Walter arrives as she’s sitting in the slipper chair, buckling her shoes. He’s still dressed in his summer linen suit, wrinkled from heat. “How are you feeling?” he asks, unbuttoning his jacket.
She straightens and says coldly: “Well enough.”
“Excellent.” He smiles, a slow and straightedged smile in the middle of his neat beard. “I say, I was rather surprised when I happened to see the linens this morning.”
“Happened to see the linens.”
“You lied to me.”
“I had to tell you something, didn’t I? You weren’t going to stop otherwise.”
“You shouldn’t have provoked me.”
“I don’t recall provoking you.”
“Hmm.” He walks across the room, removing his cuff links as he goes, and drops them into the silver tray on his chest of drawers. “You do have an astonishingly handsome figure, child. I believe your bosom is a degree or two fuller than when I first met you in Oxford. More womanly. Don’t you think?”
“I was only nineteen then. I suppose it’s possible.”
He removes his jacket and waistcoat and hangs them in the wardrobe. “No, I’m quite certain. I can picture you clearly, lying on my sofa like a newly opened peach. Those months afterward. Do you remember them?”
“Yes, of course.”
“I took excellent care of you, do you agree?”
“You were attentive, if that’s what you mean.” Violet folds her hands behind her back, so Walter can’t see how her hands are shaking.
“Of course I was. My God, what a fresh young child you were. Entrancing. To take a girl for the first time, it’s the greatest joy a man knows. And you were as innocent as a newborn. I could think of nothing else.” Trousers, shirt, drawers. Violet stands by the wall with her hands pinned to her back, watching her husband undress, willing herself not to look at her own wardrobe, in which her battered leather valise sits, packed and ready.
“Yes, I was very young, wasn’t I?” she says clearly.
He is naked and monstrously erect. He walks back to the chest of drawers and finds his pipe and his tin of tobacco. “Do you have anything to tell me, Violet?”
Violet curves her fingernails into her palms. But her face is cool and without shame as she replies: “I kissed him.”
Walter, unhurried, strikes a match and lights his pipe. He turns and leans one elbow atop the bureau, sucking carefully to start the flow of smoke into his lungs, one loving hand cupping the bowl. His gray hair, ordinarily in perfect order, has come disheveled, and the electric light casts his lean body into a relief so stark as to be emaciated. He blows out a long cloud of smoke and smiles. “Is that all?”
“It was a lovely kiss. A tremendous kiss.”
“I hope you’re not hiding something from me, Violet.”
Violet rises from the chair, walks to the dressing table, and picks up the little pot of lip rouge she owns but rarely uses. “If there’s one thing I cannot abide about you, Walter, it’s your hypocrisy.”
“My hypocrisy. And what do you think of a wife, Violet, who fucks another man and then refuses concourse to her own husband? Her husband who’s done everything for her.”
“I’d say she was in love, for the first time in her life.”
Walter’s image appears suddenly in the mirror, like an apparition, eyes narrowed and blazing. His hands close about her arms. The pipe nearly burns her skin. “You are an ungrateful idiot,” he says, between his teeth.
“Go away, Walter.”
“Do you think Richardson will stand by you? Do you think he loves you?”
“I know he loves me.”
“Do you know how many women he had in Oxford?”
Violet’s teeth cut into her lower lip. “Not as many as you, I’m sure.”
“He’s already left, you know. Packed his bags and left. Since he had what he wanted.”
Violet’s cup of rage runs over. In a swift jolt, she breaks one arm free of Walter’s enclosing hand and jams her elbow into his ribs.
He grunts and falls back. The pipe drops to the floor. Violet flies to the bathroom, where Walter’s things have been laid out already by the maid: soap, brush, towel, scissors, the razor he uses to create the crisp borders of his beard. She grasps the straightedge, flicks out the blade, and whirls around just as Walter invades the doorway.
He halts respectfully at the sight of the razor. “Violet, really. Don’t be melodramatic.”
“I will if I have to.”
“I’m your husband, Violet. I have your interests at heart. Richardson is a scoundrel.”
He stands before her, wiry and watchful, smiling and aroused, muscles flexing gently. There is a curious light in his eyes, a primal excitement.
What a fool she was. What a fool, to think that Lionel was the predator of which she must beware. She has never felt more hunted than this moment.
Walter takes a step toward her. “Put down the razor, Violet. Don’t be ridiculous. Would I ever hurt you?”
“You tried, last night.”
“Because you refused me. After all I’ve done for you, Violet.”