He glanced down at the album and thought of Prospero
drowning his enchanted book. The frame of the page hung
empty. Cherubs, roses and garlands swam moronically around
the aperture. Behind the hole he could see back to the beginning
of the album: a succession of pages once full of Vanessa’s body,
now gaping and open.

And now this last picture and the album would be stripped.
‘Renaissance Madonna’, he called it to himself. Vanessa’s left
hand holding a closed book across her naked belly, the other
cupping her breast, the thumb pressing downward on the nipple.

‘Do I have to? I really hate it,’ she had said when he
positioned her in front of the plush curtains and drew her hand
to her bosom. ‘I feel so embarrassed and cheap.’

‘Darling, darling,’ he said, disappointed by her reluctance,
yet too much in love to persist. ‘Of course you don’t have to, not
if you dislike it so much, but it is the last. I promise. After these,
it’s neck-to-ankle covering for the rest of our lives and you as
respectable as you wish.’

So she agreed and he’d stuck with his promise — almost.
There was one other series years later, taken naked on the velvet
sofa here in Hokitika, but it didn’t amount to much: it lacked thepassion of that first glimpse. Afterwards he’d destroyed those
pictures, along with the others taken in New Zealand.

But he had kept the mother-of-pearl album, hiding it even
from himself in the bottom of a cabin trunk in the attic,
disciplining himself, until today, never to look at its contents
after Vanessa had gone. The more recent photographs of her, and
their glass plates, he’d put in a pillowcase and lugged up to the
gorge. Moderately drunk at the time, he’d had difficulties
keeping his footing.

‘Take her, bitch that you are!’ he’d said to the river as he
balanced unsteadily on the trunk of a fallen tree. ‘Now at least
finish what you bloody began!’