You Within Me

Chapter 2-2

A sumptuous ballroom hummed with conversation. Drinks flowed freely and luxurious snacks, still rare after years of wartime rationing, adorned several small tables in one corner. Violet suppressed a smile as she watched people eyeing food when they thought no one was looking. Have to look dignified in the face of chocolate petit fours, filled pastries and rum punch. It all seemed so artificial. If the party hadn’t been hosted by her father’s boss, she would have skipped it. Anything for the family business, she thought, rolling her eyes. Hope I don’t get the grippe from some i***t coughing in the punch.

Clutching a cup in her hand as camouflage against unwanted kindness, her book a comforting weight in her handbag, she moved away from the wall and circulated at random, approaching a crowd and then tiptoeing away.

Randall. Drat. Why does he have to be everywhere I want to go? Her former suiter sported a dashing scar that bisected his left eyebrow. His wild brown hair, which Violet had always loved, had been slicked back with pomade and now looked unnatural. Also greasy. His slim-cut brown suit highlighted a figure that had been transformed by years of hard work overseas from a slender youth to a fuller, more muscular shape.

Women in fancy dresses flocked around him, and he absorbed the adulation with a smug grin that made Violet want to retch.

Good thing I didn’t marry him, she thought. It doesn’t look like maturity improved him much.

Shaking her head, she approached another group.

“Violet,” Hiram shouted from the middle of a knot of younger men and women, mostly his work team.

Violet’s stomach clenched. “Hello, Father.”

“Look who’s here.”

Violet sighed. “Hello, Mr. Wilson.”

“Jim, please,” the young man urged. His fingers, their nails bitten to the quick, fluttered as though to smooth his slicked hair, but he ultimately didn’t touch. He cleared his throat and coughed but made no move to reach for the hankie in his breast pocket.

Nervous, and no wonder, with Father hovering over his shoulder. Still, nerves are no excuse to spread germs. “How is work?” she asked blandly, not accepting his invitation to use a more intimate name.

“We have fifteen new accounts this month!” the young man exclaimed. Again, he attempted to touch his hair and forced his hand back to his side. “The end of the war didn’t hurt business at all! And in spite of the grippe, business is thriving. We’re having a hard time containing contagion in the factories because we need so many workers to keep up with demand. They’re packed in like sardines.”

“How lovely for you,” she said sarcastically. I used to have nothing against the boy, apart from him being too young and too bossy. Now, his casual disregard for suffering doesn’t impress me. That makes me even less interested than before. “If you will excuse me, Father, Mr. Wilson, I must go and greet a friend.”

Turning slightly to the side, she meandered away. “This party is boring,” she muttered under her breath as she approached the punchbowl. Though more than half the liquid remained in her cup, she added a splash anyway. Perhaps some alcohol will help smooth the evening.

“Is everything all right, Miss Warren?” a voice murmured in her ear.

Violet glanced over her shoulder to see the pointy, refined features of her boss, linguistics professor Miles Owen.

“I didn’t expect to see you here,” she said meekly.

Miles raised one dark eyebrow. “Your father invited me.”

“Did he? I wonder why?” Noticing a few cookies on a plate beside the punchbowl, she snagged one and tugged her mask down so she could take a bite. “I would hardly think a bunch of money-grubbing steel tycoons would be interested in world languages.”

“On the contrary,” the professor protested, “They’re always looking for new markets and new customers. Eventually, they will run out of territory in the United States. That means it’s important to learn new languages so that they can expand.”

“Interesting,” Violet said, tucking her mask up around her face. “So, from the realm of pure academia, you’ve managed to capture the interest of the captains of industry? That’s quite a coup.”

“I think so,” Owen agreed. “I may end up relying on you even more heavily to continue the cataloging and translating of ancient documents, so I can attend to more… profitable matters.”

“I’d be delighted,” Violet replied. “I’m able to read hieratic without a guide, and my hieroglyphics are almost as good as yours. Do you think, if all goes well in the next year or so, I could get some credit toward the translations?” Snack finished, she tucked the mask up around her face.

“It’s possible,” Owen said. He ladled himself a glass of the potent punch. “We’ll see what the future holds.” He downed his drink in a single gulp, coughed, and poured another. It too disappeared quickly.

“Boss, you might want to take it easy on the punch,” Violet suggested. “It’s pretty strong. You don’t want to look bad in front of all these steel tycoons.”

Owen raised bushy eyebrows but obediently set his cup down. “So, are you here with anyone?” he asked, fruit and alcohol wafting on his breath. She could smell it right through the gauze of her mask.

“Yes,” Violet said.

Owen’s face fell.

“With my father,” she added.

His dark eyes lit up.

Something in his expression alarmed Violet, and she quickly scooted away from him, muttering a vague excuse in his direction.

Annoyed by the entire party, Violet retreated to the hallway, where late arrivals had long since stopped appearing. Though a lack of windows in this interior space prevented moonlight from reaching her, she found a spot below an electric wall sconce where the light sufficed for her to see her book.

Tugging the ragged, loosely bound volume from her bag, she examined the leathery cover again. With its strange markings of embossed hieratic that she could not read or understand, it frustrated her.

“Someday, I will learn your secrets,” she whispered.

The leather seemed to pulse under her fingers. She caressed it.

“Oh, here you are. What do you have there?”

Violet glanced up to see Miles Owen standing beside her. Or rather, leaning. His shoulder rested heavily against the yellow floral wallpaper.

“A book,” Violet replied. “I bought it on holiday in Greece several years ago, and I’ve been trying to read it ever since. Have you ever seen marks like these?”

Carefully and with great reluctance, she extended the volume to her boss.

He examined the cover with narrowed eyes and then opened it with less care than Violet liked. Lips pursing, Owen ran his fingers over the unfamiliar hieratic. Then he shook his head, shut the cover and handed the volume back to Violet. “Looks like you’ve been rooked, my dear.” A soft exhalation and a waft of alcohol seemed to be a burp.

Violet frowned. “What do you mean?”

“That is not a real written language,” he replied bluntly. “It looks like someone bound up a collection of children’s scribbles and bound it all in a goat’s skin, maybe as a gift for a grandmother. There’s nothing to see here. I hope you didn’t spend too much on it.”

Violet reclaimed the volume and tucked it into her bag without a word. His opinion upset her, but why let that show? What did you expect, really? You know how he feels about himself. If he doesn’t understand something, it must be fake. That’s Mr. Owen to the core, and deep down, he knows it, which is why he lets you do the majority of the work while he takes the credit.

“Miss Warren…”

Violet’s head shot up at the tone that had crept into Mr. Owen’s voice. “Mr. Owen?”

“Miles, please, Violet.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“It was clever of you to step out into the hallway.”

She lowered the eyebrow again. Lowered into a posture of suspicion. With her free hand, she groped inside her oversized handbag and fingered the mother-of-pearl inlay on the grip of her derringer. “I wasn’t enjoying the party much,” she said bluntly. “I wasn’t trying to be clever; I was trying to escape the noise.”

“As was I,” he said. “Since we both wanted to escape the noise, I can think of several quiet things to do to pass the time.” He reached out.

She stepped back. “I doubt your wife would approve of this particular pastime.”

“As many lovers as she’s had, I doubt she’d care,” he told her bluntly. “I can assure you I do not.”

“I do,” Violet replied. “I have no interest in you, Mr. Owen. You’re married, and let’s not forget that you’re also quite full of yourself. I do the work, and you take the glory. What part of that makes you think I’m attracted to you?”

He lurched forward again, lips pursing, hands grasping.

Violet stepped to the side.

Drunk and unbalanced, Mr. Owen stumbled and fell face-first on the floor. A snore emerged.

Violet shook her head. I hope he doesn’t remember this exchange at all. I like my job, and I’d like to keep it a while longer. Leaving her boss to his booze-induced nap, she stepped back into the annoying party, intent on finding her father and telling him she was going home. The older I get, the less I enjoy events like these. I should buy a house and host my own parties. I would only invite polite, intelligent people, status be damned. No captains of industry. No egocentric boors. Wouldn’t that be nice?

From inside her bag, her book rested against her thigh, a comforting presence in a room filled with people who wanted to own her without bothering to understand her.

I will never be owned. Never.