Walter frowned. ‘Please, I have to hand that in tomorrow. Franz is the only person who you can rely on for a good time and yet when it comes to work he’s a beast. A wolf.’

Franz picked up Walter’s work. ‘Everything’s in disorder. The letters hook into one another. The bowls are too big, the tails have too much flourish. Where’s the baseline, Walter?’

‘I think it’s lovely,’ I said. ‘It’s more a picture than a word.’

‘It’s not even finished,’ Walter defended himself. ‘It’s not so much a type as—’

‘It’s capricious. The stress is variable. It creates confusion.’ Franz took three paces away from me. ‘Look, it’s not even legible. It’s worse than any of that old Blackletter stuff . . .’

‘What’s Blackletter?’ I asked, feeling lost.

‘A Gothic type,’ Walter said.

Franz seemed harder and more talkative than normal, but I put this down to his dismissal of Walter’s lawless homework. ‘At least Fraktur doesn’t have this terrible whiff of modernity.’

Walter addressed me. ‘Franz wants everything straight and clean. As if the type had to burn through something. Not everything needs to have such a will to purity, Mr Erlich.’

But Franz wasn’t really listening. ‘It’s not even legible. What does it even say?’

But this, Walter chose to ignore. I tried to stop the letters swimming, but couldn’t work them out. I felt like they would have meaning if only I could decipher them. Franz was fairly obsessive about work, and he wouldn’t let anyone denigrate his much beloved Print Workshop.

‘Where’ve you been all night?’ asked Walter.

‘The Lamb.’

‘On your own? The Lamb customers scare me.’

I thought about the young man in uniform and the intensity of his stare. ‘They’re not so bad. You know, if you’re discreet.’

‘I’ve never not been discreet in my life.’

‘Oh, sure.’

‘Were you going to bed so early?’

Behind him I saw Franz drop the paper.

I shrugged. ‘It’s nearly midnight.’

‘Oh,’ he flashed a look at Franz, ‘we must have lost track of time.’

‘Too busy having fun,’ said Franz, and they both burst out laughing.

I stayed for a while longer but these two, when they got going, could be their own private universe, and I lost track of what they were talking about – types, Frakturs, Blackletters – as I fell in and out of sleep on Walter’s bed, listening to the sounds of the school’s consolatory plumbing, which had the deep resonance of Dresden’s cathedral bells.