‘No,’ I said, but it was as if she hadn’t even asked. Instead she tipped more out on the table. I heard the razor blade’s secretive hammering, and then she took a thin line up her nose. Weeks ago, in Walter’s room in my pyjamas, I had wondered how much Franz and Walter had had to drink; but they hadn’t been drunk: they’d been high. That’s why they had been so bright and ready; so opinionated and combative.

That evening Charlotte was very talkative, as they had been. It was also out of character because she rarely talked about Czechoslovakia. ‘Our nanny was such a walkover,’ Charlotte was saying. ‘Poor girl, a Slovak, I forget her name: Lara, or Larna, or Laura, or Leila, something like that. One day we tied her to the dining-room table and threw burrs into her hair and she cried when my mother brushed them out. We’d collected them all day to do this. She died of the Spanish flu when I was eight. I cried for days. My brother wailed for weeks. My parents didn’t talk about it: she was the nanny. Odd, that I can’t even remember her name.’ Charlotte lay on the floor, her eyes tranquillised and inert. ‘Where’s Jenö?’

‘Gone to bed.’

‘Oh yes. You told me that already.’

‘Are you all right?’ I asked.

Walter was grinning as he watched us, the dried black blood flaking on his nose.

‘I’m perfect,’ she said, stretching into a long line, ‘just perfect.’

30

England

That I could have become a painter, in fact become the most famous of my group, makes no sense to me. Even now I feel I am the one making trickster pieces, as if I operate with a gang of painters out in the woods. Still, I am only relatively famous, and even in the art world I’m not always known.

I am of course known enough for Walter to have found me. His letters – I call them his Berlin Wall letters – are in my studio. I don’t know why I have kept them. After the news of his stroke, I reread them. Part of me thinks I should have dignified them with a response; that I was wrong to answer his disregard for Charlotte with my own for him. And, anyway, the fact that Walter is dead should mean my hatred is moot. Not getting him out of East Berlin and he not getting her out of Buchenwald; well, they are hardly comparable. A few whispered words to Ernst Steiner and he could have got her out. In those woods, he betrayed her twice.