At breakfast, there’s no sign of Lionel Richardson. The coffee is brought in, the sweet rolls and fruit, Walter’s very English eggs and kidneys, and at every swing of the door behind her, Violet clenches the muscles of her abdomen and stops her head from turning.
“Lionel?” Jane covers a yawn with her long-fingered hand. “I saw him go off in his motor last night, just before I went to bed.”
“What a shame,” says Lise Meitner. “I had wanted to share some good results with him.”
Violet speaks in German. “What sort of results?”
“He and I had the most interesting discussion about alpha radiation before you left Berlin.” Lise leans forward over her plate. The coffee steams untouched by her elbow. “The problem of the heterogeneous patterns. Herr Hahn and I have managed to isolate a very pure sample of thorium that . . .”
Jane clinks her fork against her plate. “No secrets!”
“There’s no secret, Mama,” says Henry. “They’re only speaking about work.”
Violet says, “I’m sorry, Jane. It’s just easier in German, that’s all.”
“Hmm.” Jane’s gaze meets hers. Her eyes are bright and well-rested, her skin petal-of-rose, making Violet conscious of her own hollow strain, the listless knot with which she bound her hair this morning, before Walter had stirred. How she covered her alien limbs in an old dress and went outside, hoping to meet with fresh air and perhaps Lionel, but the morning air was already sticky and Lionel had not appeared.
Jane takes in the history of Violet’s morning with her purple-bright eyes. She lifts her eyebrows and looks around the rest of the table. At the other end, Walter mutely sips his tea, shielded by a week-old English newspaper. Herr Einstein sits between the Hahns, drinking milky coffee and eating black bread, mournful and preoccupied, his dark pomaded hair absorbing the morning light.
Jane steeples her fingers and says, “I have a terrific idea. Let’s go on a picnic.”
? ? ?
“MOTHER LOVES PICNICS,” says Henry Mortimer, in an apologetic tone, and as Violet finishes her fourth deviled egg, washed down with ice-cold champagne, she’s hardly in a position to disagree. She hasn’t begun to plumb the depth of cured meats and pickled vegetables, delicate sandwiches and exotic fruits, fragrant cheeses and chiffon desserts laid out upon the picnic cloth before her.
Picnic cloth. In fact, there are three picnic cloths, spread beneath the lindens on the hillside to accommodate them all without crowding. Violet reclines her long legs along the side of one; Henry sits to her right and Lise Meitner to her left. They’ve been discussing thorium, and possible explanations for why the measurements of alpha radiation in Lise and Otto’s latest experiments continue stubbornly to present themselves in a heterogeneous pattern, when everyone knows—everyone has accepted, anyway; certainty isn’t a commodity in which the chemists of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut regularly trade—that each radioactive isotope emits particles with its own precise signature. Henry’s remark comes a propos of nothing, during a pause in the discussion; Violet’s brain, which she has concentrated fiercely on the subject of thorium radiation, has begun to wander, and Lise has slipped into a familiar meditative trance.
“It was a good idea, this picnic,” Violet says. Both she and Henry speak in German, in courtesy to Lise, whose English is good but not quite fluent. “I’m glad we have someone here capable of organizing these things so well. I’m hopeless.”
“The perfect day for it.” Lise shakes off her reverie and stretches her arms high above her head. The sun, finding the holes between the leaves, strikes her dark hair in tiny dapples. “I find it’s always useful to think outside the laboratory from time to time. There’s nothing like fresh air when one has an intractable problem.”
Violet glances at Lise. She’s gazing into the distance, her feet with their sensible half boots crossed at the ankles, her skirt draped correctly over her legs. A ladylike woman, Lise Meitner, raised in an orderly intellectual household in Vienna. Has she ever been in love? Working all day in her laboratory with Herr Hahn: did she ever wish for something more than professional friendship between them? If she did, it’s too late now. Otto and his wife sit side by side on the second picnic cloth, his head bent solicitously next to her smiling face, perhaps sharing a joke, perhaps asking her what picnic delicacy he can select for her. Herr Einstein reclines on his back next to them with his hands knit across his stomach, staring through the leaves at the hazy sky.
“If you don’t mind,” Lise says, “I think I’ll go for a walk. The countryside is so beautiful here.”
“Not at all.”
Lise stands and shakes the crumbs from her skirts. She is strong and fit and sturdy, silhouetted by the white July sun. She pins her hat atop her neat waves of hair and says gravely, “Herr Mortimer, would you care to accompany me? Perhaps you help tease me out of this dilemma of mine.”