“I don’t care. I don’t care if it happens. Do you?”
“It would be inconvenient.”
“Well, it didn’t happen the first time, did it? I think it would be wonderful.”
Sasha stuffed himself back inside his trousers and buttoned them. “You do realize there’s a war going on out there, don’t you?”
She rolled on her side and ran her finger along the bridge of his nose. “But do you care, or not?”
“I don’t want to put you in any kind of position, that’s all.”
“I’d say you’ve already put me in all kinds of positions, and I’ve enjoyed them very much.”
Sasha tried and failed to suppress a laugh. “Fair enough.”
“What about your position, though? That’s what I’m getting at. What would you think, if it happens? Would you want me to get rid of it?”
Finally he turned his head and looked at her. His face radiated that gleaming flush she knew so well. True, he wore a rubber most of the time, but not every single time, and sometimes when he wasn’t wearing a rubber he didn’t—or couldn’t—pull out. So Iris wanted to pin him down. She wanted to hear this from his own mouth, in case it did happen. Maybe today, who knew. Maybe it already had happened. What about last week, in the cloakroom of the British ambassador’s residence? What a messy occasion that was, but these mistakes would occur when you didn’t plan ahead. Just now, for example.
Iris patted his cheek, not quite a slap. A few blades of grass fell away from her fingers. “Well? What do you say to that?”
He trapped her hand against his skin and leaned over the inches of grass to kiss her.
“I say we cross that bridge if we come to it.”
The rest of Saturday passed in a haze, and most of Sunday, too. Sunday afternoon, as planned, Sasha drove into town to find a telephone box, from which he would call Harry to say that he’d had car trouble and would have to stay the night while the engine was being repaired, so he wouldn’t return to Rome until Monday. Foolproof!
Iris asked to go along, too. She was curious about the town—she loved old buildings and the art inside them. But Sasha said no, he’d run his errands faster if he knew she was waiting for him.
“Errands? What errands?”
“You’ll see,” he said, kissing her good-bye.
So Iris just wandered drowsily around the garden, listening to the stream and to the songbirds, until she remembered her sketchbook. Of course, she’d had to pack it after all, under Ruth’s knowing eye, and her charcoals, too. She headed into the house and the small, hot bedroom. Neither Iris nor Sasha ever took the time to unpack, and the sketchbook lay at the bottom of her valise, under all her crumpled clothes, forgotten. She dug it out and turned to leave.
But some instinct forced her to stop at the door. The shutters were closed and the room was dark, and the air still smelled of human sleep. Iris felt as if she’d lived an entire lifetime since they’d arrived here Saturday morning, had burst into this room and made ravenous love, and afterward she’d brushed her hair in the scrap of mirror above the dresser. She’d almost forgotten about that envelope in Sasha’s suitcase, and what it contained.
But not quite.
Iris rested her hand on the doorframe and stared at her short, round fingernails. A little dirty, perhaps, even though she and Sasha had bathed in the stream together that morning, and Sasha had soaped and washed her thoroughly. But that’s what you got when you spent the day outdoors. When you spent the day laughing and playing, walking and talking, drinking and kissing, rolling stark naked on the grass and the floor and the bed, away on your first holiday with the man you loved—the man who loved you.
Who trusted you.
Iris tapped her fingers against the wood and turned around. She bent over Sasha’s valise, still on the floor, and opened the lid to rummage around.
She looked in the main compartment and the small one, the zippered pocket next to the lining.
The envelope was gone.
When Sasha returned, an hour later, Iris sat on the garden wall and stared into the fallen sun. The sketchbook lay open on the bricks beside her, along with a bottle of wine. Sasha had done most of the drinking since they arrived, as usual—a bottle of wine at lunch and another at dinner, gin and tonic to quench the thirst in between—but this time Iris retrieved the bottle from the cellar, a red wine from Tuscany, easy on the palate, and drank it solemnly atop the garden wall.
Iris’s first thought, when he walked through the doorway onto the grass, was how beautiful he looked. Did she think he was plain when she first saw him, at the Villa Borghese? You could argue that his features were not beautiful, sure, that his big ears and long nose and bony cheeks and especially that sharp brow were maybe coarse and not in perfect balance, as in a work of art. But the overall effect just dazzled her. His height, and his hair, and the ultramarine eyes. He walked straight up to her and put his hands on either side of her hips and kissed her. He smelled of sweet liquor, limoncello maybe, the kind that Italians drink as digestivo.