‘No. I was happy to be out of that awful place in England. The smell and the noise. I shared with Daisy to begin with. A little room in a building that’s been knocked down now. Daisy used to say I woke up laughing every morning.’

‘Did you understand what was going on here?’

‘It was familiar to me,’ said Mary, ‘because I’d spent a lot of my life in an asylum, but of course I’m not a doctor so I don’t know about all that. The difference here was that they cured people. In England it was like a warehouse. The staff used to do a lot of counting and roll calls, but no one saw a doctor. Here there are some people who can’t leave for their own good, but they always had people getting better. Going home.’

‘I heard there were terrible arguments, though. And people died.’

‘That was Olivier. He was the brother of Dr Rebière, one of the founders. He’d been very ill since he was young. He was in torment, poor soul. He threw himself off the edge. When we were up on the mountaintop.’

Lena put down her charcoal. ‘What did you do when you came?’

‘I worked in the laundry. I could do that. Washing and putting things through a mangle.’

‘That’s what I used to do! That was my first job, too.’

‘Dr Thomas said I didn’t have to work at all if I didn’t want to. He used to say, “Just sit in the sun, Mary, and imagine the view.” Sometimes he’d come and join me for a few minutes and tell me about the lake and the Karawanken mountains. It was his idea that I should do some massage. He was watching me knead my handkerchief one day. He said my hands looked strong and they moved quick. I used to practise on Daisy in our room and it used to send her off in a trance. Then he took me to see someone in town who gave me some lessons. An elderly gentleman. And eventually I began to work on some patients. I was a bit uncertain at first. But they were all nice. And it made them feel more relaxed, I think, knowing I couldn’t see them.’

‘But how does it help them, being massaged?’

‘Well, this wasn’t the acute people, as we call them. This was the fashionable ladies and people who’d come for a rest. Some of them were overtired, that sort of thing.’

‘So it was part of the treatment.’

‘Yes, I think Dr Thomas thought it was all a nonsense. But his idea was that if we made them feel happy we could charge them a lot and we could use the money to look after the people who needed it. I used to argue with him and tell him it really did them good. We never did agree, but he was happy to let me carry on. Then he changed his mind when I massaged his wife. Kitty.’