The Drowner by Robert Drewe

Author:Robert Drewe
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781742283487
Publisher: Penguin Group Australia
Published: 2009-06-22T04:00:00+00:00

Under two lunar rainbows they drank champagne by the Zambezi.

Will had thought she would be on edge but she was surprisingly languid. She seemed to him to be seduced that night by the lunar rainbows of the full moon. How could such a strange and lovely phenomenon not lead you to believe that underneath its fierce bluster nature was indeed reverie and languor?

‘They’re very otherworldly,’ she said, sipping champagne. ‘Like rainbows in a dream.’

‘You said once the otherworld was your cup of tea.’ He leaned over and kissed her bare shoulder.

Her skin was cool and fragrant and densely female against his lips. Her unfamiliar dreamy mood aroused him, the flowing lines of her shoulders and back and upper arms. Moonrays arched over them, and he thought of light eternally refracting and reflecting through the exploding droplets. All this dramatic son et lumiere sparked off by a crack in a sheet of basalt

‘And my experience of the exotic was rather more limited then,’ she said.

There was no hotel at Victoria Falls, but during the monthly incidence of the lunar rainbows the railway company prepared an ‘African supper’ for its passengers. Consomme of impala, crocodile cocktail, roast of wart-hog or Egyptian goose served at sunset on a raised landing by a quiet creek and reed bed of the Zambezi. A champagne toast to the vivid sunset, another to herald the arrival of the night-rainbows and, between these events, the bravado of dining on some of the same wild creatures filing down to the river’s edge before them.

As the moon rose, vervet monkeys used the moonlight to dart across the deck, snatch from plates and upset sugar bowls. Natives topping up champagne glasses threw shadows across the tables. The river flowed only feet away. He was drinking champagne with gusto, and in the optimistic warmth of the evening it seemed to him not impossible that all living forms could rise up out of that deep, heavy water.

As Angelica slowly sipped her champagne, however, she felt her mood changing with the miasmal humidity settling in the dark ferns and blood lilies. This creek was only a mile above the falls, but so subtle and slow it could have been a hundred miles upriver. Damp mud and algal smells, the mineral rot of driftwood came to her.

She thought abruptly of Kate. She saw Kate suddenly as an Edgar Allan Poe character. Poe favoured water that was deep, dormant and still—full of black suffering. She thought: death associated with water is more dream-like than death associated with land. The pain of water is infinite.

Poe’s water images usually followed his main preoccupation, a reverie of death dominated by the image of a dying mother. The fact that this had occurred to her gave her a start.

It had been a long while since she had allowed herself to think of her mother.

She stared into the bush and drank more champagne without tasting it. When she was little, her father was always quoting the raven nevermore. ‘Mr Poe’ was his funny lugubrious voice.

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