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Sport 14: Autumn 1995

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In the morning the women come on deck to lounge in the sun, and smooth suntan lotion onto their long, lovely legs.

Amanda, wearing dark glasses, sensible make-up and a gay, floral print frock, sits slightly apart from them. With practised efficiency, she slips another sheet of A4 paper into the carriage of her portable Smith-Corona typewriter. For Amanda, this is no straightforward pleasure cruise. She is a working girl. And yet, and yet. Amanda has never felt so happy. A strange and giddy freedom seems to have taken hold of her limbs.

Amanda’s typewriter is old. Its capitals jump to the top half of every line. But Amanda is sentimentally attached to it. She inherited it, together with a diamond choker, a pair of crystal tear-drop earrings and a sealed envelope, from her great-aunt, the noted writer of romantic fiction who disappeared suddenly in mysterious circumstances.

At first the typewriter seemed strange and awkward to her touch. But now its worn keys seem, instinctively, to fit her fingers.

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Amanda closes her eyes. Her fingers discover a powerful rhythm on the antiquated keyboard.

Once, Amanda was a secretary. But no longer. Love over Gold changed all of that. Published, like her great-aunt’s stories, under the ‘Rose of Romance’ emblem, it told the tale of a secretary called Amanda who falls in love with and marries her employer, Luke Tarrant.

He was tall, handsome and powerful, with a lean, hardboned face that showed a wealth of experience.

She was young, spirited and inwardly vulnerable.

There were problems, quarrels, misunderstandings. For what was their love if not a powder-keg brimming with potential explosions?

But, by the last page, perfect accord. A superlatively happy ending in which love and champagne flowed in equal proportions.

The novel was a huge success. It has been translated into eleven different languages. Eleven! Amanda still has the letter informing her of the publication of the Croatian edition of Love over Gold. Somehow, it seemed special. She keeps it in a trinket box decorated with small shells, along with the diamond choker, the crystal tear-drop earrings, the sealed envelope which reads in her great-aunt’s elegant, sloping script: ‘To my dearest Amanda, not to be opened until the night of your wedding.’

Amanda recalls her great-aunt with fondness. If only she had not disappeared in mysterious circumstances!

A man is walking past on the upper deck. His shoulders are broad beneath the cloth of his white cocktail jacket. A cigarette dangles nonchalantly between slender, tanned fingers.

At the sight of him, Amanda’s heart swells in her chest. It bursts out in the form of a bouquet of paper roses, and is tossed high into the air by the wind. Abruptly it turns into a gull and performs a number of somersaults before sinking, in the form of a firecracker, into the sea, where it is extinguished with the sound of hissing.

Diligently, Amanda follows its progress. Her fingers fly across the typewriter’s worn keys.

‘Oh, Amanda! Amanda!’ she writes.

‘Oh, Luke! Luke!’

The ocean shines. And the ship? It is just a ship.