What The Catalogue Doesn't Tell

"She's broken up with Justin," Amanda informed her husband.

"Oh for goodness sake, what was wrong with him then?" Robert had liked Justin for his drive, intelligence and integrity and had offered to pull a few City strings for him, which was why he greeted this most unwelcome news somewhat more testily than usual.

"He stood up to her," replied Amanda wearily.

It always came down to either of two endings: he finally asserted himself and provoked an apocalyptic row or he became completely anonymous and she ditched him as a waste of time and space.

She arrived in time for lunch but this time there was something different about her that they couldn't quite fathom. Instead of fulminating against men and the unfairness of life as she usually did at these times, she was quiet and subdued. Amanda finally hit on the killer question.

"What did he say that's hurt you so much?"

Lorna burst into tears, "He said I'll never be happy or ever know real love because I'm obsessed with winning and because I try to protect myself by controlling people instead of trusting them. And he's right and I don't know what to do." She sniffed and dabbed her eyes with her napkin.

"What are you trying to protect yourself from?" Amanda's voice was all gentleness.

"I don't know. I need time to think. Thank you for letting me have the Glade."

In fact Lorna had always known what she was trying to protect herself from and she did not intend to spend her time in the Glade just thinking. Her economy with the truth was because she was keeping a secret she had kept since she was at ballet school studying for her A-levels, and another secret she had been keeping since her uncle and aunt's summer party.

**********

Alone in the glade with the gate locked behind her, Lorna approached the group of statues. Speckled sunlight filtering through the surrounding trees and bushes danced on their white marble nakedness. She put down her bags and stared intently into the face of the standing statue as she had done at the party. She maintained her gaze as she slowly undressed. She slipped her bare feet out of her white leather low heeled ballerina pumps. She reached behind her, undid the fastening of her pale yellow halter-neck top and removed it to reveal her small but perfectly rounded breasts with their wide, pink areolas encircling already stiff, pert nipples. She slid her tight little pale blue cotton shorts down her slim, girlish legs, followed by her pink cotton pants that had stretched around and hugged her pert, rounded bottom with her narrow hips.

Not once breaking off eye contact with the statue, she reached into her hold-all and pulled out a wrap-around tutu skirt of stiff black lace that was folded up inside. She unfolded it into a circle and fastened it around her waist. It stood out all around her, leaving her bottom, her hips and her vulva, already showing signs of her arousal, clearly visible. She took from the bag a pair of white satin ballet shoes, sat down on the grass, slipped her small, pretty and narrow feet into them and wrapped and tightened their white satin ribbons around her beautifully shaped and slender ankles.

She stood up again. With one hand she stroked her breasts while she smoothed the other backwards and forwards across her mound, shaven smooth in preparation for this moment, until it was wet and tingling with desire. She came right up to the statue and smoothed her hand up and down its cool, unyielding phallus, lubricating it with the extract of her warm and trembling womanhood. Placing her hands around the statue's neck and raising herself up onto the points of her ballet shoes, she began to ease herself onto it's petrified manhood and take it into her. She shook with the feeling as her soft and vibrantly yielding flesh moulded itself to the rock-hardness sliding further and further into her until she was fully impaled on it.

Long and passionately, she kissed the cold marble mouth, with its smile of changeless winsomeness, as she rocked herself back and forth on its passionless penetration. As her passion built up inside her she cried out again and again.

"Oh Gary, Gary. Why have you come back to me like this? Why are you doing this to me, My Darling? Please speak to me. Gary, my darling love!"

He was her first love. Her true love. The man she had given herself to completely. The man who had broken her heart. He had been her dancing partner for a while during her later years at ballet school after they had met during a gala. Several years older than her, his maturing artistry and classically Gallic good looks, allied to her fresh and girlishly youthful grace and beauty and dazzling footwork, made them an outstanding partnership in every ballet competition they entered. One warm evening when rehearsing late for a gala the following day their suppressed passions had finally found their outlet and she had given herself to him and he had taken her with equal eagerness and abandon.

As she pumped herself on his effigy her heart pounded as she remembered how he had almost torn off her leotard and pants to leave her naked in her white ballet shoes, the same ones she wore now, and her white ankle socks and had then lifted her up onto her pointes, her legs wide apart in second position, with his thrusting as she had grasped the barre on the wall to which he had pinned her. As she thrust her hips harder and harder against the immovable marble barrier of its pelvis she remembered how her passion for him had anaesthetised her against the pain and the bleeding as she had surrendered her virginity to him. She wished she would bleed again and relive the exquisite ecstasy of the pain she had felt when she had first felt a man's flesh enter and fill her.

The statue was his image graven in marble. She knew it had come from France. His mother's family was French. She remembered him telling her how they had resettled in France in the 1950's after living for several generations in Martinique.

As she approached her orgasm an erotic vision filled her mind. She had been made a living sacrifice to love. She was naked in her white ballet shoes. Her hands were bound behind her back and her mouth gagged with bandages. She was bound to his monument with more bandages, her legs to its legs, her torso to its trunk. Bandages wrapped around hers and its heads held her gagged mouth onto its unresponding lips. Then she and the statue were wrapped entirely in a covering of bandages before being walled up forever in a faraway desert cave. She was fated to be impaled on her love and bound to him forever. Until she was transformed into stone like him and thousands of years later her mummified remains would be discovered, the remnants of her ballet shoes transformed to brittle papyrus still clinging around the shrivelled stone of her feet and ankles on their petrified pointe.

As her orgasm cascaded through her she screamed his name three times and then again in a long forlorn wailing. After six months of secret bliss together revealed to no one, he had joined a ballet company overseas and told her he wasn't coming back. She was still only sixteen and she bore her grief alone because she was too afraid and yet also too proud to tell anyone of her pain and the reason for it. He was the reason why she was now a lawyer and not a ballerina, why she had given up what she had most loved. She had not been able to bear the possibility of meeting him again professionally in the future.

As her orgasm subsided she slid off the everlasting erection and collapsed sobbing to the ground before the heedless gaze of his memorial. She was a forlorn sight, her knees drawn up below her elfin body convulsing with sobs as she covered her head with her slender arms and her dark hair hung down around her face glistening with the tears streaming from her tragic dark eyes. From behind, the pale moon of her quivering bottom was haloed by the rustling penumbra of her tutu skirt, while the soles of her ballet shoes were crossed in a saltire.

As the intensity of her weeping gradually diminished she recovered a degree of composure. She took off her tutu skirt and her ballet shoes and for a while floated naked on her back in the warm water of the lake that lay in the centre of the Glade. He was gone forever. She was free of him at last. In the water's warm baptism she resolved to learn again to trust, to give, to share, to risk, to be vulnerable in her search for love the way she had been at the start. She would finally tell her secret that no longer bound her. She would be humble and ask for help. Uncle Robert and Aunt Amanda would certainly do their all for her as they always did. Caroline, bless her, would never let her down. Maybe Julia, her new friend she had recently made at the gym, who seemed so wise and experienced.

*********

The following night a storm swept across the Glade. An old tree collapsed. Its trunk fell short of the statues but its branches fell among them. All three were unmanned.

The restorer examined the broken-off parts through a large magnifying glass to discover how the sculptor had fixed them in place so exactly. On the exposed base of the one from the standing statue he could just make out, scratched in tiny writing, a dedication.

"Alain. Je t'aime. Tous le jours. Eduard."

The answer to the mystery of the reason for the statues' creation was completed when a well-to-do Parisian family read about the discovery and remembered the portrait of their ancestors painted by the same artist, which for years had hung in the dining room. The face of the statue pictured in the news section of the fine art journal matched the face of the young man in their painting. They wrote to tell their English relatives. The secret of Eduard Durand's short-lived love for Alain Fourecher, preserved in the testament of his last and greatest work, was finally revealed to the world.