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day in May when Mariana Slavik arrived at our office, looking for a summer internship. She was twenty-four years old; German, though her English was excellent; studying for her postgraduate diploma in architecture at Sheffield University. It’s not a bad faculty by any means, highly regarded in fact, but I was curious about why she’d come to England at all. Germany is hardly short of first-rate places to study our profession.
    Mariana tilted her head to one side, pouted very slightly as she thought for a moment and then explained with a shrug that there was nothing for her in Germany any more. Her father had left home when she was a girl and made no effort to stay in contact. Her mother had just remarried for the second time, ‘And this one is even worse than the last.’ She had no siblings. ‘I broke up with my boyfriend,’ she said. ‘He was such an asshole.’
    It didn’t seem to bother her that she had brought her private life into a job interview, or used a mild obscenity. She just gave a dismissive, almost noiseless, ‘Puh!’ with such natural comic timing that it was all I could do not to burst out laughing. I tried to look very serious as I shuffled through her references, qualifications and drawings, all of which were excellent: far too good, in fact for the menial coffee-making, photocopying, errand-running work we had in mind. When I glanced up again, Mariana was sitting calmly, awaiting my next question. Behind her, however, Nick Church was grinning lewdly and giving me a massive thumbs-up. Our secretary, Janice, was shaking her head in silent despair at male idiocy. And our two junior staff, Jake and Laurie, were staring, as goggle-eyed and slackjawed as goldfish.
    Frankly, my performance had been little better than theirs. Mariana had walked into my life wearing a sleeveless orange T-shirt and jeans, with a big brown leather bag slung over one shoulder. Over the years, I’d get used to her entrances and the ripple of people’s expressions as she walked down a street or across a room. But this was the first time, and its immediate effect was to make me suddenly nervous, slightly sweaty and hopelessly incoherent. I felt as though she were interviewing me, rather than the other way around.
    As I would discover from being with Mariana, extreme beauty is a force of nature and a form of power. It strikes at some deep, primal, instinctual level of our animal selves. It defines its owner as an alpha-female. And Mariana was certainly that.
    ‘That’s a one-woman argument for Intelligent Design,’ Nick said to me in the pub after work. ‘You’d have to have God-like genius to dream up a body like hers. There’s no way random genetic mutations could do the job.’
    I smiled at the truth as much as the humour of the joke. Any half-decent architect knows that the measure of a building isn’t in the flashiness of its exterior or the money that’s been spent in tarting it up. It’s all in the detail, from the craft that’s gone into the joinery of a timber roof, right down to the smallest light switch. And it was the details that I came to know and love in Mariana: the parabolas described by the curves of her eyebrows; that arrow-straight nose that was almost, but not quite, too long for her face; the way the line of her lips was so precise, yet the flesh of them so full and pillowy; the arch of her back as she cat-stretched first thing in the morning, lying next to me in bed; the velvet touch of her skin beneath my fingers.
    I wish, too, that you could know, as I do, how she smelled and tasted; what it felt like to have her in my arms; the combination of incredulity, ecstasy and triumph that surged through me every time we made love. That I should possess such a creature: no matter how much time went by, it never really seemed possible.
    At first, of course, I never even tried. I didn’t look on it as weakness or cowardice, simply a realistic appreciation of where I stood in the sexual pecking order.