Medieval paintings often showed a beautiful woman standing next to a skeleton representing death. Perhaps the experts were wrong. Maybe it wasn’t the skeleton but the woman who symbolised death. Beauté du Diable – even before I met her, was I thinking of Zara? If anyone had the devil’s beauty, she did.

His eyes followed Zara everywhere. She was such a bloody magnet, while every other woman had to endure a nuclear winter of lack of attention from the opposite sex.

Tall and slim with exquisite high cheekbones, shining skin and a perfect jaw line, this Glamazon sauntered across the hall towards us. Her blonde hair was cut in dramatic spikes, punkish style. Her eyes were an astonishing shade, a kind of electric blue. When she looked at you, it was like having high intensity lasers trained on you. She had a kind of lustrous, supernatural beauty.

Life had sickened her often enough, but it could still offer breathtaking moments. Now and again, something transcended the misery, like that lone red rose in the graveyard in the ruined abbey. Its smell, its texture. So infinitely beautiful. Was that rose really one of the Devil’s snares, one of his tricks for keeping souls imprisoned in this world?

Can one instant of ecstasy redeem a life of despair? Maybe only an artist could live that kind of life. Can beauty exist in heaven where nothing ever changes, where nothing dies or grows old, where there’s no cycle of death and rebirth, no seasons of growth and decay? How can there be beauty when everything is beautiful? Maybe beauty, true beauty, exists only when it’s perishable, already containing the seeds of ugliness.

They say that Medusa turned men to stone because she was so ugly,’ Marcus said wistfully. ‘I think the opposite was true: Medusa was beautiful beyond imagining. Her beauty paralysed men. It was because they became so still when they saw her that people believed they’d been turned to stone.