By The Sea, Book Two: Amanda Read Free

I'll never forget
you."
    Well, well, Anna, who's kidding whom?"
    He took a last cigarette from its case, a
wonderfully tacky souvenir of Chicago that she'd given him. He used
to rub it for good luck during those last horrible weeks in the
trenches. He'd kept it in his left pocket, and when the shrapnel
tore through the right side of his body his first thought was that
the case had protected the region of his heart. He stared at the
cheap tin box as he dragged smoky consolation into his lungs. A
relief of the Chicago Tower, sole survivor of the great Chicago
Fire, was soldered to its cover, and the motto "Chicago, Heart of
America" inscribed below. Anna, heart of my heart. He sent
the case whizzing through the air over the rail of the promenade
deck—a bit of debris left over from the shambles of his life.
    ****
    The last half of the trip went better than
the first, because instead of brooding about Anna, Geoff read
whatever he could get his hands on—the more trivial the subject
matter, the better. From the ship's library he'd got hold of a copy
of Lawson's History of the America's Cup. For two straight
days he immersed himself in tales of pettiness and recrimination,
stories of rich little boys taunting other rich little boys over
who was entitled to take possession of a rather homely silver
trophy. It was a wonderful narcotic; at night his brain simply shut
down, exhausted by the bickering, like a mother who cannot stand
listening to her children for another second. He slept more
soundly.
    By the last evening aboard he felt refreshed
enough to drag out his dinner jacket and join the ship's company
for the evening meal. But it was premature; it was a mistake. He
was set upon by a group of Americans, most of them women dressed to
the nines in glittering ball gowns and topheavy with jewels. One
man in the group was actually wearing tails. All were drunk.
Prohibition, a concept he found amusing, was in effect in the
States. Soon the ship would be crossing the twelve-mile limit and
alcoholic stores would be locked away; apparently the time for a
party was now.
    "It's an awful shame that you haven't been
with us all along," said one debutante aptly nicknamed Lotsy.
"We've been wearing the most scandalous gowns all week, every one
of them from Paris. They have such a great attitude toward scandal
in Paris. I shouldn't tell you this, but Mother and I are wearing
all this stuff now to avoid having to pay duty in New York," she
added, leaning toward him provocatively, tickling his nose with a
glass of champagne. "Daddy insists."
    "Daddy sounds like a practical man."
    "He's horrid. Look at him watching us."
    Daddy was the one in tails. He didn't look
practical, but he did look protective. Geoffrey leaned away from
the debutante's décolletage.
    She giggled. "Are you afraid of him?"
    "Damned right I am," he answered with a
bored smile.
    "Oh, he's a nice old dragon." She waved
prettily to her father and leaned back toward Geoffrey, her head
thrown back and her neck arched to lend her bosom maximum exposure.
"Are you afraid of me?"
    "Even more than of your father," he agreed.
Actually, shocked would have been a better description. He'd seen
this kind of blatancy behind the front lines, a kind of
tomorrow-we-die mentality, but on a genteel liner ...? His mother
would have been delighted by his reaction.
    "I've been watching you all week," said
Lotsy. "I like the way you brood."
    "Thank you. I do it for effect."
    "It has a swell effect on me. How would you
like to invite me to your cabin for champagne?"
    He glanced at her bosom, then at the dragon.
"Why not?"
    They excused themselves—he heard something
about a walk on deck to clear her head—and in a few minutes they
were in his cabin. In a few minutes more they were naked and in one
another's arms, which astonished him. Since Anna, he had considered
other female flesh not so much undesirable as irrelevant. It had
ceased to interest him. But Lotsy he found quite interesting: