So,.. a man rents a lonely old house and hides a woman in it. Then he comes and goes as he pleases, uses her to fulfil his sadistic fantasies, and though he guards his territory, it strikes me it is the instinct of the tomcat that drives him, that he might even have other women tucked away in quiet little corners like this.

I wonder how much the rent will be on the old Willet place - so old, so run down, so lacking in even the basics. It cannot be very much. Don't misunderstand: given the chance, I would rent it myself, suffer any deprivation, any inconvenience just to live and sleep, and breathe and bathe myself, for now at least, in the mysterious fluid energies of Durleston Wood.

I contemplate this as I gaze from the bedroom window of the house I'm renting on Mill Lane. A generation ago few people rented houses in England, but I am renewing my country's acquaintance at a peculiar time, a time gone far back in time, when only the moneyed classes owned property and rented it back to the rest of us.

It is a modern, flimsy house, already sinking into ruin, smelling of damp and mould and filthy carpets. Like everything I see about me now, it has known better days. My only investment here, apart from the rent, has been a kettle, a new mattress and some bedding. There are holes busted through the stud walling, radiators leak and dissolve away the cheap chip-wood floors, and everything I touch creaks and groans. It all speaks of decline. Of something lost.

The house does nothing to make me feel at home. As the nights draw in I have to rely more on the feeble energy-saving bulbs installed by the last inmates of this dismal little place. They cast a barely adequate light and make reading painful, but a proper bulb would make the meter spin too greedily, and I wonder how it's possible my country could have come to this. Is it my country though, or is it just that my perceptions of it are distorted by a sinking frame of mind?

I spend as little time in the house as I can, walking mostly - returning only to sleep. In my first two weeks of sick-leave, autumn settles in wet, so I purchase a fisherman's bivouac from the Argos store in Middleton, and I take it down into the belly of the wood. It's a lightweight, nylon thing, camouflaged like an army tent and disappears into the background in such a way that if you did not know it was there, you'd have to fall over it in order to find it. I take up residence inside, when the rain is persistent – it's surprisingly cosy – and I spend my days there in quiet contemplation, reading trash novels and brewing infusions of St John's Wort and Valerian, and I meditate, safe in the knowledge that the foul weather will keep Lillian indoors.

I leave her things, now: a bottle of fresh milk, some fruit - leave them by the fence where she's sure to find them, as I slip by on my circuit of the woods. Compassion makes me act this way, that's all. Anyone would do the the same. Other than that, she is nothing to me, and the notion that we can somehow be the saving of each other seems ridiculous.

I'm tempted to sleep in the woods, away from Mill Lane, where my neighbours' noisy couplings are becoming tiresome. By contrast the stillness and the solitude of the wood are a comforting balm, but it's growing too cold now to be sleeping out of doors. I do not pack the bivouac when I go, but leave it pegged down, leave a sleeping bag and stove, in case I should decide to stay. You might think these things would be vulnerable to passers by, but really no one comes this way, and I always find them undisturbed, when I return.

There are tricks you can play with cotton threads, stretched low across the runs, and they are always unbroken when I inspect them, so I know my sanctuary is undiscovered - that indeed only one person other than myself knows I have ever been there. So one morning, when Durleston is still crisp with the cold of dawn, and I discover my first broken thread, I am not at all surprised to find Lillian huddled inside the bivouac, asleep, wrapped snug inside my sleeping bag and covered with a blanket she has brought from the house.

I have lit a small fire by the time her eyes open, and I admit to thirty minutes of quiet admiration of the mystery of her sleeping form. She has the faintest of creases in the corners of her eyes, and her face, in slumber, relaxes into an expression of quiet bliss that seems in defiance of her bindings, which speak only of cruelty and unspeakable humiliation.

When she finally awakens, her eyes flicker a moment in fear but she does not move and seems entirely passive to her fate. Then, seeing me, she smiles in a way I have wished Davinia would smile. What does she see in me that others cannot? Why must it be her? It cannot be her! I cannot enter her dark world. Tugging that other Lillian's hair on her birthday would have been such a tame declaration, yet I proved myself incapable even of that. I look at this Lillian in her bindings and her chains, as if at some alien thing. She's asked me to remove them, yes, but how soon before she's asking me to rivet in place my own, and play a kind of game I was not made for? No, that can't be it. I must look more deeply into this,..

I brew tea with milk and sugar, and since I've only the one cup, I offer it to her. She drinks it gratefully.

"Thank you, Adam."

"Have you been here all night?"

She nods.

"What if he were to come back and find you gone?"

She shrugs as if the answer is obvious. "He would punish me."

I wonder what this word 'punishment' means. Is it just that he takes her in a rougher way? Or does it involve beating, whipping and the letting of blood? Just how dark is the path she treads?

"Has he been back since we last spoke?"

She shakes her head wearily. She's afraid - afraid he will not come, but afraid also in case he does. She needs help. I can help her. The iron ring at her throat shines dully. I see the need in her but I am reminding myself a simple kind of man cannot become involved with a woman like this – and not expect to be changed, even injured by her.

"It was you who left those things for me?" she asks, "The Milk? The food?"

I do not want her to be grateful. "Look, I'm just an ordinary kind of guy, Lillian."

"No one is ordinary, Adam. You are not ordinary. It is only circumstances that make us seem ordinary."

"I can't get mixed up in your sort of games, that's all. That's what I mean."

"If I said it was not a game? That I had no choice?"

I'm shocked. "I wouldn't believe you. I mean,… it's unthinkable,… you're telling me you're being held against your will?"

She looks away, gives a sigh - almost impatient, either with me or with herself that she is unable to find the right opening. "Of course not," she tells me, but there is something insincere in the way she says it, so I do not believe her and now my head is spinning and she has me off balance which is exactly where she wants me.

"Perhaps it's the way of life I want to escape," she says. "It might be that what you describe as ordinary is something I might want more than anything in the world. You could help me find the way again, surely?"

She's playing with me, something soft and seductive in her voice, but I am wise to it. A man might easily make a fool of himself over her, but she would always go back to her gaoler, for they are of a like mind. Right now I suspect the only thing she's seeking is the thrill of finding him waiting for her with a stern expression and something to smack her with. It is the thrill of her imagined punishment that makes her life all the more worthwhile. What would such a woman want with an ordinary way of living? She is already lost to the drug of darkness. Or am I being too cynical?

"Am I not a little old for you, Lillian?"

She smiles again. She's on the right track now, breaking through to me. "Who said anything about us getting married?"

Now I smile in order to brush away my silliness. It's such a simple thing but we are no longer as we were. The bond tying me to her is already made a little stronger, so now she should pretend to go, in order to test me on it.

"I'm disturbing you," she says, and she throws aside the blanket as if indeed she means to leave.

"You are," I tell her.

"I'm sorry," she says, her eyes lowered.

"You're not sorry at all. You don't mind disturbing me, if you think your persistence will win you what it is that you want. But really, Lillian, I cannot help you."

She examines the cuffs at her wrists. They are red where the leather chafes, and she scratches them. "It's such a simple thing," she says.

"No it's not. And I don't understand why you're looking to involve me. I'm such an unlikely choice."

"I told you, Adam. I don't want to play this game any more. I want to escape it."

"If that was true you'd simply cut those things yourself and walk away. You want to make him - I don't know - jealous, so he will feign displeasure and beat you all the harder, or whatever it is he does."

"He does not always 'feign' it."

"You said it was a game."

"Played properly I think it can be." She looks away. "It's complicated. You have not seen the thing's I've seen."

"If you're afraid of him, why don't you,… "

"What? Go the police?"

"Surely, if you're afraid,… yes."

"I have no papers," she tells me. "I have no right to be in this country at all. So he can do what he likes with me, and I've no choice but to smile and bear it. I am,.. his slave."

I had not thought of this before! "You're,… what? An illegal immigrant? "

"Yes. No. I am now, but not always. I told you, it's complicated."

"So explain it to me."

She looks at me as if she thinks I am unlikely to understand, but she tells me anyway:

"I worked in London. Before that I was educated here. I have done many things - all of them proper. I am not a bad sort of person, Adam, you know? My legal status lapsed, though no one seemed to care back then. It seemed a technicality. Is that the right word? I have lived a normal life in this country, really, but suddenly these days, questions of foreignness are important, and I find myself a fugitive facing deportation."

"You don't want to go home?"

"My country is hard on those who have nothing. Do you know what poverty is? If you did you would understand better how I would rather pretend to be the pleasure slave of an Englishman, than return to face it. Or do you really imagine that if I had a better alternative, I would remain here?"

"What manner of Englishman are we talking about? How,… did he come to putting those things on you in the first place?"

She offers me her wrists, pressed together, as if symbolic of her bondage. "It doesn't matter," she says. And then: "Cut them off."

I shake my head.

"Cut them, Adam!"

"Lillian, my life is falling apart. I can't get involved with someone like you. And you didn't answer my question. What kind of man is he?"

"I needed papers - to stay. I was told these things could be arranged. I thought it was only money that was required of me."

"Then he's what? A criminal,.. some kind of trafficker?"

"Well, obviously."

I'm not entirely surprised. "My God, Lillian. Surely, even living in poverty at home is better than this. You have to get away from him! Go to the police. Go home to your family. You want an ordinary life - that's surely the best place to find it."

"My family are dead. I belong to an ethnic group that is no longer welcome in my country – you understand this? We have been persecuted since independence from the British in 1960. My parents died in uprisings while I was here, at University."

She's quiet for a while.

Can any of this be true?

"But… surely, you wouldn't be deported if it meant your life would be in danger. There are rules."

"Things are rarely so black and white. Is that how you say it? Black and white? Sometimes the rules are overlooked, and people are deported anyway, because numbers are more important. Personally, I would rather not take the risk. At times like this it is not always wise to trust in authority.

"My parents were,… outspoken, intellectuals, professionals - how else could they afford to send a daughter abroad to study? If there is a black list, I am on it and I'm afraid I would be arrested, imprisoned for my name alone - and you know what that would mean for me, in my country? Here I wear these chains, and my gaoler pretends to be cruel, but it's a game and I trust he would never really hurt me. At home it would be a different story. At home, people simply disappear. I am afraid. Do you see that?"

I can feel my stomach churning as she tells me this. I have no experience of the kind of world she describes. There are not many places like that now in the East, but I can think of a few, and I know that what she says is far from exaggeration. She cannot go back and fears to put herself at the mercy of my country, in case my country, with a stroke of the pen, decides to put her at the mercy of her own.

"You need a solicitor, a human rights lawyer,… or something." I do not know what I'm talking about, but it sounds right, and as for the details, well they don't matter, because it's not my life in danger, is it?

"No, I just need somewhere else to hide. Adam, if you will not help me, can you at least lend me some money?"

"How much?"

"Oh,… a few thousand pounds should do it."

"Okay. I suppose you'll be wanting it in cash?"

She's puzzled and her brows knit together as she scrutinises me. "Are you a wealthy man? I did not take you for a wealthy man."

"I'm not wealthy no. But I live alone, so I'm not exactly broke either."

"And you'd give a stranger two thousand pounds, just like that?"

"We're not exactly strangers are we?"

"But I could be lying to you - I am lying in fact. I do not want your money. I'm very happy living the way I do, and I've been a naturalised citizen since 1998. So I need not fear deportation at all."

"Not all of that is true. The only bit I believe is that you do not want my money."

"You puzzle me. You'll give me money, but you will not cut these straps?"

"The money's impersonal - that's just its nature. Cutting those straps is not."

"Some would say a man giving a woman that sort of money might expect something in return - that she would be obliged to him. After all that's how I got myself into this mess in the first place."

"With some men, possibly, but not me. You could take the money and run, with my blessing."

"Then, if I said you would not be obligated if you cut these straps? You fear there might be something symbolic in it? If I told you there was not?"

"You'd be lying. There is a symbol in the cutting of them, and it would bind us. You know that. You're playing with me, and I don't understand why - you could cut the blasted things off yourself. I do not want to be bound to you, or have you bound to me."

"I think you do."

"You're wrong, Lillian."

She smiles. "You're afraid, that's all - afraid of what such a thing might mean, what it might make you feel. You might not want it, but I think you need it. Next time you pass the house, and he's not there, don't sneak by like you always do. Knock on the door, and I will open it for you."

She rises then and the belly of the wood grows empty as she walks away. I watch her, the blanket drawn about her shoulders like a cape, and I feel the energy of Durleston flow past as it is sucked towards her. I do not want her to leave me now because I will never have the courage to call upon her, and there is something in our weird conversations I am beginning to enjoy. She once asked me if there was anyone who energised me, and I told her no. It was true at the time. But that was before I came to know her.

Lillian energises me. She challenges me, talks to me,…

There comes a roaring up the valley as a sudden wind stirs the thinning canopy and sends a flurry of twisted copper dancing across the clearing in her wake. Autumn is a great revealer: no place in the forest to hide now: better to lie still then, or hibernate deep inside a hole. And if you must make a stand, then you should at least be prepared to die.