I stood. The disordering of our six made me want to quit this place. Also: I had no desire to eat, and I wasn’t going to squander my hard-won labours so far. It was no one else’s business what I did or didn’t do with my time.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Home. We’re under curfew, remember?’

I expected Charlotte to come with me, but she stayed, and I left her to it.

I caught them one last time before I turned the corner for home. They looked a lonely group: rather exposed, and just ever so slightly stupid, as if I were viewing them with the eyes of the Director, or the baited citizens of Weimar, who had us now in their sights. The scene had an elegiac feel; no one looking at anyone else. Not long ago we’d been horsing about in the woods. Now we were menaced: because of stupid Jenö, and his stupid temper.

I watched them for longer than I meant to, until Walter caught my eye. And then I saw something I hadn’t seen during the conversation: a look of pleasure drifting across his gaze, like happiness itself. It was then that I realised why Walter looked so different: he was without his spectacles.

10

Weimar

The story was all quite strange. I had never known Jenö to faint, and though he could be mute when the situation warranted it, the fact that he hadn’t offered a defence struck me as odd. All he’d done was apologise for his temper. Still, I chalked it up to misadventure: the police were never going to prosecute a couple of budding art students for a minor brawl, and so I spent Sunday preparing for Itten’s class.

The next day we were to explore the properties of newspaper, identify where it was strongest and would bear the most weight, and how this might be applied to a three-dimensional structure. I spent the morning trying to make preparatory forms, working out how I could roll it, cut it, and bend it at different angles. But my mind couldn’t keep itself on the task. Instead I kept on thinking about Walter’s story. The incident had happened at midnight, and I’d seen Jenö at the bakery at four thirty. What had they done in between? And how had Walter been able to see what had happened in so much detail at the Bath-house, without his spectacles?

Later, in the afternoon, I went to find my friends, but they weren’t in the Bauhaus, nor were they at the Ilm, and I didn’t think that on a day such as today, when we were all meant to be doing our best impressions of altar boys, they’d be up at the woods cavorting. (What had I dreamt of in the woodland? Bacchanalian rites and witchcraft?) Besides, if they were, they would have invited me.