The party in the Comtesse de Saint-Honoré’s splendid flat in Französischestrasse reaches its riotous zenith just after one o’clock in the morning. By then, the butler has long since given up answering the door, and any unfortunate latecomer is forced to wedge his own path from the packed entry hall to the dining room, where the table and chairs have been pushed back and the enormous tiger-striped rug rolled up for dancing, to the cavernous drawing room, where champagne circulates by the bottle and people lean out the windows, trailing smoke.
Through the walls, the music jingles and jingles, a bouncy ragtime tune Violet recognizes by sound but not by name. She stands by a wall in the library, cradling a glass of champagne between her palms and staring up at a wall of books. The flat has been rented at an exorbitant price from a newly rich family of Prussian industrialists, away in Monte Carlo for the duration of the summer, and if the titles of their books are any indication, they would be delighted by the use to which their rooms have been put. Violet has already opened one door to reveal a half-dressed woman straddling a man atop a precarious French chair; when she stole into the library a few moments ago, she surprised another couple on the sofa in the final throes of concourse. (Not her own husband, thank God.) The comtesse’s friends have followed her here to Berlin, and are making the most of her champagne and her ragtime and her plentiful rooms.
Violet waited calmly while the couple straightened their clothes and left the room in fits of giggles, and now she is blessedly alone with the German translations of de Sade and Casanova.
Violet has read de Sade, in the original French. Walter gave her the book soon after they began their affair; she was too reserved, he said, too inhibited, and needed shocking. As if carrying on a clandestine sexual relationship with her decades-older professor, with the renowned Dr. Grant, hadn’t been shocking enough already for a Fifth Avenue debutante from a sedate Knickerbocker family.
Violet reaches out her hand and runs her finger along the spine. Walter is somewhere in that merry cloud of noise, smoking his pungent pipe. The comtesse drew him away at the moment of their arrival, there was someone she must introduce him to, Oh, my dear Mrs. Grant, you don’t mind my borrowing your husband for just a short, short minute?
No, Violet had not minded.
A faint squeak of hinges announces a newcomer, and an instant later Violet hears the heaviness of Lionel Richardson’s voice from the doorway: “I thought I’d find you here.”
He was looking for her. She extinguishes the thought at once and keeps her gaze trained to the shelves before her, her head canted at the same two o’clock angle to read the titles. She presses her fingers into her champagne glass and says, “It wasn’t much of a stretch, was it? Did you expect to find me dancing ragtime?”
He doesn’t reply. His footsteps cross the room in authoritative clicks of his well-polished shoes, until he arrives directly behind her, so close she can feel the warmth of his body through his clothing and hers, she can smell his cigarettes and the familiar flavor of his shaving soap beneath, the I, Lionel to which her nerves are now attuned. The tip of his chin, she judges, is within an inch of the crown of her head, and he’s gazing up at the books, matching her own line of vision.
“The Prussians are the worst. The strict ones always are.”
“Don’t I know it.” He moves away, toward one of the giant twelve-paned sash windows, which he opens a few inches. He takes a plain silver case from his jacket pocket and opens it to reveal a neat line of white-papered cigarettes. He doesn’t offer her one; he knows she doesn’t smoke.
“What are you drinking?” She nods at his glass.
“Whiskey, in fact. A fine old single-malt Scotch whiskey, hiding amongst the cognac and champagne and schnapps. Would you believe it?” He lifts his glass to her and takes a drink. “Why are you here, Violet? It was the devil of a shock to see you waltz in on your husband’s arm. Not your sort of go at all, is it?”
“I don’t know. Restless, I suppose. I came home early from the lab and . . .” She lets her voice drift off, leaving it all unsaid: the limpid June air outside, fragrant with promise; Walter, straightening his tie in the mirror and looking at her in surprise, the alarmed sort of surprise. The alternative rising before her eyes, the waiting for him to return, waiting and waiting, pretending to sleep, the late-night click of the door and the rush of the bath water, the old lemony dampness again as he slides noiselessly into the bed beside her. She had accepted their routine long ago. It was part of his job, Walter told her. Part of his job, to discuss ideas into the night, to make connections with the right people. All part of the process of scientific collaboration.
But tonight she had yearned to go out, too. To meet and connect, to collaborate in the promising June air.
Except that she was not collaborating, after all, was she? She was hiding away in the study with her champagne, listening to distant ragtime while Walter talked and smiled somewhere inside the music, his trim beard parting for his laugh.
“It’s that sort of evening, isn’t it?” Lionel lights his cigarette in a rapid flare. The study is dusky and still, lit by a single lamp next to the sofa on which the previous couple had been so joyfully collaborating, disturbed only by the gaiety behind the wall and the occasional shout or blast of horn from the street outside, four stories down. “Anything could happen.”
Violet swallows the rest of her champagne and sets the glass on an empty patch of shelf. She has always disliked gloves, and the bowl is smudged with her fingerprints, making her think, rather absurdly, of detective novels. “That’s a rather melodramatic thought, coming from you.”
“What can I say? I’m a romantic at heart, beneath all my carefully cultivated cynicism. Hence the cavalry, rather than a foot regiment.”
“Yes, Walter said something like that, the evening we met. That he couldn’t quite make you out.”
“And you? Have you made me out yet?”
“No. Other than that you’re what you said you were that first night, a barbarian.”
He laughs. “Not a civilized socialist, like you and Walter? I admit it freely. Though of course I understand your point of view, far better than you understand mine.”
Violet turns to him, bracing her fingers against the shelf behind her. She’s wearing her best dress, one given to her by Walter a month or two ago, fashionably narrow and high-waisted, a gossamer amethyst purple that suits her pale skin and dark auburn hair. A silver band sparkles around her ribs, just below her breasts, and her shoes are silvery, too. The effect, she suspects, is one of ethereal virginity. She looks now at Lionel Richardson, leaning his laconic body against the windowsill, cigarette dangling between his fingers, lowball glass glinting at his side, eyes regarding her thoughtfully, and wishes she had something like what the Comtesse de Saint-Honoré is wearing tonight: a red silk dress the same color as wine in candlelight, cut low across her bosom, baring her shoulders. “I don’t think that’s true at all,” she says.
“Of course you don’t.” He uncrosses his legs and tilts his head toward the window. “Do you know what they’re shouting about, out there?”
“No.”
“The Hapsburg heir was assassinated yesterday, in Serbia. Shot with his wife in their motorcar, on a state visit.”
“How dreadful.”
“You needn’t pretend with me. I’m sure you’re crowing inside. Down with the ancient empires, isn’t it? They had it coming.” He slips his hand through the opening in the window and knocks the ash from his cigarette onto the sidewalk below.
“That’s not true. I deplore any sort of violence.”
“Ah. Not a Bolshevik, then? Not quite so far as that.”
“Not at all. I believe it will all evolve naturally, the equality of man and the just distribution of property. I don’t think we need a revolution.”
“I don’t know about that,” Lionel says. His face begins to take on weight, as if the air has grown heavy upon him. “Men want to fight, don’t they? We’ve gone a hundred years without a general European war. England, Germany, France. They’re like horses at the hunt, milling about, waiting for the first hound to scent. Then bloody mayhem.”
“That’s nonsense. We’re far too rational to fall into that trap again. The workers will never agree to fight.”
“Won’t they? We’re all nationalists, deep down, Violet. Your average German hates a Slav far more than he hates his factory foreman, and vice versa. It’s human instinct.”
Violet thrusts herself away from the shelves. “Anyway, it’s all theoretical, isn’t it? There’s no reason to fight.”
“They’ll find something eventually.”
“War is never inevitable.”
“Eventually, it is. Maybe not tonight, maybe not this year. But eventually.”
“God, I thought I was a pessimist.” The champagne is hitting her brain now, making her fidgety and dreamlike all at once. She circles the room. “Why are we even discussing this? War.”
“I don’t know. Don’t mind me. Whenever this sort of thing happens, these international crises, Agadir and all that, I get in a funk. Wondering if this is it, if this is the spark that sets everything ablaze.” He stubs out his cigarette against the windowsill and lifts his glass.
Violet picks up a small Chinese vase and turns it over in her hands. Her blood is beating pleasantly, her nerves alive and tingling. She has done her best to avoid Lionel Richardson since the night in Walter’s study, to avoid this odd understanding that runs like an electromagnetic current between them whenever they collide: at dinner parties in her flat, at Herr Planck’s musical evenings, in the halls of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut. This unexpected intersection of their orbits (or perhaps it is expected, perhaps she has planned it like this) together in this room, without Walter or the Comtesse de Saint-Honoré or Henry Mortimer or anyone else, feels rare and precious, not to be handled roughly, not to be taken for granted. “I suppose it’s your job, to wonder about war,” she says. “I suppose you’d be the first in the fight.”
“Naturally. I’m a soldier, aren’t I?”
“Yes, you are. You enjoy it, don’t you? Fighting and killing.”
“No, I don’t enjoy it. But I don’t mind it, if that’s what you mean. It’s elemental. It slices right through all the rubbish, it erases your thoughts, it erases everything else but the essential struggle. You’re never closer to nature than when you’re out hunting, when you’re nothing but an animal yourself. Better and purer than your civilized self.”
“You don’t have a civilized self.”
“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.”
“God damn it, Violet.” Lionel springs from the window and tosses his empty glass into the empty fireplace. The shattering crystal makes her jump. He follows the sound to the mantel and curls his hands around the edge, on either side of his bowed head. “I wish to God I were joking.”
A peal of laughter trills through the walls, unnervingly close, perhaps just outside the closed library door. Lionel doesn’t move. The smoke trails delicately from the cigarette in his right hand, winding around his ear.
Violet whispers, “Perhaps you should just leave Berlin altogether.”
“If I could leave, Violet, I would. Believe me.”
Another burst of laughter, which clarifies suddenly as the library door swings open. Violet turns in a jolt. The Comtesse de Saint-Honoré illuminates the room, resplendent in red silk, her chin tilted back to expose her long neck.
“Oh!” she exclaims, looking first at Violet and then at Lionel, who now stands facing the room, one arm still slung on the mantel, one ankle crossed before the other, smiling mysteriously. “There you are! We were looking for you.”
Only then does Violet notice her husband standing next to the comtesse. His necktie has come unraveled, and his elbow forms a convenient nook for her arm.
“Violet, my dear,” he says. “Have you been hiding yourself away all this time?”
“You know I dislike parties.”
“Yes, I wondered why you insisted on coming.” He glances at Lionel and takes a drink from the glass that dangles from his other hand. “But I see you haven’t suffered alone.”
Lionel shrugs his broad shoulders. “We were discussing this wretched tragedy in Sarajevo.”
“Shocking affair,” says Walter.
“Why, what’s happened in Sarajevo?” asks the comtesse.
“Oh, only the assassination of the Austrian heir and his wife,” says Lionel. “Nothing for the ladies to bother themselves about.”
Violet boils over. She opens her mouth to object, but the comtesse’s gravelly laughter already crowds the air.
“Oh, really, Lionel. You’re impossible. But poor Sophie. I really am upset. I met her in Vienna last year. She was charming, not a snob at all, as these Austrian aristocrats usually are. What happened?”
“Shot in their motorcar on a state visit. Some damned Serbian nationalist, I’m sure. Not that the Hapsburgs are fit to govern a village sheep run any longer, but what the devil good does regicide do? Only provokes Austria to kick them with booted heel.” Lionel tosses the end of his cigarette into the fireplace, amid the shards of his whiskey.
“No doubt the diplomats will sort it all out,” says Walter blandly.
The silence in the room contrasts with the merriment outside, as if the four of them are attending some secret rite in the middle of a wedding feast. Lionel drums his fingers against the mantel and trades inscrutable glances with the comtesse.
She turns to Violet. “My dear, do come along with me. I’ve got so many people to introduce you to. You don’t know what a divine novelty you are.”
Violet protests, but the Comtesse de Saint-Honoré takes her arm. “It’s not that hard, really. They’re all good and tight. Quite harmless. Just put one word in front of the other.”
Later, after Violet has made the rounds with the comtesse, has met a thousand cosmopolitan drunks and become silly herself with champagne and ragtime and male admiration, she lies sprawled on the sofa in the library while Jane strokes her hair. Neither Walter nor Lionel can be found.
“You’ve got to sleep here tonight, I guess,” says Jane. “There’s nobody respectable to see you home.”
“There was nobody respectable here to begin with.” The gentle stroke of Jane’s fingers, the rustle of red silk as she moves her arm, is lulling Violet to sleep.
“What a bad influence I am. But I can’t help it, you know. It’s how I’m made; I’ve given up trying to reform. I just like it.”
“Like what? Having parties? Having affairs?”
“Yes, all of it. There’s nothing more exciting than a new lover, or the chance of one. I’m addicted to it. You should try it yourself. Or I suppose you already have, when you started with Walter.” She giggles softly. She’s matched champagne with Violet that evening, glass for glass. “So try it again.”
“No, I won’t.” Violet yawns. “I can’t.”
“Yes, you can. Why not? Lionel’s dotty for you.”
“I’m married.”
Jane laughs outright and gives Violet a squeeze with her other arm. “What does that mean anymore? I’ve been married three times already.”
“I don’t know how you managed all that. Where did you find the time?”
“I started early, of course. That’s the trick, start early. I ran away with my first husband when I was only fifteen. He was twenty-seven and a beast, but he was rich enough, the richest man in Rapid City, and I had to get away. Out of the house.” Her fingers find a few stray ends of Violet’s hair and rub them together.
“I don’t suppose I can argue with that.”
“I divorced him the year after that. That nice old judge awarded me plenty of money, once he saw the photographs. Always get evidence, Violet, that’s my advice.”
“I’ll try to remember that.”
“No, I really mean it. The deck is stacked against us, you know. I have no patience for women who won’t look after themselves. I suppose that’s why women don’t like me very much.”
“Don’t they?”
“Well, I don’t guess I’d like me, if I were them. No, they’re right. I’m not one of them, I’m the enemy. You see, I don’t need all this business about cuddles and fidelity and love everlasting. I don’t believe in it. I like flirting; I like making love. I don’t mind sleeping with someone’s husband, if the opportunity arises. Why should I? It’s just a physical transaction that gives pleasure on both sides, if it’s done right. I’ve never understood why women make such a fuss about . . .” She waves her hand. “Well, all of it. Love and babies.”
“But you’ve had three husbands. And a child.”
The sofa cushions move beneath Violet’s shoulders. Both of Jane’s hands insert themselves in Violet’s hair to gather up the waves and lift them from her neck. “Do you wear it loose at night, or do you braid it?”
“Loose. I can’t be bothered.”
Jane begins to braid Violet’s hair. Violet closes her eyes. The little tugs and twists of Jane’s manicured fingers electrify her scalp; Jane’s exotic perfume drifts against the haze of champagne surrounding her brain. She loves the unfamiliar female intimacy of lying here, listening to Jane’s secrets while Jane braids her hair.
“Listen, Violet. I love three things: money, myself, and my son. Not in that order. I’d do anything for them, especially Henry.”
“That’s all? Not your family? Any of your husbands?” She searches for something else, some other possible object for Jane’s worship, and hazards—of all things—“God?”
“God?” Jane laughs mightily. “Really? What about Him? He’s done nothing for me, I can tell you. I’ve done it all by myself, tooth and nail. I don’t see why He should get any credit. And you don’t, either, I’ll bet. That’s why I like you, Violet. I don’t like many women, but I like you.” She’s finished the braid. She wraps her fingers around the paintbrush end and gives it a gentle pull.
“Are you sleeping with my husband?” Violet asks drowsily.
“Would you be angry if I were? Would you even care?”
Violet doesn’t reply. She doesn’t know how.
Jane pulls the braid apart and combs it out with her fingers. Violet opens her eyes. The apartment is quiet now, the guests shooed away, the servants in the scullery with the acres of glassware. It must be past four o’clock in the morning.
“You have the loveliest hair, Violet. I’ll bet Walter loves your hair.”
Violet stares up at the creamy library ceiling, and her mind turns back to another sofa and another ceiling, another body pressed against hers on an Oxford winter afternoon.
“Yes, he does. Walter loves my hair.”