"I’m not who you think I am."
They were full of surprises.
"Over to the column," Mark tersely ordered his sister.
"Oh no darling! Please…!" Terry wailed.
Mark rose to his feet. He had suddenly ceased to be a boy. Terry gave him a penitent grimace, shrugged her shoulders and resumed the pose in which Dorinda had first beheld her. She offered her wrists for the fetters. When the metal bands circled them she pulled as though to assure herself that she was indeed securely chained. "I hate you," she said to her brother without conviction. She turned her mischievous eyes toward Dorinda.
"You watch your P’s and Q’s," she warned. "He’s quite merciless."
Dorinda yearned to run. But what was the use! There was still hope that she was involved in no more than a mild behavioural oddity. But she viewed brother and sister with new and startled eyes.
"I wanted to be in on it," Terry complained petulantly to her brother. "You’re an absolute beast, darling." Suddenly, perkily, she thrust her tongue out at him in a provocative gesture of defiance.
Quietly, without haste and without anger, Mark lifted his sister’s left foot off the floor and fastened it to the side of the marble by a shackle, already provided. Terry must now perforce stand on one foot. I a little while it would become a real punishment. "Little girls should be seen and not heard," he admonished without anger.
"Oh, Mark! I’m sorry. I didn’t mean… Oh, no, not on one foot
… Please!" Her captive ankle struggled against the metal that held it a foot from the floor.
Mark laughingly bent and kissed the pouting lips. "You asked for it, darling. You know you did."
"Oh, all right! So I asked for it!" Terry admitted.
The siblings smiled at each other in pure love and perfect understanding.
Mark grasped Dorinda’s arm. "Come along," he said cheerfully. "I think we need to have a little walk."
Dorinda could not have agreed more. But she felt little optimism. The sight of the naked girl chained to the pillar made chaos in her thoughts. It was too unreal! Terry, instead of struggling and complaining, contrived to make herself quite beautiful. Perhaps she posed? Or possessed some unnatural grace. Standing on her one free foot she leaned negligently against the stone to which she was chained. The one raised leg by which she was being penalised enhanced the appeal of the picture that she made, as did the seemingly effortless raising of her arms to the shackles that held them so invincibly. She radiated the perfection of line and posture of an artist’s model. She was very beautiful. She gave the departing girl a smile of encouragement, her own condition forgotten. "Don’t be awkward, darling," she advised. "Or you’ll hurt when you sit down." The silvery peal of her laughter followed them from the terrace.
It was a pleasant room. A lounge in which perhaps a nude girl with chained hands might not seem too incongruous. Dorinda sat stiffly in the big arm chair to which she had been guided by a firm but friendly hand.
Bit early for a drink, I suppose," Mark smiled at her appraisingly.
"Handcuffed girls can’t hold drinks," Dorinda pointed out reasonably, but with a hint of sarcasm.
"No they can’t, can they?" Mark agreed as though grateful for the reminder. He remained standing. She flushed under his scrutiny.
"Couldn’t I be draped in at least something?" She pleaded with deliberate coyness.
"No." He disposed of the request as though surprised she had made it.
"I think I could talk better if I wasn’t so… so exposed."
He dismissed the subject with an impatient wave of the hand. But his smile was again that of the boy she had met upon the road. "Young Terry’s a chatterbox," he confided. "She has to sparkle. We’ll get to wherever we are going better without her."
"So you just chain her up and leave her standing on one foot?"
"What else? Besides, she loves it. Surely you saw that."
Dorinda had seen it all too clearly. It made her next question inevitable. "I am supposed to like it too?" She clinked her handcuffs.
Mark gave the question considered thought. "Actually I suppose not," he conceded. "We explained this to Dave at the time. The thing that really matters is that you are here. Crossed the Rubicon, so the speak."
"I was dumped here by a miserable S.O.B. out of spite. I was never offered a Rubicon to cross. I don’t know your Dave," she told him flatly.
"Remember little sister’s warning about hurting when you sit down?" Mark answered nonchalantly.
Dorinda tensed.
He laughed amusedly at her motion’s admission of vulnerability. "For the moment you are saved by a discrepancy of a couple of days. You weren’t supposed to show up this soon. So I’ll listen to your story. Let’s have it."
She told it in detail. "Mike’s a bastard!"
"Sounds like a resourceful type. A bit crude perhaps. Makes hard work of things… This marooning lark…! I’d have you behaving in thirty minutes."
"Behaving?" His use of the word was suspect.
He laughed at her groping for what was, for him, obvious. "For a girl, behaving is doing whatever a man wants her to do." "You don’t really mean that." Dorinda chided. She prayed inwardly that indeed he did not mean it.
"I was never more sincere."
They stared at each other in confrontation. Between them an invisible gage had been hurled upon the rug.
Dorinda temporised. "This girl your Dave is to deliver: what is she? What do you expect of her? If you’ll tell me we won’t be so at cross purposes."
"Of course, love. Sensible girl," Mark draped himself in a chair facing her and eyed his guest as though striving to gauge the effects his words would have. "Frightfully simple, really," he said airily.
Dorinda listened. The way Mark told it made everything sound exquisitely simple. Frightfully so!
"The fantasy had always been there," he explained musingly. "It was the same for Terry as for me. We were born with it as though we had carried it along from some other life or some other place. It was colored by that same wonder with which a child sees its first bird in flight or the branches of a tree against the blue sky. For us it had the beauty and rightness of all natural things. Scoff if you want. It was so. I suppose Terry was about six years old when I first tied her to the apple tree at the bottom of the garden. I wondered why she did not cry. But, for both of us it was the birth of an aesthetic glory most people never know."
"Aesthetic… tied to a tree!" Dorinda protested.
His boyish grin was accusatory. "I watched your face when we left Terry chained to her column. You glimpsed it then."
"She’s an exhibitionist with a gift for posing. She is also very beautiful." Dorinda felt her defence slipping.
"You don’t really believe that’s all you saw," Mark told her discerningly. His voice has become earnest as though she must be made to understand. "As children we played. She was always the damsel in distress. But I was never the knight in shining armor. The fantasy cast me in a different role. I was The Male: the Male to whom all females must submit by right of conquest. The wicked baron who chained the poor girl in his dungeon. He never did get as much publicity as good old Galahad. But without him there would never have been a romantic legend."
"Terry was entrancingly attuned. She always resisted in about the right degree to maintain validity. The degree of resistance always briefed me as to what I should do to her. When adolescence came she accepted the same joy with which I used it. We found her striated skin that same quality of golden wonder that had pervaded the enactment of our fantasy from the start. It was about that time that we also became lovers…"
"Whips and incest! What are you trying to prove?" Dorinda’s defences were still sliding away from beneath her feet. But she made her protest vehement.
"You don’t try to prove the Taj Mahal or Lake Louise in the moonlight. They are there. That’s the beginning and the end. Each is an entity with its own appeal and compulsion. So it is with our fantasy."