When I returned to Weimar in September it took me a while to track Walter down. I couldn’t find him in his rooms. He wasn’t at the second-year registration, nor was he at the party for the Bauhaus babies (the civilians of Weimar looking gravely on) and neither Irmi nor Kaspar had seen him since they had (joyously, triumphantly) returned from Berlin. Though I didn’t want to go there, I decided Walter must be hiding at the studio. It seemed like a test; that he would know the last place I’d want to look, and the first place he’d hide out, would be the woods.

I headed to the forest. The woods were so still they could have been a photograph were it not for the beating of birds’ wings as I cycled past. All that could be heard was my wheels on the forest floor, and my own thin whistle I’d nervously begun. I don’t know why but I felt panicked on going back to the studio. I thought about Walter mooning about as Charlotte von Stein (back in that magicked spring when all six of us had been together, unexploded) – but I hadn’t been there in months, and I had a feeling that Mr Steiner was angry with me for leaving without telling him why.

At the top of the hill I rested, and looked down at the city. I had forgotten the new term would start with a lantern festival to welcome the new students. The city roads were rivers of light.

When I reached the studio the door was locked. Even when there was no one there the big door normally slid open without a key; no one, after all, was going to steal a six-by-four painting of Persephone in the underworld. I still had the key and I unlocked the door. There were voices on the upper level, though I couldn’t hear Walter’s. Bizarrely a picture flashed in my mind of Walter modelling naked for the painters before him.

It was this image I had to clear as Ernst greeted me on the studio floor. ‘Pauli!’ he said, his mouth big, his small teeth numerous.

‘Hello, Mr Steiner.’

There were some men gathered around a canvas. On its reverse there’d be, I knew, patrols of doves and women. Walter wasn’t amongst the workers. If he wasn’t here, then I had run out of options, and it struck me for the first time that he might have left the Bauhaus altogether.

‘Where’ve you been hiding?’ said Mr Steiner.

‘Dresden. I went home for the summer.’

‘What’s Dresden got that Weimar hasn’t?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You missed the Great Exhibition.’

‘I know.’

‘Albert Einstein came. And Shostakovich.’

‘I heard.’

‘It was fun. Though of course it persuaded nobody that the school’s fit for purpose.’