She gathered her foundation around her, gave a last hesitant glance at the Scotch bottle, and made a resolute exit like a hippopotamus taking off to answer the call of Spring.
Kay Natello took care of them.
Simon didn't keep very close track of the caretaking, but the general trend of it was quite simple. After the Scotch was finished and they left the canteen, it involved stopping at a great many bars on the way and having a drink or two in each of them. Hogan acquired more blarney and boisterousness as it went on: he said that Kay was his girl, and an Irishman's girl was his castle, or something that sounded like that. He beamingly offered to pulverize various persons whom he suspected of dissenting from his opinions about Oliver Cromwell, Michael Collins, De Valera, and Kay Natello. Simon Templar did his best to keep in time with the mood, and surreptitiously dribbled as many drinks as he could into the nearest cuspidor. Through it all, Kay Natello only became more stringy and more removed. She responded to Pat Hogan's elephantine flirtations when she remembered to; in between, she was more like a YWCA chaperone trying to keep up with the girls. Simon was quite relieved that she didn't at any point offer to break into significant vers libres... But it still seemed to take a long time to reach Cookie's Cellar.
Once they were there, however, it was a repetition of the night before from another viewpoint. This time, the Saint was one of the reluctant heroes under the spotlight. Cookie sang the same kind of songs, giving and receiving the same enthusiasm.
After one of the more turbid numbers, Kay Natello nudged the Saint and said proudly: "I wrote that for her."
"Cor!" said the Saint respectfully.
That was only a mild expression of what he thought. The idea of a poetess of Kay Natello's school composing those kinds of lyrics in her lighter moments had an austere magnificence which he hoped to dwell on some quiet evening when he had nothing else at all to do.
It was like the night before again, with a difference, because Avalon Dexter was there.
She wasn't there to work. She was just another customer, wearing a simple afternoon dress, sitting at a table at the back of the room; but he saw her long tawny hair dance as she talked and looked around. It gave him a queer sensation to watch her like that and have her glance pass over him in complete unawareness. It was like being invisible.
And it also gave him a sort of guilty feeling, as though he was hiding and spying on her. Which at that moment he was. The man with her was slightly rotund and slightly bald. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and he had a round and pleasant pink face that looked very clean and freshly barbered. He was not, you could tell very quickly, another Dr. Zellermann in his manual recreations. He behaved like a nice wholesome middle-aged man who was enjoying the company he was in. Any impartial observer would have conceded that he was entitled to that, and quite undeserving the unreasonable malignance with which Simon regarded him. Simon knew it was unreasonable, but that didn't blunt the stab of resentment that went through him when he saw her chattering so gaily with this complacent jerk. He was surprised at his own symptoms, and not too pleased about them either.