There had been a wildness to Walter behind the Japanese shade. Maybe the whole thing was yet another fiction. A wedge to push us apart. It was not unthinkable that Walter might meddle, even after so many years. What had I said to Franz in Dessau? That Walter was quick to forgive. How laughable that was.

I walked the invisible suburbs until the Bauhaus appeared. It was a run-down warehouse, the scrubland around it littered with rubbish. The school’s sign swung lightly: ‘bauhaus’, it read, all in lower case. I remembered the double magnification of the Dessau sign; how big we had been back then, how grand!

A class was going on in one of the rooms. The instructor – Josef! – holding different materials one at a time: wood, stone, fabric, metal, pointing out the properties of the material. Materialgerecht: how we understand our own inner properties; the nature of what we are.

I waited. Charlotte would leave around now if she were to get home at her normal time. I didn’t want anyone to see me, and moved on. Around the corner, in a white room, Master Kandinsky sat at a tile stove, warming his hands, watching the fire. He was dressed in a suit with collar and tie, with his glasses halfway down his nose. It was probably the first time I had ever seen him doing nothing. I wondered who else from the staff had believed the Director’s vision could win out. He leaned over and put another briquette into the stove. I left before he saw me: a watchful student of the distant past.

I climbed the earthen bank to see what I could of the top floor and suddenly there she was: a buzz-cut blonde, a man’s hat in her hands. Irmi had been wrong. No walks. No city strolls. All year she had been where I had always thought she would be: the Bauhaus, of course.

And here: this is Walter’s familiar magicking: the truth pulled from deceptions – she puts her coat on, pulls her hands through her hair, places the man’s hat on her head. She embraces someone. Maybe it’s chaste; I cannot see.

She leaves; is gone. And I am standing alone in the dark.

And, for the first time, I think that Walter might not be crazy. A new and unexpected future has opened out dangerously in this day. Maybe she will leave me. Maybe she has already decided to catch that flight. Maybe, in two weeks’ time, Charlotte will no longer be with me, but with Jenö in England.