Drusilla

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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... ”

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