“You’re quite in order to throw your drink in my face and call me a bastard.”
“I don’t have any left, and if it had been anyone other than you, Philip, I might have.”
“I shall take that as a very great compliment, my dear. Believe me, if it had been any other woman, I should have kept my mouth shut. But I feel certain that Digby must have many brilliant qualities in order to deserve such a wife, and I wish on nobody the pain of . . . of marital discord.”
“Of course.”
“There. I’ve said my piece. Shall I fetch you another drink?”
Iris rose. “No, thank you. I’m going to find my husband, I think.”
Philip rose and took her hand, and for a moment Iris thought he’d kiss it, like some courtier from a hundred years ago. But he only pressed her fingers between his two palms and said softly, “I think that would be a very good idea.”
She started to pull her hand away and paused. There were still tears in her eyes, and she was afraid to blink in case they might spill out. So she left them there, brimming, because she wanted to make something clear to Philip, though she wasn’t sure why.
“You know, we were very happy once, Sasha and I. In Rome, when we first married, we were very happy.”
“Well, then,” Philip said, with the same sad smile, “maybe you should go back.”
Could she? Could Iris and Sasha ever go back to Rome? It wasn’t the first time Iris had thought about this, but she knew the answer was no. The Rome of their early months no longer existed, because the two of them were no longer the Sasha and Iris who’d met and married there. And it had been wartime. The British embassy was closed, the French embassy was closed, same with the Belgians and the Dutch; the Italians and Germans were distracted by war. Only the Swiss remained in any significant numbers, and the Swiss were so busy taking on all the consular duties of the belligerent nations, they held no parties at all. In those early days, nothing stopped Sasha coming straight home as soon as he had finished working for the day, and he usually finished as early as he could.
They’d found a larger flat together, one with two additional bedrooms. The smaller one they decorated as a nursery. Iris had thought Sasha would be dismayed by her pregnancy, but really you couldn’t have found a more eagerly expectant father. After the fifth month or so, he took to measuring her waist with a tape every evening when he got home, so he could tally the progress of their child, millimeter by millimeter. When he drank, he drank with Iris, and then not very much because the doctor said she should only have a glass or two of red wine or possibly beer, which promoted good lactation.
On weekends he would take her out of Rome, usually to the little villa in Tivoli, so she could breathe plenty of fresh air. He never said anything about marriage, and neither did she. Not until Christmas, when Iris was too huge to do much more than lie on the sofa like some sort of beached humpback, did Harry finally—and somewhat sheepishly—suggest some official recognition of their union. Iris had looked at Sasha and Sasha had looked at Iris. “I’m game if you are,” he told her, gallant as he always was in those days.
After Harry left, Iris told Sasha they didn’t have to get married if he didn’t want to. Wasn’t he against marriage on principle, after all?
“On principle, yes. But as a personal matter, I can’t think of anything I want more.”
Iris couldn’t speak. She put her arms around his neck and kissed him.
“Besides,” he murmured, “it’s better for the child. Children want their parents properly married.”
So they were married the next week by the ambassador himself, Harry as witness, and held a little champagne reception afterward for a very few friends. The next morning Iris went into labor and Kip was born twenty-six harrowing hours later—almost ten pounds of him—eight minutes before the end of 1940. Iris didn’t learn until later that the doctor had taken Sasha aside at one point and asked him if Iris’s affairs were all in order, and that Sasha was so drunk by the time the baby was born, he registered the birth as female—not by accident, but because he didn’t actually remember.
Iris found her husband in the foyer on the balcony with Burgess and the blonde in the turtleneck, smoking cigarettes and drinking gin. “I’m going to get my coat,” she told him. “Meet you outside in ten minutes?”
She turned and walked away before he could react. Before she could see the expressions on the faces of Burgess and the blonde—those expressions she knew so well. Oh, the old battle-ax. Wives spoil all the fun, don’t they?