He held the next photograph into the flames as if offering
the fire a titbit. Vanessa half-kneeling on the mahogany chair,
drawing on a single black stocking. God, it was a cliché, and yet
at the time he’d had to have it. He’d seen the pose a hundred
times — French courtesans and maidservants with dirty feet,
furtively shot, bought, handed about, ogled over. Lumpish
women posing for a few francs, photographed by hack
practitioners. But not Vanessa. It was an act of love to capture
her like this, to hold her in the eye of the lens, floating and
serpentine. Viewed from behind, her naked back caught in a
liquid movement that ran from shoulder to hip, buttocks soft
and rounded like magnolia flowers. Her skin was hand-tinted so
perfectly that even now, years later, he congratulated himself on
it. Not that it was difficult with Vanessa: a little auspicious
heightening of the creamy sepia of the albumin print and you
had her warm skin tone precisely. He was good as a colourist,
always had been.

It was ironic, Geoffrey thought bitterly, that the best work
he had ever done was this collection of images rapidly being
transformed into ash. A cache that no one other than his subject
had ever seen.

When Geoffrey looked at the photographs for this last time
he was overcome with an abject sense of how his wife, his vision
and his art blended together. The eroticism of the pictures was
not just in the titillating poses. The photographs laid bare his
need and his fulfilment more explicitly than if he had captured
on paper the sexual act itself. Having permitted Vanessa literally
to slip out of his hands to her death and to have reiterated his
perfidy by infidelity, Geoffrey felt himself utterly condemned.
Vanessa had been the gift, the light that transfigured darkness in
the miracle of his craft, the creation that he himself had part
fashioned — and destroyed. Burning the photographs was the
final rite.