At school I had always been adept at verisimilitude, and I was so engrossed in the task that I hadn’t realised how much time had gone when Master Itten returned. I showed my sketchbook to Charlotte and she nodded, though she was coy about showing me hers. Itten took a look at everyone’s sketches, and he moved so quietly that I wondered whether he was even wearing shoes. Everyone was tense. My books were straight, the lemons plump; but we were at the Bauhaus, we couldn’t have got it right.

‘No,’ he finally said, confirming all our suspicions. He took one of the lemons to the front and opened the fruit with a penknife so that the scent reached us immediately. When he bit into it the room cringed. ‘How can you draw a lemon without first tasting its flesh? Your whole body is involved in drawing. Your mouth, your gut, your lungs. If you think it’s only about the hand and the eyes and the brain, you’re dead, and the picture’s dead too. A lemon is not just a lemon: it is its acidity, its astringency, its pith, its seed chambers and pyramid interior. It’s not yellow skin wrapped around air, or pencil strokes on paper. The lemon is an odalisque. You must seduce it. You must be seduced by it.’

He threw the fruit and Walter caught it.

Itten began to pace, working up his theme. ‘The sketch is not preparatory work. The sketch is the end. Vasari knew this: what we do when we sketch is an act of furor; a passion. Only when Leonardo had paper, not papyrus, was he able to not just sketch, but freely invent. Renaissance thinkers asked the artist to seek balance between decorum and licenza. The sketch is all licence, because the sketch allows for all possibilities: that the lemon is a breast, a mouth, a tumour, or that the lemon’ – he opened out his hands, palm up – ‘that the lemon is not even really there. Begin again. But with licenza,’ he said, smacking his hand against the table: ‘Licenza! Licenza! Licenza!’

The Master watched as we began feeling up the lemon: smelling it, peeling it, tasting it. Later, he put his hands on Charlotte’s shoulders. ‘You still have sleep in your neck,’ he said. ‘You must release it.’

It was dark by the time we arrived for our welcome party. Since lunchtime the cafeteria’s windows had been covered with old newsprint. Townspeople tried to see what was going on inside but there wasn’t much light from the edges. As Walter and I drew closer, we heard strange music inside. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is it,’ though I had no idea what ‘it’ might mean. I remembered Charlotte’s tremulous voice when she had said ‘And what on earth shall we do here!’ and I wondered if this evening might provide her with an answer.