He signalled to her to wait, then returned with the owner of the trattoria, who carried a jug. He told her he could speak some German. He pulled back a chair at Lena’s table and poured them both some wine.

‘My name is Lena.’

‘Mario.’ He shook her hand. ‘Stefan has not been here for five years.’

‘Did you know him well?’

‘As well as anyone. He had many friends, but no one close. He was always away. At sea.’

‘Was he a nice man?’

‘Yes. He was decent. He liked women and the sea.’

‘What else?’

Mario shrugged. ‘Red wine.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘There was a rumour that he had moved to somewhere further down the coast. To Bari. Dubrovnik. Or even to Greece.’

‘Is that what you believe?’

‘No. A part of the hull of his fishing boat was found. With the blue stripe. Between here and Monfalcone. I think he drowned.’

Lena swallowed. ‘Don’t many boats have a blue stripe?’

‘Not many, Lena, no. Have some more wine.’

For some weeks after her return to the Schloss, Lena was withdrawn and had trouble sleeping. It was not until Anton’s arrival the following August that she seemed to come back to life.

Among the other maids, she had meanwhile made a friend in Johanna, whose parents had come from Hungary, and whose father had been killed in the war. Johanna worked mostly in the severe-patients’ building because she wasn’t frightened by their behaviour or cast down by their suffering. She told Lena awful stories, but with a smile. Lena had come close to confiding in Johanna some of the things she had done in Vienna – the bars, the white powder, the late-night callers – but always drew back.

She had also in the last year or so made friends with Mary, who sometimes came and sat with her by the lake. Lena felt proprietary about the view: she hadn’t wanted to share it with Johanna, but with the blind woman it was different. Mary could remember looking after Lena when she was a child and had been brought to the Wilhelmskogel by Carina; she told her stories about the clinic when it had first started, here in the Schloss Seeblick, more than forty years before, of Thomas and Jacques, the founders. Mary had been in a county asylum in England, dumped there because there was no one to take care of her in the village where she had been born. Thomas Midwinter had been in charge of diagnosing her in the long line of new admissions to that awful place one Sunday evening.

‘They shouted at him to hurry up and say what was wrong with me,’ said Mary. ‘They wanted to know which ward they should put me in, off the long corridor or down in the basement with the bad ones. But he said out loud, “This girl is blind.” It didn’t stop them locking me away, but he kept an eye on me all the time I was in there and when he left he took me with him, me and Daisy.’