Someone began to pull them, from behind, by cords, as they do for plays in parish halls. When they were about two-thirds open, they stopped; but long before that the parallel with parish halls had vanished. The light came from a shade hung from the ceiling. It let no light through, so that the illumination was thrown down in a soft, intimate cone on to what lay beneath.

A low couch, covered by a huge golden-tawny rug, perhaps an Afghan carpet. On it, completely naked, was Lily. I could not see the scar, but I knew it was her. The tan was not dark enough for her sister. Lying against a mound of pillows, deep gold, amber, rose, maroon, themselves piled against an ornate gilt and carved headboard, she was turned sideways towards me in a deliberate imitation of Goya’s Maja Desnuda. Her hands behind her head, her nakedness offered. Not flaunted, but offered, stated as a divine and immemorial fact. A bare armpit, as sexual as a loin. Nipples the colour of cornelians, as if they alone in all that honeyed skin had been, or could be, bitten and bruised. The tapering curves, thighs, ankles, small bare feet. And the level, unmoving eyes staring with a kind of arrogant calm into the shadows where I hung.

Beyond her, on the rear wall, had been painted an arcade of slender black arches. I thought at first that they were meant to represent Bourani; but they were too narrow, and had slender Moorish-ogive tops. Goya … the Alhambra? I realized the couch was not legless, but that the far end of the room was on a slightly lower level, rather like a Roman bath. The curtains had concealed further steps down.

The slender form lay in its greenish-tawny lake of light, without movement; and she stared at me as from a canvas. The tableau pose was held so long that I began to think this was the great finale; this living painting, this naked enigma, this forever unattainable.

Minutes passed. The lovely body lay in its mystery. I could just see the imperceptible swell of her breathing … or could I? For a few moments I was looking at a magnificently lifelike wax effigy.

But then she moved.

Her head turned in profile and her right arm reached out gracefully and invitingly, in the classical gesture of Recamier, to whoever had switched on the light and drawn open the curtains. A new figure appeared.

It was Joe.

He was in a cloak of indeterminate period, pure white, lined heavily with gold. He went and stood behind the couch. Rome? An empress and her slave? He stared at me, or towards me, for a moment, and I knew he could not be meant to be a slave. He was too majestic, too darkly noble. He possessed the room, the stage, the woman. He looked down at her and she looked up, a grave affection; the swan neck. He took her outstretched hand.

Suddenly I understood who they were; and who I was; how prepared, this moment. I too had a new role. I tried then desperately to get rid of the gag, by biting, by yawning, by rubbing my head against my arms. But it was too tight.

The Negro, the Moor, knelt beside her, kissed her shoulder. A slim white arm framed and imprisoned his dark head. A long moment. Then she sank back. He surveyed her, slowly ran a hand down from her neck to her waist. As if she was silk. Sure of her surrender. Then he calmly stood up and unbroached his toga at the shoulder.

I shut my eyes.

Nothing is true; everything is permitted.

Conchis: His part is not ended yet.

I opened my eyes again.

There was no perversion, no attempt to suggest that I was watching anything else but two people who were in love making love; as one might watch two boxers in a gymnasium or two acrobats on a stage. Not that there was anything acrobatic or violent about them. They behaved as if to show that the reality was the very antithesis of the absurd nastiness in the film.

For long moments I shut my eyes, refusing to watch. But then always I seemed forced, a voyeur in hell, to raise my head and look again. My arms began to go numb, an additional torture. The two figures on the lion-coloured bed, the luminously pale and the richly dark, embraced, re-embraced, oblivious of me, of all except their enactment.

What they did was in itself without obscenity, merely private, familiar; a biological ritual that takes place a hundred million times every night the world turns. But I tried to imagine what could make them bring themselves to do it in front of me; what incredible argument Conchis used; what they used to themselves. Lily now seemed to me as far ahead of me in time as she had at first started behind; somehow she had learnt to lie with her body as other people could lie only with their tongues. Perhaps she wanted some state of complete sexual emancipation, and the demonstration of it was more necessary to her as self-proof than its exhibition was to me as my already supererogatory ‘disintoxication’.

Everything I had ever thought to understand about woman receded, interwove, flowed into mystery, into distorting shadows and currents, like objects sinking away, away, down through shafted depths of water.

The black arch of his long back, his loins joined to hers. White separated knees. That terrible movement, total possession between those acquiescent knees. Something carried me back to that night incident when she played Artemis; to the strange whiteness of Apollo’s skin. The dull gold crown of leaves. An athletic body, living marble. And I knew then that Apollo and Anubis had been played by the same man. That night, when she had left … the next day’s innocent virgin on the beach. The chapel. The black doll swung in my mind, the skull grinned malevolently. Artemis, Astarte, eternal liar.

He silently celebrated his orgasm.

The two bodies lay absolutely still on the altar of the bed. His turned-away head was hidden by hers, and I could see her hands caressing his shoulders, his back. I tried to wrench my aching arms free of the frame, to overturn it. But it had been lashed to the wall, to special staples; and the rings were bolted through the wood.

After an unendurable pause he rose from the bed, knelt and kissed her shoulder, almost formally, and then, gathering his cloak, calmly quit the stage for the shadows. She lay for a moment as he had left her, crushed back among the cushions. But then she raised herself on her left elbow and lay posed as she had at the beginning. Her stare fixed me. Without rancour and without regret; without triumph and without evil; as Desdemona once looked back on Venice.

On the incomprehension, the baffled rage of Venice. I had taken myself to be in some way the traitor Iago punished, in an unwritten sixth act. Chained in hell. But I was also Venice; the state left behind; the thing journeyed from.

The curtains were pulled slowly to. I was left where I had started, in darkness. Even the light behind was extinguished. I had a vertiginous moment in which I doubted whether it had happened. An induced hallucination? Had the trial happened? Had anything ever happened? But the savage pain in my arms told me that everything had happened.

And then, out of that pain, the sheer physical torture, I began to understand. I was Iago; but I was also crucified. The crucified Iago. Crucified by … the metamorphoses of Lily ran wildly through my brain, like maenads, hunting some blindness, some demon in me down. I suddenly knew her real name, behind the masks. Why they had chosen the Othello situation. Why Iago. Plunging through that.

I knew her real name. I did not forgive, if anything I felt more rage. But I knew her real name.

A figure appeared in the door. It was Conchis. He came to where I hung from the frame, and stood in front of me. I closed my eyes. The pain in my arms drowned everything else.

I made a sort of groaning-growling noise through the gag. I did not know myself what it really meant to say: whether that I was in pain or that if I ever saw him again I would tear him limb from limb.

‘I come to tell you that you are now elect.’

I shook my head violently from side to side.

‘You have no choice.’

I still shook my head, but more wearily.

He stared at me, with those eyes that seemed older than one man’s lifetime, and a little gleam of sympathy came into his expression, as if after all he might have put too much pressure on a very thin lever.

‘Learn to smile, Nicholas. Learn to smile.’

It came to me that he meant something different by ‘smile’ than I did; that the irony, the humourlessness, the ruthlessness I had always noticed in his smiling was a quality he deliberately inserted; that for him the smile was something essentially cruel, because freedom is cruel, because the freedom that makes us at least partly responsible for what we are is cruel. So that the smile was not so much an attitude to be taken to life as the nature of the cruelty of life, a cruelty we cannot even choose to avoid, since it is human existence. He meant something far stranger by ‘Learn to smile’ than a Smilesian ‘Grin and bear it’. If anything, it meant ‘Learn to be cruel, learn to be dry, learn to survive.’

That we have no choice of play or role. It is always Othello. To be is, immutably, to be Iago.

He gave the smallest of bows, one full of irony, of the contempt implicit in incongruous courtesy, then went.

As soon as he had gone, Anton came in with Adam and the other blackshirts. They undid the handcuffs and got my arms down. Along black pole two of the blackshirts were carrying was unrolled and I saw a stretcher. They forced me to lie down on it and once again my wrists were handcuffed to the sides. I could neither fight them nor beg them to stop. So I lay passively, with my eyes shut, to avoid seeing them. I smelt ether, felt very faintly the jab of a needle; and this time I willed the oblivion to come fast.