By The Sea, Book Two: Amanda (4 page)

Geoff wondered what the plain-spoken Lipton
thought of all this plain speaking as he followed Amanda's swaying
hips into the entrance hall for her bronze.

"The Thing" was far too kind a description
for it. The sculpture was a two-foot high rendering of the
grotesque. Something long with limbs was sprawled flat under a
piece of flat-bar, the end of which curved up. A roundish ball lay
nearby, and a longish something else, and a neat pile of what
looked like spaghetti.

"Interesting," Geoff said, with a vague
sense of distaste. "What do you call it?"

"Tank," she answered shortly, and then: "You
should know; the British invented it, just in time for the
war."

"And in the nick of time, too," he answered
with edgy cheerfulness. He studied it more closely. "Ah, so this
flat piece, then, is a tank tread?"

She blinked an assent, like a stroke victim.
Her sense of herself infuriated him.

"And this squashed—this would be some poor
bloke who got his?"

She looked away, apparently bored with his
struggle to grasp the profound.

"He has no head, so it's a bit difficult—ah,
yes, I see; there it is. And this over here," he continued, puzzled
and intrigued despite himself. "This little pile of business
is—what I think it is?" he inquired politely, pointing to the mound
of spaghetti.

Amanda did everything but tap her toe on the
parquet floor to express her impatience. "Can we go now?"

"Of course. Silly of me to babble on. After
all, you know what it means already, don't you?" He was jockeying
for a safe lifting position, not at all sure that his comeuppance
wasn't nigh, when the maid came out to meet them.

"Phone for you, miss. It's David. I think
something's wrong," she added triumphantly.

"Thank
you, Sara." To Geoff she said,
"Don't lift it till I bring the car around. You look like you could
easily hurt yourself."

Geoff hurled a little oath at her back, then
found his glance sliding to her buttocks again. It wouldn't
surprise him if she had nothing at all on underneath. He turned his
attention back to the bronze. It was crude, simplistic. But it was
undeniably effective. Or maybe he was predisposed, in his gloomy
postwar mood, to see it that way. He wondered how long she'd been
at the game, and whether her work had always been so fierce. He was
still wondering when Amanda charged through the entry hall, tossing
off a command. "There's been a change in plan. Stay right
there."

She kept on going, never looking back to see
whether the order had registered on Geoff, and he saw her march up
to her father again. Some of it he heard—"accident," "
my
car," and
"that
crowd." He saw Mrs. Fain throw her hands up
to her cheeks and Amanda encircle her waist briefly in reassurance
as she flew past on her way out.

"I need your help," she said to Geoff. "My
brother has managed to smash up my car. He can't drive it back
himself. Can you drive me to the scene? I'll take the car to the
hospital, pick up that poor excuse of a sibling, and return him to
the one person on this planet who can say his name without
choking."

"Your father?"

"Be serious. My mother. Will you?"

"Yes. But what about the, uh …. " He
fluttered a hand in the direction of the bronze.

"Monday."

And so he was drafted into the service of a
woman whom he began to think of as the Naked General. Except for
her curtly precise directions, not a word escaped her lips. He
stole a glance or two at her as he drove. She was better in
profile: the belligerence of her chin was softened then, and so was
the line in her brow when she frowned. She spooked him, a little,
and as a result his driving suffered. She had knocked his
right-side-of-the-road concentration out of whack, that's all there
was to it. He turned into wrong lanes, jumped when a car passed
them, braked all too quickly. He felt, in short, like a raw recruit
whose first assignment is to ferry his commanding officer to the
front line over mined roads.

Which irritated the hell out of him. He
tried again to establish an equal footing. "What seems to be the
problem with your brother?"

"He has a classic case of Oedipal complex,"
she said. "Downshift."

"I hope it's not catching," he answered
lightly as he shifted gears. He had only a nodding acquaintance
with Freud's studies and hoped to God that she wasn't going to
expose him as an ignoramus. "Actually, I wasn't really prying into
whether or not David wants to depose your father. I meant, was he
hurt in the accident, or just shaken up?"

"His wrist," she answered in a tired
voice.

After that she had nothing more to say, and
neither did he. Amanda Fain was a lost cause. What she lacked in
civility she made up for in rudeness. His mother was right, or
rather, his father was wrong; it wouldn't surprise him if the
entire Fain family's last known address was a treehouse.

"There it is!" she said with more urgency
than he'd yet heard from her.
"Shit!
Look what he's done to
it!"

Geoff winced, more from her candor than from
the sight of the crumpled fender and twisted bumper. He pulled over
to the curb. She had the door open before Geoff's rented Dodge
Tourer rolled to a stop.

"Anytime," he muttered as she fled from him
toward her battered car. Probably he should stick around to see
whether the Daniels started or not; his father had raised him to do
the decent thing, after all.

It gave him particular joy to pull out
around her and wave a jaunty good-bye without knowing whether she'd
be able to get the car going or not.
Obviously,
he told
himself cheerfully as he headed back for New York,
I have an
Oedipal problem of my own.

To a man brought up year-round on a country
estate, the sights and sounds of a big city can be either
fascinating or overwhelming. Yesterday Geoff had been intrigued.
Today he wanted all the horses, automobiles, streetcars, vendors,
shoppers, strollers, bicyclers, bellhops, porters, and shoeshine
boys—to go away. New York was like a London in which no one spoke
English.

He'd had a response to one of his notes.
Late in the day, the hottest of the year so far and certainly the
steamiest, a lifesaving call came through to his rooms: it was
Matthew Stevenson, an American he'd met back in his days at
Eton.

The voice at the other end was exasperated.
"For Pete's sake, Geoff, why didn't you call instead of
writing?"

"Habit, I guess. We've only just got around
to having a telephone put in at Seton Place."

"It's just sheer luck that I happened to
call the New York house to check on the mail. I'm in Newport, of
course."

"I'm sorry to hear that; I'd hoped we could
get together during my stay," Geoff said.

"And we will, as soon as you pack your bags
and come east. Do you have a car?"

"I do."

"Swell. Or better still, get down to Pier 14
and hop on the
Priscilla.
She's old but grand, still the
best ship of the line. If you hurry you can just make it. What
d'you say? No one wants to rot in the city if he can avoid it."

"I'm here for the Cup Races, but the offer
sounds tempting. I could pack a bag—"

A knock at the door startled Geoff. Another
one of his ships coming in? He got Matt to hold and answered it:
the Naked General. She was wearing an absolutely smashing ivory
dress trimmed out in black, and her red, red lips were shaped into
the approximation of a smile. He invited her in—he must have,
although later he had no recollection of it—and asked her to wait
while he finished his call.

"Matt? Give me your number and I'll call you
back."

She was staring out the window of his room,
which gave him time mentally to declare her bum, absolutely and
without reservation, the best he'd ever seen. She turned, and on
impulse he reached into his pocket, withdrew a keyring, and tossed
it to her.

Instinctively she caught it, then looked at
him, puzzled. It was a new look but not a softer look: suspicion
was not a soft emotion.

He shrugged. "I assume you're here for
something. All I really have, besides a few old clothes, is the
Dodge." It sounded more mean than he'd intended; he guessed that
his feelings were still smarting from her abrupt treatment of him
the day before.

"What a xenophobic race you Brits are," she
said coolly, taking a seat. "Do I look as if I need anything you
could possibly possess?'

A heart,
it occurred to him to say,
but he let it pass.

"I'm here," she began, filling in his
stubborn silence "because I was feeling lousy yesterday and I think
you might have caught the brunt of it."

"Really? I wasn't aware of it," he said
blandly.

She gave him her suspicious look, and he
wanted to say,
Who's xenophobic now?
but again he resisted.
He had the feeling that she was there for a punch-up. He would not
be suckered in.

"Anyway," she continued, giving him a
sideways look, "I suppose this is an apology."

"But you're not sure?" he asked, amused.

"I was in the neighborhood," she said, as if
that answered the question. "Sir Tom mentioned where you were
staying."

"How are things with Sir Tom?" he asked,
wondering if the old man was more tolerant than he of the Fain
clan.

"I don't know. My father doesn't talk about
his business to me."

"And yet you both create in metal. I should
think you'd have a lot in common," he said, leaning back against
the lowboy and crossing his arms.

"I don't approve of war machinery, as you
may have noticed," she said testily. "Why are you so
defensive?"

He did a double-take at that one. "Shouldn't
I be asking that question?"

"Not at all.
I'm
not leaning away
from you and protecting my breast with my arms the way you
are."

He could see that for himself, even though
he'd been trying hard not to. The black lapels of her dress led the
eye to a breast that was anything but protected. He smiled and said
nothing. It seemed to frustrate her.

She foraged through her bag and came up with
a cigarette case which she snapped open and held out to him. When
he shook his head she took one out for herself, tapped it against
the silver box, and lit it without waiting for his help. Everything
was done in quick, impatient movements, as though she had a train
to catch. Sitting there, tapping her nails on the edge of the salon
chair, her foot swinging in a short, restless stroke, she seemed
his temperamental opposite. She had a world to set on fire; he'd
been savagely burnt and was looking around for a comfortable cave
to hide out in for a while.

Finally she jumped up—it would be inaccurate
to say she rose from her chair gracefully—and spoke. "If you want
to come along with me, that's all right."

He opened his mouth to say something, then
closed it again. He had no idea how to respond to her odd
invitation, but instinctively he knew that she would be mortified
if he declined. The truth was, he didn't necessarily feel like
declining. But he wanted to get out of the city heat and go to
Newport, if only for a day or two, and he had just time enough to
catch an evening steamer.

"It's very kind of you to ask," he said,
hesitating as a man will who wants two things at once.

"Well, you don't have to go all snooty on
me," she snapped, grinding her cigarette into a silver ashtray
stand.

"I didn't know I was being a snoot. I
apologize." He tried to make eye contact with her, but she was
resolute in her effort to look everywhere in the room but at him.
He decided in a flash that she was shy, so painfully shy that it
distorted the features of her face. "I was about to go downstairs
for dinner," he said, abandoning his plans for Pier 14. "Would you
care to join me?"

"I asked you to dinner first!" she cried,
looking at him as if he'd committed an atrocious
faux pas
.
Her eyes were big and round and dark, almost without color; she
fixed them directly on him in a blazing stare. So much for his
theory that she was shy.

"I didn't realize ... do all you Americans
speak in the same odd shorthand?" he asked, curious.

"At least it's English shorthand. Can we
go?"

Her Speedster was brought around for them,
mangled fender and all, and they got in. She tossed him her
handbag. "Light me a fag, would you? Do you have a favorite speak
yet?"

He knew the word from Lotsy. "No. I haven't
been here very long. But I get the impression the country is wetter
now than it was before Prohibition," he said, lighting a cigarette
for her and passing it over.

"Check with someone you trust before you go
off on your own. Some of the clip joints can get very rough. You
could get hurt."

"You keep saying that," he said with an
ironic smile. "Eventually I'm going to take offense."

"Yeah, well, they can get expensive too. A
cousin of mine, a real rube from out west, wrote out three separate
checks to cover his bill; they told him he was too drunk to sign
legibly, so he tried and tried again. When he got home he found
they'd all been cashed; the evening cost him seven hundred and
fifty bucks. So stay away from the Tipsy Canoe, for starters. And
if you do get drunk, whatever you do, don't let
them
call
you a cab. You'll end up on the waterfront worked over and minus a
wallet."

He didn't believe her, but then he didn't
exactly
not
believe her. "You sound pretty well informed,"
he ventured. He wanted to add, "especially for a woman," but
women's suffrage was all but a fact. Probably she let things like
that go to her head. Probably she didn't care for the phrase
"especially for a woman."