By The Sea, Book Two: Amanda (12 page)

"That boy could easily pose a threat to
England's national security," Geoff remarked as he and Amanda
leaned against the rail, watching the spectator fleet head out
around them.

Amanda, who had become more and more quiet,
did not answer.

"Cat got your tongue?" he ventured.

She let out an exasperated sigh. "I
shouldn't have come," she said abruptly, and turned her back to the
fleet, crossing her arms over her chest.

"Why on earth not? The boy's having one hell
of a time," Geoff argued, surprised.

"And that's part of the reason. Look around
you. What do you see? What does Perry see? The idle rich, doing
what they do best: nothing. Millions of dollars are being spent on
half a dozen yacht races. Think how that money could feed the poor
of New York. Think what a rotten example all of this is for a young
boy."

Again!
Suddenly she was no longer
Amanda in the pretty white dress; she was just a misguided
revolutionary, completely lacking a sense of proportion or humor.
Still, he couldn't very well walk away from her. For one thing,
there was nowhere to flee. He decided to engage her in debate,
politely of course.

"That's the most precious drivel I've heard
in a long time."

She turned her attention to him very
deliberately, very calmly. "Can you be more specific?"

"Of course. Who do you think built all the
yachts and steamers that are out here? Who sands and paints them
every year? Who sews their sails and awnings and berth cushions?
Who builds the docks that the excursion steamers tie up to when
they return after a race? Who prints the tickets that the steamer
passengers buy? Who mans the ticket booth? Who sells the lunches?
Who
grows
the lunches, for God's sake? You have this notion
that two or three wizened old misers squat in their luxuriously
appointed cabins, tearing up hundred-dollar bills. It's a little
naïve," he finished up, almost kindly. "The fact is, hundreds, even
thousands of people make an honest living because of the Cup races.
Surely you must see that, Amanda."

She was biting her lower lip, trying hard
not
to see. "What about the ridiculous waste of fuel? All
we're doing is steaming round and round in circles, a total waste
of money if not of time." It was a desperate argument, and she knew
it.

"Coal miners have to eat, too," said Geoff
with a shrug. The debate had begun to bore him. Really, there was
no debate.

She didn't look at him as she murmured, "You
think you have all the answers, don't you? How well you defend the
status quo. It's inbred, I suppose. Very safe. Very smug. Very
British." Her attention was on her cousin as she spoke. Geoff had
the feeling that she was trying very hard to look very bored.

His interest was piqued again. "I must say,
Amanda, I find your attitude puzzling. You talk mighty fine about
the redistribution of wealth, but what, exactly, have you done
about redistributing yours, if the question isn't too
personal?"

She glared at him then. "The question is
extremely personal, but I'll answer it anyway because I'm tired of
your looking at me as if I were some kind of hypocrite. I
give—generously—to support the arts. And charities."

"Like the Red Cross, that sort of
thing?"

"Yes."

"And the Café Budapest Society?" he pursued
innocently. "Do you support that cause generously as well?"

"There is no such society," she said curtly.
"What are you getting at?"

"Nothing, really," he answered. "Only it
occurred to me the other day that your friend Lajos isn't being
paid a regular wage while he pickets your father's shipyard. He
must be tapping an endowment somewhere. Russian pockets are deep, I
know, but the benefactor may be—shall we say?—a little closer to
home than that."

She began to protest, but he cut her short.
"On the other hand, it's none of my business whether or not you'd
like to contribute to the collapse of your father's business, is
it?" He smiled, not so much to placate her as to annoy her just a
little bit more.

"No. It's none of your business," she agreed
through clenched teeth, and turned back to the scene on the
water.

Amazingly, they had missed the start of the
race, these two adversaries who were trying so hard not to take one
another seriously. They watched in silence as the wind shifted in
the second leg to accommodate
Shamrock's
best point of sail,
a reach, and the big green boat began to pull out ahead. When
abandoned applause went up on the
Victoria
as
Shamrock
rounded the mark, the two joined in politely, and
when Perry turned and waved cheerfully from half the boat's length
away, they smiled and waved cheerfully back. But to one another
they did not speak, and by the end of the race, which Lipton won by
a respectable two and a half minutes on corrected time, their
continuing silence had become more thunderous than the
ear-splitting din on the decks of the
Victoria.
Bells,
whistles, shouting, laughing, clapping, screaming—all Geoff heard
was the silence, her own and his.

What was it about the two of them that they
tried to wound one another with their words, and, failing that,
with silence? Where was the pleasant small talk, the civilized
chitchat that men and women relied on to get to know one another?
Initially he had judged her to be ill-bred, but either she had
risen to his level or he had sunk to hers, because they seemed to
be eyeball to eyeball quite a lot lately. Why couldn't he put aside
his hostility and have a quiet talk with her about her misbegotten
revolutionary tendencies?

Why did he
care
whether she had
misbegotten revolutionary tendencies?

He stole a look at Amanda as she watched the
victorious
Shamrock
return to curtsy to Sir Tom after her
wonderful performance on the water. There was something about
Amanda, undeniably; she got under one's skin. Mosquitoes got under
one's skin, too, of course. And thorns, and household detergents.
He sighed.

"Amanda ... look, it's a lovely afternoon.
The
Victoria
is bubbling over with joy. Can't we borrow a
bit of it for ourselves and be nice to one another? I really was
out of line a while back, and I'm sorry." He took a risk and held
out a hand to her.

She stared at it just long enough to make
him feel threatened by a rejection, then took it. Her dark eyes,
more troubled than he had seen them before, lifted to his. "You
make me out to be so shallow, so scatterbrained. Naturally I resent
it. When I'm with my own circle—-"

"You mean the gang from Budapest?" he cut
in, still holding her hand.

She whipped it away from him. "That gang,
any gang, anyone but you! I never—
hello,
dearest," she cried
in a magically transformed voice as her cousin rejoined them at
last. "You've been avoiding me all day," she said playfully. "Now
come and tell me why." She put her arm around Perry and led him
away from Geoff, who was left to mingle with other, much happier
guests aboard the
Victoria.

The sweet taste of victory was on everyone's
lips, although one rather somber fellow whom Geoff knew by sight
from Cowes took him aside and said, in strictest confidence, that
it was his opinion that the American yacht was the faster of the
two but that he was very happy for Lipton nonetheless. Everyone was
willing to acknowledge that the gods were with Sir Tom for a
change. And even if they weren't, the odds were: Lipton led two
races to none. One more to go.

Geoff didn't rejoin Amanda and her charge
again until the
Victoria
was tied up to the dock and the
guests began to disembark. The two of them came up to him in high
spirits and full of life and Geoff thought,
Obviously I'm the
problem.
There was nothing wrong with Amanda; at least, not
when she was around Perry. Her face was flushed with pleasure, her
teeth—he really had not noticed her teeth before—were straight and
dazzlingly white. Her hair was thick and black and shining in the
late golden sun; her eyes glowed in its reflection. She was pretty.
For God's sake
, he thought,
when did she become
pretty?

"Hello, you two," he said, smiling despite
himself. "I thought I'd lost you overboard."

"We got a tour of the engine room!" cried
Perry. "I never saw anything so grand in my whole life. The
engineer told me you could fry an egg on the engine, that's how
clean he kept it."

Amanda grabbed a hank of Perry's hair and
rattled his head back and forth. "Wall Street is out, apparently,
and so is painting.
Now
he wants to become a steam
engineer."

"And join the merchant marine," Perry said.
"Then I could see the world—even if I couldn't hear it," he added,
grinning at his own joke.

He was an astoundingly well-adjusted boy. It
was no wonder that he drew out Amanda's loveliness and good humor;
he could charm the honey out of a bee if he wanted to.

"I'm glad the day turned out so well for
you," said Geoff to the boy. "Did Amanda have to bribe the engine
room crew? Those places are usually off limits, you know."

I did no such thing," Amanda answered,
smoothing her cousin's hair. "Sir Tom sent him down. He wanted a
few words with me."

So she did have a heart-to-heart talk with
the old man, just as Jim Fain had planned. Obviously it had worked;
Amanda was more relaxed than he'd ever seen her before. Or else it
was the boy. Either way, it wasn't Geoff who'd put that cheerful
smile on her face. The realization chafed his self- esteem like
sand across a sunburn. Not that it really mattered, but still.

The drive back into Manhattan to drop Perry
off at his parents' townhouse went smoothly enough. Amanda and her
cousin bantered pleasantly back and forth. Geoff sulked quietly. As
a result there was not a single acrimonious exchange. After that,
the usual silence ensued during the drive to her Village
studio.

Geoff was about to get out of the car to get
her door when she said in a low, almost wistful voice, "Do you want
to come in for a drink?"

Oh boy
.
Now
what?

"Do you think that's wise?" Geoff kept his
hands on the wheel, conscious that he looked and sounded like a
prig.

"You don't have to drink if you don't want
to," she said, misinterpreting his reluctance. "Will you come in
anyway? There's something I'd like to show you." In the darkness
her voice was soft and tentative, utterly unlike her usual manner.
She might have been an Englishwoman. Miss Marylsworth, for
instance. How did she
do
that?

He glanced at her suspiciously. "To be quite
honest, I'm afraid to."

The surprise in her voice was genuine.
"Afraid? Why?"

"Up until now, we've always met on neutral
ground. I think that's the reason neither one of us has taken a
poke at the other so far. Anything could happen in there. Are you
sure you want to chance it?" He tried to make it sound light.

Her voice wavered a little through her smile
as she said, "Now you're being silly. Everyone knows the English
don't go in for that Wild West stuff."

In the dark she couldn't see his eyebrows
lift in resignation. "All right, then. Lead on." Damn. He didn't
want to, he didn't want to, he didn't want to.

The courtyard was dark. He kept close to
her, close enough to smell her sunburn and the leftover heat of a
July day spent on the ocean. Damn. As Amanda fumbled with her keys,
he wondered why she didn't keep a maid to get the door. Earlier
that day he'd caught a glimpse of a stunning flat through a door of
her studio; clearly she had the money for all the live-ins she
wanted. Amanda dropped her key ring. They both reached down for it.
There was a brushing of heads and an immediate schoolboy's apology
from him. The last thing in the world he wanted was for her to
think he was looking for an excuse to grope.
Damn.

Inside, Amanda flipped a switch, washing the
entire studio in white light. Geoff stood in the center, hands in
his pockets, eyes squinting to adjust to the glare, and looked
around more carefully than he had earlier. It was a full working
studio, with several projects underway. History would decide
whether Amanda was any good, but Geoff had already decided that she
was definitely hard-working.

"How long have you been at this?" he asked,
curious.

"I fooled around at it for a year or two
after I graduated from Radcliffe. But I've been working full time
for ... well, forever, I think. Do you have any moral objections to
watching me have a drink?" she asked with only a trace of
sarcasm.

"That isn't what I—sure, drink away," he
said.

She'd lit a cigarette and was pouring brandy
from a paint-spattered crystal decanter into a glass for herself.
It was the old Amanda, to be sure; her voice had the old
challenging tone in it as she said, "I'm in the middle of a
professional crisis, and I thought you might be able to help me.
You're the most old-fashioned person I know—no, wait, let me
finish—and even though I couldn't possibly accept your judgment, at
least I'd know what one extreme of the range of opinion was. This
is very hard for me," she added, looking down into her brandy. "I
wish you wouldn't stare at me so."

Right. Don't stare,
he thought. Just
stand patiently while she tosses off insults and demands advice she
has no intention of following. "What is it that you're not
interested in my advice on?" he asked, running a finger over a
bronze bust of Lenin that was covered with dust. She had such
incredible cheek. Really, he'd not known anyone like her.

"Promise you won't make fun."

"I won't make fun."