"That's enough," Michael said, feeling guilty and hopeless.
"I don't want to hear any more."
"Any more questions?" Laura shouted. "No other men you want to ask me about? No other suspects? Shall I write out a list for you?"
Suddenly she broke. She fell on the couch. A little too gracefully, Michael noted coldly, like an ingenue. She dug her head into the pillow and wept. She looked spent and racked, sobbing on the couch, with her pretty hair spread in a soft fan around her head, like a frail child in a party dress. Michael had a powerful impulse to go over and take her in his arms and say, "Baby, Baby," softly, and comfort her.
He turned and went into the garden. The guests had moved discreetly to the other end of the garden, away from the house. They were standing in a stiff, uncomfortable group, their bright clothes shining against the deep green background. Michael walked over to them, brushing the back of his hand against the cut over his eye.
"No badminton today," he said. "I think you'd better leave. The garden party has not been the success of the Pennsylvania summer season."
"We were just going," Johnson said, stiffly.
Michael didn't shake hands with any of them. He stood there, staring past the blurred succession of heads. Miss Freemantle looked at him once, then kept her eyes on the ground as she went past. Michael did not say anything to her. He heard the gate close behind them.
He stood there, on the fresh grass, feeling the sun make the cut over his eye sticky. Overhead the crows were making a metallic racket in the branches. He hated the crows. He walked over to the wall, bent down and carefully selected some smooth, heavy stones. Then he stood up and squinted at the tree, spotting the crows among the foliage. He drew back and threw a stone at three of the birds sitting in a black, loud row. His arm felt limber and powerful, and the stone sang through the branches. He threw another stone, and another, hard and swift, and the birds scrambled off the branches and flapped away, cawing in alarm. Michael threw a stone in a savage arc at the flying birds. They disappeared into the woods. For a while there was silence in the garden, drowsy and sunny in the late summer afternoon.
CHAPTER SIX
NOAH was nervous. This was the first party he had ever given, and he tried to remember what parties looked like in the movies and parties he had read about in books and magazines. Twice he went into the kitchenette to inspect the three dozen ice cubes he and Roger had bought at the drug-store. He looked at his watch again and again, hoping that Roger would get back from Brooklyn with his girl before the guests started to come, because Noah was sure that he would do some awful, gauche thing, just at the moment it was necessary to be relaxed and dignified.
He and Roger Cannon shared a room near Riverside Drive, not far from Columbia University in New York City. It was a large room, and it had a fireplace, although you couldn't light a fire there, and from the bathroom window, by leaning out only a little, you could see the Hudson River.
After his father's death, Noah had drifted back across the country. He had always wanted to see New York. There was nothing to moor him in any other place on the face of the earth, and he had been able to find a job in the city two days after he landed there. Then he had met Roger in the Public Library on Fifth Avenue.
It was hard to believe now that there had been a time when he didn't know Roger, a time when he had wandered the city streets for days without saying a word to anyone, a time when no man was his friend, no woman had looked at him, no street was home, no hour more attractive than any other hour.
He had been standing dreamily in front of the library shelves, staring at the dull-coloured rows of books. He had reached up for a volume, he remembered it even now, a book by Yeats, and he had jostled the man next to him, and said "Excuse me." They had started to talk and had gone out into the rainy streets together, and had continued talking. Roger had invited him into a bar on Sixth Avenue and they had had two beers and had agreed before they parted to have dinner together the next night.
Noah had never had any real friends. His shifting, erratic boyhood, spent a few months at a time among abrupt and uninterested strangers, had made it impossible to form any but the most superficial connections. And his stony shyness, reinforced by the conviction that he was a drab, unappealing child, had put him beyond all overtures. Roger was four or five years older than Noah, tall and thin, with a lean, dark, close-cropped head, and he moved with a certain casual air that Noah had always envied in the young men who had gone to the better colleges. Roger hadn't gone to college, but he was one of those people who seem to be born with confidence in themselves, secure and unshakeable. He regarded the world with a kind of sour, dry amusement that Noah was now trying desperately to emulate.
Noah could not understand why, but Roger had seemed to like him. Perhaps, Noah thought, the truth was that Roger had pitied him, alone in the city, in his shabby suit, gawky, uncertain, fiercely shy. At any rate, after they had seen each other two or three times, for drinks in the horrible bars that Roger seemed to like, or for dinner in cheap Italian restaurants, Roger in his quiet, rather offhand way, had said, "Do you like the place you're living in?"
"Not much," Noah had said, honestly. It was a dreary cell in a lodging-house on 28th Street, with damp walls and bugs and the toilet pipes roaring above his head.
"I've got a big room," Roger had said. "Two couches. If you don't mind my playing the piano every once in a while in the middle of the night."
Gratefully, still astonished that there was anyone in this crowded, busy city who could find profit, of any kind whatsoever, in his friendship, Noah had moved into the large, rundown room near the river. Roger was almost like the phantom friend lonely children invent for themselves in the long, unpeopled stretches of the night. He was easy, gentle, accomplished. He made no demands on anyone and he seemed to take pleasure, in his rambling, unostentatious way, in putting the younger man through a rough kind of education. He talked in a random, probing way about books, music, painting, politics, women. He had been to France and Italy, and the great names of ancient cities and charmful towns sounded intimate and accessible in his slow, rather harsh New England accent. He had dry sardonic theories about the British Empire and the workings of democracy in the United States, and about modern poetry, and the ballet and the movies and the war. He didn't seem to have any ambition of his own. He worked, sporadically and not very hard, for an advertising firm. He didn't pay much attention to money, and he wandered from girl to girl with slightly bored, good-humoured lust. All in all, with his careless, somehow elegant clothes, and his crooked, reserved smile, he was that rare product of modern America, his own man.
He and Noah took rambling walks together along the river, and on the University campus. Roger had found Noah a good job through some friends as a playground director at a settlement house down on the East Side. Noah was making thirty-six dollars a week, more money than he ever had made before, and as they trudged along the quiet pavements late at night, side by side, with the cliffs of Jersey rearing up across the river, and the lights of the boats winking below them, Noah listened, thirsty and delighted, like an eavesdropper on an unsuspected world, as Roger said, "Then there was this defrocked priest near Antibes who drank a quart of Scotch every afternoon, sitting in the cafe on the hill, translating Baudelaire…" or "The trouble with American women is they all want to be captain of the team or they won't play. It comes from putting an inflated value on chastity. If an American woman pretends to be faithful to you, she thinks she has earned the right to chain you to the kitchen stove. It's better in Europe. Everyone knows everyone else is unchaste, and there is a more normal system of values. Infidelity is a kind of gold standard between the sexes. There is a fixed rate of exchange and you know what things cost you when you go shopping. Personally, I like a submissive woman. All the girls I know say I have a feudal attitude towards women, and maybe they're right. But I'd rather they submitted to me than have me submit to them. One or the other is bound to happen, and I'm in no rush, I'll find a proper type eventually…"