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!’

The nightmare had come true. There before me was the same image of James, golden, glowing, white, brilliant, naked and crucified. Arms and legs wide, head lowered, the remembered fall of blond hair tumbled, trussed in an aura of shimmering light, a gleaming naked Jojo kneeling before him, one black hand placed on a white thigh, the other holding a thick whip. All in vivid Technicolor. Eight by ten.

There was no sign of a Jojo in my nightmare, only the hideous image, glowing, pulsating, it had seemed, in an explosion of light. But otherwise what I presently held in my hand was precisely what had awakened me in a sweating terror of hatred. The unfinished crossword puzzle of my life finished by the tidy filling in of the final word.

Hate.

And I sat there on my bed, slumped, exhausted by ugliness, by the shock of discovery, of revelation.

How had this come about? How had a photograph, taken years before it seemed by the look of his youthful body, suddenly been imprinted into my sleeping brain?

Here I was looking at the darker side of a golden moon: and dark, God knew, it was.