The Secret Life of Violet Grant. Beatriz Williams

       Violet

      Violet knows she had only herself to blame for what happened that day. Walter might have made the invitation, but while the Violet Schuyler of 1911 was still sexually innocent, she was nobody’s fool.

      As she walked down the darkened paving stones of Magdalen Street, with Dr. Grant at her side keeping up a reassuring stream of chatter, she knew his suggestion of a private meeting had not been made thoughtlessly. They might have gone to a tea shop on the high street, or even a respectable hotel lobby, some public place, well lit and filled with people. There was no need to rendezvous at his house.

      He was speaking of telephones. “I’ve never quite liked the things, to be perfectly honest. As a means of communication, they’re wholly unsatisfying. One can’t hear the other party properly, one hasn’t the assistance of gesture and tone. It has all the disadvantages of communicating by letter, without the advantage of being able to express oneself with any sort of detail or subtlety.”

      Violet, who hated telephones, found herself saying, “But at least they’re immediate. If you want a doctor, or the police—”

      “Yes, for emergencies, of course. But it’s a disaster for human communication.”

      “And you pride yourself on being so very modern.”

      Dr. Grant laughed. “Yes. I suppose one’s got to be old-fashioned about something.”

      They crossed Broad Street, under the dull orange glow of an arc lamp, and for an instant, as a motor-omnibus rattled near in a jangling chaos of headlamps and petrol fumes, Dr. Grant laid a protective hand at her elbow.

      Violet knew the way; her own rooms were not far from Dr. Grant’s imposing house. The buildings slid past the sides of her vision, gray Oxford stone blurred by the settling darkness, illuminated in lurid patches by the arc lamps. People hurried past, buried deep in their overcoats, never looking up, never noticing the pair of them, Violet and Dr. Grant, his hand now permanently affixed to her elbow. The heavy damp chill in the air froze her lungs.

      She could have said no. She could still stop and say she had changed her mind, she’d rather go to the tea shop, she’d rather go home and study. Dr. Grant’s limbs struck out confidently next to her, his voice cheered the frosted air. Dr. Walter Grant, taking her to tea in his private residence.

      Red-brown and Gothic outside, Dr. Grant’s house surprised Violet on the inside. Its high-ceilinged grace reminded her of home, of the elegantly proportioned rooms over which her mother competently presided, except that these light-colored walls and clean furnishings disdained the cluttered excess of the past. A silent housekeeper took her coat, and Dr. Grant ushered her into a small sitting room at the back, where not a single silver-framed photograph decorated the side table, and a coal fire fizzed comfortably under a mantel nearly bare of objects, except for a pair of small Delftware vases standing at either end. A phonograph horn bellowed upward from a square end table near the wall.

      Dr. Grant walked to the fire and spread out his hands. “Ah, that’s better. What a devil of a chill out there today. I shouldn’t be surprised if it snows.”

      “It certainly feels like snow.”

      He turned to her. He was smiling, quite at ease. He spread out his hands behind him, catching the warmth from the fire. “You, of course, have the advantage of youth. A man of my advanced years feels the cold more acutely every year.”

      “You’re hardly that,” Violet said, taking her cue. But she meant it, too. Though Dr. Grant was older than her own father, he existed in a separate category altogether from parents and uncles and middle-aged men, whose waistcoats strained over their comfortable bellies. Dr. Grant’s stance was elastic, his eyes bright and blue, the mind behind those eyes quick and supple. His brilliant mind: it excited her; it had excited her for years, long before she arrived in England. She couldn’t quite believe that she was standing in Dr. Walter Grant’s own private sitting room, waiting for his housekeeper to bring tea. That he had chosen to bring her to his home.

      “The tea should be ready directly,” he said, as if he’d read her own mind, “by virtue of that very telephone I’ve just been reviling. Though perhaps a drink of brandy might not come amiss, in this chill?” He raised his eyebrows hopefully.

      “Yes, brandy. Of course.”

      He poured and offered; Violet sipped hers watchfully. She was not a drinker of brandy. It burned down her throat to her empty stomach. She disguised the shock with a bright smile.

      “Drink it down, child,” Dr. Grant said. “All of it. Brandy warms the soul.”

      Violet drank obediently. She was surprised to find that the glass trembled slightly in her hand.

      Dr. Grant walked to the phonograph and settled a disc on the turntable. “Do you like Stravinsky?” he asked. Before she could think of a reply, a violin zigzagged tinnily from the scalloped edges of the bell.

      A knock, and the door opened. The housekeeper arranged the tea things on the side table. Dr. Grant offered Violet a chair and poured her a cup. She sat and drank her tea, trying to think of something clever to say, while Dr. Grant carried another chair from near the sofa and placed it beside hers. He settled himself into it, tea in hand.

      “Here we are, quite comfortable,” he said.

      Looking back, Violet is never able to pinpoint the moment in which the tenor of the conversation began to change. Perhaps the note had always been there, from the beginning, from the morning she first walked into his office. Perhaps it had only amplified slowly, decibel by decibel, week by week, tea by intimate tea, so that Violet was not quite alarmed when Dr. Grant’s hand found its way to her knee, half an hour after she had entered his house, and he asked her whether she had left any admirers languishing behind her in New York.

      “No, none at all. I was far too busy for that.”

      “Surely some young man awakened your interest?”

      “No. Not one.” She met his gaze honestly. She could feel the pressure of his hand in every nerve of her body, heavy with significance. The music behind her built into an arrhythmic climax, and then fell away again.

      His fingers stroked the inside of her knee in languid movements. His other hand reached for his cup, applied it to his lips, and set it back carefully in the saucer. “You were wise, child, not to succumb to your natural physical urges with such unworthy objects. Young men who don’t understand you, as I do.”

      “I don’t remember feeling any such urges.”

      The stroking continued, an inch farther up her leg. “Nonsense, dear child. It’s perfectly natural, the sexual instinct. You should never feel ashamed of your desires; you should never feel as if you must deny the existence of these inclinations. Of what you want with me.”

      Another inch.

      Violet was dizzy with disbelief. She had half expected this moment, had at some level determined to accept it, and now that it had arrived, now that the impossible invitation had quite clearly been made, she found that her heart, her presumably logical and scientific heart, was beating too frantically to allow words.

      Dr. Grant picked up her hand and kissed it. His beard scratched her fingers. “Have I frightened you, child?”

      Violet wanted to sound worldly. “No.”

      “You are very beautiful. It’s natural that men should desire you.”

      “I