“I suppose it’s useful for him, though. Getting to know all these important chaps, having his path smoothed. Do you think he misses the English race at all?” Lionel folds his fingers together across his middle and twiddles his thumbs.
“Oh, there’s plenty of English people around. But Walter’s a cosmopolitan. He loves meeting people from other countries. I’m no help at all to him in that regard, I’m afraid. He sometimes brings them here for dinner parties, and of course I do my best, but they’re all so . . .” She drifts off, unable to account for the stream of unguarded words. It’s the darkness, perhaps, or the conspiratorial nature of what they’re doing, meeting like this in Walter’s private study. Or the way Lionel sits back in Walter’s chair, his gray eyes charcoal with understanding. Easy to confess her thoughts, her failings.
“Of course it’s a bloody nuisance for you. All those stiff Prussian fellows. We had a dinner a year or so ago, a regimental dinner, to which we invited a few visiting German colonels. Frightfully clever and all that, but they would say the most outspoken things.” He smiles. “I nearly challenged my opposite number to a duel by the end of it. Whereas he probably wondered why I kept going on about the weather.”
“And yet you’ve been very outspoken tonight.”
“Only to you.” He lifts himself forward and dribbles his fingers on the desktop. “Were you awfully uncomfortable, then? Who was there?”
“Oh, von this and von that. I don’t recall. That’s part of my problem, you see: I can’t keep names straight, and I can’t pretend interest in someone who doesn’t interest me.”
“Yes, that’s number thirty-eight.”
“Number thirty-eight?”
“On my list. Violet cannot tell a lie. Do you mind if I smoke?”
“Not at all.”
Lionel takes a cigarette case and lighter from the inside pocket of his tailcoat. The silk lining gleams in the yellow light from the lamp. Violet looks down and listens to the snap of the metal case, the scratch of the lighter. “There was only one interesting fellow. The nephew of that old general, the one who laid siege to Paris in the seventies.”
“Oh, von Moltke, you mean? By God, was he there? I’d have given a hundred pounds to meet him.”
“Yes, he was there. I didn’t mind talking to him. He actually talked to me as if I were a human being, instead of a . . .”
Lionel smiles again. “A terribly attractive woman?”
Violet has always viewed with contempt her shallow pretty-prettiness, her large blue eyes and chestnut hair and rosebud mouth, far better suited to chocolate boxes and Coca-Cola advertisements than laboratories. She despises the way it makes her seem younger than she already is, the way it makes men stare at her mouth as she speaks, not listening to her words. Not that she imagines herself a great beauty. If she were really beautiful, beautiful like the Comtesse de Saint-Honoré, formidably beautiful, powerfully beautiful, it would be easier. People obeyed the comtesse; people rose and fell according to her whim. People respected that sort of beauty, imperfect though it was. It was like a being unto itself, an idol to be worshipped, mythic. Violet’s beauty—her prettiness, she reminds herself, for that’s what it is, a very conventional combination of features to which the human animal was trained to respond—diminishes her.
She’s not stupid. She knows that Walter, human animal that he is, was at least as attracted to her face as her mind, and that she wouldn’t have achieved her present arrangement without her large blue eyes and her full bosom. But perhaps she would have achieved more. Perhaps she’d still be in Oxford, part of a larger team, making actual progress, instead of exiled here in Berlin carrying out her experiments almost by herself.
She certainly wouldn’t be standing here in this well-appointed study in Kronenstrasse, with the likes of Lionel Richardson sizing up her charms and her willingness to share them, inviting her to tell him Yes, please, kiss me senseless, never mind my husband and my life’s work, my everything. Her wanting desperately to say yes, wanting desperately to be kissed senseless, and the force of that wanting carrying through the air like a wave of alpha particles, exploding in tiny green-white pings against the solid atomic nucleus of Lionel Richardson.
The smell of Lionel’s cigarette wafts past her nose. “Have I been too bold? Are you going to send me away?” he asks, in an amused voice.
“No, of course not. You’re only flirting. It’s what you do.”
“What if I’m not just flirting?”
Violet stares at the desktop, at Lionel’s fingers spread apart like the legs of a spider.
“Do you know, this is a magnificent damned desk,” says Lionel. He flattens his palms and smoothes them across the surface. “The same one he had at the institute?”
“No, that’s in his office now. But they’re much the same, I suppose.”
“He keeps it very tidy, as ever.”
“Everything in its place.”