F Campbell - Drusilla

For those within, there comes a time of day that has no name. It is the dying afternoon, telling of twilight and the threat of night, mourning the hours of the sun. A time of melancholy.

Drusilla was familiar with it. She had always supposed it to be the hour in which Claude Debussy had been inspired to compose his ‘Afternoon of a Fawn’: that tinkling lament for the lost felicity of the day and a satyr promise of eroticism beneath the moon. Its mood weighed heavily upon her solitude.

She welcomed it as sympathetic to her condition. Most of her day was past, but Bryce’s return was still distant enough that she could savour her mastery of the pain and the panic; especially the panic! There had been times... ! Since none of what she was enduring made sense, it was as well to achieve a perspective from which it could be dispassionately viewed.

It was primarily physical. Its sexuality was still something to explore. A physical imposition to invoke responses in the mind—or would it be the spirit! Cynically she supposed she could erase both words and substitute the heart. The poor human heart got blamed for everything. Its function was to pump blood, but people made it a repository for all their guilts. She recalled Bryce’s words: “A change of heart... ”

The pain was an ally. It was not severe, no throbbing. agonies. But its constancy proclaimed purpose. It belonged. It countered boredom. Increasingly it was giving her a sense of accomplishment. Virtue! Drusilla supposed this a discovery. Interwoven in her day had been wry glimpses of absurdity. Suburban basements lack character. Their atmosphere is domestic. From where she stood she could observe the washer and dryer against one wall and the shelves holding the jars of pickles and preserves at the other. If she strained her neck enough there would be Bryce’s work bench and his treasured tools. He had mentioned them:

“I can make some of the stuff we’ll need... ” But the basement was cool in the heat of summer. In addition, it possessed a facility.

The post.

Drusilla was tied to the post with neat competence.

Bryce had taken a lot of time in the binding of his wife. She had helped by standing limply passive, her naked back against the wood. They had discussed her nakedness with the same polite detachment they had employed after the initial heated resentments had been set aside and they had begun their postulation of the impossible. Bryce had suggested it diffidently. With a willingness she found suspect within herself, Drusilla had agreed.

Nudity had added a quality of deliciousness to the mixtures of Drusilla’s captivity. It had provoked awareness. It had also enabled Bryce’s rope to sink intimately in her flesh and hold her doubly secure. After the first panics had passed she had ceased to struggle for release. The rope and her skin had found an affinity against which she could not prevail. In the first few hours of fruitless rebellion against her bonds she had repeated again and again a shocked admission: “No way... ! No way... !”

She found it necessary to constantly test her impotence.

The flexings and twistings caused the rope to bite in reassurance that she was indeed tied to a post in the basement of her own home and that she was truly naked and frighteningly helpless. Her situation was real, unfeigned, not contrived. She supposed the flickerings of fear arose from imaginings of discovery, of fire, of burglars! Ruefully she recognized these alarms as implicit in the validity of her plight. They, too, were a touch of spice.

Bryce had crossed her wrists behind the post and tied them there. Drusilla could not see how it was done, only feel. Several ropes made a band round her middle. They had been painstakingly cinched to weld her bottom and her back immovably to the stanchion’s vertical authority. Her ankles had been similarly treated, but one to teach side so as to separate her legs enough that her cleft was murkily visible below its black pubic thatch. That was the totality of her bindings. Above her strictured waist there was nothing. But her shoulders were well planted against the pillar by the compulsion of her bound arms straining against the bondage of their wrists. She remembered Bryce’s doubtful summation.

“Think you can stand it?”

“I’ll damned well have to, won’t I?”

She made her retort bitterly sardonic. That which was between them prohibited humour.

“Well, it won’t kill you.”

He spoke in the same tone. They found it a workable medium, conserving pride, denying doubt. Nothing said in such a vein need wound.

“Run along to the office, Bryce.” Drusilla had injected into the injunction an insouciance she did not feel. “If we chit-chat I may change my mind. Then we’d be off on the wrong foot again.”

“How come?”

“You’d refuse to untie me, and then I’d be mad.” She had looked at him uncertainly. “You would refuse?”

“Of course.”

When the door had slammed and the car had revved its way out of earshot, Drusilla had considered those two final words. Having uttered them, Bryce had given her bound nudity a lingering scrutiny, nodded and shrugged enigmatically as he turned towards the door. He had meant what he had said. His “Of course!” had been the turning of a key. It had possessed the same implacability as did the rope. The silence in which she stood helpless was suddenly tangible. It was then she had fought her first battle with her bonds.

Her defeat was bitter. In the compliant yielding of her person, Drusilla had allowed a crafty feminine certainty to lurk, chuckling in her mind, that no healthy young woman of intelligence could possibly be constrained to stand still by a few pieces of rope. She had secretly conceded as much as thirty minutes for her fingers to find the knot or the loose strand. She had cherished a glowing and hilarious picture of a chagrined Bryce finding his ropes scattered on the concrete floor. When, after an hour of painful twisting, she had found herself as tightly tied as at the start, she had wept in fury, and been surprised and angry to discover she had no hands with which to dry her tears.

Now, comfortably bereft of hope, she searched over and over in her mind for a flaw in the reasoning that had placed her where she now stood. She could pinpoint a beginning.

“I’m not going to bulldoze it at you, ’Silla.”

His use of his pet name for her was a part of Bryce’s casual approach to something that should not be casual. He had a gift for always putting the ball in her court.

“But it’s medieval!”

“All punishment seems like that.”

“Don’t use that word! It’s—it’s—it’s beastly and inappropriate.” She was conscious of fighting a rearguard action.

“O.K. You name it.”

“I can’t. It’s absurd.”

“Forget it then, Dru’. It was a thought. We’ve tried everything else.”

“We’re not half as ‘don’t give a damn about this’ as you’d like me to believe,” she accused, aggrieved. “And your constant muttering about divorce.”

“Name an alternative.”

“Why me? I don’t want to be divorced—and neither do you.” Drusilla was panting. “But you keep pushing—”

“It was you who threw the wrench in the works, ’Silla.”

“All right, all right!” She knew herself flushed. “We’ve gone over all that. I’ve said I’m sorry.”

“For the umpteenth time.”

“Buy a whip then—if you think that’s the answer.”

“I’ve already bought it.”

Drusilla remembered the shock. Her sudden sense of having taken a step into the unknown. Gazing at her husband she did not see a stranger—and yet—! In irritable impatience, she plunged: