‘It’s a bit early to be introducing apprentices, isn’t it, Mr Beckermann? He might do you out of a job.’

I shrugged: I had no answer for this.

‘Half pay. If everyone else rates him, he can stay.’ He looked at Walter. ‘When you paint the women, think of your sister.’

‘I don’t have a sister.’

‘Your mum then. Don’t mess them up.’

‘Thank you, Mr Steiner,’ said Walter.

‘Call me Ernst.’ This was odd. He had never given me such permission. ‘Aren’t you meant to be under curfew?’ he asked, as Walter returned to the canvas.

‘Yes. But I need the money. You know how it is. Spend a hundred, lose a thousand.’

This softened him, and he let me go.

I painted the big sky for a few hours while Walter worked on Leda’s crowd. He worked close to the canvas, to make up for his lack of spectacles. Other men on other canvases worked elsewhere. Leo the courier came to take a commission even while the paint was still wet. All the padlocks took the same combination: 1919 – the year Ernst had founded the studio; the year, too, of the founding of the Bauhaus.

‘Are you all right, Pauli?’ asked Walter.

‘Fine,’ I said, giving Walter a thin smile, and gesturing at the skittering clouds. ‘Just working out the direction of the wind.’

‘Does Mr Steiner make lots of money from this?’

‘Tons,’ I said. ‘But we’ll see only a fraction.’

‘Who does he sell to?’

‘Foreigners. Anyone with valuta.’

A few steps back I saw that the sky’s light was too approximate: Ernst liked it literal and disambiguated. I’d have to go over it.

‘Do you ever think about why you paint?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, taken off guard. ‘I guess it’s always been a way to make sense of things.’

Walter nodded, brush held aloft. Without his glasses he stood close to the canvas. ‘It’s a form of truth-telling?’

‘Not exactly’ – though it had started out as that – ‘more a way of understanding what’s already there.’

‘Does this picture hold any truth to you?’

‘This?’ I analysed the commission. The women were not so different from Kirchner’s Bathers at Moritzburg. ‘I don’t know.’

‘It’s my father’s taste, but I can see why someone might like it,’ said Walter. ‘There’s beauty in it. Do you see beauty in it?’

‘Isn’t it a little deceptive? Look at the way the brushwork disappears; it’s all surface.’

Ernst told us to get back to work. Were we a couple of old wives, come for a chat? Walter stared at him for longer than I did, but then returned to Leda’s army, staying with the nymphs all night. His brushwork was lovely: his paint dazzled their hair.