Commander Amanda Nightingale

by George Revelli

  "Don't worry, darling," said Guy. "It's all over."

  Amanda awoke from her reverie and seemed aware of Guy for the first time. "Oh leave me alone," she said. "And for God's sake stop fingering that damn scar of mine. Finger your own if you want."

  Guy rose, bowed to her most elaborately, put on his bathrobe and retired to the single bed in his dressing room, a bed he had come to occupy with greater frequency in recent months. Amanda thereupon passed out and spent the rest of the night in dreamless sleep.

  Breakfast was an affair of silence in two tones, one of silence of indifferent rejection, the other of active resentment. They read their newspapers in silence over their breakfast, Amanda The Times, Guy the Daily Express. The silence was broken by William, the butler.

  "Lady Goodman." he announced, and hastily withdrew, being well aware of the tension.

  "Oh, hell," said Guy into the racing section.

  Erika came in wearing a spring dress and kissed Amanda on the cheek. "Good morning, darling," she said.

  "Ah!" Guy exclaimed. "Northminster's leading Nazi Jewess."

  Erika did not reply. This was conventional protocol between them. Guy always greeted her with the same words and Erika always ignored them.

  "Will you have some kippers, darling? " Amanda asked.

  "No, thank you," said Erika. "I will just help myself to a cup of tea, if I may."

  "How's Isaiah?"

  "Not very strong. Yesterday was so hectic. But he's very sweet."

  "And Rachel?"

  "Adorable. Did you read the Daily Mail today? It says you will probably get a cabinet post if we win the next election."

  Erika over the years had lost her accent and spoke like an Englishwoman, except that her w's tended to emerge as v's.

  Guy cried in delight. "Vee! I love the 'vee'. Who's 'vee', Erika? The Brown Shirts or the Stern Gang?"

  Erika ignored him, and Guy let her alone. "Who are you having lunch with today?" he asked Amanda. "The American Legion? The wardresses of Holloway Prison? The Cheltenham Old Girls' Bitches Society?"

  Amanda elected to answer him straight. "Some of the officers at the German Legation, those who were in the July 1944 bomb plot, have asked Erika and me to luncheon in the Legation offices."

  "I suppose that means the one-armed fellow?"

  "You suppose correctly."

  "I have to go into London too," said Guy. "I'd like to come along."

  Amanda regarded him grimly. "When you go to London you always eat in the City»

  "I know, but Belgrave Square would make a change. I like the one-armed fellow. He can speak English."

  "Please, Guy," said Amanda becoming angry. "Don't insult my intelligence with that cheap bluff. If you take it far enough I shall call it."

  There was more than a hint of threat in that and Guy changed his tactics. "Who honours you next, Amanda? The Vatican?"

  "Can't you leave her alone, Guy?" asked Erika. "After all she was been through, you might give her a little peace."

  "All she's been through! When? Yesterday? Or during the war?"

  "If it comes to that, both," said Erika.

  Guy lifted his hand. "Wait," he said. "Wait. Wait. I want to get this thing right in my mind. You don't feel, Amanda, that your wartime experience was the best thing that ever happened to you?"

  It was Erika who replied. "How dare you say that, Guy!" she said.

  "So that instead of being a maid-of-all-work for that pious fraud of a father of yours, you are a heroine?"

  The eyes of Amanda were blue and the eyes of Erika were brown, but as they regarded Guy, they seemed to turn black and fill the orbs. Their expressions were identical, like those of twins, and their lips were curled with disgust.

  "That was the remark of a rotter, Guy," said Erika very quietly.

  All had lowered their voices so that the servants would not hear. Guy laughed at them both quietly. "By God, Amanda, I have the title and the theme music for that film they are going to make about you." He hummed. " 'Til Eulenspiegel's Lustige Streiche. Til Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks. There's the title for you, Amanda Nightingale's Merry Pranks. It will go down well in Germany; if it is told accurately, that is."

  "If it hadn't been for Amanda," Erika hissed furiously, "you might not be sitting here, so jolly and secure. You might have Hitler here."

  Guy regarded Erika, enthralled. He turned to Amanda but her face was a hostile mask. He looked back at Erika. "It's true," he whispered. "I had suspected it but was never really sure. But it is true. You believe it. You have come to believe in the entire humbug. You actually believe it."

  "Come on, Erika," said Amanda, rising. "Let's get out of here." They both left, their backs turned to Guy who was pouring himself some tea from a teapot of Georgian silver, shaking with silent laughter.

  * * *

  When she was alone Amanda drove a new post-war Morris Minor and she handled it with skill and vivacity. It had been an unusually dry spring for England, and the car raised dust behind it. Erika was trembling with anger. "What a cad he is," she said.

  "Forget him. What has Heinrich set up?" Amanda asked.

  "A fellow called Walker. And someone else. He says Walker is jolly good value. Is Jennifer going to be there?"

  "Yes."

  "What name will you be introduced by?"

  Amanda smiled. "Maureen Brown."

  "Funny that they never recognize you from the newspaper photographs."

  "They never do. Mental disassociation, I suppose they call it. Anyway, I'm not that much of a front-page celebrity. Politicians rarely are." She looked into the rear mirror and groaned. "Here comes the Lord and Master himself."

  Guy's Rolls swept majestically alongside. He had lowered the roof and his bowler hat was rammed tightly on his head against the wind. He shouted at them as he passed, "You believe the whole fol-de-rol! Ho! Ho! Ho! It's all imagination, girls. Don't you remember?" and was gone. Erika hissed hate at him, but Amanda was silent and uneasy. Guy had laughed, but she had looked fleetingly into his eyes as he passed, and they reminded her of a pain she had known years before when the marriage first turned to dead leaves.

  What was it about Guy that was always so defenceless? Was it natural or assumed? Amanda had never really known. Before he had joined the Army, the two had known the mutual nightmare of getting married, two young innocents without the resources of deceit, facing the terrible problem of keeping from Amanda's father the fact that she was pregnant. The marriage died before it began, but Guy never complained. He did not complain either when he lay under the African sun for hours at El Agheila, unable to move for his wound, although his ginger skin must have bubbled like lava. They had said before the war that he could have captained Essex, perhaps even England at cricket, but he never did because by the time the war was ended he walked with a limp, and coughed when it rained, and his insides were held together with bits of platinum. He had to put up not only with her father but with his own, a rich brewmaster too sodden with whisky to look after the family business. But above all, he had to put up with her, Amanda, with her shrill voice, her teeming schedules, her public posturings, her private frigidity. He had to put up with her in private as well as in public, with the aroused postwar Amanda as well as the old dormant, snobbish Amanda; with the Amanda of the House of Commons and Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum, as well as the Amanda of absent alibi-filled afternoons, which sometimes stretched into days if her body bore bruises. His only reward had been rejection to the point of virtual elimination. And yet he still liked her, and preserved his own sense of humour and balance. Why? How could he possibly stand her? She could not stand herself, anything about herself. She hated her voice, her shape, her personality, her whole fraudulent, phony being.

  It was a pity it happened the way it had. If they had known more about life perhaps it would have been different. Amanda felt herself choking with unhappiness, a sensation she felt increasingly rarely, because she so rigorously suppressed it when she sensed it coming.

>   She saw the Rolls disappearing at high speed, handled deftly by a man to whom speed had replaced war and field sport as vicarious pleasure, an ill-used man who deserved better but who had no complaint to make with life.

  "I know where you will be this afternoon," she called at the speck in the distance ahead. "The City my foot. I know all about you and Diana Mapleson. I have a damn good mind to telephone you together at her flat."

  There were tears in her voice but her friend did not notice them. Erika was still seething. "That husband of yours," she said. "He's… he's… he's strictly for the goyim."

  Amanda's moment of rosemary and nostalgia was over. She fluttered her long natural eyelashes at her friend who was staring angrily in front of her, biting her short dirty fingernails, her glasses thicker than ever to counter her increasing myopia. The glance held for just that fraction of a second permitted by driving prudence, and then her blue eyes returned to the road. Behind, the dust whirred and flailed like foam in the wake of a speedboat, blurring the signposts that pointed to places with names like Bury St. Edmunds, Bishop's Stortford, and Theydon Bois. The Morris Minor sped, heading for the anonymity of London, Heinrich Scappini, somebody called Walker, sister Jennifer — the whipping triangle from Wormwood Scrubbs which Scappini had picked up for eleven pounds in the Portobello Road — and, perhaps, if the afternoon party finished early enough, for a few of the evening overs in the cricket match between Middlesex and Warwickshire at Lord's.