I saw less of my wife that week than ever before. I couldn’t help it: suddenly I could not bear her presence, her scent, her voice. I had tasted stronger flesh now and Effie’s sick pallor appalled me. She smelt of laudanum all the time now-she was taking the drug in frequent doses, unprompted by me, and I noticed that she tended to become increasingly nervous as the day progressed and her medicine lost its potency. She ate little and spoke less, accusing me with her smoky eyes. The cat was always on her lap like a malignant familiar, fixing me with its narrow yellow stare. In spite of myself I became infected with the delusion that somehow they were judging me, that they could see into the very channels of my brain.

I could not bear it, and I began a further correspondence with Dr Russell, expressing concern at my wife’s mental condition. Even now I am not certain why I did so. Perhaps I realized even then that life with Effie would be unbearable once I had fallen under Marta’s spell. I saw Russell several times and told him that his new drug, chloral, was exactly what I needed to combat my insomnia-his boast that it had no side effects was not idle-and I discussed Effie’s seeming addiction.

Russell showed polite, respectful interest at all times, his keen grey eyes gleaming with absorption as he enumerated the various manias to which the female of the species is commonly prone, citing cases of hysterical catalepsy, schizophrenia and nymphomania. The weaker intellect of women, he told me, renders them more susceptible to diseases of the mind and the thought seemed to fill him with the abstract delight of the true academic. It occurred to me that in Russell I had a potentially invaluable ally. A pilgrim in search of more and more exotic cases of insanity, a collector of shrunken heads. One day-and the thought was barely formulated but stored away, delicately, for future use-he might be persuaded to add Effie to his collection. I put his letters to one side in a locked drawer of my desk, with the deliberate nonchalance of a poisoner laying aside the murderous vial for later use.

I spent whole days in my studio, trying to finish The Card Players, and for the first time in my life I painted without a model. Instead, I reached into my memory for her half-remembered features, sketching directly on to my canvas in oils and crayon. I found that she took form magically beneath my fingertips as I recalled the texture of her hair, the warmth of her skin, the careless turn of her head. I made no studies but painted directly, with a lover’s delicacy: the reddish light glowed on her cheekbones, emphasizing the vulnerable, arrogant set of her jaw, the pale quivering bow of her mouth; a stray flicker from the fire reflected coals from her eyes. Her mouth was slightly tensed as she looked over the table at the other player, but there was a sardonic arch to her dark brows which spoke of laughter or triumph. I painted her figure in dark colours in order to emphasize her face-perhaps the most expressive features I have ever painted-and I highlighted her cascading hair with a nimbus of red which gave her a dangerous, ambiguous radiance, like a burning city. For five days I worked feverishly at my Queen of Spades, darkening the finished areas of the canvas so that the viewer was led to her face, only her face.

Once, very fleetingly, I fancied I saw that certain resemblance to Effie in her mobile, shifting features: but no sooner had I formulated the thought than I knew that I was wrong. Marta was so vibrantly alive that she could not be compared with my poor little Beggar Girl-as well compare a flame to a sheet of paper. I knew instinctively that if they were to meet, Effie would be as utterly consumed by Marta’s voracious energy.

During that week I burned for her and at night I cramped and clawed under my heavy bedclothes with the Eye of God fixed like a nail into the top of my head. My sheets burned with the sulphurous dank of my body and my stench appalled me, but still I longed for her.

For six nights I borrowed my sleep from the chloral bottle-I still remember the midnight-blue glass, cool antidote to all scarlet dreams. Wasted by the potency of my fever and my lust, I met Thursday’s dawn with a sense of doomed anticlimax. It was a mistake to go to her twice; I knew it now. There was no Scheherazade, no faery-footed damozel with eyes like garnets. Today she would be a penny whore, cunningly lit and robed, but a whore nevertheless, all her tender alchemy gone. Today I knew it.

I arrived at midnight: I saw the clock in the hall tick over the crucial minute and I shivered in foreboding as the hour began to strike. As the notes sank into the silence a door opened at my back and Fanny emerged, vibrant in yellow brocade, her hair like vines. Two of her familiars were coiled around her ankles, and I tried to avoid their silent, contemptuous gaze as Fanny led me, not to the red parlour as before, but up the stairs to a room on the first floor which I had never seen before.

She tapped on the door, then, wordlessly, opened it. It was almost dark, the light from the passageway momentarily destroying the subtle lighting inside the room. I heard the door shut firmly at my back and for an instant I looked around, disorientated. The room was large and almost bare, lit by several gas-jets shielded by blue glass globes. I was reminded for a moment of the chloral bottle, promising cool oblivion, and I shivered. It was not the thought, I realized: the room was cold, the dead fire screened by a dark Chinese lacquer panel. Rugs partly covered the floor, but the walls were bare and the room seemed dead, with none of the opulence of the red parlour. The only furniture I could see was a small table upon which stood a blue decanter and a glass.

‘Please pour yourself a drink,’ hissed a voice behind me, and suddenly she was there-strange how inconspicuous she could be when she chose. Her black hair (how could I have thought it was red? It was crow-black, black as the Queen of Spades) fell straight as rain between her spread hands. She was pale as smoke in the deathly light, her mouth a blur, her eyes a startling cobalt in the Gothic pallor of her face. Her dress was made of some stiff, panelled fabric which stood out against her vulnerable flesh, and its opulence was somehow disturbing in the bleak surrounding, as if she were a forgotten Coppélia in a deserted workshop, just waiting to be set into motion.

Mechanically I poured myself a glassful of the liquor in the cornflower-blue decanter-it was tinselly and sharp, with the stinging taste of juniper-and struggled once again to overcome my sense of unreality. For a moment I wondered if there were chloral in the drink, for I felt myself sink in watery abandon, the figure of Marta a swaying ghost in that undersea light, a drowned mermaid with the smell of weed and decay in her floating hair. Then her cold arms folded around me and I felt her mouth fleetingly against mine, her voice whispering inaudible obscenities in my ear, and I collapsed against her, clutching her dress, pulling her down with me on to the floor, on to the dim sea-bed, her blood a rushing in my ears, her flesh a welcome suffocation of my sense of sin.

When at last I was spent we lay together on the soft blue rugs and she whispered a long, dreamlike tale to me of a woman who changed with the moon, growing from young girl to beautiful woman to hideous crone as the month went by…then I wanted her again and I plunged into her like a dolphin into a wave.

‘I have to see you again. I have to see you again soon.’

‘Next Thursday.’ Her whispering voice is matter-of-fact, passionless, almost coarse: the voice of a penny whore planning business.

‘No! I want to see you sooner than that.’