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born of custom, reached for her robe.
    ‘No,’ he told her. ‘I want you naked.’
    She felt inclined to tease him. ‘I was always told a woman’s body looked better if she was wearing a little something.’
    ‘A man would have to be mad to acquire a perfect Ming vase and then want to cover it with a cloth wouldn’t he?’
    ‘Am I your “Ming”?’
    ‘You are exquisite and very precious and beside you Ming is commonplace.’
    She felt liquid with the release from months of remorse and self-denial. She wanted to rush at him and re-pledge herself but, instead, feeling that she was exercising super-human control, she turned away from the extravagance of his compliment and went into the kitchen.
    As she went through the mindless ritual of coffee-making she wished she had something more exotic, something undreamt of, to offer him. But, she wistfully understood, there was only herself – and that, too, was soon to be found out. She had an uneasy feeling that they had started too quickly and, too soon, gone too far. She feared that anything travelling at this velocity must surely come off the rails at the first curve.
    Towards noon he was to surprise her yet again.
    Ordering her to stay as she was, he produced a pencil and a pad of notepaper and started sketching her. At first she was happy enough to have a reason to stay still for a moment and expected his sketches to be no more than amateur crudities. So she was pleasantly surprised, when he handed them to her, to see a vibrant, naked young woman – one who just happened to have her face – drawn with great economy and directness.
    ‘You’re an artist?’
    ‘An early ambition, quickly squashed.’
    ‘What happened?’
    ‘My father. I wanted to go to art school but he insisted that I should study something more vocational. The closest to art he would allow was architecture.’
    He placed her in another pose and, as he worked, she thought she had found the first weak spot in his until now apparently impregnable armour.
    ‘Isn’t it a little unusual to give up art to become a property tycoon?’
    ‘In the first place, I haven’t given up art. Secondly, I became – what you are pleased to call – a “property tycoon” by accident. The same father that denied me my earlier ambitions left me a seedy, run down, rambling apartment block whose only asset was a good address. I used my newly acquired architectural skills to refurbish it. Everyone told me I was crazy and that it didn’t make economic sense, but I couldn’t stand owning anything that was that shabby and that ugly. Then the controlled rent laws were changed. I had moved it up market and it became the collateral asset from which I spread upward and outward.’
    ‘And what happened to the art?’
    He shrugged off the question and only the sound of his pencil spoilt the absolute silence until he heaved a huge sigh.
    ‘It’s time you knew about me,’ he said.
    Allowing her only a raincoat and a pair of shoes, she found herself being hustled out of her apartment to feel the chilly December wind invading parts she would never have normally exposed to the winter chill.
    ‘Where are we going?’
    ‘To my place.’
    They got to a street corner and he hesitated. She didn’t notice his concern at first. She was too busy eagerly scanning the faces of passers-by trying to judge whether or not they could sense she was naked under the coat. She found it particularly thrilling when she understood that no one was noticing. Either that or they just didn’t give a damn!
    His cursing brought her back to the present reality.
    ‘The bloody car’s gone!’ he exploded. ‘I wasn’t sure at first but now I distinctly remember parking it there outside that shop.’
    ‘Stolen?’ she asked.
    ‘What else? Come on, we’ll have to get a cab.’
    He was one of those people for whom taxis miraculously appeared on cue. It was in the cab that she was reminded that he loved to play erotic games.
    He urged her to move