Charlotte studied the marshy brushstrokes. ‘Maybe it was used as firewood. Probably the best use for it, at the time.’ There was another lightning flash that blued the room. ‘It’s odd, this weather, isn’t it?’ she said, putting down the frame.

We both wandered over to the glass, from where we had an uninterrupted view of the sky. ‘Otti said it’s something to do with weather fronts and jet streams. Warm air and cold air. She actually said the words extratropical instability.’

‘That,’ I said, ‘is not a surprise.’

The thing about Otti was that despite her charm she also liked to fake her expertise on matters of which she had no idea. And, because she was a little hard of hearing, I think people were ready to listen to her for longer. I’d heard her talk at length about the Republic’s constitution, about reform in Bavaria, and wine production in Zmajevac – once, on a winter’s night, how to slaughter a pig. I asked her if she really knew how to do that, and she said, ‘We’re Jews. Of course not.’ (I wondered why I adored the sight of her crooked teeth, looking so infantile and sweet; why her smile, almost always extended a quarter-inch with a rolled-up cigarette, provoked my own.) ‘I suppose Otti knows what she’s talking about.’

‘Otti knows what she’s talking about thirty per cent of the time.’

‘As low as that!’

‘I’ll give her forty, but that’s generous.’ Another leap of lightning. ‘All the snow will be gone by tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I wish it would settle so we could do something with it.’

Behind us the bedspread was hardly visible what with all of Walter’s things. ‘Here, help me get everything into the box,’ I said. ‘I don’t want Walter to know we’ve been through it.’

‘Naughty Paul,’ she said. ‘How’d you get in?’

‘I remembered the combination. All this time and Ernst hasn’t thought to change it.’

While I piled the notebooks into the box, Charlotte rewrapped the large painting: she frowned, summarising it as awful. The light was all wrong, she said, but then, of course, she wasn’t able to see its doubleness; its lit deception. Now, I saw, this was not so much the painting’s technical fault as it was the animating reason why the landscape – with its throwaway tropes and images – was so haunting.

‘Is there something going on between Walter and his boss?’ she asked, retying the string around the painting.

‘He’s always liked Walter.’

She frowned. ‘I thought you didn’t like him very much.’

‘Ernst Steiner? I don’t. But if Walter’s happy . . .’

‘I thought something was going on between him and Franz.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. It changes every week.’

Charlotte watched with interest as I fastened the buckles and slipped the numbers on the padlock. ‘Nineteen-sixteen?’

‘Nineteen. The year Mr Steiner went into business.’