GRUMMAN: You say that you then drove to Elstree. Why? LOUGHLIN: I had rented an aircraft there a Piper Twin Comanche.

GRUMMAN: I see. Anyway, you then flew across London and on down to Gatwick, where you paralysed the airport for an hour by buzzing all the BEA jets parked on the ground.

LOUGHLIN: I knew that if I could find Judith's plane I could somehow fuse my aircraft with hers, in a kind of transfiguring GRUMMAN:... crash? But why?

LOUGHLIN: I was convinced that I could fly her to safety. It was the only way she would survive her cancer.

GRUMMAN: What actually happened?

LOUGHLIN: I landed and skidded into the nosewheel of a VC1O. Richard Northrop pulled me out. We had some sort of disagreement he resented my dependence on him, and my involvement with Judith and then the security guard was accidentally shot.

12.

Although there is no doubt that Judith Loughlin had been married to her husband for three years, their relationship was never close, and she in no way could be regarded as 'his'. Before her marriage she had been involved in a longstanding liaison with Dr Douglas, whom she continued to see even after the latter's engagement and marriage in 1974. A successful barrister, selfwilled and ambitious, she found herself increasingly unsympathetic towards Loughlin's erratic mental behaviour and incipient alcoholism. It is almost certain that but for her death she would have divorced Loughlin the following year. Viewing her charitably, one may say that her actions that fatal afternoon in the bathroom of her Gatwick hotel had been provoked by years of marital unhappiness.

13.

Careful reconstruction of the events surrounding the murder of Judith Loughlin on 28 March 1975, indicates that she had arrived at Gatwick with Dr Douglas the previous day. They passed the night in room 117 of the Skyport Hotel, intending to take the 3.15 p.m. flight to Geneva the following afternoon. It was while they were having lunch in the hotel restaurant that Loughlin appeared at the airport, already in an extreme state of alcoholic distress. He began a futile search among the parked airliners for the Trident jet then being prepared for the 3.15 flight, possibly intending to hijack the plane or even to blow it up with himself aboard. In the course of this search the security guard was shot. Loughlin then made his way to the Skyport Hotel, and by some ruse located and entered his wife's room. Befuddled by a heavy overdose of alcohol and amphetamines, he decided to revive himself in a bath of cold water. He was lying unconscious in the bath, fully clothed, when Judith Loughlin returned alone to her room after lunch.

14.

All the evidence collected indicates that Judith Loughlin's decision to murder her husband was a sudden response to the sight of him slumped unconscious in her bath. Shocked by the damage he had done to the room in his rage Loughlin had torn apart Dr Douglas's clothes and suitcases she apparently decided to put an end to the sufferings of this unhappy man. Unfortunately she had reckoned neither with Loughlin's powerful physique the moment she pressed his head below the bath water he leapt up and seized her nor with the total transformation that had taken place within her husband's mind. Already he seems to have decided that she was leaving him only in the sense that she was dying of pancreatic cancer, and that he might save her by constructing a unique flying machine.

15.

Questions as to the exact person indicated by this pronoun have been raised since the moment Loughlin was rescued from the fire blazing in room 117. It was first assumed from the ravings of the injured man that he was an airline pilot. He was sitting on the burning bed in the tandem position behind the charred body of a similarly seated woman, as if giving her pilot tuition. His wife had been forcibly trussed into a flying suit and wore helmet and goggles. She was identified by the doublehelix of her intrauterine device. Thanks to his sodden clothes, only Loughlin's hands and feet had been burned. The furniture in the room had been arranged to form a rough representation of an aircraft, perhaps inspired by the elaborate aeronautical motifs in the bedroom decor.

16.

Not surprisingly, the trial exposed all the contradictions inherent in this puzzling case. Questions as to 'Loughlin's' identity continued to be raised. There was no evidence that he was a qualified pilot, though a Private Pilot's Licence in his name was found in a locker at Elstree Flying Club, perhaps left there as part of a false identity carefully fabricated by him. Certainly he was obsessed with aviation, as his use of aircraft manufacturers' names for his medical colleagues indicates. Nor was there any real confirmation that he was a physician, particularly when we consider his lavish use of meaningless pseudo medicalese (e.g. 'serotonin'9 and2... proteinreaction21 suppressor22 m.v.d.23' etc.).

17.

This afterthought, attached to the previous 16 words with their apparently straightforward description of the events leading up to his trial, almost certainly indicates the author's real intent in compiling his ambiguous history.

18.

The author's evident conviction of his own innocence, like his earlier belief that he had been discharged from hospital, may be taken as an expression of hope for the future. Meanwhile he continues with his busy round of activities in the Unit of Criminal Psychopathy, constructing his bizarre 'aircraft' and tirelessly editing the footnotes with which he has annotated so many of the medical textbooks in the library. Ultimately the entire stock will have been provided with a unique gloss. As all these books are outofdate, like the 1972 BP Codex, little harm is done. Most of his complex annotations have been shown to be complete fictions, an endlessly unravelling web of imaginary research work, medical personalities and the convoluted and sometimes tragic interrelationships of their private lives. Occasionally, however, they describe with unusual clarity a sequence of events that might almost have taken place. The patient seems trapped between what his psychiatrists call 'paradoxical faces', each image of himself in the mirror reinforcing that in the glass behind him. The separation of the two will only be achieved by the appearance of the as yet incomplete document Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown, of which we possess only an 18word synopsis and its set of footnotes. It seems possible that although the synopsis conceals a maze of lies and distortions, it is a simple and incontrovertible statement of the truth.

1976.

The 60 Minute Zoom 2.15 P.M.

Lioret de Mar, Apartamentos California I am looking into a silent world. Through the viewfinder of this cinecamera, set at its maximum field, I can see the Hotel Coral Playa three hundred yards along the beach, covered by a desert light so glazed that it would embalm Pharoah. It's incredible that the sea is only a few feet to the right of frame with this dense powdery light we could be at Karnak, in that tourist hotel by the necropolis where Helen befriended her Stuttgart dentist and first set in train this epic of the amateur camera. The ultimate home movie, perhaps, but so far everything has gone well, thanks to $2500's worth of Nikon Zoomatic and an obliging Barcelona camera specialist. Renting this apartment was the only difficult moment delivering a second key to my door, did the suspicious Swedish manager catch a glimpse of the complex tripods and clamps I was assembling by the bedroom window? Like the barbette of some sinister assassination weapon, which it is in a way. But this secondrate apartment building provides the only suitable vantage point. The fifteenstorey faade of the Coral Playa must exactly fill the opening sequence in an hour the automatic zoom will carry me along the carretera, past the hundreds of parked cars and beached speedboats, to within three feet of my target within the bedroom of our tenthfloor hotel suite. A miracle of Japanese lenscutting. Thinking of the electrifying image, worthy of Bergman or Polanski, that will be the climax of this film almost derails my mind. I listen to the faint susurrus of the zoom motor, the sound of wellbred Osaka matrons at a flowerarrangement course. Despite everything, the degrading but exciting months of anger and suspicion, I feel the first hint of an erection.

2.19 P.M.

Already I am closer to the Coral Playa, the equivalent of perhaps 200 yards away. For the first time I can pick out our own suite, Helen's black waterskis arranged like runes on the balcony. Now and then something flicks through the afternoon light, a bottletop or cigarette packet flung from one of the unseen apartment blocks on the left. Lying here on a raised couch in the darkened bedroom, it is hard to believe that the Coral Playa exists at all except as a figment of this viewfinder. But the rectilinear faade of the hotel is sharper. The fifteen floors are each taking on a separate identity. There are differences of tone, subtle declensions of balcony geometry that hint at the personalities of the people behind them. The varying angles of the shutters, the beach umbrellas and bikinis hanging on improvised lines, constitute an elaborate personal notation, a complex of ciphers that would send a semiologist into trance. Almost no sky surrounds the hotel, and half the lurid electrographic sign on the roof has been cut away. The image of the hotel's faade, its 150 balconies, is an increasingly abstract entity. As yet there is no sign of movement Helen will still be on the bed where I left her, a towel around her head, reading her showerdamp copy of American Vogue as I set off ostensibly for Barcelona. The guests are still finishing their gaspacho and paella in the hotel restaurant. In the main groundfloor entrance I can identify several of my neighbours sitting in the armchairs and talking to the lobby clerks. They resemble bored marionettes, unable to sustain their roles in this drama in which I have cast them. My main concern is with the two balconies of our suite and the cluster of adjacent rooms. Already the dark interiors are beginning to lighten, I can just distinguish the internal doors that lead to bathrooms and corridors Wait... While my attention is fixed on my own bedroom, impatient for Helen to make her first appearance as the star of this film, I almost fail to notice that a man in a red bathrobe is standing on a balcony five floors above. An American journalist named Anderson, he is looking down at the entrance drive, where a black Mustang has pulled into one of the diagonal parking spaces. The overheated carapace is about to flow like tar, and for a moment I am too distracted to notice the young man hefting flippers and snorkel from the rear seat. Rademaekers! Panicking, I realize that the young Danish heart surgeon has returned half an hour earlier than I estimated. My zoom may close in on a shot bolt!

2.24 P.M.

I have calmed myself, straightened the damaged blind and realigned the tripod. In the last few minutes the scene before me has been totally transformed. Rademaekers has gone straight to the American's room, where he wanders about gesticulating with the flippers. Drink in hand, he seems unlikely to be visiting Helen in the next hour. The Nikon purrs smoothly, carrying me ever nearer the Coral Playa. Little more than an apparent hundred yards from me, the hotel has become a hive of activity as the guests return from the dining room and prepare for siesta. Already I recognize dozens of my neighbours in their bedrooms, the men taking off their shoes, the women testing the beachtowels on the balconies and examining their teeth in the dressingtable mirrors. These commonplace but almost meaningless activities have an extraordinary fascination, for years I have watched them in a hundred hotels. But now I am glad that Helen has failed to make her entrance. With her entrenched rationality, her overcalculated approach to life in general and the needs of her sexuality in particular, she has always failed to understand the real significance of my obsession with the private behaviour of my neighbours. She cannot grasp that this aimless minor traffic around their bodies, the applications of sunoil, the dabbing of scent into this or that fossa, represent a continuing authentication of their physical selves, a nonvocal gossip about their armpits and pudenda that no kinaesthetic language, beyond those provided by the instructions on a deodorant or ladyshaver, has yet been found to express. Fifty units of intense private activity, they edge closer to me. On the second floor the young wife of a Marseilles lawyer undresses to reveal a breastless brown body like a catamite's, sits in bed with the sheet over her knees forming a white pyramid, a geometry of remarkable chasteness from which I move my eyes only when I notice that, at last, the central balcony of the film has been mounted by my wife.

2.28 P.M.

A shame that there is no soundtrack. Rather than the Polanski or Fellini of the home movie I shall have to become its D. W. Griffith. With his architectural obsessions he would have appreciated the special merits of this film. I am now looking at the faade of the Coral Playa from a distance of fifty yards. Haifa dozen floors are visible, a cluster of balconies at whose centre stands my wife. Wayward and erotic, faithless spouse but excellent travelling companion, she is gazing, uncannily, straight towards my camera. The powdery light has cleared, and every detail of the hotel is exposed with the vividness of an hallucination the rust stains leaking from the balcony rails, the drying swimsuits and discarded paperbacks on the balcony tables, the unfamiliar brands of towel picked up in some provincial MonoPrix. Oblivious of this plethora of detail swarming around her, Helen is brushing her hair with a reflex hand, revealing the strong muscles of her neck and making the greatest play with her profile for the benefit of the audience watching her from the balconies above and below. For all this attention, she is dressed discreetly in my white towelling robe, no doubt a signal to someone in my absence. Moving my eyes from her, I notice that on the surrounding balconies stands the full complement of her admirers, that troupe of beachpartners, one of whom will play the supporting role in this film. Penelope with her suitors, and I with my Nikonbow. Even the everfaithful Argus is there in the bedroom behind her, the dented but still inflated rubber sealion which Helen bought me, with cruel irony, two years ago at Venice Lido, and which I, refusing to be outdone, have cared for devotedly ever since, much to her exasperation...

2.32 P.M.

Helen has loosened my beachrobe, exposing the entire upper hemisphere of her right breast. There is a quickening of heads and eyes. I feel a familiar surge of excitement as I make a last inventory of my rivals. Rademaekers, the pedantic Danish surgeon who took her snorkelling yesterday, has returned to his room three floors diagonally above ours. Even as he hunts for a clean shirt in his wardrobe he is still holding one of the flippers, like a seaborn land creature clinging obsessively to an obsolete organ. I eliminate him, and move to his neighbour, a thirtyyearold Brighton antique dealer, whose speedboat, during our first week, sat reversing in the shallows ten yards from the beach where Helen and I lay under our umbrellas. Engaging but unscrupulous, he too is taking in his opposition principally Fradier, the Paris comicstrip publisher two floors above, leaning on his balcony rail beside his attractive wife while openly admiring Helen. But Fradier is moving out of frame, and by the logic of this film can be dropped from the castlist. As the camera moves nearer I approach the main stage of this vertical drama a tier of fifteen balconies distributed among five floors, Helen at the centre. Two floors below her, barechested in the fierce sunlight, is a minor Italian film actor who arrived only yesterday, bringing with him an anthology of dubious sexual techniques which he had already displayed for Helen in the hotel bar after dinner. His profession would make him my chief suspect, but he too is about to move out of frame, exiting from this reductive fable.

Helen is scrutinizing her eyes in a lacquered handmirror. She plucks a stray hair from her browline with the ruthlessness she always applies to her own body. Even thirty feet away, hovering in the air like an invisible angel, I find this violence unnerving. I realize that I have only been fully at ease with my wife while watching her through the viewfinder of a camera even within the private space of our various hotel rooms I prefer her seen through a lens, emblematic of my own needs and fantasies rather than existing in her own right. At one time this rightly outraged her, but recently she has begun to play along with my obsession. For hours I watch her, picking her nose and arguing with me about something as I lie on the bed with a camera to my eye, fascinated by the shifting geometries of her thighs and shoulders, the diagrams of her face.

Helen has left the balcony. She tosses the mirror on to the bed, gazes with a pensive frown at the fading but still cheerful expression on the face of the sealion, and walks straight through the suite to the front door. Almost before I stifle a shout she has disappeared into the corridor. For the moment I am paralysed. Under my beachrobe she is naked.

2.36 P.M.

Where is she? The camera is closing with the Coral Playa at an unsettling speed. I wonder if the Nikon engineers have at last overreached themselves. I seem to be no more than ten feet from the faade of the hotel, I can almost reach out and touch the balconies. Only three of the suites are now in frame, our own sandwiched between the Lawrences above us, an affable English couple from Manchester, and a fortyyearold Irish pharmacologist below with whom we have made no contact. These three have involuntarily gatecrashed their way into my film. Meanwhile Helen could be anywhere in the hotel, with Rademaekers or the antique dealer, even with the comicstrip publisher if Mme Fradier has left for the beach. Fumbling with the tripod, I am about to realign the camera when Helen reappears, standing in the centre of the Lawrences' sitting room. Barefoot, hands in the pockets of my white beachrobe, she is talking to Lawrence, a handsome, sandyhaired accountant wearing nothing more than a string swimslip over his ample crutch. But where is his wife? Is she in the hotel pool, or hidden from me by the lowered bedroom shutter, joining in the conversation through the open door? Confused by this unlikely tryst, I am ready to stop the camera when Lawrence and Helen embrace. I catch my breath, but their kiss is merely a light peck. With a wave, Helen takes a magazine from him and steps into the corridor. Thirty seconds later, as Lawrence wanders around the sitting room patting his groin, Helen reenters our suite. After a pause, she leaves the door ajar. Her actions are calm and unrushed, but totally conspiratorial. With aching relief, my loins are at full cock long before the heavily built figure of the Irish pharmacologist steps deferentially into the sitting room and locks the door behind him.

2.42 P.M.

Reverie of pain, lust and, above all, childlike hate, in which the slights and antagonisms of a lifetime are subsumed in this unresolvable confrontation between fear and desire, the need and refusal to face the basilisk stare of Helen's sexuality... all these modulated by the logic of the zoom, by the geometries of balconies and the laminated gleam of a fashion magazine on a white sheet, the terrifying reductive authority of the encroaching lens. By now the entire frame of the viewfinder is filled by our hotel suite, I seem to be no more than three feet from the nearer of the two balconies, watching Helen and her lover like a theatregoer in a front stall. So close am I that I fully expect them to incorporate me in their dialogue. Still wearing my beachrobe, Helen strolls around the sitting room, talking away matteroffactly as if demonstrating a new domestic appliance to a customer. The pharmacologist sits on the white plastic settee, listening to her in an agreeable way. There is an unforced casualness, a degree of indifference so marked that it is hard to believe they are about to copulate on my bed. Leached away by the camera lens, the dimension of depth is missing from the room, and the two figures have an increasingly abstract relationship to each other, and to the rectilinear forms of the settee, walls and ceiling. In this context almost anything is possible, their movements are a series of postural equations that must have some significance other than their apparent one. As the man lounges back Helen slips off my robe and stands naked in front of him, pointing to the burn marks left by her shoulder straps.

2.46 P.M.

For the first time the camera lens has crossed the balcony and entered the domain of our hotel suite. I am no more than a few steps from the Irishman, who is undressing beside the bed, revealing a muscular physique of a kind that has never previously appealed to Helen. She sits naked on the bidet in the bathroom, clearly visible through the open door, picking at a toenail and staring with a preoccupied expression at the rubber floormat. The white porcelain of the bidet, the chromium fitments and the ultramarine tiles of the bathroom together make a curiously formalized composition, as if Vermeer himself had been resurrected and turned loose to recreate his unhurried domestic interiors in the Delft Hilton. Already I feel my anger begin to fade. Annoyingly, my erection also slackens. The transit of this camera across the last forty minutes, which should have brought me to a positive Golgotha of last humiliation, has in fact achieved a gradual abstraction of emotion, an assuagement of all anger and regret. In a way, I feel a kind of affection for Helen.

2.52 P.M.

They lie together on the bed, taking part in a sexual act so relaxed that this camera should film them in slow motion. I am now so close that I might be sitting in the armchair beside the bed. Enlarged by the lens, the movements of their bodies resemble the matings of clouds. Steadily they inflate before me, the vents of their mouths silently working like those of sleeping fish, a planet of anatomical abstractions on which I will soon land. When they come, our orgasms seem to take place in the air above the bed, like the aerial copulation of exotic and gentle birds. Little more than three feet from the camera, the blurred smile of the sealion presides over this interlude of nuptial bliss.

2.56 P.M.

Helen is alone now. Her face is out of frame, and through the viewfinder I see only a segment of the pillow, an area of crumpled sheet and the upper section of her chest and shoulders. An almost undifferentiated whiteness fills the lens, marred by the blue hollow of her armpit and the damp sulcus of her right breast, in which a few of the pharmacologist's hairs have been caught. Edging closer, I watch the easy rise and fall of her ribcage Helen has sat up. Breaking this extended calm, she has turned on one elbow. The sharp movement almost jars the camera, and I realize that far from being asleep she has been lying there fully awake, thinking to herself about something. Her face fills the viewfinder, in the only true closeup of this film. She is looking me straight in the eye, violating our neverspoken agreement in a blatant way. In a blur of light I see her hand pull the sealion towards her, then stab with her nails at its worn eyes. Instantly it buckles as the air spurts from the dented plastic.

At this moment I am certain that she has known about this film all along, as she must have known about the others I have made, first with the still Hasselblad as she and the young waiter flirted around the Pontresina skilift, later following the Bayreuth Kappelimeister with a cheap cinecamera mounted in the back of the car, productions that have increased in both range and ambition as they led to this present most elaborate exercise of all. But even now, I dream of the ultimate voyeurist film, employing bizarre lenses that reach to some isolated balcony over extraordinary distances, across the Bay of Naples to Capri, or from Dover to a beach hotel in Calais, magnifying the moment of orgasm to a degree of absolute enlargement where the elements of her infidelity become totally abstracted from themselves, areas of undifferentiated light that assuage all anger.

3.05 P.M.

Within a few seconds the camera will reach the limits of its zoom. Helen sleeps on her side with her face away from me. Never faltering, the camera creeps onwards, excluding more and more details from the edges of its frame, the stray hairs of her lover, the damp sweatprints of her shoulder blades on the sheet. Yet I am aware that there has been a sudden intrusion into the white spaces of the bedroom. What are unmistakably parts of a man's shoes and trousers have appeared soundlessly beside the bed, pausing by the sagging beachtoy. Helen sleeps on, her malice forgotten, unaware of the flash of chromium light that irradiates the screen. Fascinated, with no sense of alarm, I watch the movements of this mysterious intruder, the articulated volumes of almost unrelated forms.

Only a white field is now visible, detached from all needs and concessions, a primed canvas waiting for its first brush stroke. Applauding, I see the screen fill with sudden red.

3.15 P.M.

The man kneels beside the bed, watching the elaborate patterns formed by the quiet blood as it runs across the sheet, hunting a hundred gradients. As he turns, exposing his face to the camera, I recognize myself. The sealion, my faithful Argus, expires at my feet. As always when I see this film and listen to its commentary, the infinite dream of the sixtyminute zoom, I remember the long journey across the dust and noise of Lloret, past the clamour of the sea to the serene world within this hotel bedroom, to my faithful wife rediscovered in the marriage of red and white.

1976.

The Smile Now that a nightmare logic has run its course, it is hard to believe that my friends and I thought it the most innocent caprice when I first brought Serena Cockayne to live with me in my Chelsea house. Two subjects have always fascinated me woman and the bizarre and Serena combined them both, though not in any crude or perverse sense. During the extended dinner parties that carried us through our first summer together three years ago her presence beside me, beautiful, silent and forever reassuring in its strange way, was surrounded by all kinds of complex and charming ironies.

No one who met Serena failed to be delighted by her. She would sit demurely in her gilt chair by the sittingroom door, the blue folds of her brocade gown embracing her like a gentle and devoted sea. At dinner, when my guests had taken their seats, they would watch with amused and tolerant affection as I carried Serena to her place at the opposite end of the table. Her faint smile, the most delicate bloom of that peerless skin, presided over our elaborate evenings with unvarying calm. When the last of my guests had gone, paying their respects to Serena as she watched them from the hall, head inclined to one side in that characteristic pose of hers, I would carry her happily to my bedroom.

Of course Serena never took part in any of our conversations, and no doubt this was a vital element of her appeal. My friends and I belonged to that generation of men who had been forced in early middle age, by sexual necessity if nothing else, to a weary acceptance of militant feminism, and there was something about Serena's passive beauty, her immaculate but oldfashioned makeup, and above all her unbroken silence that spelled out a deep and pleasing deference to our wounded masculinity. In all senses, Serena was the kind of woman that men invent.

But this was before I realized the true nature of Serena's character, and the more ambiguous role she was to play in my life, from which I wait now with so much longing to be freed.

Appropriately enough though the irony then escaped me completely I first saw Serena Cockayne at the World's End, in that area at the lower end of the King's Road now occupied by a cluster of highrise apartment blocks but which only three years ago was still an enclave of secondrate antique shops, scruffy boutiques and nineteenthcentury terrace housing overripe for redevelopment. Pausing on my way home from the office by a small curio shop announcing its closingdown sale, I peered through the sulphurstained windows at the few remnants on display. Almost everything had gone, except for a clutch of ragged Victorian umbrellas collapsed in the corner like a decaying witch and an ancient set of stuffed elephants' feet. These dozen or so dusty monoliths had a special poignancy, all that remained of some solitary herd slaughtered for its ivory a century earlier. I visualized them displayed secretly around my sitting room, filling the air with their invisible but dignified presences.

Inside the shop a young woman attendant sat behind a marquetry desk, watching me with her head tilted to one side as if calculating in a patient way how serious a customer I might be. This unprofessional pose, and her total lack of response as I entered the shop, ought to have warned me off, but already I had been struck by the young woman's unusual appearance.

What I first noticed, transforming the dingy interior of the shop, was the magnificence of her brocaded gown, far beyond the means of a sales girl at this dowdy end of the King's Road. Against a lustrous blue field, a cerulean of almost Pacific deepness, the gold and silver patterning rose from the floor at her feet, so rich that I almost expected the gown to surge up and engulf her. By comparison, her demure head and shoulders, white bust discreetly revealed. by the low bodice, emerged with an extraordinary serenity from this resplendent sea, like those of a domestic Aphrodite seated calmly astride Poseidon. Although she was barely beyond her teens, her hair had been dressed in a deliberately unfashionable style, as if lovingly assembled by an elderly devotee of twenties' film magazines. Within this blonde helmet her features had been rouged and powdered with the same lavish care, eyebrows plucked and hairline raised, without any sense of pastiche or mock nostalgia, perhaps by an eccentric mother still dreaming of Valentino.

Her small hands rested on her lap, apparently clasped together but in fact separated by a narrow interval, a stylized pose that suggested she was trying to hold to her some moment of time that might otherwise slip away. On her mouth hung a faint smile, at once pensive and reassuring, as if she had resigned herself in the most adult way to the vanishing world of this moribund curio shop.

'I'm sorry to see you're closing down,' I remarked to her. 'That set of elephants' feet in the window... there's something rather touching about them.'

She made no reply. Her hands remained clasped their millimetres apart, and her eyes stared in their trancelike way at the door I had closed behind me. She was sitting on a peculiarly designed chair, a threelegged contraption of varnished teak that was part stand and part artist's easel.

Realizing that it was some sort of surgical device and that she was probably a cripple hence the elaborate makeup and frozen posture I bent down to speak to her again.

Then I saw the brass plaque fastened to the apex of the teak tripod on which she sat.

SERENA COCKAYNE.

Attached to the plaque was a dusty price ticket. '250'.

In retrospect, it is curious that it took me so long to realize that I was looking, not at a real young woman, but at an elaborate mannequin, a masterpiece of the dollmaker's art produced by a remarkable virtuoso. This at last made sense of her Edwardian gown and antique wig, the twenties' cosmetics and facial expression. None the less, the resemblance to a real woman was uncanny. The slightly bowed contours of the shoulders, the toopearly and unblemished skin, the few strands of hair at the nape of the neck that had escaped the wigmaker's attentions, the uncanny delicacy with which the nostrils, ears and lips had been modelled almost by an act of sexual love together these represented a tour de force so breathtaking that it all but concealed the subtle wit of the whole enterprise. Already I was thinking of the impact this lifesize replica of themselves would have on the wives of my friends when I first introduced them to it.

A curtain behind me was drawn back. The owner of the shop, an adroit young homosexual, came forward with a white cat in his arms, chin raised at the sound of my delighted laughter. Already I had taken out my chequebook and had scribbled my signature with a flourish befitting the occasion.

So I carried Serena Cockayne to a taxi and brought her home to live with me. Looking back at that first summer we spent together I remember it as a time of perpetual good humour, in which almost every aspect of my life was enriched by Serena's presence. Decorous and unobtrusive, she touched everything around me with the most delicious ironies. Sitting quietly by the fireplace in my study as I read, presiding like the mistress of the house over the dining table, her placid smile and serene gaze illuminated the air.

Not one of my friends failed to be taken in by the illusion, and all complimented me on bringing off such a coup. Their wives, of course, regarded Serena with suspicion, and clearly considered her to be part of some adolescent or sexist prank. However, I kept a straight face, and within a few months her presence in my house was taken for granted by all of us.

Indeed, by the autumn she was so much a part of my life that I often failed to notice her at all. Soon after her arrival I had discarded the heavy teak stand and substituted a small gilt chair on which I could carry her comfortably from room to room. Serena was remarkably light. Her inventor this unknown genius of the dollmaker's art had clearly inserted a substantial armature, for her posture, like her expression, never changed. Nowhere was there any indication of her date or place of manufacture, but from the scuffed patentleather shoes that sometimes protruded below the brocade gown I guessed that she had been assembled some twenty years earlier, possibly as an actress's double during the great days of the postwar film industry. By the time I returned to the shop to inquire about her previous owners the entire World's End had been reduced to rubble.

One Sunday evening in November I learned rather more about Serena Cockayne. After working all afternoon in the study I looked up from my desk to see her sitting in the corner with her back to me. Distracted by a professional problem, I had left her there after lunch without thinking, and there was something rather melancholy about her rounded shoulders and inclined head, almost as if she had fallen from favour.

As I turned her towards me I noticed a small blemish on her left shoulder, perhaps a fleck of plaster from the ceiling. I tried to brush it away, but the discoloration remained. It occurred to me that the synthetic skin, probably made from some early experimental plastic, might have begun to deteriorate. Switching on a tablelamp, I examined Serena's shoulders more carefully.

Seen against the dark background of the study, the downlike nimbus that covered Serena's skin confirmed all my admiration of her maker's genius. Here and there a barely detectable unevenness, the thinnest mottling to suggest a surface capillary, rooted the illusion in the firmest realism. I had always assumed that this masterpiece of imitation flesh extended no more than two inches or so below the shoulder line of the gown, and that the rest of Serena's body consisted of wood and papier mch.

Looking down at the angular planes of her shoulder blades, at the modest curvatures of her wellconcealed breasts, I gave way to a sudden and wholly unprurient impulse. Standing behind her, I took the silver zip in my fingers and with a single movement lowered it to Serena's waist.

As I gazed at the unbroken expanse of white skin that extended to a pair of plump hips and the unmistakable hemispheres of her buttocks I realized that the manikin before me was that of a complete woman, and that its creator had lavished as much skill and art on those nevertobeseen portions of her anatomy as on the visible ones.

The zip had stuck at the lower terminus of its oxidized track. There was something offensive about my struggling with the loosened dress of this halfnaked woman. My fingers touched the skin in the small of her back, removing the dust that had accumulated over the years.

Running diagonally from spine to hip was the hairline of a substantial scar. I took it for granted that this marked an essential vent required in the construction of these models. But the rows of opposing stitchmarks were all too obvious. I stood up, and for a few moments watched this partly disrobed woman with her inclined head and clasped hands, gazing placidly at the fireplace.

Careful not to damage her, I loosened the bodice of the gown. The upper curvatures of her breasts appeared, indented by the shoulder straps. Then I saw, an inch above the stillconcealed left nipple, a large black mole.

I zipped up the gown and straightened it gently on her shoulders. Kneeling on the carpet in front of her, I looked closely into Serena's face, seeing the faint fissures at the apex of her mouth, the minute veins in her cheek, a childhood scar below her chin. A curious sense of revulsion and excitement came over me, as if I had taken part in a cannibalistic activity.

I knew now that the person seated on her gilt chair was no mannequin but a once living woman, her peerless skin mounted and forever preserved by a master, not of the doilmaker's, but of the taxidermist's art.