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Sport 14: Autumn 1995

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Distracted by the sound of laughter, Amanda looks up for a moment from her typewriter. She sees a group of well-dressed men lounging by the deck rail. They seem amused by something. Amongst them, she notices, there is a woman, a woman with a brilliant laugh and a pair of perfect legs.

How Amanda admires her boldness, her splendid insouciance!

And, with her perfect creamy breasts disappearing beneath her fitted bodice (where a single hothouse rose blooms with an intense but dewy lustre) she is, Amanda tells herself, a sight worthy of, at the very least, an extended description.

Amanda thinks, If this woman were in my novel, she would have a name. A name like … Lucinda.

‘Lucinda,’ Amanda types.

‘Cocktail dress.’

‘Hothouse rose.’

These words are her talismans. Solitary isles, drifting at anchor upon the white ocean of her page. Amanda’s fingers hover above her keyboard. She dreams of a story that will lead her, like the dotted lines on the ship’s chart, away from the safe shore, from one island to another, out to the margins of her page, and beyond.

This is how one plots a journey, the journey into romance.

Although sometimes, when you reach your destination, it is different from how you expected it to be.