For the first few days I had wondered where the fast might take her. I knew Charlotte would want to escalate things; that it was not in her nature to keep things still. Privately, I hoped that our empty stomachs might draw us together. We might do our breathing exercises, light candles, and in the magic-lantern of a fasted afternoon, we’d finally, lazily, instinctively, end up in bed, too weak to resist temptation a moment longer. Hours of hunger would tip us together. We’d apex. We’d roll around.

For this fantasy I found auguries everywhere, and perhaps this too was a product of the starved mind. The blackbirds were the first thing I noticed, chirruping so sweetly it was as if Charlotte herself were serenading me. Then there were the things she began to leave in my room: bags and notebooks, and even some clothing: signs of her moving in with me. More notes written with red Ps. Perhaps Master Itten was right: if Jerusalem might spring up in this medieval town, perhaps it might even appear in a corner of my bedroom.

That week I began to vibrate. Even when the fire was lit in my room, there was a tremor in my hands, and my body was shivery and cool. The fast was adrenal. There was a hard ledge in my stomach off which I hung, and I brought that ledge around with me, leaning on it when I was weak. After the meditation I wondered whether there might indeed be a sharpening of my perceptions as promised. All morning I had watched how Charlotte’s lantern moved in the room’s draughts. It was deliciously warm beneath the blankets on the badly sprung mattress, and I went in and out of dozy sleep, moving from one pleasant dream to the next as the lantern circled above me, lightweight, planetary, perfect. If this dreaminess was an effect of the fast, then it was a sweetness to dream on.

Life, like this; it was no bad thing. Sure, all morning I dreamed of what Kaspar was privately devouring (beignets, blood pudding and dumplings), but I had more focus. It was as if the fast had shut down all the unnecessary parts of my brain. I spent hours preparing for Master Itten’s class, and I thought how good I was getting at what it was he wanted us to do: understand the true nature of the material at hand. It seemed plausible that I could be an old master in the beech forest, and a modernist at the Bauhaus.

What I hadn’t expected was Charlotte’s first escalation to happen elsewhere, and without me.