His hand was warm around hers. “I am perfectly capable of understanding the difference, Dr. Grant. As I said, I haven’t answered the notes. I don’t have the slightest interest that way in any of my colleagues.”
“Good.” He patted their enclosed hands. “Very good. I’m relieved to hear it. I take a particular interest in you, Violet. I see you as a kind of protégé. I intend to look after your interests with all the zeal in my power.”
His kind voice made her eyes prickle with tears. She wouldn’t tell him, she couldn’t tell him how lonely she’d been, nobody saying a word to her, cold glances and cold lunches, her cramped and empty rooms at the end of the day. Studying, studying. Her coffee delivered hot in the morning by her landlady, accompanied by the only smile she would receive until her return that evening. The alien voices and vehicles and architecture, the September drizzle parted at intervals by a fickle sun. At least at Radcliffe she knew a few other girls like her, ambitious and clever girls, who were always happy to commiserate over hot cocoa at midnight. Here she had nobody, she had less than nobody: a negative space of openly hostile company.
“You are so kind,” she said.
“There, now. If you have any trouble, Violet, you’re to come to my office immediately. You may ring me at any time, day or night. You’re to think of me as an uncle, Violet, a very dear uncle who admires you greatly.”
If his words were a little more fulsome than avuncular, Violet was too grateful to notice. She blinked back her tears and returned the squeeze of his warm hands. She looked up into his face—the face of Dr. Grant, brilliant and renowned Dr. Walter Grant, gazing at her with such tenderness! She was overcome with gratitude; she was melting with it. “Thank you, sir.”
He shook his head, smiling. “You must call me Walter, in these rooms. I’m your uncle, remember? Your nearest relation here.”
“Yes, of course.” But she couldn’t quite bring herself to say Walter, not yet.
He gave her hand a last pat and picked up his cup. “You’ll come to me every week like this, Violet. You’re looking rather thin, rather pale; you must eat better. I shall stuff you with cake and sandwiches and send you on your way. Does that sound agreeable?”
She smiled. “Yes, very much.”
And so she and Dr. Grant came to take tea in his sumptuous offices every week, served without comment by his own personal secretary, talking and laughing and calling each other Dr. Grant and Violet, while the leaves changed color and fell from the trees, and the afternoon sky grew darker and darker, until it began to turn quite black by four o’clock, when she knocked punctually on his door. It was then a week before Christmas, and the air smelled of snow. Dr. Grant stood in his office with a pair of workmen, his white shirtsleeves glowing in the lamplight, wires and plaster everywhere; he was having a new telephone installed, he told her, shaking his head, and the case was hopeless.
Perhaps they should take tea at his house in Norham Gardens instead?
Vivian
Doctor Paul’s living room had potential, and I told him so.
“Your living room has potential, if you’d consider unpacking the moving boxes.” I waved my chopsticks at said boxes, which were clustered in haphazard stacks about the room, like some sort of ironic modernist furniture set. “Maybe a lick of paint, too. White is so sterile.”
“Agreed. It’s like being in a hospital.”
“How can you stand it?”
“I’m not here often. I usually sleep in an empty examining room.”
I tsked. “And you’ve lived here four weeks. If I were a shrink, I’d suggest you were having second thoughts.”
“About the apartment?”
“About the apartment. About New York.”
“Maybe I was.”
In the absence of furniture, we were lying on the floor in an exact perpendicular relationship: fully clothed, I hasten to add. Our heads were propped up by a single upholstered cushion, provenance unknown, and the little white boxes of Chinese takeout sat agape between us, like a row of teeth awaiting root canals. I picked up one of them now and dug my chopsticks deep into a shiny tangle of chow mein. “What, the charms of our humble town have worn thin already?”
“I don’t mean to offend—”
“Which means you’re about to do just that.”
“—but I haven’t seen much charm to begin with. I work in a hospital, Vivian. All I see is New York’s greasy gray underbelly. Do you know what my first patient said to me? My first patient, a little kid of eight years old, in for an appendix—”
I put down my chopsticks. “You’re a kid surgeon?”
“Yes. He said to me—”
“This is just too much. Perfect Doctor Paul is so perfectly perfect, he saves the lives of nature’s little angels.”