Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Sport 14: Autumn 1995

[section]

The plot must thicken.

page 24

Whatever can it mean?

Amanda knits her brow in concentration as she gazes at the mysterious message.

There is something vaguely threatening about it. Something that reminds her of her home economics teacher, standing grimly over a recalcitrant sauce, grasping a wooden spoon in her hand.

The plot must thicken.

Well, then. It is rumoured that the ship has been infiltrated by undesirable elements. A ring of drug smugglers, perhaps, or international jewel thieves. The rumours generate fear, anxiety, a morbid sense of foreboding. The tranquillity of shipboard life is threatened. The women clutch their jewel cases in perplexity. They mutter uneasily over their Rabbit Blanquette, their Shrimps Mariette, their Potatoes Gorbachev, their Fillets of Sole Véronique, served with a Sauce Aurore whose colour resembles the perfect sunsets that flame every evening above the sea of love.

‘Potatoes Gorbachev?’ Amanda asks.

The waiter smiles enigmatically.

There are other rumours, too. Of legacies, rightful inheritances, fitting conclusions. Mrs Papadopoulos is grave. She speaks of business difficulties and uncertain speculations, of the shifting fortunes of the stock market, as changeable and deceptive as the shifting surfaces of the sea of love itself. It is not easy, she says, to be the heir to an oil and shipping fortune. A single scandal, she says, could spell certain ruin.

Amanda pays little attention to the rumours. She has, after all, little to lose! Outwardly, she remains calm. Until the evening when she goes to her trinket box to take out her great-aunt’s crystal tear-drop earrings (purely, it must be said, for the pleasure of holding the cool crystal to her hot cheeks), and finds that they are gone.