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.”