps one never did, not formally, as an image in the mind, though one recognized faces if they turned up. Remembering and recognizing were not identical functions, as all the experiments showed. What he remembered of his mother was a presence, a gracious turn of face or arm, cool fingers in his hair, a scent spiced with lemon and… No…no. He wouldn’t go any further.
    ‘It was different for you, Amelia, you know. You never knew your biological parents. And when the time came that you wanted to, it seemed right to encourage you.’
    Eve and he had agreed on that. Had agreed way back in the sixties when they had adopted the tiny mite who was to grow into the woman beside him. They had always told her, ever since she had begun to ask, what was effectively a child’s version of the truth. That she had been chosen. That her mommy, Eve, couldn’t have babies – she had left it too late, what with the death of her first husband in the war, then her medical training and work. Bruno had met her when she was already forty, six years older than he was, though she looked utterly girlish, a dark, slim, darting creature with curling black hair and red lips that burst into lavish smiles, sunlight after the storms of her cares. The miracle was she had chased him. Had eventually proposed in a matter of fact way, or he would never have thought of it.
    It wasn’t that he didn’t want to settle down. Or that he didn’t like women. There had, in the welter of circumstance, been perhaps too many. His desires seemed not so much unassuageable as somewhat random, unpredictable. Yet he had benefited from the kindness of women. And he had loved them in turn, passionately at times, best as he could at others. But somehow he had never settled. It wasn’t quite an inability to commit, as