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 the black shoulders of his dinner suit. He went down the stone steps in two jumps and raged up the street, leaping a puddle to run across and turn at the first corner, to put her and her house and her words behind him. He walked, then broke into a run to the end of the street, then another, heart pounding and breath coming hard. Then he stopped. Looked around, momentarily lost, and then, breathing more slowly, he began to walk.
He headed towards Regent Street without knowing it; the people he began to pass looked at him - hatless, coatless in the rain, somebody crazed or drunk. In the end, he went into the Café Royal because he found himself there and it was bright and warm and he felt battered. He headed for the tables along one side where he wouldn’t know anybody, ordered brandy and glowered at anybody who looked his way. By being rude to people he knew, he managed to drink alone, his thoughts ugly; then a cadger of drinks named Crosland came by trying to sell anybody for a shilling apiece the news that Oscar Wilde had died in Paris. Then people were weeping and shouting - the Royal had been Wilde’s hang-out, his table, until his trial, a salon - and Denton was caught up in what became a wake. There were shouted arguments about who had supported Oscar and who had abandoned him; Denton, who had known Wilde only slightly but who had by then drunk too much, was doing some of the shouting. Then he was talking to a man he didn’t know about the perfidy of women, and then he was standing on a table with the notorious writer and editor Frank Harris, who was proposing a toast to the dead man’s memory, and when the response wasn’t quick enough to suit him, Denton roared, ‘On your feet, you bloody bastards! You killed him, now you’ll damned well drink to him!’
Then the room was half-empty and Denton was alone, looking down at Wilde’s old table, a heap of flowers