Yarns Without Threads 

He went back into the living-room to fetch himself another glass of sherry. From behind, as he was pouring it, he heard her voice.

"Paul?"

He raised his head, and almost dropped the bottle he was holding. She stood with one foot on the landing, one foot on the first tread of the stairs, face averted to run her nose with sensual approval along her arm. She was pinkly flushed from the heat of the bath, and completely naked.

"Urchin, for goodness' sake! Go and put your clothes on!"

She let her arm fall and stared at him with hurt bewilderment. After a pause she said, "But don't you like to look at me?"

"Yes! Yes, God damn it, you're a beautiful girl. But-"

"I don't understand people here," she sighed. "Even when it's warm, always in clothes, and always talking about clothes, too-never about how their bodies look, or about how to make their muscles firm . . . But, Paul, that stuff you put in the bath makes me so delicious! I want you to smell, first."

She came leaping down the stairs three at a time, holding out her hands towards him. Just before she arrived within arm's reach of his petrified body, she stopped dead, her face falling.

"Paul, this is ... not right?"

"I-" His voice was thick, and refused to form words properly. "Urchin, I think you're sweet and charming and lovely and everything. But I'm your doctor, I'm supposed to be looking after you, and so I'm not allowed to ... to . . ."

Shyly, she rejected the short-skirted frocks, the saris which Video India's influence had made so popular on Earth, the virtually translucent chitons from Zeus, and screwed up her courage to put on a suit of silky pajama-like garments from K'ung-fu-tse, which was the closest of all to the demanding standards of Ymiran modesty.

Timidly, feeling like a new arrival in a naturist colony, knowing that she was not conspicuous and yet unable to rid herself of self-consciousness, she ventured to follow the doctor from the sick quarters.

He was standing with the young man alongside the transfax platform, watching the Ymiran girl, who lay in the sunlight fifty yards distant, eyes closed. She wore nothing but dark glasses, and her pale sun-starved skin had tanned to golden brown.

It was the measure of a considerable achievement, to have rid her of her deep-seated irrational conditioning about clothes. Counce had said so.

'It's like everything else. An individual who is at the mercy of a reaction not based on necessity is that much a malfunctioning person.'

"A red Alfa," said the Contessa Vittoria di Polano-Besco, and took another meditative sip of her julep. "That rings a bell in one's memory."

Eyes closed, I was stretched out in full sun-glare on the walled tower-top of her villa, wearing nothing but dark glasses and a wrist-watch. The shrapnel scars from the explosion were healing very well, but there was a wound in my mind which was festering.

I said, "I don't think this was the Honourable Society."

"How can you be sure? After all, you're not Italian. You've never even been to Italy before."

In spite of the glasses, the fierce sun was turning the darkness behind my eyelids to blood-red. Floating on the red were the heads and limbs of frilly dolls. Also there were shreds of flesh. I opened my eyes and looked at Vita instead. She was invariably worth looking at, whether she was dressed in mink and diamonds or - as now - in a coat of sun-tan cream. She had been married at sixteen and widowed at twenty-four. Childless, she had the same figure as on her wedding-day, bar an inch or two extra on her bust which wasn't doing any harm, and her eyes were the same violet shade as the deep Mediterranean you could see by looking over the wall around the tower.

All of which was irrelevant. What I liked about her was that she had a well-developed conscience. ...

She reached towards a gold-legged marble-topped table on which rested the julep jug and an intercom phone so that none of her servants would need to come up here when she was sunbathing nude. She'd sold off most of her late husband's ill-gotten possessions and donated the proceeds to Danilo Dolci, but she'd kept the villa and a few of the nicest things in it.

Well... okay. It was low pay for putting up with the Count for eight years.