The Secret Life of Violet Grant

by Beatriz Williams

  “Colonial subjects in revolt.”

  “Precisely.”

  Lionel throws back his dark head and laughs. The electric lights flash along the ridges of his throat. “Still a Marxist, I see. I suppose it comes with the territory, as you Americans say, Mrs. Grant. Isn’t that right?” He turns to Violet, and his eyes crinkle in a silent laugh.

  She fingers the bowl of her wineglass. “Of course Walter is a socialist. We are all socialists, aren’t we? All forward-thinking people must be. It’s the natural progression of history.”

  “Oh, quite. I can’t fault you there.” He blows out another slow stream of smoke and winks at her, and she thinks that it’s not fair, not a bit. No just Nature should have bestowed so many physical gifts on a single man, while the rest huddle about their urban café tables in thin-shouldered, narrow-faced obscurity. He reclines like a lion before her, or rather a particularly robust panther, with his dark sleek hair and watchful gray eyes, his easy muscular grace, his air of patient vitality. When she switched on the lights in the laboratory two hours ago, she nearly staggered in shock. Had she really shared a darkened room with such a predatory creature? As if she were a mouse curled up with a cat for the night.

  “There’s no point in arguing with him, my dear,” says Walter. “One cannot expect the son of a British peer to welcome the revolution with hands outstretched to lift up the downtrodden.”

  “Third son. Of no account whatever, really. I should be marching with sickle in hand this instant.” Lionel’s charming lopsided mouth maintains its smile. He looks directly at Violet, as if daring her to challenge him on the subject of primogeniture.

  Walter laughs and refills Violet’s glass. “Beware Captain Richardson’s charm, child. He may be a pretty fellow, but he’s not the sort of man to allow women careers in the sciences.”

  “Perish the thought. Should never allow my wife near the laboratory. Primitive brute of the worst sort.” Richardson’s white teeth bare themselves at Violet. “Barbaric, on good authority.”

  “You deferred to me perfectly well during the experiment.”

  “Oh, that’s quite another matter. I’m perfectly civilized with other men’s wives.”

  “But not your own?”

  “I’m not married, Mrs. Grant. I speak hypothetically.”

  Violet tilts forward. “I don’t envy this hypothetical wife of yours. She sounds more like a vassal. I don’t suppose you’d allow her a single thought of her own. A life’s work of her own.”

  “Naturally. I’d expect I would be her life’s work. And a damned tedious project it is, too. I shouldn’t wish it on anyone, which is why I remain obstinately unshackled.” He reaches for his wineglass, cigarette still planted between his index and middle fingers, and inspects the bowl against the light from the sputtering yellow-tinged candle at the center of the table. Three deep lines extend from the corner of his squinting right eye, interrupting the marvelously even flow of his skin. The red-dark wine stills obediently before his gaze.

  “I don’t believe you. Surely you’re not opposed to the rights of women.”

  “I suppose it depends on the woman. You seem perfectly capable of making rational decisions, Mrs. Grant, but I shudder to think of the state of the British nation if any of the chattering canaries in my mother’s drawing room were allowed the vote. An absolute balls-up within a generation, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “It depends on which way they voted.”

  “Then you don’t mind how idiotic the rationalization, so long as the poor fools vote for your side?” Lionel sighs and sets down the glass without drinking.

  “But that’s not the point. There are plenty of idiotic men already voting. The point is that a fair vote, a just vote, must extend to everyone who’s subject to the government in question, whether stupid or blind or poor or self-interested. Equality must be enshrined in the franchise itself, otherwise those in power can decide who does have the vote, as arbitrarily as they like . . .”

  “Stop, stop!” Lionel waves both hands, causing a ribbon of smoke to undulate between them. “You go too far, Mrs. Grant, with all this talk of franchises and equality. As a frivolous and frankly apolitical chap, I won’t stand for it. You see?” He turns to Walter, smiling again. “I warned you what would come of your feminist sympathies. I suppose you talk suffrage and the proletariat over your pillow at night. Propagande par le fait, isn’t that it?”

  Walter rumbles a low laugh and covers Violet’s hand with his. “As you see, I have fashioned my ideal mate. A fortuitous turn of the stars, the day she marched into my office and demanded a place at the Devonshire.”

  Lionel’s warm eyes tilt back to Violet. “I can rather picture it.”

  Violet pictures it. She looks down now at the quiet hand covering hers, and the swamp of gratitude floods her again. She is understood; she is accepted. She lifts her thumb to sidle against his: Walter’s thumb, his hand, his whip-thin body that—for all its sins—is her bulwark against the Schuylers, against the cuts and slights of her fellow scientists at Oxford and now in Berlin, against the primitive barbarism of men like Lionel Richardson.

  Lionel Richardson, whose left eyebrow is now raised, having caught the minute caress of Violet’s thumb against Walter’s. “My felicitations.”

  “Thank you,” says Walter.

  “And how long are you married? I’m useless with dates.”

  “Two years.”

  Lionel stubs out his cigarette. The charming smile has returned, curling around the wide edges of his mouth. He seems to have twice as many teeth as ordinary men, lined up like gleaming white soldiers at the parting of his lips. “Dare one hope for the pitter-patter of little scientific feet?”

  Walter’s hand drops away, leaving Violet exposed. She doesn’t wear a wedding ring—both she and Walter agreed that it was a loathsome symbol, a relic—and by the up-and-down flicker of Lionel’s gray eyes she knows he’s registered the absence. His question rotates in her mind, pitter-patter of little scientific feet, his panther smile, and Violet looks down at the smooth grain of the table before her while her belly rotates in sympathy. She waits for Walter to say something, but he remains silent at her side. She wonders what expression sits on his face, and whether Lionel is reading him, too.

  “I beg your pardon. Have I put my foot in it?” says Lionel quietly, and then: “Ah! Here’s our dinner at last.”

  The waiter departs, and Lionel switches topics effortlessly. He draws in Walter with a reminiscence of old Oxford days here, a shared joke there, an earnest diversion into the results of Walter’s current experiments. At the shift in tone, Violet lifts her head from her boeuf en daube, her potatoes Lyonnaise, and inserts herself bluntly. She is convinced that Rutherford is right about his neutrons, and Walter is wrong.

  “Child, you defend this theoretical particle as if it were your own creation,” Walter says, smiling.

  “Because it exists, and you refuse to acknowledge it.”

  Lionel whistles low. “There’s a chap for you. Sponsors his wife’s experiments, though he doesn’t believe her theory.”

  “It’s a legitimate line of inquiry,” says Walter, “though wrongheaded.”

  “As opposed to imagining that electrons and protons can be packed into the atomic nucleus together without bursting it apart . . .” Violet launches passionately into her argument, waving her fork in a way that would cause the entire Schuyler matriarchy to expire of shame, arranging her peas to illustrate her point. She doesn’t notice that Walter is clearing his throat, that Lionel has uncrossed his long legs and shifted in his chair, until an actual shadow crosses the neat clusters of legumes on her plate.

  Violet glances upward, and her sentence dangles half finished and forgotten in the smoke.

  “I beg your pardon. Am I interrupting something dreadfully important?”

  Days later, years later, when Violet ha
s immersed herself in an entirely different world peopled with entirely different characters, when her memories of Berlin have settled into a sequence of emotions and impressions and crisis, she will still recall the precise shade of the Comtesse de Saint-Honoré’s blue silk dress as she stood silhouetted against a blurring backdrop of black-and-white waiters and attentive faces.

  She will still picture the exact slant of the elbow-length sleeves against the pale skin, the angle at which the neckline caresses the bosom, the height of the gathered hair underneath a jaunty tip-tilted confection of a blue hat. She will recall the angle of those black-lashed violet eyes, the thick piano-key ivory of the skin, the pools of color along the velvety arch of the cheekbones.

  Most of all, Violet will know the smile: a slow and confident widening of a too-abundant mouth. This woman is something more than beautiful, something alchemical, an unstable mixture of rare elements bound together by nerve and charm. Am I interrupting something dreadfully important? she asks, with the ironic warmth of a woman who knows in her bones that she is always the most important object in the room.

  Am I interrupting something: pronounced in a distinct American accent, not quite like Violet’s own. The drawling sophistication of her words slips around the flatness of her vowels.

  The men rise in tandem. “Not at all,” says Walter.

  “Why, Lionel,” says the intruder, with an arch surprise that might or might not be feigned, “is that you?”

  Of course this woman knows Lionel Richardson. They are made for each other, hungry predator and luscious prey. Or perhaps it is the other way around?

  “Comtesse.” Lionel’s delight is not feigned at all. He takes her gloved hand and kisses it rapturously. “Imagine you in Berlin in May. Saint-Germaine must be hung with mourning.”

  “Ha. I’m sure Paris is glad to see the last of me. But you! Aren’t you supposed to be galloping about the Transvaal with saber flashing?” She keeps her hand safe within his grip and does something with her eyes, some dip or flutter, unspeakably flirtatious.

  Lionel taps his leg. “Invalided for the summer. This barmy old knee of mine. I’m to see some surgical specialist on Wednesday, who’s meant to fix everything up, or at least knock off the clicking for me.”

  “How boring for you.”

  “And you, my dear? Specialists? Business, perhaps? Surely not shopping.”

  She laughs. “No, no. How could you possibly think I’m so frivolous? I’m here for Henry, of course.” She slides her hand away from Lionel’s grasp at last and loops it around the elbow of the grave young man at her side.

  Walter intrudes. “Look here, Richardson. Do you mean to introduce your charming friend, or not?”

  “What a wretch I am. I thought you must know one another. My dear, I have here none other than the renowned physicist Dr. Walter Grant and his accomplished and rather argumentative wife, Violet Grant. Dr. and Mrs. Grant, the Comtesse de Saint-Honoré, whom I believe needs no introduction, and her son, Henry Mortimer.” Lionel steps back a single pace and extends his hand, palm outward, as if offering up young Mr. Mortimer and the comtesse for the private amusement of Violet and Walter.

  The Comtesse de Saint-Honoré holds out her hand and extends her smile to dazzling proportions. “But I know Dr. Grant already. He’s the very reason I’m here.”

  Violet watches her husband take the comtesse’s kid-gloved hand and shake it. A flush overtakes the skin of his cheeks, the tip of his nose: a flush she knows well. “Of course, of course. I recall the name. Henry Mortimer, of course. The young fellow who wishes to be a physicist.”

  “Not just any young fellow, Dr. Grant. My son is brilliant, an acknowledged genius, and yet I had no reply at all to my repeated applications on his behalf.”

  Walter glances at the boy. “He is only sixteen, is he not, madame?”

  “Nineteen. Nearly twenty. But you’ve seen the letters of introduction I sent you, haven’t you? He’s just back from Princeton, graduated six days ago with the highest possible marks in mathematics, the youngest boy ever to do it. I want him to study with you, Dr. Grant. No one else will do.”

  The comtesse’s flat American vowels ring with authority. Violet looks at Henry Mortimer, who should be languishing with humiliation in the blue-silk shadow of his mother’s ferocity, but he only stands there with a patient expression, as if he’s heard it all before. He’s a tall boy, rather handsome, with a thatch of dark hair brushed back from his high pale forehead, and a pair of solemn eyes fixed toward the wall beyond Lionel Richardson’s sturdy right shoulder. His navy blue suit hangs a little loosely on his skeletal frame, held up by the pristine round-edged Eton collar that strangles his neck. Violet knows a few Mortimers, or once did. A Boston family, severely Brahmin, not the sort to breed with flat-voweled professional beauties, and certainly not to divorce them afterward. But then, Violet doesn’t follow scandal very closely.

  All at once Violet becomes conscious of the silence teetering in the space between them, the absolute rock-stillness of Walter’s body next to her. She looks back at the Comtesse de Saint-Honoré, whose bright eyes haven’t waved a millimeter from Walter’s stricken face.

  Lionel’s laugh fractures the impasse. “Ah! That’s the marvelous thing about American women. You’re never in any doubt where you stand, are you?”

  The comtesse laughs, too. “I’m awfully sorry. Was I too direct? Perhaps you might offer us a seat, Dr. Grant, and I’ll promise to be on my best behavior.”

  “Of course, of course.” Walter lifts his hand and gestures with relief for the waiter. Chairs are brought, another bottle of wine called for in Lionel’s flawless German. Violet crams herself into the corner, making room for Henry’s lanky adolescent shoulders. He glances at the clusters of dainty green peas on her plate.

  “Oxygen?” he asks quietly.

  Violet lets out a breath she hardly knew she was holding. “Yes, oxygen.”

  She glances up, sensing observation, and finds Lionel Richardson watching them both with his patient gray eyes.

  • • •

  VIOLET WAITS until Walter joins her in the bedroom before making her decision. She is already in bed, a book in her lap; the evening is warm, and for the first time since September she wears a summer nightgown, white cotton trimmed with a token bit of lace at the neck and sleeves. She dislikes the itchiness of lace against her skin, the sense of delicate entrapment.

  Walter comes from the bathroom in his thick flannel pajamas, smelling of soap and tooth powder. He bathes every night before bed, no matter how late the hour, and again in the morning when he wakes up, bracketing his sleep with cleanliness. Ordinarily Violet is irritated by this ritual, the way she’s forced to wait for his attention in the evening, and she resents the lemony dampness of his skin when he climbs at last into bed beside her. Tonight, for some reason, she welcomes it.

  “I think you should take him on,” she says.

  Walter is swinging his legs under the covers. “What’s that?”

  “The boy, Henry Mortimer. I think you should take him on.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes. I think he’s brilliant. I think you should give him a chance.”

  “Hmm.”

  Violet turns on her side to face him. He has already switched off the lamp on his side of the bed; hers still casts out a gentle incandescent glow. Their Berlin flat is large and quite modern, quite up-to-date, fully wired for electricity and telephone, piping-hot water delivered with casual abundance to every bathroom. There are brand-new Victrola gramophones in the study and here in the bedroom. Violet feels the outline of the electric light along her body and sets the book on the nightstand.

  “What did you think of them?” she asks. “The comtesse and her son.”

  “I shall take the matter under consideration.” He turns his head to look at her. His eyes are crinkled at the corners, wry or amused. “A
nd you, child? What did you think of my surprise this afternoon?”

  “What surprise?”

  “Young Richardson.”

  “He’s not so young. He’s older than I am.”

  “Ah, but you’re very, very young, aren’t you, child? Not much older than Mr. Mortimer.”

  “I am several years older than Mr. Mortimer.”

  “Did you find him handsome?”

  “What, the boy?”

  Walter laughs. “No. Richardson.”

  “I suppose so. Not really.”

  Another laugh. “Which is it?”

  “Well, he’s not conventionally handsome, is he? Not an Adonis.” Violet closes her eyes and pictures a silken black head.

  “He was quite the most extraordinary student I ever had. Excepting you, of course, little child.” He pulls away abruptly and rises from the bed.

  Violet watches him pad across the bare wooden floorboards to the Victrola and sift through the recordings piled up beside the machine. “How so?”

  “He murdered his stepfather when he was fifteen.”

  Violet starts upward. The blanket falls away from her chest. “What?”

  “Oh, it wasn’t cold-blooded. His parents divorced when he was quite young—the old earl was a vicious chap, there’s the aristocracy for you—and the mother picked another blackguard for her second husband, as these silly women do. Regular beatings, according to the evidence. Bloody threats and knifepoint arguments.” Walter holds up a black disc and examines the label. “And one day Lionel had had enough. Picked up a gun of some sort and shot the old fellow through the heart. The court ruled it was self-defense, but of course none of the other universities would have him. I had to fight like blazes to bring him in.”

  “Good God.” Violet’s pulse bangs against the skin of her neck. She recalls Lionel’s measured movements, his thick arms, his predatory grace. His silvery gray eyes, vivid in her memory. “Why did you? Bring him in?”