‘A milkmaid with the eyes of Nefertiti,’ said an eminent Egyptologist who came to dinner.

She adored talking, she needed to know everything; she was an infant fixer convinced she could put the world to rights.

‘She shouldn’t know such words,’ said Leonie’s friends, shocked.

But she had to know words. She had to know everything.

The Professor, a tall grey-bearded and patriarchal figure accustomed to the adulation of his students, nevertheless took her himself through the Natural History Museum where he had his own rooms. At six she was already familiar with the travail and complications that attend the reproductive act.

‘Sex is a little bit sad, isn’t it?’ said Ruth, holding her father’s hand, surveying the bottled wind spiders who bit off their partners’ heads to make them mate faster. ‘And the poor octopus… having to hold on to a female for twenty-four hours to let the eggs go down your tentacles.’

From her unworldly Aunt Hilda, who was apt to depart for the university with her skirt on back to front, Ruth learnt the value of tolerance.

‘One must not judge other cultures by the standards of one’s own,’ said Aunt Hilda, who was writing a monograph on her beloved Mi-Mi — and Ruth quite quickly accepted the compulsion of certain tribes to consume, ritually, their grandmothers.

The research assistants and demonstrators in the university all knew her, as did the taxidermists and preparators in the museum. At eight she was judged fit to help her father sort the teeth of the fossil cave bears he had found in the Drachenhöhle caves and it was understood that when she grew up she would be his assistant, type his books and accompany him on his field work.

Her little, bald-headed Uncle Mishak, still grieving for the death of his wife, led her into a different world. Mishak had spent twenty dutiful years in the personnel department of his brother’s department store, but he was a countryman at heart and walked the city as he had walked the forests of Bohemia as a child. With Mishak, Ruth was always feeding something: a duck in the Stadtpark, a squirrel… or stroking something: a tired cab horse at the gates of the Prater, the stone toes of the god Neptune on the fountain in Schönbrunn.

And, of course, there was her mother, Leonie, endlessly throwing out her arms, hugging her, scolding her… being unbearably hurt by an acid remark from a great-aunt, banishing the aunt to outer darkness, being noisily reconciled to the same aunt with enormous bunches of flowers… Carrying Ruth off to her grandfather’s department store to equip her with sailor suits, with buckled patent leather shoes, with pleated silk dresses, then yelling at her when she came in from school.

‘Why aren’t you top in English; you let that stupid Inge beat you,’ she would cry — and then take Ruth off for consolation to Demels to eat chocolate eclairs. ‘Well, she has a nose like an anteater so why shouldn’t she be top in English,’ Leonie would conclude, but the next year she imported a Scottish governess to make sure that no one spoke better English than her Ruth.

And so the child grew; volatile, passionate and clever, recommending birth control for her grandmother’s cat, yet crying inconsolably when she was cast as an icicle instead of the Snow Queen in the Christmas play at school.

‘Doesn’t she ever stop talking?’ Leonie’s friends would ask — yet she was easily extinguished. A snub, an unkind remark, silenced her instantly.

And something else… The sound of music.

Ruth’s need for music was so much a part of her Viennese heritage that no one at first noticed how acute it was. Ever since infancy it had been almost impossible to pull her away from music-making and she had her own places, music-places, she called them, to which she gravitated like a thirsty bullock to a water hole.

There was the ground-floor window of the shabby old Hochschule für Musik where the Ziller Quartet rehearsed, and the concert hall by the fruit market — the Musikverein — where, if the janitor had been kind enough to leave the door open, one could hear the Philharmonia play. One blind fiddler of all the beggars that played in the streets would halt her, and when she listened she seemed to turn pale with concentration, as children do in sleep. Her parents were sympathetic, she had piano lessons which she enjoyed, she passed her exams, but she had a need of excellence which she herself could not provide.

So for a long time she had listened with wide eyes to the stories about her Cousin Heini in Budapest.

Heini was a scant year older than Ruth, and he was a boy in a fairy story. His mother, Leonie’s stepsister, had married a Hungarian journalist called Radek and Heini lived in a place called the Hill of the Roses high above the Danube in a yellow villa surrounded by apple trees. A Turkish pasha was buried in a tomb further down on the slope of the hill; from Radek’s balcony one could see the great river curling away towards the Hungarian plains, the graceful bridges and the spires and pinnacles of the Houses of Parliament like a palace in a dream. For in Budapest, unlike Vienna, the Danube flows through the city’s very heart.

But that wasn’t all. When he was three, Heini climbed onto his father’s piano stool.

‘It was like coming home,’ he was to tell reporters afterwards. At the age of six, he gave his first recital in the hall where Franz Liszt had played. Two years later, a professor at the Academy invited Bartók to hear him play and the great man nodded.

But in fairy stories there is always grief. When Heini was eleven, his mother died and the golden Wunderkind became almost an orphan, for his father, who edited a German language newspaper, was always working. So it was decided that Heini should continue his studies in Vienna and be prepared there for entrance to the Conservatoire. He would lodge with his teacher, an eminent Professor of Piano Studies, but his spare time would be spent with the Bergers.

Ruth never forgot the first time she saw him. She had come in from school and was hanging up her satchel when she heard the music. A slow piece, and sad, but underneath the sadness so right, so… consoled.

Her father and aunt were still at the university; her mother was in the kitchen conferring with the cook. Drawn by the music, she walked slowly through the enfilade of rooms: the dining room, the drawing room, the library — and opened the door of the study.

At first she saw only the great lid of the Bechstein like a dark sail filling the room. Then she peered round it — and saw the boy.

He had a thin face, black curls which tumbled over his forehead and large grey eyes, and when he saw her, his hands still moving over the keys, he smiled and said, ‘Hello.’

She smiled too, awed at the delight it gave her to hear this music in her own home, overwhelmed by the authority, the excellence that came from him, young as he was.

‘It’s Mozart, isn’t it?’ she said, sighing, for she knew already that there was everything in Mozart; that if you stuck to him you couldn’t go wrong. Two years earlier she had begun to attend to him in her daydreams, keeping him alive with her cookery and care long after his thirty-sixth year.

‘Yes. The Adagio in B Minor.’

He finished playing and looked at her and found her entirely pleasing. He liked her fair hair in its old-fashioned heavy plait, her snub nose, the crisp white blouse and pleated pinafore. Above all, he liked the admiration reflected in her eyes.

‘I musn’t disturb you,’ she said.

He shook his head. ‘I don’t mind you being here if you’re quiet,’ he said.

And then he told her about Mozart’s starling.

‘Mozart had a starling,’ Heini said. ‘He kept it in a cage in the room where he worked and he didn’t mind it singing. In fact he liked it to be there and he used its song in the Finale of the G Major Piano Concerto. Did you know that?’

‘No, I didn’t.’

He watched the thick plait of hair swing to and fro as she shook her head.

Then: ‘You can be my starling,’ Heini said.

She nodded. It was an honour he was conferring; a great gift — she understood that at once.

‘I would like that,’ said Ruth.

And from then on, whenever she could, she settled quietly in the room where he practised, sometimes with her homework or a book, mostly just listening. She turned the pages for him when he played from a score, her small, square-tipped fingers touching the page as lightly as a moth. She waited for him after lessons, she took his tattered Beethoven sonatas to the bookbinder to be rebound.

‘She has become a handmaiden,’ said Leonie, not entirely pleased.

But Ruth did not neglect her school work or her friends, somehow she found time for everything.

‘I want to live like music sounds,’ she had said once, coming out of a concert at the Musikverein.

Serving Heini, loving him, she drew closer to this idea.

So Heini stayed in Vienna and that summer, preceded by a hired piano, he joined the Bergers on the Grundlsee.

And that summer, too, the summer of 1930, a young Englishman named Quinton Somerville came to work with the Professor.

Quin was twenty-three years old at the time of his visit, but he had already spent eighteen months in Tübingen working under the famous palaeontologist Freiherr von Huene, and arrived in Vienna not only with a thorough knowledge of German, but with a formidable reputation for so young a man. While still at Cambridge, Quin had managed to get himself on to an expedition to the giant reptile beds of Tendaguru in Tanganyika. The following year he travelled to the Cape where the skull of Australopithecus africanus had turned up in a lime quarry, setting off a raging controversy about the origin of man, and came under the influence of the brilliant and eccentric Robert Broom who hunted fossils in the nude and fostered Quin’s interest in the hominids. To avoid guesswork and flamboyance when Missing Link expeditions were fighting each other for the ‘dragon bones’ of China, and scientists came to blows about the authenticity of Piltdown Man, was difficult, but Quin’s doctoral thesis on the mammalian bone accumulations of the Olduvai Gorge was both erudite and sober.

Professor Berger met him at a conference and invited him to Vienna to give the Annual Lecture to the Palaeontological Society, suggesting he might stay on for a few weeks to help edit a new symposium of Vertebrate Zoology.

Quin came; the lecture was a success. He had just returned from Kenya and spoke with unashamed enthusiasm about the excitement of the excavations and the beauty of the land. It had been his intention to book into a hotel, but the Professor wouldn’t hear of it.

‘Of course you will stay with us,’ he said, and took him to the Felsengasse where his family found themselves surprised. For it was well known that Englishmen, especially those who explored things and hung on the ends of ropes, were tall and fair with piercing blue eyes and braying, confident voices which disposed of natives and underlings. Or at best, if very well bred, they looked bleached and chiselled, like crusaders on a tomb, with long, stately noses and lean hands folded over their swords.

In all these matters, Quin was a disappointment. His face looked as though it needed ironing; the high forehead crumpled at a moment’s notice into alarming furrows, his nose looked slightly broken, and the amused, enquiring eyes were a deep, almost a Mediterranean brown. Only the shapely hands with which he filled, poked at and tapped (but seldom lit) an ancient pipe, would have passed muster on a tomb.

‘But his shoes are handmade,’ declared Miss Ken-more, Ruth’s Scottish governess. ‘So he is definitely upper class.’

Leonie was inclined to believe this on account of the taxis. Quin, accompanying them to the opera or the theatre, had only to raise the fingers of one hand as they emerged for a taxi to perform a U-turn in the Ringstrasse and come to a halt in front of him.

‘And there is the shooting,’ said Ruth, for the Englishman, at the funfair in the Prater, had won a cut-glass bowl, a goldfish and an outsize blue rabbit and been requested by the irate owner of the booth to take his custom elsewhere. And what could that mean except a background of jolly shooting parties on breezy moors, disposing of pheasants, partridges and grouse?

The reality was different. Quin’s mother died when he was born; his father, attached to the Embassy in Switzerland, volunteered in 1916 and was killed on the Somme. Sent back to the family home in Northumberland, Quin found himself in a house where everyone was old. An irascible, domineering grandfather — the terrifying ‘Basher’ Somerville — presided over Quin’s first years at Bowmont and the spinster aunt who came to take over after his death hardly seemed younger. But if there was no one to show the orphaned boy affection, he was given something he knew how to value: his freedom.