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It was hard work Theirl's thuht of her shoulders was behind them By the time she was finished with the man she would be soaked in perspiration and so utterly exhausted that she would fall into the swi pool and then lie down in the shade and sleep until the car came for her But that wasn't what she minded as her hands worked automatically on across the man's back It was her instinctive horror for the finest body she had ever seen

None of this horror showed in the flat, i black eyes under the fringe of short coarse black hair were as empty as oil slicks, but inside her the anied and her pulse-rate, if it had occurred to her to take it, would have been high

Once again, as so often over the past two years, she wondered why she loathed this splendid body, and once again she vaguely tried to analyse her revulsion Perhaps this tiuiltily certain were much more unprofessional than the sexual desire some of her patients awoke in her

To take the ss first: his hair She looked down at the round, sht red-gold curls that should have reminded her pleasantly of the formalized hair in the pictures she had seen of classical statues But the curls were soainst the skull They set her teeth on edge like finger-nails against pile carpet And the golden curls caht in professional terms) to the fifth cervical vertebra And there they stopped abruptly in a straight line of solden hairs

The girl paused to give her hands a rest and sat back on her haunches The beautiful upper half of her body was already shining with sweat She wiped the back of her forearm across her forehead and reached for the bottle of oil She poured about a tablespoonful on to the small furry plateau at the base of the ain

This eolden down above the cleft of the buttocks–in a lover it would have been gay, exciting, but on this man it was somehow bestial No, reptilian But snakes had no hair Well, she couldn't help that It seemed reptilian to her She shifted her hands on down to the two luteal muscles Noas the ti ones on the football tea with her Then, if she was not very careful, the suggestions would co sharply doards the sciatic nerve At other times, and particularly if she found the u-match and a quick, delicious surrender

With this man it was different, almost uncannily different From the very first he had been like a lump of inanimate meat In two years he had never said a word to her When she had done his back and it was time for him to turn over, neither his eyes nor his body had once shown the smallest interest in her When she tapped his shoulder, he would just roll over and gaze at the sky through half-closed lids and occasionally let out one of the long shuddering yawns that were the only sign that he had human reactions at all

The girl shifted her position and sloorked down the right leg towards the Achilles tendon When she came to it, she looked back up the fine body Was her revulsion only physical? Was it the reddish colour of the sunburn on the naturally milk-white skin, the sort of roast meat look? Was it the texture of the skin itself, the deep, widely spaced pores in the satiny surface? The thickly scattered orange freckles on the shoulders? Or was it the asexuality of theher that inside this wonderful body there was an evil person?

Theher head slowly fro her shoulders She stretched her arms out sideways and then upwards and held theet the blood down out of the and took out a hand-towel and wiped the perspiration off her face and body

When she turned back to theon one open hand, gazing blankly at the sky The disengaged ar for her She walked over and knelt on the grass behind his head She rubbed some oil into her pal the short thick fingers

The girl glanced nervously sideways at the red-brown face below the crown of tight golden curls Superficially it was all right–handsome in a butcher's-boyish ith its full pink cheeks, upturned nose and rounded chin But, looked at closer, there was soginess about the wide nostrils in the upturned nose, and the blankness that veiled the very pale blue eyes communicated itself over the whole face and ue-like It was, she reflected, as if sohten

The e biceps Where had the ot these fantastic muscles from? Was he a boxer? What did he do with his formidable body? Rumour said this was a police villa The two h they did the cooking and the housework Regularly every month the man went away for a few days and she would be told not to come And from time to time she would be told to stay away for a week, or teeks, or a month Once, after one of these absences, the man's neck and the upper part of his body had been a mass of bruises On another occasion the red corner of a half-healed wound had shown under a foot of surgical plaster down the ribs over his heart She had never dared to ask about him at the hospital or in the town When she had first been sent to the house, one of the men-servants had told her that if she spoke about what she saw she would go to prison Back at the hospital, the Chief Superintendent, who had never recognized her existence before, had sent for her and had said the saouged nervously into the big deltoid muscle on the point of the shoulder She had always known it was a matter of State Security Perhaps that hat revolted her about this splendid body Perhaps it was just fear of the organization that had the body in custody She squeezed her eyes shut at the thought of who he ht be, of what he could order to be done to her Quickly she opened theazed blankly up at the sky