59

Three men, all in dark trousers and black polo-neck jumpers – they came so quickly that, paralyzed in everything but instinct, I had no time to do anything but grab the bedspread over my loins. The one in the lead was Joe, the Negro. He flung himself at me just as I was about to shout. His hand clapped brutally over my mouth and I felt the strength and weight of him throw me back. One of the others must have turned on the bedside lamp again. I saw another face I knew: the last time I had seen it had been on the ridge, when the owner had been in German uniform, playing Anton. The third face belonged to the blond-headed sailor I had seen twice at Bourani that previous Sunday. I tried as I struggled under Joe to see Julie – I still couldn’t accept that this was not some nightmare, like some freak misbinding in a book, a Lawrence novel become, at the turn of a page, one by Kafka. But all I glimpsed was her back as she left the room. Someone met her there, an arm went round her shoulders as if she had just escaped from an air disaster and drew her out of sight.

I began to fight violently, but they had obviously anticipated that, had loops of rope ready. In less than half a minute I was tied up and lying on my face. I don’t know if I was still shouting obscenities at them; I was certainly thinking them. Then I was gagged. Somebody threw the bedspread over me. I managed to twist my head to see the door.

Another figure appeared in it: Conchis. He was dressed like the others, in black. Flames, devils, hell. He came and stood over me, looked down at my outraged eyes absolutely without expression. I hurled all the hate I had in me at him, tried to make sounds that he could understand. My mind flashed back to that incident in the war: a room at the end of a corridor, a man lying on his back, castrated. My eyes began to fill with tears of frustrated rage and humiliation. I realized at last what Julie’s final look at me had been like. It was that of a surgeon who has just performed a difficult operation successfully; peeling off the rubber gloves, surveying the suture. Trial, flames… they were all mad, they must be, and she the most vicious, shameless, degenerate …

‘Anton’ held out a small open case to Conchis. He took out a hypodermic syringe, checked it was correctly filled, then leant over me a little and showed it.

‘We shall not frighten you any more, young man. But we want you to go to sleep. It will be less painful for you. Please do not struggle.’

The absurd memory of the pile of examination papers I had still to mark went through my mind. Joe and the other man turned me on my back again and gripped my left arm like a vice. I resisted for a few moments, then gave in. A dab of wet. The needle pricked into my forearm. I felt the morphine, or whatever it was, enter. The needle was withdrawn, another dab of something wet. Conchis stood back, watched me a moment, then turned and replaced the syringe in the black medical case it had come from.

I tried to realize what I had got into: a world of people who knew no laws, no limits.

A satyr with an arrow in his heart.

Mirabelle. La Maîtresse-Machine, a foul engine made fouler flesh.

Perhaps three minutes passed. Then June appeared in the doorway. She did not look at me. She was dressed like the men, in black shirt and trousers – and I seethed again, remembering she had worn those very clothes outside the school, even then knowing this was to happen – and all this, after I had at last told them about Alison! She moved across the room, her hair tied back now with a black chiffon scarf and coolly began to empty clothes from the corner wardrobe into a suitcase. My head began to swim. Faces and objects, the ceiling, receded from present reality; down and down a deep black mine of shock, incomprehension and flailing depths of impossible revenge.