Beatriz Williams - The Secret Life of Violet Grant

The day after Dr. Grant took her virginity with tea and cake in his sitting room, Violet sat alone in the institute’s cramped dining hall, eating a typically overboiled and lukewarm lunch, when a young laboratory assistant approached her with a folded note. Miss Violet Schuyler , it was labeled, in the brusque black slashes she had come to associate with a concurrent jolt of energy inside her belly. She opened the paper to read that her presence was required in Dr. Grant’s office on a matter of immediate urgency. Five minutes later, she lay on the edge of a broad desk with her skirts raised obediently about her hips, while the head of the Devonshire Institute for Physical Chemistry conducted a rigorously invasive experiment between her legs.

That night, he walked her back to her rooms and went upstairs with her, though he was not particularly pleased by the extreme narrowness of her bed and the spartan illumination of the single lamp. He remained only half an hour, including drink and cigarette. That was a Thursday. The next evening, they met at his house and shared an intimate dinner of pheasant and a pair of 1894 Margaux in the sitting room, and afterward Violet followed Dr. Grant upstairs to his wide and well-dressed bed. “Remember, child,” he said, as he unbuttoned her shirtwaist, “nothing is unnatural that gives man and woman pleasure together. The sexual instinct is Nature itself.”

In the morning, she found three new dresses hanging in the wardrobe, next to Dr. Grant’s suits. They were for her, he said, so she would have something to wear when she stopped the night; there were also underthings in the drawer, each of them a perfect fit, and a new toothbrush in the bathroom. The housekeeper brought a tray loaded with breakfast, and Violet found she was terribly hungry.

On New Year’s Eve, Dr. Grant surprised her by driving her up to London in his motor, where they rang in the year of grace 1912 at an enormous party at the Ritz hotel and stayed all weekend in a grand suite. He took her to the theater and out to dinner, and on the final evening he presented her with a pair of thick gold bracelets, studded with tiny diamonds on the outside and engraved with his initials— WG —in a bold modern typeface on the inside. “One for each wrist,” he said, smiling, as he slid them over her amazed hands.

It still felt like a dream in those early weeks; it was a dream. Violet had never imagined herself with a lover. She knew she would never marry; she despised the thought of marriage and supposed she would eventually take a partner or two when she had the time, but she hadn’t conceived of having a whirlwind love affair like this, complete with weekends in London and extravagant gold bracelets and satiny hotel sheets. These ideas had never occurred to her.

She found, rather shamefully, that she liked it.

She liked the attention and the excitement, the sense of belonging and purpose. The shared secret, as they moved about the institute each day, each knowing what extravagant acts had occurred in Dr. Grant’s bedroom the previous night. She liked the way he looked at her when he undressed her, the fervid enjoyment he took in her young body; she liked the way he would call her into his office or wake her up in the night, as if his need for her could not be contained within respectable hours. She liked feeding his appetites. She liked the heavy drunken look of his face after he had taken her, the knowledge that she, Violet Schuyler, and she alone, had given him this intensity of pleasure he could not do without. Splendid, child, well done, that was a damned splendid fuck, he would groan, and she thought she might boil over from the joy of having satisfied the worldly and experienced Dr. Grant, of having soldered herself so thoroughly to another human being.

January fled. The afternoons began slowly to lighten as Violet danced along the Oxford streets each day, illuminating the frozen pavement, the occasional blankets of snow, the piles of exhausted slush. She could hardly now remember her despair at the beginning of September. The introductory lectures had ended, and she now worked directly in the laboratory with her eminent lover, unlocking the mysteries of the atom, every day burgeoning with the hope of some electrifying discovery. She gazed in rapture at the exquisite green-white explosions on the scintillating screen, the smacking of individual alpha particles into individual gold atoms, proving beyond doubt the existence of the atomic nucleus and the vast empty space between each one; she counted each spark as if she were counting diamonds in a crown. What did they mean? They were trying to tell her something, these flashes. They were trying to lead her to some unspeakable treasure: What was it? What was it made of, the nucleus of an atom of gold? What did it look like? And how could she find out, short of the impossible act of breaking it apart? She took her measurements, she made and remade her calculations, she ran the experiments over and over again with different isotopes. The immersion thrilled her, the sense of sinking into a three-dimensional puzzle, a new and fabulously minute universe that only a handful of men had ever seen.

And her, Violet Schuyler.

By February, her colleagues at the institute, perhaps encouraged by Dr. Grant’s example, began to soften toward her, even to speak with her. One evening, she fell to talking with one of the second-year fellows, a shy and handsome young man with friendly brown eyes, as they happened to leave the institute together. Before she realized it they had walked all the way to her own lodging house.

She had stopped, embarrassed, at the little black wrought-iron gate at the front entrance, and at that instant Dr. Grant had come swinging around the corner on his way to his own house, where they were to meet later that night, after dusk had fallen.

The greetings had been awkward, the second-year fellow sensing the current of Dr. Grant’s disapproval. In bed that night, Walter (she had finally grown used to his Christian name) had asked her how she knew young Mr. Hansbury.

“We happened to be walking out at the same time. We were talking about electrons.”

“You didn’t look as if you were talking about electrons.”

“Well, we were. What else would we be talking about?”

“He looked as if he wanted to fuck you.” Walter used those words with her, fuck and spunk and prick . They had shocked her at first, but she soon grew to appreciate their earthiness, their total absence of hypocritical Victorian euphemism. My prick is up you, child, Walter would say, with his lugubrious bedroom grin, and who could refute this fact? What point was it to pretend away man’s basic carnal urges, to deny the existence of such vital elements of the human body and the use to which they were put?

“Oh, for God’s sake, Walter. You’re not jealous .”

“You shouldn’t encourage them. Someone will find out about us.”

“I’m not encouraging anyone. Except you, of course.” She smiled.

Walter rose from the sheets and lit his pipe from a packet of matches on the bureau. “I fail to see how you could lead a man to your lodging house door without having encouraged some hope of reward, child.”

She had soothed him back to bed, but a new note had entered the air between them, and after that afternoon in late February, Walter insisted that she leave the institute every day by the rear door and meet him in the alley, from which they would walk directly to his house. If she happened to be late, the walk took place in a frigid silence; and the more frigid the silence, the more immediate and forceful were Walter’s requirements once inside. His staff seemed to recognize his moods. One look in the hallway, and the maid and housekeeper melted away downstairs, leaving free the sitting room at the back, the study, the conservatory, until Walter rang the bell for dinner.