The Secret Life of Violet Grant

by Beatriz Williams

  Violet’s eyes are closed. Lionel’s skin is warm beneath her cheek, smelling of grass and clean water. A drowsy bee lingers near her hair; she is too spent to brush it away. “It doesn’t matter. We’re together, here, right now. Does it matter if we can’t read each other’s minds?”

  “I can read yours.”

  “And what do you read there?”

  “Doubt.”

  “Yes. Can you say to me honestly, can you promise you’ve told me everything? There’s nothing else?”

  He lifts himself away and reaches for his jacket pocket. “To answer your earlier question,” he says, lighting a cigarette, “it does matter, practically speaking. This isn’t a holiday. We’re on the run, Violet. If we get in another tight spot, like we did on the train, you’ll have to do exactly as I say. Obey me without question.”

  She wraps her arms around her bare skin and watches him, the way the sun touches the tip of his nose, the sprinkles of hair on his unshaven cheek. “I obeyed you on the train, didn’t I?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I know you wouldn’t hurt me. You must have some sort of use for me, some feeling for me, or you’d have left me in Berlin.”

  “Christ, Violet. Some sort of feeling for you. Is that what this is, the two of us? Just some sort of feeling for each other?”

  “Because God knows you’re competent at what you do. You take care of those who depend on you.”

  “I’m flattered.”

  “And because, in the end, I don’t care. Whether you really love me or not, whether you’re telling me the truth about everything, or anything, or nothing. Whether or not you plan to go on your way once we’re safe in Switzerland—”

  “To abandon you.”

  “—once you’ve accomplished your mission, and begin another one. I’ve thrown my lot in, haven’t I? I sink or swim with you. If I’ve only got a day of you left, I’ll take it.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “What do you think it means?”

  Lionel stands with his hands linked behind his head, watching the sky. The cigarette dangles from his full lips. “Ah. Do you love me, then, Violet? Do I have that, at least?”

  “I love you, Lionel.”

  He grinds out the cigarette against a tree and turns to kiss her. “There, now. That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

  • • •

  VIOLET AND LIONEL cycle on, toward the mountains. The grassy hills pass by, the sweet-laden orchards, the abundant fertility of July. Every three or four kilometers, a village rises up along the road, gray-roofed and somnolent under the summer sun. They pass a few farmers, who wave and call greetings as if all Europe is not on the brink of war.

  Violet doesn’t want the day to end. She wants to cycle forever, exhausted and happy, watching Lionel’s broad gray back shift with the effort of pedaling. They must stop for the night at some point, and he will make love to her again, as sure as the coming darkness, and perhaps even again before dawn. How many more times will Violet lie with Lionel? Twice? A dozen? A thousand? If she keeps pedaling, if they never stop, can they hold back the inevitable?

  Evening falls softly. They find a barn and share a picnic dinner, nestled in straw. Violet aches in every bone. She has bicycled thirty miles at least today, most of it upward, winding around the Alpine foothills. Her blouse is unbuttoned, her dusty shoes and stockings laid out nearby. She watches in bewilderment as Lionel moves about the hayloft, checking the doors and windows, whistling softly as he examines his revolver. He’s in his element, doing what he was born to do: the way Violet feels solving a page of equations, or calibrating a perfectly designed experiment.

  He glances at her. “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. You. You can’t really intend to give all this up and settle down with a dull woman scientist.”

  Lionel sets the revolver down on the wooden floor beside the straw and prowls toward her on his hands and knees, his teeth gleaming in the moonlight, like the panther she imagined him all those weeks ago in Berlin. “I can’t think of anything more exciting,” he says.

  • • •

  LIONEL COULD have broken her hold like a spiderweb, but he doesn’t. He falls against her, shuddering like a dying man. “So you’ll take that risk,” he says, when he can speak again. “But you won’t trust me. You want me to father a child on you one moment and betray you the next.”

  “I don’t want you to betray me.”

  “But you think I might.”

  “All the more reason to want this now. To be selfish. To keep as much of you as I can.”

  Lionel’s head sinks into the straw next to hers. His breath is still hard and rapid, his heartbeat like a bass drum. “You’ll kill me, Violet.”

  He is so heavy, so warm and excessive. How can she ever be empty of him, in want of Lionel? It defies imagination. The straw prickles her back. His thick elbows stab her shoulders; his hands cradle her hair as if she were made of rubies.

  He says, “We’ll be married in Zurich. At the British consulate.”

  Violet doesn’t answer. She tightens her arms and legs and keeps him safe inside her, as long as she possibly can.

  The light retreats through the windows. Not a sound reaches them, there in the hayloft, as if they’re the only two people in the world: only his breathing and hers, the rustles of straw, the tiny movements of their bodies in the loneliness.

  Lionel lifts himself away and draws on his trousers.

  “Where are you going?” she asks, half asleep. The sudden exposure makes her shiver.

  “Just to smoke.” He lays his jacket over her chest and shoulders. Violet listens to the creak of wood as he climbs down the ladder from the hayloft and crosses the floor below. In his absence, the silence is primeval. She curls herself into a ball, so that she fits entirely inside the weight of his jacket, and closes her eyes. She sees Lionel standing next to the barn, perhaps leaning his bare shoulder against the wall, smoking quietly under the sliver moon. His gray eyes squint into the darkness, and his arms are crossed, and the pale smoke drifts thoughtfully along the side of his face.

  When Lionel returns some untold time later to settle into the straw, her mind startles awake. He curves his body like a protective shell around her. He’s still wearing his trousers, but his chest is bare.

  “I can’t blame you,” he says.

  “Blame me for what?”

  “It’s a dirty business, isn’t it. What I do. I lie, I seduce, I break faith. I change masks without a blink. Sometimes I kill.”

  “Not wantonly, surely. Only when you need to.”

  “And then there’s you, like the new-fallen snow.”

  She works herself deeper into the shelter of him. Her legs ache from pedaling, her back aches from bending over the handlebars. She has been caressed and pummeled and made gloriously alive. She thinks for an instant of Walter and his more exotic demands, of her faithful acquiescence and her pride—oh, God, her ridiculous pride—in her own large-mindedness. As if obedience to the unspeakable were proof of worth. “That’s not true. I was no innocent.”

  “In the essentials, you were. You are. There’s no pretense in you. The way you’re lying in my arms now, lying here willingly with your head between my jaws. You astound me.”

  Violet takes his hand and holds it against her belly. She loves the sound of his voice, the cigarette-scented breath of him. The words themselves no longer matter.

  Lionel tucks her hair over her ear. “You are so beautiful. Your skin and hair, all sunburned and lovely. Your marvelous mind, your practical fingers. You make me believe in things again. You make me think it’s possible.”

  “What’s possible?”

  “Everything.” He kisses her hair. “Anything.”

  • • •

  LIONEL WAKES HER at dawn, bristling with energy. “You’re not hum
an,” Violet says, rolling her face into the straw.

  “Come along.” He gives her bottom an encouraging swat. “We’ve got to cross the border today. I’d give anything for a newspaper this morning.”

  “I’d give anything for a bath.”

  “You can bathe in our hotel in Zurich tonight. I’ll wash you myself. Up you get, or I’ll be forced to take extreme measures.”

  Violet yanks him into the straw. He yanks her up again, and in a few minutes they’re on their way, while the breeze pulls the stalks from her hair.

  • • •

  AT LUNCHTIME they arrive in the outskirts of the town of Blumberg. Lionel stops to consult a map, the bicycle balanced between his long flannel legs.

  Violet brushes back her damp hair. She left her hat behind in the train compartment, and the sun is hot against her unguarded skin. “Where are we?” she asks, for perhaps the dozenth time that morning, though this time she knows the answer. Here, the streets are alive with the hum of commerce, the rattle of urgent travel. The gathering momentum of a steam engine chuffs over the rooftops. Violet cannot breathe.

  “It’s the main border crossing.” Lionel looks up. “This way.”

  Violet seizes her handlebars and follows him about the streets, between carts and chattering pedestrians and the odd automobile, too exhausted to think. He pulls up before a small hotel and dismounts the bicycle. “Here we are.”

  “Here?” She looks up doubtfully at the ancient building, which looks as if it’s been welcoming weary travelers since the days of the Grand Tour. A columned portico sags to leftward, dreaming of more elegant days, above a double entrance shut tight to the hot afternoon air. A cluster of agitated tourists huddles in the slanted shade.

  “My dear Mrs. Brown.” He helps her from her bicycle and kisses her hand, right atop the ring. “Do remember we’re on our honeymoon.”

  In the absence of a doorman, Lionel ushers her through the entrance with her valise in his hand. The lobby is cramped and dark and blissfully cool. Two figures rise from the worn red velvet settee in the corner, flanked by a pair of valises.

  “I might have known,” Violet says with a sigh.

  • • •

  “I SUPPOSE you know more than I do about all this,” Violet says to Henry. They are sitting at a small table in the dining room, sipping weak lemonade, while Jane and Lionel confer quietly next to them. Lionel’s shoulder brushes her with reassuring nearness, and yet she feels quite apart from the two of them, a different world entirely.

  Henry stares at the stained and pitted wood before him. “Not much.”

  “Does she usually drag you about on her . . .” Violet squints for a word. “Her missions?”

  His dark head lifts, and his eyes examine her with an expression that seems far wiser than his years. All of him seems older and wiser than he did just months ago, in May. His shoulders seem wider, his jaw sturdier. As if his flesh is finally filling out the gaps in his long skeleton. “She’s a force of nature, you know,” he says. “She lands on her feet, every time. You can trust her.”

  Violet glances at Jane’s animated face and back again. She smiles. “We’re a great deal alike, aren’t we, Henry?”

  He manages a smile of his own and reaches out boldly to squeeze her hand. “I’d like to think so.”

  Lionel turns to her and speaks in a low voice. “Does that make sense, Violet?”

  “Does what make sense? I’m sorry.”

  “Crossing here, instead of the smaller station near Stülingen. We’d stand out more among the locals.”

  Jane speaks up. “Henry and I went for a walk earlier. There’s a terrible amount of foreigners crowding up here at the moment. Because of the emergency, I guess.”

  “The emergency?”

  “Austria’s declared war, Violet,” says Lionel. His fingers drum against the wooden tabletop. “I expect Russia’s mobilizing already.”

  “Good God. What does that mean?”

  “It means we’ve got to move like lightning. We’ve already wasted enough time.” Lionel rises from the table, without waiting for Violet’s agreement. Not that it matters to her where they cross the border; not that she can possibly have an opinion on that point.

  Outside, the bright clear air makes Violet blink. The streets are busy, full of hurry and a simmering sense of panic, quite out of place in the idyllic Alpine setting. A train whistle sounds shrilly, making her jump.

  Lionel’s hand touches hers. “Nothing to worry about.”

  Jane’s arm loops through her other elbow. “What a grand coincidence, isn’t it, Sylvie? Our meeting up here in Germany like this. What a story we’ll have for them, back home.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Jane keeps up her chatter all the way through the thickening crowds. They reach the border queue on the outskirts of town. It snakes down the road and around the corner of a squat red-tiled guardhouse. Henry sets down his two valises and dashes out to buy a newspaper from a busy vendor.

  “They’re disembarking everyone from the train and sending them through the crossing,” he says, when he returns. “That’s why the queue is so long.”

  “I see,” says Lionel.

  “What a nuisance to have our holiday spoiled,” says Jane. “And these Europeans claim to be so civilized. Is Italy going to be a part of all this? Maybe we can run down to Monte and stay there.”

  “Monte Carlo is in Monaco, not Italy,” says Violet.

  “Oh, that’s right. But don’t they speak Italian?”

  “French.”

  Jane tosses her white chiffon scarf over her shoulder. “Well, well! Imagine that. I always thought it was Italian. I never can keep these lingos straight. I wonder if anyone knows anything.” She taps the shoulder of the man before her. He turns, starts at the sight of her, and whips off his hat. She smiles with understanding. “Excuse me, do you speak English?”

  To his obvious regret, he does not.

  The queue edges forward. Henry finishes the newspaper and hands it to Lionel. “Not much new, sir,” he says.

  Violet peers between the restless bodies around her and spies the border guards. Nothing seems out of the ordinary. They’re strapping fellows, of course; she would expect nothing less. They wear uniforms of dull field gray, stern and official as they examine papers in the dusty road. The one nearest has a pink and bulbous nose. His jowls dangle doubtfully over the papers in his large paw.

  “Nothing to worry about,” says Lionel in her ear, and she swallows her anxiety into her belly.

  “The heat is terrible, isn’t it?” Jane fans herself. “I do wish they would hurry along.”

  Lionel’s hand finds the small of Violet’s back. “How do you feel, darling? Are you all right in this heat?”

  “Yes.” She wants to turn into him, to cling to him and hold him here, to take him away from this ominous long queue and the guard with the bulbous nose. She wants to find their bicycles and pedal backward, back to the barn of last night, the riverbed of yesterday, the Hotel Adlon of two days ago with its indigo twilight and crisp linen sheets. If I’ve only got one day of you left, I’ll take it, she said yesterday, but yesterday she didn’t know what that meant. She didn’t know that tomorrow would actually arrive. She had thought, somehow, that the clock would stop for her, and she would not actually be standing here before the border to Switzerland listening to the final minutes rattle past.

  An automobile rushes by, raising clouds of bitter dust. A pair of uniformed men leap out and approach the guard with the bulbous nose. He looks up and scans the crowd before him. His mouth is working. What are they saying to each other? Violet gathers the alert tension in Lionel’s hand at her back, in his body inches away, watching the exchange as intently as she does.

  The guard bursts into unexpected laughter. The other men laugh, too, and head into the guardhouse.

/>   “Well! I thought there was a war on,” says Jane.

  “Not yet.” Lionel picks up the valise and moves forward in the queue. “Nothing’s written in stone, is it?”

  Another hour. The guards are working with remarkable efficiency; only one party stands ahead of them in the queue now. They are now being split between the two guards. Violet looks back and forth between them, trying to judge which will finish first. She doesn’t want to go to the man with the bulbous nose; she doesn’t like the keen squint of his eye, the bloodhound hang of his jowls above his stiff gray collar.

  The other guard waves his party through the gate and calls over the next in the queue. Lionel’s hand closes about Violet’s, in a solicitous husbandly way. “Tired, my dear?”

  “It’s dreadfully hot.”

  “We’ll be through soon, I promise.”

  Violet watches the guard. He looks up and jerks his head at the man who stands nervously before him, and the man picks up his valise and hurries with relief through the barrier. The guard turns his gaze to Violet, and then, more thoroughly, to Jane. He lifts his hand and motions them forward.

  Jane thrusts her papers forward. “Jane Mortimer, of New York City,” she says. “And my son, Henry.”

  The guard takes the papers and looks them over.

  “What an adorable country you have,” says Jane. “I admire your efficiency tremendously. Such a strong and muscular race.”

  He looks up. She smiles winningly.

  His eyes shift to Lionel and Violet. “You travel together?”

  Lionel offers the papers. “Yes. Edward and Sylvia Brown, New York City. Some crowd you’ve got here, eh? You’d think there was a war on, ha, ha.”

  The guard runs his thumb along the side of Lionel’s false passport. He opens the leather cover and flips over the pages. “Edward Brown?” he says.

  “Yes, siree. My wife, Sylvia.”

  The guard spares a glance at Violet and returns to his study. For some reason, the word wife comforts Violet, even though it’s false, even though Lionel is telling a patent lie. She likes the way it sounds in his confident American voice. As if, in that instant, she really is his wife, and he really is her husband.