By The Sea, Book Two: Amanda (13 page)

I've been offered a commission to do a war
memorial."

He stared at her, puzzled. "Is that supposed
to leave me rolling in the aisles with laughter?"

"The offer was from the Veterans of Foreign
Wars."

"Ah. I see the problem. I assume they
haven't seen old Vladimir here?" he asked, hooking a thumb at the
bust of the Communist revolutionary.

"I'm sure they haven't," she said,
grimacing. "The chapter president or whatever he is saw a small
sculpture I'd done that was shown at an exhibit, and he wants to
commission a life-size version for the front lawn of their VFW
hall."

"Well, if you think you'd be compromising
your values in some way, then don't take the job."

"But it's my first commission," she said
with a look of pain.

"No kidding?" Immediately he wiped the smile
off his face. Now was not the time to ask her to share a laugh over
life's little ironies; she seemed in too much anguish over the
whole business. He slid onto a tall wooden stool that sat nearby
and reflected a moment. "Is there something ultra-patriotic about
the sculpture that they want?"

"I certainly hadn't intended it that way,"
she answered, obviously mortified at the possibility. "I have a
photograph of the piece. It was sold at the exhibit." She rifled
through a pile of sketches and photographs that lay on a table next
to him, found the one she wanted, and handed it to him. "It's an
early work," she said, apologizing.

It certainly was: a nice, straightforward
piece of realism depicting a young, obviously exhausted soldier,
his gun trailing in the mud, his rucksack torn and hanging from one
shoulder. The amount of detail was extraordinary. No Dadaist
influence here; no weirdness, no arrogance, no stridency. Just an
honest, compassionate piece of work. He was immensely drawn to it.
It seemed to him to speak well both of the VFW president who wanted
it and of the young woman who stood self-consciously beside Geoff
at the moment, waiting not to take his advice.

"I think you should take the commission," he
said quietly. "I see no compromise of your pacifism here. If your
client is responding to it, all the better. You'd be a fool not to
take advantage of the opportunity," he added, almost gruffly. He
looked at her, then turned away from the burning intensity in her
eyes. She reminded him just then of her young cousin; he wanted
none of it.

He lifted his hands and let them fall with a
slap on his thighs. "Well, by Jove, no doubt that's just what you
didn't want to hear. I'm delighted I could oblige. And now—"

"You don't have to go yet, do you?" she
asked quickly. "Can you have coffee?"

"I, ah, think I'd best be toddling off. I
haven't spent a whole day on the water since—well, since before the
war. I'm too out of shape for such nonstop idleness. One has to
work back up to it," he said with fairly gentle irony.

But there was no way to be gentle with
Amanda Fain. She didn't give gentle, and she didn't take gentle.
Her chin came up sharply and she said, "I can't imagine why I
almost took you seriously just now. I've been around actors before;
they're some of the biggest cynics I know."

She let him mull that one over while she saw
him to the door. It occurred to him again how incapable of
chit-chat they were with one another. When she opened the door for
him, he turned to her and said, "You can believe this or not, but I
meant what I said about your bronze soldier back there: it's damn
good work." She might think he sounded condescending; he didn't
care. If he could give her a gentle chuck under the chin he would,
but ... all things considered, he'd rather try it on the Queen of
England.

They said good night, and he took away the
tantalizing smell of Amanda's salty, sun-heated body with him. He
put her scent—he put the very idea of her scent—out of his mind as
he climbed back into his sedan for the long drive back to Old
Saybrook.

Anyone but Amanda. The more he knew her, the
less he desired her. She had a nice body and a great bum, but there
was something untouchable about her. She was not a virgin, of that
he was certain. But despite her professed liberalism, she had none
of the slam-bam aura that promised a satisfying lay. Lotsy had it;
Amanda didn't. On the other hand, Amanda wasn't exactly the shy and
serious kind who invited you to conquer her. Not like Anna. Anna!
He hadn't thought of Anna since—well, he hadn't thought of Anna.
Period.

He let his mind drift quietly back to her:
was she really happy now? With her lakefront Tudor and her precious
rosebushes? Had she managed finally to get pregnant? Had her
husband got a grip on his vice-presidency yet? He found himself
hoping that the answers to all of the above were yes, and he found
himself shaking his head in wonder at the realization.

****

The morning after Geoff's tête-à-tête with
Amanda in her studio, he arrived at the shipyard with time to
spare. On an impulse he took a little walk around. His first
impressions of the yard were confirmed. It was a well-run facility,
with good men and plenty of work to keep them busy. If the company
ever went public, he'd like to buy some shares—always assuming he
had the money. He decided to check on the progress of the repair of
David Fain's wooden freighter. It had not looked like a moneymaker
to him when first he saw it; maybe he was wrong.

He rolled the huge shed door open and peered
inside: no freighter. Gone, launched, vanished. He couldn't believe
it; it had been nowhere near ready a couple of days ago. Maybe they
had moved it to another shed. He was curious, but not enough to
spend any more time away from his desk. There was work to do. He
returned to his office and dug into the new pile of papers, each
with cryptic notes attached, which had been dumped on his desk
while he was at the Cup race.

When Jim Fain got in he pointed to Geoff's
"in" box, grinned, and said, "That's your punishment. I hope you
aren't making plans to kip out for another race."

"If I were going to do it, today would be
the day," admitted Geoff, feeling deprived. The fact is, however,
that he'd resolved not to go. He was on someone's payroll now, and
Amanda had managed to make him feel guilty about behaving like a
dilettante. She'd also made him feel guilty about having stolen a
perfectly good job from some unsuspecting proletarian. Amanda had a
way with guilt the way some women had a way with floral
arrangements.

"You Brits will never accept the fact that
we took the Cup from you and we aim on keeping it," said Fain,
chomping on a cigar.

"Hell, we Brits have never accepted your
independence
from us," Geoff answered with a good-natured
scowl, and he returned to the business of making American ships
look irresistible to British merchants.

As it turned out, Jim Fain was right about
America keeping the Cup—at least for one more day.
Resolute
beat
Shamrock
, although just barely. If the race course had
been a mile longer, Lipton would have had his Auld Mug at last; his
yacht had been overtaking the American boat at a steady clip, much
to the horror of the New York Yacht Club and to the rip-roaring
delight of a good portion of the spectator fleet. Geoff read every
paper he could find the next day, noting that there was something
for each side to cheer about; Sir Tom had the advantage, two races
to one; and the Americans had a kind of skittish momentum going for
them. The next race would be fantastic, and Geoff seriously
considered walking out on the shipyard to go to it.

The problem was Amanda. Jim Fain had let
drop that Amanda and her cousin had accepted Sir Tom's standing
invitation to view the contests from aboard the
Victoria.
During the second race Geoff and Amanda had managed to argue right
through the start and ignore one another and just about everything
else at the finish. Together they wouldn't do. He could try to
wrangle an invitation aboard another yacht, but all in all, it
seemed easier to read about it in his rooms. Amanda was right: he
was a cynic, and a lazy one at that.

Resolute
won the fourth race. There
was a thunder squall, and a wind shift, and the
Shamrock
was
outsailed, pure and simple. The conditions were maddening, as Geoff
well knew from his own racing experience. His sympathies were one
hundred percent with Lipton, but in his heart he knew that the
momentum had shifted and that the tension among the afterguard and
crew of Lipton's big green boat must be great. Amanda was still
following the races from aboard Sir Tom's yacht; and Jim Fain had
allowed himself to be reconciled to his daughter partly so that he
could get the scoop from her firsthand and pass it on to his
restive new employee. No one seemed to find the situation ironic
except Geoff.

On the twenty-fourth of July a clear, hard
southwester set in at about thirty knots.
Shamrock
weather.
She was a big boat, and a heavy boat, and she needed to be driven
hard. She'd been towed across the Atlantic and had survived the
tremendous strain a boat endures in such circumstances. Lipton
believed in her completely. The trouble was, neither his crew nor
his afterguard (who were, after all, the ones sailing the boat)
shared his confidence. When the New York Yacht Club ran up signal
flags asking whether each side was willing to postpone the racing
because of the dangerous conditions, both sides agreed readily.

And there ended Sir Tom's one, last, best
chance to lift the Auld Mug and carry it back across the Atlantic
in triumph.

****

Late at night on the twenty-seventh of July,
the day of
Resolute's
third and final victory, Mrs. Streep
banged on the door of Geoff's room, rousing him from sleep. He
opened the door and squinted bleary-eyed into a torrent of
distress.

"It's a young lady says she's Amanda, Mr.
Seton. Well, I'm sure I never heard of such a thing, telephoning at
half past midnight, but she's very insistent," whispered the
elderly widow. She wrapped her heavy wool robe more tightly around
her, as if she were standing on tundra instead of on an Oriental
runner in the hall of a cozy house in July. "She doesn't say why.
She just insists," she added in an injured tone.

"Sounds like Amanda, all right," muttered
Geoff as he belted his own robe and slipped past his fretting
landlady on his way to the downstairs landing. "I'm awfully sorry
about this. I can't imagine how she got hold of your number."

"Good heavens! Is she dangerous, are you
saying?" asked Mrs. Streep, padding down the stairs hard on his
heels.

"No, no, not that. Just a little
high-strung. Sometimes she overreacts."

"I don't like this, I don't like this at
all. You seemed like such a nice young man, and you came well
recommended ... the phone is not really for my boarders, you know …
a widow alone, with emergencies to face ... I do need it ... but
this ... well, I never
thought
of hysterical young females
... really, I cannot sanction—"

"I quite agree with you, Mrs. Streep. It
won't happen again." He picked up the receiver from the mahogany
corner-stand and stared at Mrs. Streep's rag-tied hair, trying to
pretend that she wasn't within spitting distance of his
conversation. "This is Geoffrey Seton," he answered.

The voice was by no means hysterical, but it
was coiled tight, ready to spring. "Geoff! I need your help, and I
need it now, no questions asked. It's life or death, I mean it, so
don't toy. Yes or no?"

"I—" He let out a silly, irrelevant laugh,
convinced that Mrs. Streep's ears were angling like a cat's at the
sound of Amanda's voice. He gave his landlady the most do-you-mind
smile in his bag of looks and turned his back on her. "I
understand. What can I do?"

"There's a row of overnight cottages off
Route 1 just east of Guilford called Oak Leaf Cottages—or maybe
it's Maple Leaf, I don't remember. Go to cottage six. It's dark,
the numbers don't show, but the one you want is between two tall
trees."

"Oak trees."

"Or
maple. Cut it out. This is
serious. I'll be inside.
Don't
go to the registry desk."

"Sure. I'll get there as soon as I can.
Bye." He hung up and Mrs. Streep rounded on him, confident that she
was entitled at least to a small piece of the pie.

"What's wrong? Is it serious?"

"Oh, not really, Mrs. Streep. Just a little,
ah, mishap. A branch of an oak tree split off and fell across the
young lady's garage and she'd like my help in clearing away the
entrance," he lied.

"At twelve-thirty in the morning?" said the
woman pointedly. "Can't she park on the curb for the night?"

"Well, that's just it, you see. The
automobile is inside the garage and her keys are inside the
automobile, so she can't get in her house." This made absolutely no
sense to Geoff, but Mrs. Streep bought it, so he kept right on
going, up the stairs and into a pair of trousers and a shooting
jacket he favored for the mild months. He had several hundred
dollars banked under the mattress tick; he agonized briefly over
whether to take it along, then stuffed the whole wad into the
inside pocket of his leather-shouldered jacket.

In two minutes he was on the road again.
He'd done more driving in America in a couple of weeks than he'd
managed in England in a couple of years. No one had any respect for
distance over here; he was becoming like everyone else. Geoff made
excellent time to Guilford and what turned out to be the Elm Tree
Cottages. He found number six, parked in front of it, and knocked
on the door. The lights were out, there was no answer; he thought
he must have dreamt the whole strange thing. He knocked again.

The door opened; he was grabbed by a lapel
and hauled inside, cursing. A light went on. Amanda stood in front
of him, biting her lip in tension, her breath coming short and
fast. Behind her, in a corner chair near a beat-up bureau, slumped
her brother David. He was hurt: a large circle of blood gone black
stained the shoulder of his shirt. The area had been bandaged;
David looked more frightened than in pain. Geoff had seen the look
before, on men who'd had close encounters in combat.