That first winter after Dessau, when our rent was in arrears, both of us knew we couldn’t survive from my paintings alone. I took in some students to tutor – the Bauhaus name got us this far – and Charlotte started some shifts at a fabric factory in Neukölln. We saw much less of each other; and, because work made us tired, in the nights we fell asleep rather than made love.

Life turned a little more normal; things do. But it was those later Berlin years that I learnt who Charlotte really was, and who she was to me. She sang in the bath. It was the only time I heard her speak Czech; they were lullabies her nanny had sung to her (her old nanny – burrs in her blonde hair; dead of the Spanish flu). I learnt she had a curious habit of becoming obsessed with clubs or cafes she rated as excellent, then, just as suddenly, dismissing them as absurd. She was lively and enthusiastic, then she could be taciturn and, as Jenö had said, maddeningly private when she wanted to be. Sometimes she suffered depressions, which made her quiet for weeks, when it was all she could do to force herself to her shifts at the factory. During those times she was far away and impossible to find. We rowed, of course we did; we had arguments when sometimes we both doubted whether things would work. Then she’d pull a chestnut curl; kiss me; tell me she loved me. I was, she said, her Serious Painter.

I was dozing when Charlotte came home, shaking the sleet from her umbrella. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I lost track of time.’ She put her hat on the stand, untucked her shirt. She brought in a smell of the wood glue we’d used in the carpentry workshops. Outside the trams sliced the tracks; there were car horns too; in front of me, she yawned. ‘Good book?’

I put the Paul Klee back on the coffee table. ‘Where’ve you been?’

‘Walking.’

‘Until now?’

‘I’ve got a new idea.’

‘Go on.’

She took a large drink of her wine. ‘It’s a secret. I don’t want to jinx it.’

I put my nose to her neck. ‘What do you smell of?’ I said. ‘Marzipan, is that it?’

She batted me away. ‘Soap!’

‘Charlotte. Do you ever think of having a baby?’

‘A baby! Aren’t I too old for that?’

‘Of course not. My mother was forty when she had me.’

‘Well, I’m hardly forty!’

‘Exactly; we could try.’

She smiled. ‘A girl or boy?’

‘Both.’

‘Shouldn’t we be married first?’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Let’s get married.’

‘We can’t get married in Berlin.’

‘Why not?’

‘Such a bloody stage for a wedding!’

‘Maybe in the summer, when things have quietened down?’

‘Yes. Maybe in the summer.’ And she smiled at me, and we both wondered, perhaps, how serious we were.