Pam Rosenthal - The Slightest Provocation

For a mad moment he imagined himself dragging her from the chair, tossing her onto the bed-solving their problems the easy way, by exercise of force. The thought rather repulsed him. Not that they hadn’t played at such things-and of course he knew plenty of men who felt it their right to impose themselves on a woman, as though to protect the public order. But no matter how infuriating she could be, he wasn’t one of those men. Nor would he be playing, if he tried to take her right now.

He peered over her shoulder, at her white face glaring up at him from the mirror.

“Yes, and when you did heal-isn’t it odd, Kit, how you were too shy to tell this lady that crucial detail, that you were quite well and… functioning again. He’s at White’s, I’d tell myself- or at the fives court watching the pugilists. He’s doing one of his gentlemen’s things that he suddenly needs to keep secret from me, these nights he stays out so late.”

When she spoke again her words fell heavy and dull as lead. “And so I had to find out for myself about that… actress, as I believe she called herself… hearing the news at Gunter’s, of all places, over my favorite… pistachio ice, from some ladies who didn’t think I was listening.”

The timbre of her voice grew stronger, burnished by irony now. “Let me amend that-from some ladies who must have known full well that I was listening.”

For she’d already borne some animosity from that particular set, whinnying like overbred mares in a paddock at whatever stupid joke had been making the rounds at White’s Club.

Better concentrate her fury on his slut of an actress. About whom, it seemed, he had the grace to evince a hint of discomfiture.

Or was that a trick of the light from the fire? He stood in front of it now, his hands (gracefully, elegantly-amazing that she could find them so at this moment) spread out to warm himself.

You don’t need the fire. Touch me instead. Here, where I’m so very warm. Her thighs trembled; she’d parted her legs without realizing it. She clamped them shut. Damn those absurd stray thoughts (if thoughts they could be called), tripping her up amid the worst of their arguments, disarming her before his next round of attack.

“That actress meant nothing, dammit, and you know it. And you were out too, quite often, in the afternoons, when I’d be, um, waking up. Gadding about with that swine Morrice…”

“He wanted to meet Sir Francis Burdett, who’d been Papa’s friend, and I was happy to do him the favor of presenting him to a circle of intelligent people. He’d had enough-as I expect I had too-of the imbecility that passes for talk in Mayfair and St. James. He was interested in learning…”

“About what mush-minded Jacobins thought? About what you thought?”

Politics again. Was there any more deadly combination, he wondered, than eros and politics?

“Please, Mary, the only thing Richard Morrice was interested in learning was what was under your skirts.”

She blinked at a sudden loud crash. Thunder and lightning: an unanticipated storm must have blown in from the Atlantic.

Nice to imagine so. Nice to delay acknowledging, for even an instant, that she’d hurled the bottle of Calvados at him.

Invigorating in its way.

She supposed it was relief she was feeling for not having hurt him. He’d leaped out of the way; the bottle had shattered against the mantel. Brandy was dripping down to the hearth, raising blue flames as though from a plum pudding and causing a ridiculously festive round of popping.

Well, he shouldn’t have said that about Richard. Though of course she and Richard shouldn’t have given him cause to say it. Not that they ever would have, if…

They were shouting at each other now.

It appeared that a part of her had wandered off into a corner of the room to witness their verbal sparring. Quite as though she were a spectator at a match between a pair of boxers.

A good, experienced couple of pugilists, each of them leading with a classic gambit.

“But he was my closest friend, Mary!”

“Rubbish! You’d begun ignoring him, quite as you were ignoring me! ”

Feinting, parrying, now; dancing on their feet, catching their breath while exchanging stupid, babyish insults. She’d never minded that he wasn’t much above medium height, but he minded terribly-he left her the opening; she took it. It was as easy a jab as ever. And he could always get to her about certain inadequacies in her toilette-damn him anyway, for making fun of the state of her undergarments.

Ah yes, and now the new moves they’d picked up during their years apart. The political vocabulary: Tory and radical. Habeas corpus. Treason.

“Danger in the countryside,” he said. “Sedition, even if your friends are too blind and naïve to see it.”

“Nonsense,” she snapped. “Just because your family has always and entirely opposed any extension of rights to the general populace doesn’t mean…”

They circled the ring, taking the time to repeat some of their earlier gambits. The actress… but I wouldn’t have looked at her, he was shouting, if you’d ever listened when… no, of course I didn’t try to explain it to her, why should I, she wasn’t my bloody damn wi-

“ Nor would I be at this moment, if we lived in a civilized nation. If the law didn’t insist on considering the two of us one person-and you know very well which bloody one of us they mean. But I shall manage. I’ve managed thus far to live a quite reasonable and satisfying life; I shall continue to do so, and you can like it or… or lump it. England isn’t so small a country that we can’t both reside in it.”

But she must be running out of energy. She imagined a boxer staggering against the ropes. One final offensive, she thought-against him and against her own ambivalence.

“While as for being your wife-perhaps I shall give you cause to put an end to that.”

Had she scored a knockout blow?

The pity was that it never felt quite as good as you thought it would.

“Suit yourself, Mary,” he was saying. “I wish you well with your reasonable life. Of course, you never really did have the dash, the ton…”

Bits of glass crackled below the soles of his boots as he made his way to the door.

Had she meant to speak of the possibility of divorce?

Until this moment, it had remained only that-a distant and rather abstract possibility.

Not so distant now. She’d opened a Pandora’s box; the room seemed to swarm with nasty little winged things, with names like alienation of affections, bring suit, criminal conversation, Parliamentary divorce.

A legal nightmare and a public ordeal.

But at the end of it, she’d be free to marry a man she wouldn’t want to pitch things at.

She found that she was pacing again, between the fire and the window. I freeze, I fry, the old poets liked to say… Simple, not inaccurate, and not entirely unpleasant.

Her hands were icy, her breasts were warm… Dear Lord, her nipples were hard and erect as cherry stones, through the fabric, between her fingers.

She’d have to watch where she stepped, with all that glass on the floor. Too bad; she’d wanted to taste the brandy straight. They’d have drunk it by now. She’d have had his boots off by now. His boots, and probably more than that.