Over the decades, critics have noted the heat of the paintings’ colours; but to me it is the unprimed corridors that are of interest: unlit and chilly, no bleed between. They’re meant as edges you could drop off. These paintings reference Charlotte’s woven black squares, with their lightning strikes of panic, but no one knows who she is, and so they can’t read into the painting how much her absence and her influence has been left.

Sometimes these zips – I’m borrowing Barnett Newman’s phrase – are at the perimeter, at other times the white caption goes right through the mass, dry as a gone riverbed. Whatever these late works are, their spaces are all Charlotte. Beware the oncoming colour, they say; watch out where it isn’t happening.

18

Weimar

Looking back, I still fail to see when it was that Charlotte and Jenö came together during my hapless fast. Was it when I had left him in her rooms, drunk and sound asleep? Maybe he had spent the night there, and they had ended up in bed together. Was it as she chalked his green portrait, and he had reached out a hand to hers behind the canvas, and I’d caught them later, him looking dreamily to the parkland? Or maybe it had been when I’d been staring out from the luckless window at five in the morning, and I’d had that prophetic rush that things were ending; the lantern collapsed; that something odd stirred abroad; that our group, as we knew it, was over. At that point I had pushed the feeling aside, but maybe some part of me knew.

But all this is conjecture. Really, it could have been any curfewed night I’d spent alone; it could have been the weekend of the migraine. I will not know. I won’t ever know.

I had thought the fast would give me clearer sight: instead I’d only been getting blinder. Hour by hour, day by day, I failed to see what was in front of me. Charlotte and Jenö, two perfect creatures. Of course. Why wouldn’t they be together? They made sense; they made sense.

Jenö’s dalliance with Walter in the Bath-house had been nothing. In the church at dawn I had given Walter a future with Jenö that had seemed viable. And over the week, as I’d been snooping around, fancying myself a hungry detective, I had been watching Walter, when really I should have been watching them.

Walter too must have gone over these weeks, trying to work out when they had come together; or the moment, more precisely, when we had failed. We knew we had. As soon as we saw her take Jenö’s portrait from the portfolio case in Master Itten’s class that Monday morning, we both knew. Here was a man beloved.