Oliver had met Sylvia again only two months ago at a family wedding. It was one of the greatest moments of disillusion he had ever experienced. It wasn’t so much that his North Sea Venus, his icon of femininity, had crumbled before him. It was more that she had partially melted. The firm, full flesh had sagged; the round glory of her breasts had succumbed to twenty years of insistent gravity; the summer-burnished golden gleam had faded and her complexion had, perhaps because of so many summers outdoors, aged prematurely and had assumed the same pasty, blotchy paleness that Oliver remembered in her mother. And, worst of all, the firm, full roundness of Sylvia’s large, beautifully sculpted bottom had given way to a generalised, waistless bulk. Oliver had wondered, as he chatted to her about nothing in particular, if she still had the scar, and the image of it, dimpled and white in a mass of soft, formless flesh had made him feel sick. But the encounter had not cured him of his strange obsession. The idol might have been shattered but the zeal had remained.

Oliver was sipping his overpriced cocktail and contemplating the fall of his idol when he became aware of someone by his side.

‘Are you Herr Meierhoff?’ she asked in a foreign accent that Oliver took to be Russian or Polish. He smiled and nodded but his heart thudded in his chest. If it had not been for the accent and the lack of a summer tan, she could almost have been the Sylvia of his youth. No – she was actually much prettier. But prettiness wasn’t the criterion that she had to meet for Oliver. There were plenty of pretty girls whom he could have. The girl beside him was about twenty-two, Oliver figured. She had reddish-blonde hair, crystal-blue eyes and a fresh complexion sprinkled with pale freckles. Oliver found himself involuntarily scanning her from head to foot. She was wearing a blouse that hung loose around a tiny waist yet which was stretched taut by the fullness of her upper arms and breasts. She turned slightly sideways, smiling coyly, knowing what he wanted to see. She wore a pencil skirt which narrowed towards the knee yet which accentuated the fullness of her upper thighs and her magnificent, massive buttocks.

‘Am I what you were looking for?’ she asked. ‘Do I please you?’

‘You, my dear,’ said Oliver with a broad, handsome grin, ‘are sheer perfection.’

6.