“Did I? I could have rung for a constable. I could have made one of the servants come out.”
“He might have killed her in the meantime. And you were a boy, you were scared.”
“Anyway,” he says, “I made sure Mother was all right—she was in shock, of course, so I laid her in the bed and put a blanket over her. I wrapped up the baby and ran upstairs with her, to the nanny’s room, and told her to ring for the police and a doctor, that I’d shot her master. The rest is a bit of a blur, I’m afraid.”
“How old were you, at the time?”
“Fourteen.”
“So you’re only twenty-five,” she says in wonder, touching his chest.
“And you’re only twenty-two, and yet we’ve both lived longer than most people, haven’t we? We’re as old as Methuselah.”
“Walter always called me a child.”
“He was as wrong about that as everything else.” Lionel’s hand finds her hair. “When I came into your room and saw you, the two of you, I went blind, Violet. I wanted to kill him. I don’t know why I didn’t.”
“Because you couldn’t. You’ve grown up, you knew he had no power over you.”
Lionel turns on his side and lifts the blanket away. “Let me look at you, Violet. Let me see you, the moonlight on you.”
She sees the tears in his eyes. She lifts her arms and takes him to her breast. “We’ll be old together now.”
“Yes,” he says. “Nothing can touch us, can it?”
Vivian
At least he had the grace to knock, instead of using his key.
I was still tying the belt on my robe, still pulling the bobby pins from my hair, which I scattered on the floor as I went. I unlocked the dead bolt and pulled open the door. “Well, hello! Look who’s come to apologize for getting engaged to my dear old friend.”
Doctor Paul looked me up and down. He had undone the buttons of his overcoat, and underneath he was still dressed in his betrothal suit, every flawless crease of it, trim and tidy except for his sunshine hair, which had been raked through a few too many times, and his chest, which was moving rapidly. He took off his hat. “You’ve been drinking?”
I turned away and sauntered to the table. I picked up the vodka bottle and gave it a healthy jiggle. “Still a bit left, if you want it. Although I suppose you can afford your own liquor now. Half a million smackeroos! And more to come! That’s a lot of money for a regular kid from San Francisco. I can’t blame you for taking the dough and the blonde.”
His hand was on the door frame. “May I come in?”
“You might as well.”
He stepped forward. I was weak enough to steal another peek. Well, wouldn’t you? In the harshness of the bare entry bulb, his face was still pallid with shock and gleaming damp. Even his lips look exhausted, drained of blood. He reached inside the pocket of his overcoat and pulled out his cigarette case, but instead of opening it, he fiddled the plain silver around his fingers. “Look, I’m not asking you to forgive me—”
“You won’t be disappointed, then.”
“I know what I did was unforgivable. I knew it when I did it. I guess I thought I could just wait until . . . until I’d fixed everything, and then—”
“And then we could live happily ever after on Lightfoot’s money and Gogo’s heartbreak? What a brilliant plan. Devious, even.” I clapped my hands. “I applaud you.”
“Listen to me, Vivian . . .”
The sound of his voice hurt me. Listen to me, Vivian, said my mother, when my eleven-year-old self encountered her half dressed on the library sofa with a man not my Dadums. Listen to me, Vivian, said my professor, pale and naked on a cold February afternoon, except for a sagging Trojan and another girl’s lipstick.
Why did I ever listen? Why did I ever crack myself open enough to allow the slightest whiff of sentiment inside? With sentiment arrived pain, they were twins, inseparable, didn’t I know that already?
I said: “Believe me, I understand. The allure of riches for the scholarship boy. Always had your nose pressed against the glass, watching us, didn’t you? I mean, you’d have some money eventually, a nice well-padded life at the country club, but that’s the thing about medicine, they make you work for it—”