The worst thing was that now both the future was dead and the past had to be reassessed. What promises had she given me all year? None! What love tokens? A few doodled messages, some scrawled portraits, a hand held on the banks of the Ilm. I hadn’t been kissed in the Bath-house. I didn’t even have that to resent. I didn’t even know whether I had the right to be angry. Heartbreak. Herzschmerz. What a common wretched thing it is. Most of April I spent bewildered.

Pain gathers. It hardens.

We were witness to their growing closeness in the classroom and in the cafeteria; their in-jokes and soft smiles; their conversations in the windowed light; their collaborations on new projects; their picnics in the woods. It’s not hard to see a relationship forming: their new love came off them in beams.

If I had felt left out of the secret weeks ago, it was nothing compared to this. I had a mania to find them out: I wanted to know what they were doing. I wanted to know where they were doing it. More than ever before, I wanted to be around her.

Charlotte came to see me often enough but the visits were empty; as if she had discussed with Jenö that I should be let down gradually. In any case my behaviour clipped her visits short. I hated her going but I hated her company more. My meanness that April shocked my September self, who had fallen in love with this golden girl and thought she could inspire me only to good. Charlotte tried desperately for normality, but it was a dream of how we were, and it made things worse. I could tell she checked her mood when her happiness unsettled me.

When I had arrived at the Bauhaus last September I had fashioned a future life – narrow-minded magistrate that I was – of my little Dresden wedding to my little Dresden wife. By May it all looked impossible; laughable; silly. I waited for her to say something, but she didn’t, and I said nothing to her.

I had thought the future unshakeable; I was wrong.

Weimar soon lost its memory of winter. Blossom was rich in the air or else browning in the streets. In the cemetery, full of dead Walters, the tulips opened; hydrangea offered their heads. It was very dry that spring, almost no rain, and the bees in the air were fat as beans, and the birds unendingly cheerful.

Walter and I spent most of May at the studio: him, working out Sommer’s reparations; me, keeping away from the Bauhaus. As we painted nymphs at the reeds, or Alpine mountains, Walter’s pain so mirrored my own that coming to the woods after a long day at the Bauhaus was hardly the distraction I longed for. Still, sorrow made committed painters of us both.