The Secret Life of Violet Grant (27 page)

T
hey reach the outskirts of Berlin just before dawn. Violet lifts her head from Lionel's shoulder to see the pinkening rooftops, the transparency of air. “What day is it?” she asks. “I've lost count.”

“The twenty-fifth of July. Serbia's reply to Austria is due today.”

“What does that mean?”

“Unless Serbia intends to grovel at Austria's feet, I suppose it means war.”

But his tone is light. He drives down the empty streets, confident of the route, whistling softly. It takes Violet a moment to recognize the tune. “Stop that,” she says, laughing. “You'll have us arrested.”

He breaks into his booming rich baritone, echoing from the stones.
Send him victorious, happy and glorious
 . . .

“Lionel, you're an idiot.”

But he doesn't stop, and Violet sits up.
Oh, say, can you see, by the dawn's early light . . .
she sings defiantly into the morning.

Lionel lifts his voice.
Confound their politics, frustrate their knavish tricks . . .

. . . 
Whose broad stripes and bright stars . . .

. . . God save the King!

They duel all the way past the Reichstag, along the empty Potsdamer
Platz, laughing and singing to raise the dead, until Violet's throat aches a happy ache.
Nothing can touch us.
The automobile turns the corner of Kronenstrasse, and a bolt of golden-orange sunrise hits the windscreen. Lionel parks the car along the curb, just outside Violet's apartment building. “I'll go up with you.”

“You shouldn't. The attendants will notice.”

“Let them notice. Let them see the way I look at you.” He reaches in the back for her valise. “I don't want to be without you, not for a minute.”

“Well, then.”

He jumps around the front of the car and helps her out. Together they walk through the door, they nod at the sleepy doorman. Lionel's hand grips hers. His jacket lies about her shoulders. The attendant in the lift, a man Violet doesn't recognize, keeps his eyes trained on the silk-lined ceiling and sees no evil.

Violet's heart pounds as the numbers tick upward. The machinery clangs to a stop; the attendant opens the door and the grille. A musty smell floods around her: the scent of abandonment. All of the servants have gone with them to Wittenberg.

Lionel tugs her hand. “Come along, then.”

There isn't much to pack; Violet only wants enough to get by until she can find new things, a new life. She picks a couple of old dresses from the wardrobe, a woolen cardigan she bought that autumn in Oxford. She folds them carefully atop her notebooks and underthings from Wittenberg, the jewelry from Walter she plans to sell. Lionel waits in the doorway, watching her, his arms folded.

She snaps the valise shut. Lionel steps forward and takes it from her. “Is that all?”

“No. There's something else.”

Lionel follows her to the study. She selects a book from one of the shelves, opens it, and takes a small key from the hollowed-out center. Lionel examines the spine and snorts. “
The Hound of the Baskervilles
. How clever.”

Violet unlocks the glass shelves near the desk and flips through Walter's journals until she finds the one she wants.

Lionel props himself on the desk and watches her lazily. His arms are crossed against the bottom of his ribs. The valise sits next to him, atop Walter's empty green leather blotter. “What's that?” he asks.

“Nothing. Just to satisfy my curiosity.” She tucks the journal into the valise and snaps it shut.

He holds out his hand. “Shall I?”

She hands Walter's key to him. He slips it into its hollowed-out nest of Conan Doyle and slides the book back into the slot on the library shelf. He turns to her and smiles. “Let's go.”

“Where to, exactly?”

“I thought we'd go to my hotel. Clean up and have breakfast. Do you object?” He picks up the valise and holds out his other hand for her.

She takes it. “Not at all.”

•   •   •

THE STAFF
at the Adlon is far too polite to notice their disheveled appearance, the road dust and the faint whiff of petrol. It might be Lionel's confidence, the way he strides up to the desk with Violet's hand indisputably enclosed within his elbow, and asks for his key.

“My luggage is in the motor out front,” he says in German. “The Daimler. Could you have it sent up immediately.” More command than question.

“Yes, Herr Richardson.”

They cross the marble lobby toward the multitude of lifts. “Did they save your room for you, all this time?” asks Violet.

“I should hope so. I paid in advance for the entire summer.”

The lift whisks them upward. Lionel still carries Violet's valise, as if he doesn't trust it to any other hands. She curls her hand around his arm and wonders if he's brought any other women into this elevator. Jane,
perhaps, or some woman from a party, some wealthy baroness or an official's bored wife. To her horror, she hears herself asking him.

Lionel twists his hand to knit her fingers with his. “No, Violet.”

“I'm sorry. It's not my business, is it?”

“Christ. Of course it is.”

They reach his room, a comfortable corner suite with a double-doored entrance. “I wanted something comfortable, as I was staying all summer,” says Lionel, standing back to allow her through.

The room is beautiful, furnished elegantly in pinks and greens, a large sitting room and a bedroom door to the right. The early sunlight gushes through the tall windows. Lionel sets the valise on a desk and turns to her, smiling, rubbing his unshaven cheek. “Bath first, don't you think?”

They bathe together in the luxurious enamel tub, surrounded by steam and a weightless translucency of sunlight. Violet lathers his chest an inch thick; she fills her hands with suds and lavishes him all over, his arms and legs and privates, his toes and ears and the sharp tip of his nose. “Now you're all clean,” she says, “clean and bright and lovely.”

“And scruffy.” He touches his chin.

“Clean and bright and lovely and scruffy.”

Lionel turns her around, against his oaken chest. He unpins her hair and washes it with gentle movements of his strong fingers. He rinses it clean. When the water cools, he wraps her in a towel and takes her to bed.

•   •   •

VIOLET LOVES
the way she and Lionel make love: his exuberant movements, the impish way he tickles her and nudges unexpected parts of her body into wakefulness; the snatches of delighted laughter, the luxurious stopping and lingering. She loves the morning beauty of his body, his black hair and golden skin, his burly strength, the way the light curves around his shoulders as she rolls him over for more. The way he looks at her, as if he's about to swallow her whole, and then he does.

Now he clasps both her hands, now he tightens his fingers and dares her to look away. Now she finishes with a violent cry, under his naked stare, his tender pummeling, and a moment later she finishes him, too. They lie joined and senseless in the sunlit bed. He keeps his palms locked with her palms, his fever skin pressed into her fever skin, his body safe inside hers as long as he possibly can.

•   •   •

VIOLET WAKES
to the sound of splashing water. Through the open wedge of the bathroom door, she sees Lionel standing before the sink, beautifully naked, brute-boned and muscular, shaving his face with efficient strokes of his razor. She stretches pleasurably, enthralled by the intimacy of this domestic act. He catches her gaze in the mirror and smiles. “Awake at last?”

“It can't be that long, can it?”

“Three hours, sleepyhead. It's past ten o'clock.” He finishes, cleans the blade, pats his face dry with a towel. “I've ordered breakfast. It should be up any minute.”

“Good. I'm awfully hungry.”

“You should be.” He hangs the towel on the rack and emerges from the bathroom to sit next to her on the tousled bed. His black hair has been sleeked back from his face with a wet comb. He rests his hand on her hip. “I've been thinking.”

“Oh, don't do
that
.”

“What we should do next.”

She smiles and wiggles her toes. “I have a few ideas.”

But Lionel doesn't laugh. “We have to leave Berlin, Violet. As soon as possible. You know we can't stay.”

“No, of course not.” She rolls onto her back and stares at the ceiling. Her body is loose and heavy from the warm bath, from Lionel's lovemaking, and the soft feather-scented nap afterward. “I shall have to divorce Walter.”

“The sooner the better, I think.”

“As soon as I can speak to a lawyer.”

“Well, you've plenty of grounds. But we'll have to do it in London. We'll have to leave, in any case; I daresay they'll be expelling us shortly, if the situation gets any touchier. Or worse, interning us.” He pauses. “What are you thinking, Violet?”

“I was thinking that I should probably apply to Rutherford's laboratory, in Manchester. I suppose Walter has too much influence at the Devonshire; they'll never take me back.”

“Actually, I imagine it's quite the opposite.”

She turns her head to look at him. “The
opposite
?”

“I mean he's still in disgrace there, the last I heard.”

Violet heaves herself up to a sitting position and holds the sheets illogically to her chest. “Disgrace? What do you mean? Are they angry because he left them for Berlin?”

The skin flexes below Lionel's right eye. He studies her for a moment, and says, “Do you mean you don't know? You've no idea?”

“About what?” She grips his bare knee. “About what, Lionel?”

“Violet, he was thrown out. You didn't know that? When you left. Someone had told the trustees about you, that he'd seduced you.” His hand covers hers. “That you were with child by him.”

Violet whispers: “Yes, I was. But nobody knew, except for me and Walter. Well, and . . .” She frowns. “But he wouldn't have said anything, would he? He couldn't, he would have been risking everything—”

“Who, Violet?”

“The doctor. The doctor Walter sent me to.” She doesn't say,
To get rid of the baby.

Lionel looks at her earnestly, as if he knows she's holding something back. But he's a gentleman, he doesn't ask. Instead he allows a patient pause and says: “Violet, Grant was thrown out. I know it beyond a doubt. I expect they only helped him with the Kaiser Wilhelm to keep things quiet.”

She watches Lionel's face blankly, hollowed out, bewildered. “That's why he married me. That was their condition. Their dirty bargain.”

“Not so dirty, I think. They were only trying to protect you.”

“If they wanted to protect me, they should have kept me away from him.” Violet stares at her hands, enclosed in Lionel's. They are not a lady's hands. They have been tried and tested in a chemical laboratory, and despite her youth there are tiny wrinkles about the knuckles, callouses about the pads of her fingers and thumbs. “I lost the baby anyway.”

“I'm very sorry.”

“You sound as if you mean that.”

“I do. I gather you wanted it?”

Her eyes well. “Yes. Not at first, but later. And then it was gone.”

Violet expects him to fill her ears with idiotic platitudes.
Well, we'll have one of our own,
or
Don't worry, darling, I'll give you all the babies you want.
She remembers lying in bed, with all that sterile white linen stuffed between her legs, and the doctor above her with his expression of professional sympathy.
Never fear, Frau Grant, you'll have another
. But she hadn't wanted another. She'd wanted this one, her baby.

Lionel's thumbs move, but he doesn't speak. She imagines what he's thinking, the obvious fact that Lionel and Violet have mated in utmost passion, entirely without restriction. No sheepskin condoms from Charlottenstrasse, no useless vinegar douches, no last-instant withdrawal or precarious tabulation of dates.

“Have you had any children?” she asks.

“No. God, no. I'm not . . . I've been careful.”

“Except with me.”

“Except with you.” He doesn't move, doesn't look at her, doesn't demand her attention. He doesn't tell her why, of all women, she is his exception. He doesn't ask her any of the questions that must be burning in his head: why, for example, she and Walter didn't have another child. Whether she wants a child with him, Lionel.

Instead, he says, “Violet, in case I haven't made things clear. I do mean to marry you, if you'll have me.”

“Yes.”

“Yes, you understand, or yes, you'll have me?”

She looks back up at him. “Both.”

“Good, then.” He exhales. “In the interim, however, I suppose I should exercise a bit more caution. My fault. The heat of the moment and all that.”

“Yes, of course.” And Violet knows, in that moment, that she does not want to be careful. She wants to be thoroughly reckless. She wants the possibility of life, of some mark of permanence between them, some proof that she and Lionel once existed and were in love and lay joyfully together.

A knock sounds.
Zimmerservice,
calls a voice through the wood and plaster.

“Breakfast,” says Lionel. “Thank God.”

•   •   •

LIONEL HELPS HER DRESS;
she buttons his waistcoat and manages, after several tries, to knot his necktie properly. “Not that I wouldn't rather spend the day shamelessly in bed with you,” he says, picking up his hat, “but I've a few loose ends to tie up, if we're to leave tomorrow. You don't mind?”

“Not at all. I have to pay a visit to the laboratory. There won't be many people there, it's shutting up for August any day, but I want to gather my things and say good-bye.”