“It’s a legitimate line of inquiry,” says Walter, “though wrongheaded.”
“As opposed to imagining that electrons and protons can be packed into the atomic nucleus together without bursting it apart . . .” Violet launches passionately into her argument, waving her fork in a way that would cause the entire Schuyler matriarchy to expire of shame, arranging her peas to illustrate her point. She doesn’t notice that Walter is clearing his throat, that Lionel has uncrossed his long legs and shifted in his chair, until an actual shadow crosses the neat clusters of legumes on her plate.
Violet glances upward, and her sentence dangles half finished and forgotten in the smoke.
“I beg your pardon. Am I interrupting something dreadfully important?”
Days later, years later, when Violet has immersed herself in an entirely different world peopled with entirely different characters, when her memories of Berlin have settled into a sequence of emotions and impressions and crisis, she will still recall the precise shade of the Comtesse de Saint-Honoré’s blue silk dress as she stood silhouetted against a blurring backdrop of black-and-white waiters and attentive faces.
She will still picture the exact slant of the elbow-length sleeves against the pale skin, the angle at which the neckline caresses the bosom, the height of the gathered hair underneath a jaunty tip-tilted confection of a blue hat. She will recall the angle of those black-lashed violet eyes, the thick piano-key ivory of the skin, the pools of color along the velvety arch of the cheekbones.
Most of all, Violet will know the smile: a slow and confident widening of a too-abundant mouth. This woman is something more than beautiful, something alchemical, an unstable mixture of rare elements bound together by nerve and charm. Am I interrupting something dreadfully important? she asks, with the ironic warmth of a woman who knows in her bones that she is always the most important object in the room.
Am I interrupting something: pronounced in a distinct American accent, not quite like Violet’s own. The drawling sophistication of her words slips around the flatness of her vowels.
The men rise in tandem. “Not at all,” says Walter.
“Why, Lionel,” says the intruder, with an arch surprise that might or might not be feigned, “is that you?”
Of course this woman knows Lionel Richardson. They are made for each other, hungry predator and luscious prey. Or perhaps it is the other way around?
“Comtesse.” Lionel’s delight is not feigned at all. He takes her gloved hand and kisses it rapturously. “Imagine you in Berlin in May. Saint-Germaine must be hung with mourning.”
“Ha. I’m sure Paris is glad to see the last of me. But you! Aren’t you supposed to be galloping about the Transvaal with saber flashing?” She keeps her hand safe within his grip and does something with her eyes, some dip or flutter, unspeakably flirtatious.
Lionel taps his leg. “Invalided for the summer. This barmy old knee of mine. I’m to see some surgical specialist on Wednesday, who’s meant to fix everything up, or at least knock off the clicking for me.”
“How boring for you.”
“And you, my dear? Specialists? Business, perhaps? Surely not shopping.”
She laughs. “No, no. How could you possibly think I’m so frivolous? I’m here for Henry, of course.” She slides her hand away from Lionel’s grasp at last and loops it around the elbow of the grave young man at her side.
Walter intrudes. “Look here, Richardson. Do you mean to introduce your charming friend, or not?”
“What a wretch I am. I thought you must know one another. My dear, I have here none other than the renowned physicist Dr. Walter Grant and his accomplished and rather argumentative wife, Violet Grant. Dr. and Mrs. Grant, the Comtesse de Saint-Honoré, whom I believe needs no introduction, and her son, Henry Mortimer.” Lionel steps back a single pace and extends his hand, palm outward, as if offering up young Mr. Mortimer and the comtesse for the private amusement of Violet and Walter.
The Comtesse de Saint-Honoré holds out her hand and extends her smile to dazzling proportions. “But I know Dr. Grant already. He’s the very reason I’m here.”
Violet watches her husband take the comtesse’s kid-gloved hand and shake it. A flush overtakes the skin of his cheeks, the tip of his nose: a flush she knows well. “Of course, of course. I recall the name. Henry Mortimer, of course. The young fellow who wishes to be a physicist.”
“Not just any young fellow, Dr. Grant. My son is brilliant, an acknowledged genius, and yet I had no reply at all to my repeated applications on his behalf.”
Walter glances at the boy. “He is only sixteen, is he not, madame?”