The Drowned Sailor Read online

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  That evening, Ravella returned to her rooftop apartment in a kind of dream as she pondered on investments, real estate and wills. Her mind strayed to Devonshire, where she envisioned a great mansion with green lawns, and remembering certain expressive glances on the Millennium Wheel she revelled in her prospects.

  It was a blustery night, and she was often distracted from these important thoughts by the lowing wind, and other sounds that pricked her ears now and again —a car receding out of hearing, a muttering argument downstairs diminishing into nothing, a pelican crossing bleating aimlessly. But it seemed there was another sound too, among the breezes, slipping beneath the blowing weather— and the keener she listened, the more she was convinced she heard a voice, a familiar, whispered voice. Taken with curiosity, she crossed the room to the window, where the flitting moonlight was streaming in.

  Turning the latch, she leaned out. The brilliant moon fell full upon her face, and the gale broke like a mighty wave, beating and streaming around her, setting the curtains dancing. She felt very small then, a tiny thing against the crashing storm-gusts, and in the bellow of the blast she could hear still more distant sounds, for doubtless that breeze had swept up from the ocean and soared a vast distance— so it brought with it the calls of waders picking for shrimps at the mouths of mighty rivers, the creaks of ships shifting at their moorings, the toll of buoys rocking their solitary bells, the breathing of immense whales on the surface of the choppy brine, and towers of ice splitting off the polar caps to crumble into the sea. Wave upon wave of gale poured over her there, and still, in the lulls and pauses, she could hear the voice, a familiar voice from long ago, whispering something at the bottom of the sea, whispering something indistinct and dreadful— and in a sudden panic she shut the window and hurried off to bed.

  Nevertheless, the following morning she rose full of vigour and enthusiasm, ready to bring about her stratagem to ruin Clare Belmont’s love affair at the first opportunity. Being entirely her own mistress that day (her current amour presently and conveniently on business in St. Petersburg) she elected to call on Guy Laurence, who she knew to be in love with Clare.

  ‘Another man,’ she speculated on the way, ‘is just the lever I need to prize the lovers apart.’

  On arrival at his apartment she entered directly, switched off a particularly maudlin ballad that was playing, and called for her inadvertent host. Receiving no answer, however, she was obliged to throw off several cushions from the sofa in order to discover its occupant beneath, curled up around an empty vodka bottle.

  ‘What’s the matter with you, Guy?’ she demanded, pulling out the bottle and tugging his ear.

  ‘Me?’ he replied feebly, ‘what’s the matter with you? I never asked for a wake-up call.’

  ‘It’s time you woke up to yourself,’ tutted Ravella, and threw open the curtains.

  This fellow Laurence was generally considered a very handsome man, indeed winningly attractive— blonde, blue-eyed and statuesque. But though the camera usually adored him, at the present moment even the most doting lens might turn aside. He was in a poor state of repair due to both the spirits, and a want of them, since that heady liquor love had brought him very low of late. The intrusion of sunlight, birdsong and street-bustle from the open window seemed to sink him still lower; he burrowed under another cushion, until Ravella snatched it off.

  ‘What do you want?’ he appealed. ‘Why are you harassing me? What did I ever do to you?’

  ‘Do you think I’m going to let you wallow here in your pit and die of a broken heart? Get up, get in the shower, clean your teeth, and I’ll fry you something that’ll really give your heart something to break about.’

  This nursing counsel was not met with much enthusiasm, and she was obliged to make several more attempts before finally harrowing him into the bathroom.

  ‘On second thoughts, take a bath,’ she advised, ‘and I’ll sit on this stool outside the door so we can talk.’

  The poor man obeyed.

  ‘Well, what is it you want to talk about?’ he enquired, once installed in the tub.

  ‘Nothing at all, Guy,’ said Ravella. ‘What do you want to talk about?’

  He replied gloomily that he did not want to talk about anything.

  ‘What! Why not? What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said, sulkily.

  ‘Oh, I don’t believe that. You’re not the man you used to be. You never used to sit in on your own, brooding on your woes. You used to be quite chirpy. What’s changed?’

  ‘You know what’s changed,’ he returned despondently.

  ‘You’d be amazed how I forget things,’ she replied, and conjured him to relate his miseries, which were, in short, that he was ardently in love, while Clare would not return the passion, and was seeing somebody else. His plaintive dirge carried on for a good hour altogether, since unhappy people are always at pains to tell you so at length; and at its conclusion the bathwater had gotten cold, which did not improve his humour any.

  Ravella turned aside as he ambled to his bedroom, lamenting all the while, and then repositioned her stool outside this new door.

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ he complained, while dressing. ‘I don’t understand myself, Ravella. I love her too much, I know that, and I know what it does to me. But I don’t know how I’m supposed to get on, what I ought to feel, what my life will be like tomorrow, or what I’ll feel then. I don’t remember what it was like before her, either— I suppose I must have been happy, but I can’t imagine it, with her missing— oh, it makes me so miserable, I could kill myself!’

  Ravella buffed her nails for the hundredth time and said: ‘Oh Guy, I don’t believe you’re in love at all.’

  He put his head around the door and startled her. ‘How can you say that? After everything I’ve just told you!’ —and he snapped the door shut. She opened it ajar.

  ‘It seems to me that if you were in love, you’d be happy.’

  ‘What’s to be happy about?’

  ‘The prospect of winning Clare, and making her love you too.’

  He laughed mirthlessly. ‘She doesn’t want me.’

  Ravella frowned. ‘Who can blame her, though? Who would want you, Guy, for all your company’s worth? All you do is traipse around, moaning about how painfully miserable you are, when really you needn’t bother, because it’s perfectly obvious. Well, now I’m here to bring you out of it, once and for all— don’t interrupt, I’ve got plenty to say, and you’re going to listen to me. Last time you met her, Guy, you nearly reduced her to tears with your sighs and longing looks.’

  ‘Did I?’ he asked, hopefully.

  ‘Tears of boredom, Guy! And it’s no wonder, is it? She’s hardly going to be swept off her feet by that sort of mawkish carry-on. You must snap out of these doldrums if you’re to get anywhere.’

  At this point he emerged sheepishly from his room, and Ravella began to tidy him up as best she could, wondering how she might get him out of this black pullover into something altogether more ravishing.

  ‘Tell me immediately,’ she said, ‘do you actually want Clare, or do you just want to pine about her?’

  ‘Of course I want her!’

  ‘Good, because I’m sick and tired of watching you dither about. If you’re really determined, I can help you.’

  ‘You know I’d die for her, Ravella,’ he said heroically.

  ‘I’ll kill you myself if you continue in that vein,’ she warned. ‘Now, you must do exactly what I tell you, to the letter, do you understand?’

  ‘Alright. But you can’t make her love me any more than I can,’ he protested.

  ‘Excuse me, I can do whatever I wish. And first of all, I’ll make you into the most fascinating, attractive prospect going, which will be no mean feat, even with your pretty face.’

  So she set upon transforming him by the method of cheering him up, because (she reasoned) cheerful people are always more attractive than gloomy ones, which is why t
hey say that those who are not looking for love always find it first— if you are happy without it, you are loved for being happy. With this, and many other convoluted maxims, she brought him into her devices and persuaded him that Clare would fall for him yet. And he, I suppose, reasoned that the assistance of his beloved’s best friend could hardly do his cause any harm, so consented to her dictates.

  Over the ensuing weeks Ravella casually brought Laurence into Clare’s society more and more, to restore the ground of friendship he had jeopardised with his loverish miseries. And in a short time she saw a chance, and gleefully seized upon it. She considered the intelligence she had gleaned, what her own moves should be, the various ways in which her players might react, and how she would respond; and having plotted sufficiently she gave Laurence his directions, relying on the assumption that, as in the best comedies, everybody would play to type.

  Her discovery was that Trevick had devised a romantic appointment for his beloved’s birthday at the end of May. He hinted to Clare that he was going to treat her, and that she would receive an invitation on that morning. Swept up by the romance of this gesture, Clare enthusiastically imagined a surprise trip to Venice, Hong Kong or Australia, and pestered Trevick on the subject so thoroughly that she ruined her own surprise, because he was forced to reveal that she could expect no more than dinner and a show, followed by a trip to his house in Devonshire.

  This she