Your trusting slave, pupil, and ever-humiliated servant.

This ugly piece of work was signed simply with a ‘J.’ Must have caused a ripple of unease in the white and yellow room up on the third floor. I was not amazed that Millar had kept it. Copied it, and attached it to the pieces which Millie, and obviously he himself, had chosen for my education.

How much of all this did Florence know? Did she have the very least idea of her ‘husband’s’ other life? Of the whips, the belts, the chains, the desperate need for ‘humiliation’ and pain. His need, as these pages showed so clearly, for domination and degradation, when only the screamed word ‘Pax!’ could bring torture to a stop. Did she know? Could she know? She had once said that sex had an odour. She had practically ripped a thumbnail off when she had spoken of Jojo and Daniel Jacquet. She must have known something.

He writes of

the supreme excitement of being straddled by your black glossy boots. The slippery delight of that oiled plastic sheeting … tied and helpless, waiting your command to Jojo to administer my punishment.

Now then, come on! Surely she must have known? How could he hide his cuts and bruises, for God’s sake? I assume there had to be some? Did she ever see Daniel

all in his leathers, so tight that you could not have slipped a playing-card between the taut black skin and his hard flesh. Feeling the heat of him straining against my lusting mouth…

And so on.

She did know Jojo. He had gone on the false honeymoon. Now, why? Had she the very least idea that in the early days Jojo had been the one who readied the complaisant James for Millar’s savage whip? Did she know, much later, after the famous fall, that James, bound and spread, was dragged (of course willingly, that was all part of the fun) to the eager hands and greedy mouth of Brent Millar? Paralysed from the waist down but sexually capable if manipulated and his prey was brought ‘struggling’ to his side.

Did she have the least idea of any of this? Could she? Was there only a deepening silence after the birth of Thomas? She said so; said that they had lain side by side in the barren bed. But could that possibly be so? There was, I recollected, the empty room next to Thomas’s room. Did he seek refuge there? Or in the studio perhaps? When Jojo and Daniel came to pose, it would appear, for their portraits or whatever they all did together up there.

Impossible to guess. Impossible, equally, to ask Florence. How could I?

I only skip-read this stuff. The light had gone completely and I had put on the elephant-lamp and sat and stared at the secret James in my hands. There was also the envelope.

Photographs. One or two. One large one which so surprised me that I did catch my breath. Quite loudly. Loud enough for me to hear myself say, ‘Oh! Christ!’