TERPSICHORE'S FIRE
1. DAY OF INFAMY
To you.....
My heart cries out "Perfidia"
For I find you, the love of my life
In somebody else's arms
Your eyes are echoing "Perfidia"
Forgetful of the promise of love
You're sharing another's charms
With a sad lament my dreams are faded like a broken melody
While the gods of love look down and laugh
At what romantic fools we mortals be
And now.....
I find my love was not for you
And so I take it back with a sigh
Perfidia's won
Goodbye
The Ventures
My story begins on Tuesday 19th June 1984, because it was on that day something happened which set in motion the chain of events that is the reason for this book. It was high summer and therefore a hot sunny day with hardly a cloud in the sky. Up until that afternoon I had been involved with a girl called Theresa for the last nine months. She lived in a small village called St. Margaret's, which is about eleven and a half miles south from my home town of Stevenage in Hertfordshire. Her parents did not approve of me, for all the usual self-righteous narrow-minded bigoted reasons, and so, for the last three months or so we had got engaged to be married in secret. I was waiting for her to get just a little bit older so that she could leave home and come to live with me in our own flat when my name came up with the council to be offered one. I had been on the waiting list for my own place for several years already. To keep things under wraps, my fianc\u00e9e only wore her dazzling new engagement ring in front of my family and close friends. She had been very pleased with it. But unfortunately, in the last two weeks things had gotten considerably worse, with her parents now doing a complete clampdown and forbidding her to see me at all. Since this sort of mindless tyranny only invites disobedience, we carried on meeting up every couple of days or so in secret; while we tried to work things out and resolve this problem. But that wasn't to last for very long. Not until this awful day was I to fully realise that our so-called engagement was nothing but a lie and a swindle on her part; as had been the whole relationship for the past nine months. It was only on this day of dreadful infamy that I realised just how fickle and perfidious women can be. Theresa was in her last few months of secondary school, and because she had not turned up to our rendezvous the previous day, I went to try and meet her outside the school gates where I anticipated her to come on her way home at the end of the day. Sure enough, at just after four o'clock, I caught sight of her coming through the big iron gates. She turned to walk along the pavement by the roadside, and she was on her own. Naturally, I walked towards her to greet her and put my arms around her. It was then that she also caught sight of me striding towards her.
"Don't put your arms around me!" She yelled at me and scowled before
I could reach her.
"Why on earth not? What's wrong?" I replied in amazement at her totally unloving way of responding to me. Pacing myself to walk alongside of her, I turned to try and place one arm around her waist.
"Don't put your arms around me!" She yelled again, this time in an even more contemptuous way.
"What the hell is the matter with you?" I said as I recoiled. In the entire nine months that we had been dating, she had never behaved anything like this before.
