Entry-Seven
“Will you be joining us for cocktails this evening now that you seem more yourself, Mr Burnside?”
The words had been spoken to me in the corridor outside my stateroom by my neighbour for the voyage, a stout American widow of some fifty years or more I knew to have been sizing me up as a possible on-board romance. An American widow with whom I had, consequently, been spending the rare occasions we happened to bump into each other diplomatically explaining - via the tendering of a whole host of falsehoods intended to get me off the hook and spare her feelings - that I was unable to enter into romantic liaisons of any kind at this stage of my life.
And with her, as pleasant as she seemed…?
Never.
Hardly surprising then that Mrs Eleanor Mapplethorpe, as was, appeared none too
