‘A little high, yes, but don’t spoil the story. Anyway, I had this feeling we’d be together. That we had been apart for a long time, but we hadn’t been able to stay away from each other. We hadn’t been able to stop being friends; we couldn’t stop being in each other’s rooms, or at the Workshops. Jenö put up with it, but I think he knew. I think he just saw it as a condition of us, back then. Some part of me wonders whether he didn’t tell me what he did in Rügen because he wanted out of it. The triangle; the troika.’ She reached out and touched my hand. She almost never spoke like this, so openly, and I wondered what had brought it on; maybe it was the violence outside. ‘And I knew, as I watched you that night, that everything would be all right. That it was going to be hard, but you would always be there. That you weren’t going away.’

I remembered how she had come to my room later that night. We had lain on the bed, and I had touched her neck, and she had moved away, knowing perhaps that it was not yet the right moment.

Now she rubbed at her eyes. ‘The wine’s made me mushy. This is why we can’t drink in the day.’

As we finished our lunch I told her that as she had watched me I had watched Oskar and Walter, two men nearly fucking; and then how I’d had to creep past them, out of Walter’s room. It must have excited her – because we quickly made love again that afternoon.

After, in the January dark, as she dozed in my arms, I thought about running to Irmi’s flat to tell her I’d been wrong. She was right. She was right! Charlotte was here, she was fine, nothing was happening between her and Jenö. I wanted to tell her I was sorry we had argued. I imagined Irmi, curled up against Teddy just as Charlotte was curled up against me, watching and dreaming next to the fogged-up window, where I had days ago imagined the snapping road, the snaking river, the coming flood.

The army did not come that weekend.

Instead, on Tuesday, the unthinkable happened instead: Hitler became Chancellor. Perhaps to others, who had paid more attention, it was not as much of a surprise, but to me and Charlotte, who had spent all weekend cloistered away, it was nothing less than astonishing. We heard it first from Mrs Müller’s radio before we switched on ours. By the time the bulletin ended, Charlotte had gone very pale. ‘What’s going on?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It might be all right.’

We listened to more before the broadcast returned to an afternoon play. ‘No other Nazis have power, do they? It’s only him.’