After some time, Jenö spoke, and I was surprised his voice was a little scalding. ‘It’s not always easy on the other side either.’ I hadn’t thought about this. I hadn’t thought that what they had given us, as well as what we had given them, had been a performance.

‘I know about you and Walter at the Bath-house.’

I heard his tongue on his lips. ‘It was a mistake. I still feel terrible about that night.’

‘Does Charlotte know?’

‘I told her in Rügen.’

‘Ah, I see.’ Walter had said their arguments were more frequent after our holiday there.

Jenö struck a match and the flame guttered in the wet air. He stood holding it until he couldn’t any more. ‘I saw the spa in Binz, and then felt like the time to confess. Now I think I shouldn’t have. It’s caused problems, naturally. About what she did and didn’t know. About what’s happened as a result.’

The match went out and I didn’t get to see his expression. I lit another, but by then he’d already started speaking. ‘I should have been more careful. Foolish; to have treated Walter’s feelings with so little care. I simply wanted to see what it was like. To be with another man like that – well, it was nothing more than curiosity. I apologised, but he didn’t really hear it. And by the summer it had blown over. He’d forgiven us.’

I thought of the strange September oil painting and wondered if that were true. ‘Walter said you’d told him you loved him. The autumn before. When we’d all just started.’

‘That’s not true. I never said that. I promised him nothing.’

I wondered why I would so quickly believe Jenö over my friend. ‘There’s enough promise in a body.’

‘I agree. But people make mistakes. People make mistakes with their bodies too. I have apologised, over and over. There was nothing else for me to say. Nothing else for me to do.’

The dark was so black it amplified all sound in here. I heard him lick his lips again, I heard the shifting of his body. I vaguely wondered if he might kiss me too, down here in the dark, where no one could see us, and no one would know.

‘And then Charlotte came along.’

‘Yes. And then Charlotte came along.’