Smiling, I turned to face Miriam, drawing back the frayed sheets so that the firelight warmed her broad hips and ribcage. “I don’t know … in a way, dissection is a kind of erotic autopsy. We could start with the cervical triangle, save me having to wring your neck…” I kissed the small mole under Miriam’s chin, savouring the taste of her mother’s perfume. “Or a nasal resection, you have been getting a little toffee-nosed…” I pressed my tongue into her nostril with its scent of decayed lavender until she snorted with laughter. “Or what about an augmentation mammoplasty, not really necessary in your case…” I ran my lips from the musky sweet hollow of her armpit to her full breast with its heavy nipple. Veins ran below the white skin, asps waiting to sting a princess. I tasted the skin of her breasts, hunting for the scent glands, running my tongue against the hard pippin of her nipple. I moved down to her abdomen. “Your navel smells of oysters…”

“Wait a minute. You haven’t dissected the abdomen yet.”

“The only tool I need here is a slice of lemon.”

“So this is what you get up to in the DR. My mother always warned me about unqualified doctors…”

I embraced her, pressing my lips against her nipple. The only women I had made love to, apart from David Hunter’s Chinese girlfriends in Shanghai, were the middle-aged landlady and her daughter who ran the small hotel in west London where I had stayed during my mother’s return to the Far East, and a Cambridge prostitute who thought I was an American serviceman posing as an undergraduate, a shrewd guess in the circumstances. With Miriam, sex for the first time brought with it a sense of the future. I hoped that she and I would make love many other times, and that an unlimited store of affection lay waiting for us in some bonded warehouse of the heart.

Miriam’s fingers were snipping across my chest, scissoring at my breastbone. She tapped down to my stomach, bypassing my navel with an elegant swerve, and with a cry caught my testicles in a lobster’s claw. Laughing, I raised her thigh and placed it across my hip. She sat astride me and rested her vulva against my penis, teasing me as she held the tip between her labia. I entered her vagina, needing her so much that I could happily have dissected her. I imagined a strange act of love performed by an obsessed surgeon on a living woman, in a deserted operating theatre in one of those sinister clinics in the Cambridge suburbs. I would kiss the linings of her lungs, run my tongue along her bronchi, press my face to the moist membranes of her heart as it pulsed against my lips …

“Jim…” Miriam paused, a forefinger on my nose. “What are you thinking about?”

“It’s probably illegal.”

“Well, stop…”