Our group was quiet, not used to Walter’s mood, which was usually sardonic and powerful. But then he flipped the solemnity to something else. ‘If you listen carefully to the trees, it sounds just like a woman’s voice – Charlotte’s, some might say – moaning, von Goethe, von Goethe, von Goethe!’

And at this he pulled himself up to a tree in a passionate embrace, and started rubbing his crotch against it.

Jenö shook his head. ‘You’re mad!’

‘Sounds like an oil painting for you, Paul,’ said Charlotte. ‘Dido and Aeneas. Or Goethe and Charlotte, under his Oak.’

I ignored her. Walter, anyway, wasn’t happy that the attention had been diverted. ‘“Beware,” Charlotte continues to moan, even to this day,’ – and his voice was high-pitched and witchy, as he humped the tree, ‘“Beware ye men of fickle hearts! The woods will have their revenge!”’

He unclasped himself and lay on the forest floor, showering mulch on his face in a strange kind of burial. Was it my tiredness that pricked the thought I could see his excitement tenting his trousers? Or it could have been nothing; in memory I seem to catch them all in the erotic net of a dream – and Walter, surely, wouldn’t have been titillated by a beech tree.

In any case he scrambled to his feet when we heard the distant spray of gunfire. Clubs often used the woods for target practice and we heard the pop, pop, pop of a rifle. The fire lit Walter demonically. ‘You see! Blood comes to the woods again!’

Charlotte threw a conker at him. ‘Oh, do shut up, Walter.’

And the rest of us laughed.

6

Weimar

Ernst Steiner was right. After the oasis scene (women bathing their breasts in the aquamarine waters) what followed on my first shift at the studio was a scene of rural German life. Meadows; mountains; sheep; peasants; et cetera. Swans flew with heavy throats and alarming wingspans. Children frolicked in the river’s spray. It was for a rich lady in Zurich with big tits, Ernst said, and she’d be paying in Swiss francs. Valuta: hard currency.

The paintings were all hectic and overlit, and, I must say, I loved the work almost immediately. ‘Good job,’ Ernst said to me at four in the morning, once I’d lit the kindergarten of kids. ‘They don’t look like they do anything but eat.’ I didn’t have the opportunity to worry before it was taken away; in truth I didn’t even know whether the paint was dry.