'Yes, Ma'am,' said the bartender.
'Christ,' said Felice to Michael, 'I could kill him. He's driving me crazy. And fundamentally he's such a sweet man.'
'A darling man,' Michael said.
'Was he awful?' Felice asked anxiously.
'Darling,' Michael said.
'Nobody'll invite him any place any more and everyone ducks him…' Felice said.
'I can't imagine why,' said Michael.
'Even so,' said Felice sadly, 'it's awful for him. He sits in his room brooding, telling everyone who'll listen to him that he's a has-been. I thought this would be good for him and I could keep an eye on him.' She shrugged, looking after Arney's rumpled, retreating figure. 'Some men ought to have their hands cut off at the wrist when they reach for their first drink.' She picked up her skirts in a courtly, old-fashioned gesture, and went off after the playwright in a rustle of taffeta.
'I think,' Michael said, 'I could stand a drink.'
'Me, too,' said Laura.
'Pal,' said Mr Parrish.
They stood silently at the bar, watching the bartender fill their glasses.
'The abuse of alcohol,' Mr Parrish said in a solemn, preacher-like voice, as he reached for his glass, 'is the one thing that puts Man above the animal.'
They all laughed and Michael raised his glass to Mr Parrish before he drank.
'To Madrid,' Parrish said, in an offhand, everyday way, and Laura said, 'To Madrid,' in a hushed, breathy voice. Michael hesitated, feeling the old uneasiness, before he, too, said, 'To Madrid.'
They drank.
'When did you get back?' Michael asked. He felt uncomfortable, talking about it.
'Four days ago,' Parrish said. He lifted the glass to his lips again. 'You have very good liquor in this country,' he said, grinning. He drank steadily, refilling his glass every five minutes, getting a little redder as time went by, but showing no other effects.
'When did you leave Spain?' Michael asked.
'Two weeks ago.'
Two weeks ago, Michael thought, on the frozen roads, with the cold rifles and the makeshift uniforms and the planes overhead and the new graves. And now he's standing here in a blue suit like a truck-driver at his own wedding, rattling the ice cubes in his drink, with people talking about the last picture they made and what the critics said and what the doctor thought about the baby's habit of sleeping with his fists in his eyes, and a man with a guitar singing fake Southern ballads in the corner of the room in the heavy-carpeted, crowded, rich apartment eleven storeys up in the unmarked, secure building, with a view of the Park through the tall windows, and the magenta girl with three breasts over the bar. And in a little while he would go down to the docks on the river that you could see from the windows and get on a boat and start back. And there were no marks on him of what he had been through, no hints in the good-natured, clumsy way in which he behaved of what was ahead of him.
'… money is the important thing,' Parrish was saying to Laura, 'and political pressure. We can get plenty of guys who want to fight. But the British Government's impounded all the Loyalist gold in London, and Washington 's really helping Franco. We have to sneak our fellows in, and it takes bribing and passage money and stuff, like that. So one day we were in the line outside University City, and it was cold, sweet God, it would freeze the nipples off a whale's belly, and they came to me and they said, 'Parrish, me lad, you're just wasting ammunition here anyway, and we haven't seen you hit a Fascist yet. So we decided, you're an eloquent lying son-of-a-bitch, go back to the States and tell some big, juicy, heartbreaking stories about the heroes of the immortal International Brigade in the front line of the fight against the Fascists. And come back here with your pockets loaded.' So I get up at meetings and just let my imagination ramble, green and free. Before you know it, the people are dying with emotion and generosity, and what with the dough rolling in and all the girls, I think maybe I have found my true profession in the fight for liberty.' He grinned, his brilliantly even false teeth shining happily in his face, and he pushed his empty glass towards the bartender. 'Want to hear some bloody tales of the horrible war for freedom in tortured Spain?'
'No,' said Michael, 'not with that introduction.'
'The truth,' Parrish said, suddenly sober and unsmiling, 'the truth is not for the likes of these.' He swung round and surveyed the room. For the first time, Michael could sense, in the cold, harsh, measuring eyes, something of what Parrish had been through. 'The men running, the young boys that came five thousand miles suddenly surprised that they are actually dying, there, right there, themselves, with a bullet in their own sweet bellies. The French, stinking up the border and accepting bribes to let men walk on bleeding feet through the Pyrenees in the middle of the winter. The crooks and fourflushers and smart operators everywhere. On the docks. In the offices. Right up in battalion and company, right up next to you on the front line. The nice boys who see their pals get it and suddenly say, 'I must have made a mistake. This is different from the way it looked at Dartmouth.''
A little, plump, forty-year-old woman in a school-girlish pink dress came up to the bar and took Laura's arm. 'Laura, darling,' she said, 'I've been looking for you. It's your turn.'
'Oh,' Laura said, turning to the blonde woman, 'I'm sorry if I kept you waiting, but Mr Parrish was so interesting.' Michael winced a little as Laura said 'interesting'. Mr Parrish merely smiled at both women with an even, impartial lust.
'I'll be back in a few minutes,' Laura told Michael. 'Cynthia's been reading fortunes for the women and she's going to do mine now.'
'See,' Parrish said loudly, 'if there's a forty-year-old Irishman with false teeth in your trouble.'
'I'll ask,' Laura said, laughing, and went off arm in arm with the fortune-teller. Michael watched her as she walked through the room, in her straight-backed, delicately sensual way, and caught two other men watching her, too. One was Donald Wade, a tall, pleasant-looking man, and the other was a man called Talbot, and they were both what Laura described as 'ex-beaux' of hers. They seemed constantly to be invited to the same parties as the Whitacres. The term ex-beau was one which Michael sometimes puzzled over uneasily. What it really meant, he was sure, was that Laura had had affairs with them, and wanted Michael to believe that she no longer had anything to do with them. He was suddenly annoyed at the whole situation, although at the moment, turning it over in his mind, there didn't seem to be very much to do about it.
'When are you going back?' Michael asked.
Parrish looked around him, his blunt, open face taking on a ludicrous expression of guile. 'Hard to say, Pal,' he whispered. 'Not wise to say. The State Department, you know… Has its Fascist spies everywhere. As it is, I've forfeited my American citizenship, technically, by enlisting under the colours of a foreign power. Keep it to yourself, Pal, but I'd say a month, month and a half…'
'Are you going back alone?'
'Don't think so, Pal. Taking a nice little group of lads back with me.' Parrish smiled benevolently. 'The International Brigade is a wide-open, growing concern.' Parrish glanced at Michael reflectively and Michael felt that the Irishman was measuring him, questioning in his own mind what Michael was doing there, in his fancy suit in this fancy apartment, why Michael wasn't at a machine-gun this night instead of a bar.
'You looking at me?' Michael asked.
'No, Pal.' Parrish wiped his cheek.
'Do you take my money?' Michael asked harshly.
'I'll take money,' Parrish grinned, 'from the holy hand of Pope Pius himself.'
Michael got out his wallet. He had just been paid, and he still had some money left over from his bonus. He put it all in Parish's hand. It amounted to seventy-five dollars.
'See you later,' Michael said. 'I'm going to circulate.'
'Sure, Pal.' Parrish nodded coolly at him. 'Thanks for the dough.'
'Stuff it, Pal,' Michael said.
'Sure, Pal.' Parrish turned back to his drink, his wide, square shoulders a blue-serge bulwark in the froth of bare shoulders and satin lapels around him.
Michael walked slowly across the room towards a group in the corner. Long before he got there, he could see Louise looking at him, smiling tentatively at him. Louise was what Laura probably would call an 'old girl' of his,