Commander Amanda Nightingale

by George Revelli

  Lucien laughed and took a small notebook from his breast pocket. "The bilan, as I have it, is as follows: Phoebe Smith, you broke her nose."

  Amanda chuckled. "Serves her right. I'm told that the beastly creature will have to have plastic surgery if she is not going to spend the rest of her life with a nose like Tommy Farr." She licked some ersatz crème Chantilly off her fingers with the tip of a pink tongue, and sniggered in satisfaction.

  Lucien continued. "April Spencer. Four stitches had to be taken in her face."

  "Four?" said Amanda. "I thought she would have needed more."

  "And finally, Constance Davenport received such a severe black eye that she was relieved of public appearances for a week."

  "I wouldn't have minded working on her a little more," said Amanda. "In some respects she was the most loathsome of the lot. I have spared you the details of what she did to me. And as a matter of fact, I am still not fully recovered."

  Lucien paid the bill and they ran the gauntlet of smiles, purrs, and bows into the street. The rain of the day had passed, and streams of silver moonlight ran down the narrow lanes of Seven Dials. Lucien held a pound note high in the air, standard procedure in wartime for people seeking taxis. They did not have to wait more than fifteen minutes.

  "Where do you live?" asked Lucien, who knew perfectly well.

  "We keep a place in Bryanston Square, but the children stay in the country, away from the bombing. Part of the square has been bombed, but fortunately the Hun has missed us so far."

  "I shall drop you off," said Lucien, "and then drive on to the French Club."

  Lucien was careful that his arm did not touch Amanda's. The taxi rolled along Piccadilly which was rolling with drunks, through the deserted side streets of Mayfair, across Oxford Street to Bryanston Square.

  Amanda was thinking what Lucien knew she was thinking. Arguing with herself. Beryl Grey, the Sadler's Wells, and the Ivy. One should invite him for a nightcap. Should be polite. But suppose he makes a pass? Of course he wouldn't. But then he's French. But then he has a wife in occupied France. But that doesn't stop the French. It would be too awful if he thought the invitation meant that. Of course not, he's a civilized person. He would not compromise the relationship that would need so much mutual confidence and trust in the days to come. That would be a form of suicide. It wasn't that she was particularly worried. She could volley a pass back over the net as easily as she could volley a tennis ball. It was just that she did not want to have a pass made by him. The very rejection of it would be just too embarrassing for words, particularly regarding the dangers they were about to undergo together. But he deserves something after Beryl Grey, the Sadler's Wells, and the Ivy…

  The taxi stopped at Bryanston Square and Lucien alighted to help Amanda out.

  "If you would care for a small digestif, Commandant," Amanda said diffidently, "I don't have much to offer, but I do have a little whisky."

  She had made the gesture, and prayed he would excuse himself on the grounds that it was too late.

  Lucien bowed with politesse. "It is most kind. I would be delighted." It was all over except the shouting.

  He gave the driver a pound note, and Amanda was instantly alarmed. "I don't think you should dismiss the cab," she said. "You will never get another at this time of night, and it will only be for a few minutes."

  Lucien smiled reassuringly. "It is a lovely night. I would enjoy a walk through the park to the French Club before bedtime."

  That sounded all right. They went up together in the creaking elevator. Amanda opened the door, crossed the room to draw the blackout curtains, and turned on the light. Lucien looked around him appreciatively. It was large, elegant, lavender, from wall to wall and ceiling to floor, serene, confident, cool, with cool Louis XIV pieces, cool prints — cool like Amanda, blonde like Amanda. Amanda's life was the spreading of her coolness around her like a carpet, wherever she went. It was as if she perennially trod on a Raleigh's cape of her own elegance, invulnerable, carefully avoiding the mud below. Even the gruesome incident of her brawl in Scotland seemed to have left no scars.

  Lucien said, "What a beautiful home. I'm glad the Hun spared it."

  Amanda, at the cocktail cabinet, said, "It is rather nice, isn't it? We are very proud of it. I just hope it survives the war."

  Lucien stood before the fireplace, admiring an almost life-size portrait of Amanda, a sleek, photographically perfect work, clearly done by a Mayfair portrait painter confident in the continuity of his fees.

  "Beautiful," said Lucien.

  Amanda gave him a glass and they regarded the picture together. "It was hung at the Royal Academy two years ago," Amanda murmured. "I think it came out rather well."

  They sat down, Lucien on a sofa, Amanda in an armchair a proper distance away. She wished he would go. At the first sip of whisky, Lucien rolled his eyes.

  "Mon Dieu, this is really whisky," exclaimed. "I did not know Scotch like this existed any more."

  Amanda smiled. "I'm not an expert, of course, but I received a case of this from the Master of Montrose, a friend of mine, some time ago. There's not much left."

  "You are a very beautiful girl, Amanda," Lucien said.

  Amanda smiled wearily. This was an easy ball to field, but she wished he would go. "My mother was very beautiful," she said. "She was painted by many great painters. My father is a very good-looking man."

  "How about your younger sister, the one who sleeps with G.I.s?"

  Damn, said Amanda to herself, that subject is coming up again. She knew she should not have invited him up. The time had come to get rid of him. "She is darker than I," she said briefly. Then to her horror, she saw Lucien rise, and come over to her. He bent down and attempted to kiss her on the lips. She turned her head away, rose, and smiled brightly.

  "Commandant, I see you have finished your whisky. It has been a long day, and I am rather tired. Thank you for everything."

  Lucien said nothing. He looked at her sardonically, and put his hand on her breast. Amanda slapped the hand away, but not so hard as to lose control or even sever diplomatic relations. She still smiled, although inwardly she seethed. A typical dirty French trick. In a few days they would be sharing the dangers of death together in France, and he was spoiling any moral authority he had over her with a vulgar, sordid pass.

  She spoke with exquisite politeness. "I think I owe you an apology, Commandant," she said. "If, by inviting you up, I gave you the impression that you could stay, then I did you a grave disservice, and I am sorry. Do please leave now."

  She walked to the door to open it, and, as she passed, Lucien yanked the collar off her shirt. Amanda wheeled, flabbergasted, her throat bare, the collar stud gleaming absurdly. She could scarcely believe it. Her hands went instinctively to her neck. With a great effort she kept control of herself. "Leave," she said. "Just leave. Leave at once before I say something I may regret."

  Lucien, the smile not leaving his face, dropped the collar on the floor, and in a single, trained movement, caught first one wrist, then the other and pinned them behind Amanda's back. For a moment they were locked together, as if they were doing an Apache dance, Amanda's eyes pure circles of amazement, the whites showing. Then she began to struggle furiously, but Lucien's hands were huge and they possessed a soldier's strength. "How dare you?" Amanda hissed at him. "Get out of here."

  With his free hand, Lucien unbuttoned Amanda's tunic, button by button, while Amanda writhed impotently. That done he began on her shirt buttons. Amanda shouted her rage and terror at him. "Get out of here. How dare you, you dirty French swine."

  One hand snapped free and sprang like elastic across Lucien's face, but it was immediately recaught. Amanda's struggles assumed a fury that became too intense for the sound of words. Silently, the two wrestled, panting back and forth across the room, bumping into sofas and library shelves, ricocheting off the mantelpiece, and setting the antique clocks in a cabinet a-jangle. A slender Louis XIV chair fell over. Amanda tried t
o butt him, but his head bobbed away from her. All the time, clasped together, they seemed to be performing some tribal dance, Amanda writhing to avoid the touch of his loins, just as he sought to press them against her. Amanda's teeth were set, Lucien's bared in a savage, twisted grin. Locked together, the two reeled past a floor lamp, knocking it over, and the bulb broke with an electric sputter, extinguishing the lights in the room, leaving them only shadows and the streaming light from the hall. Hairpins spattered on the floor, and the breathing became grunting.

  Amanda spat in his face, but spitting is not a woman's talent, and Lucien laughed through the spray. Amanda felt herself rammed back against the wall with a force that made the house shake, knocking askew an old hunting print behind her. She tried to bring her knee up into his groin but couldn't. Lucien had reached her bodice now and touched skin which exploded into prickly goose pimples of revulsion. A second later, his free hand was luxuriating on flesh. Amanda felt weak. Her strength seemed to be straining drop by drop from her finger tips, squeezed out by his grip around her wrists. She sobbed with the nightmare of it, with the rage and disgust. And above all with the disappointment. There was to be no glorious mission to France after all. It was ruined. The great adventure was ashes before even the flame had been lit. She could never serve this man now, take orders from him, risk death with him. She was neither frightened of him, nor hated him. She merely despised him. She made one last breathless effort.

  "Please go," she begged. "I implore you. It's not worth it. I'm not worth it. If you go now, maybe it will still be possible."

  Lucien said nothing. His hand left her body, and began to unzip her skirt. At this, suddenly, Amanda stopped struggling and became quite still, like ice. The zipper on her skirt descended, and Amanda said, "I have stopped fighting you, Commandant. You can release my hands if you want to. You must be quite exhausted yourself."

  The sudden stillness and the remark took Lucien by surprise. For a moment he continued to hold her, and then let her go, reluctantly. He did not know why she had stopped, and he had no desire to yield the initiative to her. Amanda was both a lovely and a ridiculous sight. Her face was crimson. Her long hair had escaped the restraints of the hairpins and fell in her eyes. Her jacket and shirt gaped, and one breast had spilled free.

  Amanda spoke in a breathless voice from which she tried to suppress the tremors. "I presume you will persevere with this childish and despicable brawl until you get what you want."

  She waited for a reply, but Lucien was staring at the breast. He touched it with a finger. Amanda did not stop him, but shuddered with disgust. "I'm not strong enough to stop you," she said, and stooped to pick up the chair. "I have some regard for my furniture, if nothing else. I'll do what you want just to get it over with. You fill me with contempt. I am going to get one crumb of satisfaction out of it, though, namely, that you are going to hate it just as much as I will."

  She walked past him to the bedroom, removing her jacket as she did so, wincing at the pain in her wrists. She had lost the straightness of her carriage. Her shoulders were hunched miserably. There were tears in her eyes.

  Chapter Four

  "Limited advance at Monte Cassino." In other words, another Allied offensive blown to smithereens by the Germans. "Germans defending strongly at Kharkhov." Furious Japanese counter-attacks at Iwo Jima." War news much too depressing. "The military correspondent thinks the Allied invasion of Europe will begin with diversionary landings in Denmark in May." Very prescient of him. Domestic news. "The cheese ration is reduced from eight ounces to seven, and the meat ration from 1s 2d to one shilling." The B. B. C. is broadcasting "It's That Man Again", with Tommy Handley tonight. What's showing in the West End? A Song To Remember with Cornel Wilde as Chopin and Merle Oberon as George Sand. Augurs ill. His Girl Friday with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. Sounds better. What's the French film at Studio One? Hotel du Nord with Annabella and Louis Jouvet. Still eking out with prewar stock. Soon it may be different, with luck.

  Lucien threw away The Times, bored, and reread Guy Nightingale's letter, chuckling at his references to the French, and wondering why women spent so much longer in the bathroom than men. Then Amanda swept in, royally, bearing a tray her long blonde hair falling down her bare back almost to her waist.

  "I hope I wasn't too long," she said.

  She sat herself side by side with Lucien on the tormented bed, their hips touching. "Fresh butter," she pointed out "from our farm in Essex. Very, very hard to get. Plum jam made by my cook in Northminster. Darling, I didn't know whether you would want coffee or tea, so I decided, when in England, do as England doth. Milk or lemon? Have some toast before it gets cold. I hope you have not been converted to the English breakfast. All our bacon goes to the children."

  "Bacon, pah," said Lucien eating. "I have always felt that the Anglo-French alliance was a fundamentally unnatural marriage." He kissed her on the corner of the mouth. "Don't I smell delicious?" said Amanda. "I had a bath, brushed my teeth. You smell like sex."

  Amanda was unstoppable. "Hello, reading Guy's letter? He thinks he is a brilliant letter writer. Actually he is sometimes quite amusing. There is a funny piece about the little urchins in Naples buying and selling Allied soldiers. Is there anything amusing in the Times? Don't laugh. Sometimes the letter column is quite marvellous. My father is always writing to it, damning Rome and all that."

  Lucien looked at her, filled with pleasure. Her blue eyes were alight with the morning. This was the kind of English beauty plucked from Arthurian legend, from the Chantry Bequest, from the Pre-Raphaelites. No French painter could have painted her. Her cheekbones were Dante Gabriel Rossetti, her hair was Ford Madox Brown, her shoulders Holman Hunt, her breasts Millais. There was Etty about her too. And Mulready and Maclise. She needed the Georgian poets to describe her.

  Amanda, her mouth full of toast crumbs and jam, went suddenly into a fit of giggles that set the Holman Hunt shoulders heaving. "This is quite awful, what I'm going to tell you. Sorry, darling, did I spit some crumbs over you? I really am a frightful pig. Do you know what I was thinking last night when we were doing you-know-what? I should have been thinking the most exotic thoughts, but what kept coming up in my mind was that dreadful poem the girls say in the mess. 'Round and round went the great big wheel. And in and out went the thing of steel. It's all about a queen, you see, who was all alone, and invented a what'sit made of steel, and it worked with a wheel, but the mechanics broke, 'Until in ecstasy she cried, Enough, enough, I'm satisfied. But now we come to the vital bit. 'There was no means of stopping it. And the poor queen died. I suppose it is really a rather tragic story. Like the Lady of Shallot. So different from us. Miss Beall and Miss Buss."

  Amanda poured hot water into the teapot. "Have another cup of tea. I suppose you are one of those Frenchmen who has a shot of cognac or Calvados or something for breakfast. Ugh! Pernod perd nos fils. Good Ceylon tea will put hairs on your French chest. Isn't the jam delicious? La Confiture est exquise, n'est ce pas, топ amour? Mon cher amour avec son vit d'acier. I suppose you are wondering how a well-brought-up young lady, une jeune fille de bonne famille managed to pick up bad French three-letter words. I learned them on a French farm before the war, when I was a young lady learning the language. I hadn't the slightest idea what they meant. Crumbs! I don't think I really knew what they meant until last night. After last night I don't suppose there is anything left for me to learn, is there? God, I hope I'm not pregnant."

  "What about Guy?" Lucien asked, interested.

  "I don't know if you are going from the sublime to the ridiculous, or from the ridiculous to the gross and disgusting."

  "Well, what about Guy?"

  Amanda made a comic face and held her thumb and index finger extended. "Just like that," she said, "teeny-tiny. But we mustn't make fun of the poor dear. It's all he's got. I mean to say he can't take it back to the shop and change it, can he? Anyway I was in no position to choose. I thought they were all like that. I never realized they ca
me in such large sizes. I had no yardstick to measure them by, if you'll excuse the pun."

  "I thought you told me last night you had no intention of enjoying it."

  "I didn't think I would. After all, I've never enjoyed it before, so why should I think I would now?"

  Amanda laughed and laughed. "Wouldn't the girls in the mess get a shock if they knew what I was doing all last night. As a matter of fact, I did not know it was possible to do it more than once. That's how naïve I was. Not any more. I bet I could teach my younger sister, Jennifer, a thing or two now."

  She let her hair fall over him and tickle his chest. Lucien removed the tray, laid it on the floor, and they snuggled together in each other's arms.

  "I want you to promise me something," said Amanda, curling her finger in the hairs of his chest. "When you go to France before us, not to make love to any other girls."

  "Naturally, I promise," said Lucien at once.

  "It's not that I'm a jealous type, but if I thought you were making love to other girls, I think I would die. For one thing they would all be so much better than I."

  "Nonsense."

  "I should have known better," Amanda ruminated. "When I was at Cheltenham we went on a summer school holiday to Italy, and we saw the statue of David in the Piazza della Signorina in Florence, and I think we were all somewhat dumbfounded, but the teacher hurried us past and directed our attention to fettuccine. Stop it, Lucien. What, again? Oh, darling, it's impossible, really it is. I'm sore. I suppose you gentlemen can't adjust it, the size of it, I mean, make it larger or smaller as necessary. Oh, Jesus!"

  "Darling, you must be out of the house in half an hour," Amanda said later. "My woman, Mrs. Hutchinson, comes in to do. She adores Guy." Amanda imitated a Cockney accent. "She finks 'e's ever so bryve. She would be thrown on her beam ends if she knew I was being unfaithful to him in the 'Arrod's bed, and with a Dago too. Would you like a bath?"