One day, walking further north through the city, Claire discovers a deconsecrated church that contains a small psychiatry museum. Inside are phrenological sculptures that break the brain into jigsaw pieces, and Rorschach blots that look to her like nothing at all. In the main exhibition hall stands a brown leather day bed, a sort of proto-recliner that doesn’t straighten up, with straps all the way down both sides, wrist straps and ankle straps and even a strap for the chest. It is nearly two hundred years old, and reminds Claire immediately of the gold brocade chair at her mother’s, which reclines if you pull a switch. The plaque calls it a ‘compulsory chair’, and explains that it was used to treat mental illness in the 1850s. Doctors had thought people’s brains were inflamed, and that if they kept them immobilised the swelling would go down, but instead the patients developed haemorrhoids and bedsores and arthritis, and went even crazier because they couldn’t move around. It actually says that: ‘crazier’.

Next to the plaque is a poster:

LIVING MUSEUM

COULD YOU SIT IN THE COMPULSORY CHAIR FOR AN HOUR?

COME AND HELP US BRING OUR EXHIBITS TO LIFE!

Claire approves, instantly, of this project – she likes it when the public gets involved – and it comes naturally to her to volunteer, almost as a civic duty, even though this isn’t her town, her country, even. And isn’t that what people said you should do if you were lonely? Volunteer for something? She goes to the desk and puts her name down, and they tell her they will text her to set a performance time. She leaves with a hope, a prospective lightness, she’s grateful for.

Back in her office, someone knocks. It is the American with the Los Lobos T-shirt – though today he wears the Grateful Dead – who also has an office in the tower. His name is Jerome and he’s an art historian, visiting from a university she’s never even heard of.

‘Hallabassee County College for the Arts. It’s basically a money-laundering operation for white-collar criminals. They send us their filthy kids with their filthy tuition and we wash ’em all clean with four years of keg parties and classes on Breaking Bad. Really, it’s a disaster.’

He says this standing in her doorway, as tall and wide as the frame, his eyes scanning every inch of the room.

‘Oh, you’ve got a great view. You’ve got the Spaarne. Have you been on the water yet? Have you been to Mooie Nel? So peaceful. Seriously, though, Hallabassee, it’s a graveyard. I’ve been there six years and I’m never getting out, not unless I win some huge grant or someone decides to make a movie about Pieter Claesz and pay me for consulting.’

‘Is that likely to happen?’