“Yes, I do. Look at me now, quite calm and under control, while you stand right there, a few feet away from me, and the light glows against your skin. Turning you to gold. I don’t think there’s any higher proof of the power of civilization, that I’m not kissing you senseless.”
Violet stares at the vase in her hands, the intersecting whorls of virgin blue and white, the soft bleeding of color at the edges, the curve that shapes itself perfectly beneath her palm. At the edge of her vision, Lionel stands waiting by the window. She doesn’t look at his face, but she imagines, in absolute clarity, the expression it wears now: eyes silver and watchful beneath the furrows of his patient forehead. The predatory angle of his cheekbones, perfectly still.
“How is your knee?” she asks, still staring at the vase.
He turns to the window and braces his hands against the sill. “Splendid. These German surgeons are the wonder of the world. I should have headed home a week ago.”
“Perhaps you should head home. Go back to England, to your regiment. Killing things.”
“Do you really mean that?”
Violet cannot say yes. She cannot tell an outright lie. She puts the vase down and wanders to the other side of the room. “You could always take up with the comtesse.”
“I understand she’s otherwise occupied.”
“I’m sure there’s room for one more. She strikes me as the accommodating sort.”
“Don’t, Violet.”
Her palms are damp. She presses them against the side of her dress. Why doesn’t she just leave? Why can’t she say good evening and walk back through the door? Or—a better question perhaps, more to the point—why can’t she simply give in and lie secretly down on the sofa with Lionel Richardson and lose herself, as everyone else in Berlin loses themselves? Is it some vestige of loyalty to Walter himself, some superstitious reluctance to profane her marriage vows? Or the more practical fear of discovery and its consequences?
Or something else, something worse: the hypothesis, still unproven, that if she laid herself on the sofa in Lionel Richardson’s embrace, she would never rise again.
“Don’t what?” she asks mechanically, because anything is better than this screaming silence between them.
“Don’t pretend this is something simple, between us.”
“Of course it’s not simple. My husband is a friend of yours. That’s what I mean. You’re much better off with someone like the comtesse. It suits you.”
“As it happens, I have already had that honor, and we didn’t suit at all.”
Violet feels his words like a bad fall: one moment jogging comfortably along, a little breathless, and the next landing shocked against the pavement without any breath at all. “Oh? When was this?” she asks lightly, fingering the edge of the sofa as if his answer means nothing at all.
“A year or two ago, when I was on leave in London, right after her latest divorce.”
“But you’re still friends.”
“Why not? That’s what happens when things are simple, you see. You meet, you flirt, you engage in a spot of fucking to pass the excruciating bloody time, to forget yourself for a single godforsaken moment. You head back to your regiment when your leave is over.” He takes the Berlin evening deeply into his lungs and turns around. “I’m not at all certain I could remain friends with you afterward.”
“There won’t be an afterward with us.”
“No, you’re right about that. If I had you, I wouldn’t let you go.”
“Then we had better not start at all.”
“No, we’d better not.” He picks up his glass, examines the remains against the light, and tilts it up to his mouth. “Your husband has invited me along to Wittenberg with you.”
“Oh? What did you say?”
He takes out another cigarette and lights it swiftly. “I said yes, of course. Fresh air, sunshine, tennis in abundance. Who could refuse?”
“I won’t go. I’ll stay here in Berlin. I’ll tell him I want to keep working.”
“Look at you. You’re dead frightened, aren’t you?”
“What about your regiment? I suppose they need you.”
“Let me worry about my regiment.”
She grips the sofa edge and pictures Wittenberg, the charming villa Walter has rented for the month of July, the sky and the clean water and the pungent sunshine. She pictures Lionel dropped in the center of this bucolic idyll, dazzling in tennis whites, shedding restless energy into the shimmering air. “He’s your friend, Lionel. Don’t do this.”
“Ah, loyal Violet. I can’t imagine what the good doctor has done to earn this violent fidelity of yours. Still, I suppose I’ve only to wait. The chap’s twenty-eight years older than you—”
“Thirty.”
“Thirty, of course. But anything might happen at that age. A heart attack, a fall, an accidental poisoning, that sort of thing. I’m a patient man.”
“I wish you wouldn’t joke.”