"He would kiss my ear and hold me with one hand on my belly and one across my breasts and say, 'Good night, dear Amanda; I shall always love you only."He would kiss my ear and hold me with one hand on my belly and one across my breasts and say, 'Good night, dear Amanda; I shall always love you only.'" The night before they left, he made dinner for her. "It was not very good, but he was very sweet." Then he made love to her, very tenderly and sweetly and passionately. Then, at his insistence, she joined him in a nightcap. He got drunk and she helped him into the bed. His last few things were laid out for packing, among them the photograph of his family. As she looked at it carefully for the first time, she saw his daughter's name. In the morning, she asked if he missed his family and learned that they had been killed in an automobile accident years before. "I felt bad for him, but not so bad about what we did -- mostly." In Manila, they did not go directly to the rendezvous with the uncle. First, he stopped at the Bank of England office where he ordered a trust account opened for her and had one of the bankers appointed guardian. He could pay out of this account on her behalf, making purchases for her if he approved them, but he could not give her one penny in cash until her twenty-first birthday. "He had assigned me almost three thousand dollars, American!" Her eyes were wide as she said it and she took another big gulp of her Irish coffee. "He said it was to say thank you and to apologize for when he was not so pleasant. And he thanked me because I never asked him who 'Amanda' was." "He knew he talked in his sleep?" She nodded gravely and sadly. They met her uncle and he was paid in cash -- and so was she. Half she gave to her uncle on the spot, repaying the advance. The British man nodded at this. The other half she had wired to her mother in Mindinao. She went back to work for her uncle, as a hostess and visitor to hotel rooms and cabanas and sometimes to small parties and a few more times to movies. |