The Frightened Man Read Free Page A

pleasant to walk through, the streets wet and shining, lamps reflected in long, shivering tracks down puddles.
     
    Alice, the elderly maid, recognized him and took his damp coat, hat and stick and let him into the small drawing room, which he knew well enough to know which was the most comfortable chair. When Emma came in, he was staring into the coal fire, already thinking of her, but he stood, and she smiled but stopped well short of him and so postponed his kiss.
    ‘I thought I’d be ahead of you,’ he said. ‘How was the opera?’
    ‘Awful people with me. I don’t know why I go out so much.’ She had moved to the small fireplace, a dark red love seat behind her, clashing with her dress, also dark red but the wrong shade. She was remarkably pretty, nonetheless, the dress cut low, her arms bare.
    He moved a half-step towards her, the beginning of something he never finished; he would have embraced her, kissed her, started them upstairs.
    ‘Not yet,’ she said, holding out a hand, palm towards him. She smiled. ‘I wanted to have a word with you first. Down here.’ She laughed. ‘Where it’s safe.’ They looked at each other. Her smile was brilliant, slightly false.
    ‘Well, Emma, what?’
    She chuckled, surprising him. ‘This is more difficult than I thought,’ she said. The smile became more brilliant. ‘I’ve found somebody else, Denton. There!’
    At first, he didn’t make sense of ‘finding’ somebody else. Then he understood: she’d found somebody she preferred to him and was giving him his walking papers. He wondered later if he had closed his eyes, because he couldn’t see her for one sightless instant, a moment of horrendous rage that deafened and blinded him. When he could see again, she was smiling at him.
    ‘Now, now,’ she said. ‘Take it like a man.’ Smiling .
    He governed himself. ‘While you take it like a woman? A professional woman?’ He managed to force his violence down into words, words alone. She had meant that tonight would be their last time together, but that there would be tonight. That she had found somebody she preferred so much that this would be the last, but this would happen - that she would open herself to him while she had already decided on the other man, undoubtedly had already opened herself to him too.
    Her face flushed; her eyes widened.
    ‘“Take it like a man,”’ he said, ‘what the hell does that mean - take it from you and then jump in bed with you and then leave you for your new man to—?’ He crossed the little room to her in two strides, still not able to control himself fully but getting enough control so that he wouldn’t do something terrible. ‘Goddamn you!’ he said very low. ‘How long have you been going to bed with both of us?’
    ‘Long enough to know which I prefer.’
    He wanted to say But you’re mine , to shout You belong to me , but he knew she belonged to nobody, never had; it was what he liked about her. He was panting, his collar seeming to strangle him. ‘You whore,’ he said.
    ‘Get out of my house,’ she said in a voice so low it sounded like a growl.
    ‘Christ, woman—’ He leaned towards her and she backed away, leaning on the love seat and putting it partly between them.
    ‘I gave you a chance to make me admire you, Denton. You failed.’ She was still flushed but very much in charge of herself. She chuckled. ‘I gave you the chance to act like a gentleman, and you showed yourself to be the vulgar American oaf everybody thinks you are. Get out!’
    He tried to stare her down, failed, turned in a rage and tore the door open and rushed out. The elderly maid was there in the dark hall, frightened, recoiling when she saw him but muttering, ‘Coat, sir, your coat—’
    He rushed on, tore open the front door, thinking To hell with the coat , thinking To hell with her and everything , hating himself and her for what she had done to him and for what she had said. The drizzle was in the air again, beading up on