Beatriz Williams - The Secret Life of Violet Grant

Richardson says, “I’d be happy to help you with the counting. I know it’s something of an eyestrain.”

“That’s not necessary. It takes some practice, as you know.”

“Oh, I remember how. I was the first one, you know, back in ought-nine, when your husband began his experiments. I still see those bloody little exploding lights, sometimes, when I close my eyes.”

Violet laughs. “I know what you mean.”

“Maddening, isn’t it? But I see the crafty doctor has found a permanent replacement for me. A far more agreeable one, at any rate.”

This time Violet feels the actual course of acceleration in her chest, the physical sense of quickening. How did one bring one’s heart back under proper regulation after a shock? You couldn’t simply order it to slow down. You couldn’t simply say, in a firm voice, as one spoke to a misbehaving child: Sixty-two beats is more than sufficient, thank you. The heart, an organ of instinct rather than reason, had to perceive that there was nothing to fear. The chemical signals of danger, of distress, had to disperse from the blood.

Violet flicks open her watch. “It’s time. Are you able to see?”

“Just barely.”

“We can wait a few more minutes, if you like.”

“No, no. I’m not here to interrupt your progress. Carry on.”

Violet rises from her chair and moves to the table in the center of the room, guided more by feel than by sight. She flicks the switch on the lamp, though she doesn’t look directly at the feeble low-wattage bulb. It illuminates her notepad and pencil just enough that she can write down her notes.

She casts her eyes over the apparatus: the small box at one end, containing a minute speck of radium; the aperture on the box’s side, through which the particles of radiation shoot unseen toward the sheet of gold foil; the glass screen, coated with zinc sulfide; and the eyepiece with its magnifying lenses.

She takes out her watch, settles her right eye on the eyepiece, and squints her left lid shut.

A tiny green-white flash explodes in her vision, a delicate firework of breath-stopping beauty. But Violet’s breath is already stopped, already shocked by the unexpected invasion of Lionel Richardson into her laboratory, and the tiny flashes make no impression, other than the scratches of her pencil as she counts them.

Why this oversized reaction? Why this perception of imminent danger?

Has Walter perhaps mentioned Lionel Richardson’s name before? Is there some association buried in her subconscious that causes the synapses of her brain to crackle with electricity, to issue these messages of alarm down her neural pathways to the muscles of her heart and lungs? Or maybe it’s just that she can’t see him, can’t inspect his face and clothes and person and confirm that he’s speaking the truth, that he’s only a man, a visiting former student of her husband’s, benignly curious.

Violet takes her eyes from the screen for an instant to check her watch. Nearly five minutes have passed. At five minutes she will draw a line under her counting marks and start again.

“Can I help you? Keep time for you?” asks the invader.

“It’s not necessary.” She looks at her watch. Five minutes. She draws a line.

“Aren’t you missing your count, looking back and forth like that?”

“A few, of course.”

“Dr. Grant always had me take a partner to keep time. We switched off to rest our eyes.” He offers this information respectfully, without a trace of the usual scientific arrogance.

“We don’t have the staff for that here in Berlin.”

“You have it now.”

Without taking her eye from the eyepiece, Violet grasps the watch in her left hand and holds it out. “Very well. If you insist.”

He gathers the watch in a light brush of his fingers against her palm. “Five-minute intervals?”

“Yes.” Violet shuts her eyes.

“All right. Ready …”

A tranquil leather-scented silence warms the air. Violet breathes it deeply inside her, once, twice.

“Go.”

Violet opens her eyes to the glorious flashing blackness, the stars exploding in her own minute universe. Her pencil moves on the paper, counting, counting. Lionel Richardson sits just behind her, unmoving, close enough that she can feel the heat radiating from his body. He holds her watch in his steady palm. Her gold pocket watch, unadorned, almost masculine; the watch her sister Christina gave her four years ago on a smoke-drenched pier on the Hudson River, as the massive transatlantic liner Olympic strained against her moorings a few feet away. Her watch: Violet’s only parting gift from the disapproving Schuylers.

“Time,” says Lionel Richardson.

Violet draws a line to begin a new count.

“And … go.”

He issues the direction with low-pitched assurance, from his invisible post at her left shoulder. He hasn’t simply swallowed the blackness, he’s become the dark space itself. Even his scent has absorbed into the air. Violet makes her tireless marks on the notepad. She sinks into the world of electric green-white scintillations, the regular strikes of radioactive particles against atomic nuclei, and somewhere in the rhythmic beauty, her heart returns at last to its usual serene pace, her nerves smooth down their ragged edges. Only the pencil, hard and sharp between her thumb and forefinger, links her to the ordinary world.

“Time,” says Richardson, and then: “Would you like me to count this round? Your eyes must be aching.”

Her eyes are aching. Her shoulders ache, too, and the small of her back. She straightens herself. “Yes, thank you.”

Lionel’s chair scrapes lightly. His body slides upward in the darkness behind her. A pressure cups her right elbow: his hand, guiding her around her own chair and into his. He places the watch in her palm and settles into the seat before the eyepiece, hunching himself around the apparatus without complaint, for he’s much larger than she is.

She lifts the watch and stares at the face. “Ready?”

“A moment.” He adjusts himself, settles his eye back against the lint lining. His profile, lit by the dim bulb next to the notepad, reveals itself at last: firm and regular, the nose a trifle large, the hair short and dark as ink above his white collar. His forehead is high, overhanging the eyepiece, and in the soft yellow light Violet cannot detect a single line. “Ready.”

She drops her gaze back to Christina’s watch.

“And … go.”

Aunt Violet. I had a great-aunt named Violet, an adulteress and murderess, about whom I’d never heard. A scientist. What sort of scientist?

I regarded the valise on my table, and then turned to tell Doctor Paul the extraordinary news.

Alas. Too late.

Inexplicably, unfathomably, he lay upon my sofa, in the hollow left by Sally’s debauched corpse an hour or two earlier, so profoundly asleep I was tempted to hold my compact mirror to his mouth and check for signs of life.

Hands to hips. “Well. There’s courtship for you.”

But then a tiny steel ball bearing of sentiment rolled downward through the chambers of my heart. Poor dear Doctor Paul. One arm crossed atop his chest; the other dangled to the floor. His legs, far too long for the sweeping red Victorian curves of the sofa, propped themselves over the edge of the opposite armrest.

I knelt next to him and touched the lock of hair that drooped in exhaustion to his forehead. Up close, I could see the tiny lines that fanned from the outer corners of his eyes. I bent my nose to his neck. Here, he smelled of salt instead of antiseptic, and perhaps a little long-forgotten soap, too, sweet and damp. I rubbed the tiny golden bristles of his nascent beard with my pinkie. He didn’t even flinch.