When we cross the street, I look over my shoulder. But nobody’s there, after all.
We reach the atelier. Orlovsky unlocks the iron-studded door. He ushers me inside first, and as he turns to follow me, he seems to look both ways, up and down the sidewalk, before he steps into the vestibule and closes and locks the door behind him.
“When do we meet this friend of yours?” I ask.
Orlovsky replaces the walking stick in the stand and puts his hand to the small of my back. “Is here already. He said not to waste any time.”
“Good. I agree.”
I say this bravely to stifle a tremor of panic. We climb the stairs, which spiral upward in a pleasant medieval way. The damp, cool smell of the stones wafts by. I find myself wondering who he is, this contact of Orlovsky’s, and what he does. Is he some kind of double agent nested inside the Soviet embassy? A disaffected Italian Communist?
All these possibilities whirl through my mind as we reach the first floor and walk down the hallway, at the end of which lies the studio that runs the width of the courtyard below. None of them comes close to the truth. The man who looks up from the drafting table, who scrapes the chair back and stands politely, is a man I already know.
“Miss Macallister,” says Sumner Fox. “You’d better take a seat. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”
Iris
July 1948
London
At half past six the next morning, the boys burst into the room and jumped on the bed.
“Mama! Daddy! I lost a tooth!” Kip said.
Next to her, Sasha groaned and rolled on his stomach. Iris’s head throbbed. She must have drunk more champagne than she realized last night. She glanced at Sasha—out cold—and sat up painfully. “You lost a tooth! Where?”
He showed her.
“There was blood all over his nightshirt and Mrs. Betts put it to soak!” Jack announced.
“The tooth or the nightshirt?”
“The nightshirt, of course! You look awful, Mama.”
“Not as awful as Daddy,” she said.
“Does this mean we don’t have to go to church?” Kip asked, bouncing a little.
Iris swung her feet to the floor and stared at her toes.
“I don’t know, darling, but I guess we’d better start breakfast, just in case.”
Even though Sasha was an atheist, the family went to church most Sundays, a habit they established when they moved to London. Sasha said it was important for the boys to have a proper religious education, so they could disavow God from a position of confidence when they were old enough to reason things out for themselves. Besides, you met a lot of important people at church on a Sunday.
So Iris rolled out of bed and trudged to the bathroom to make herself a little more human. On the way back to the bedroom, she picked up Sasha’s discarded clothes and hung them in his wardrobe. Sasha himself hadn’t moved. He sprawled on his stomach, hair in disorder, perfectly naked—thank God for the blankets. There was just enough light that she could see his face, so relaxed it was almost angelic, relieved of all its sins. Iris remembered what Philip had said last night—the hearings—and wondered why Sasha hadn’t said anything to her about them. Because he wasn’t worried about anything this woman might reveal in her testimony, or because he was?
She tucked the blanket around him and headed down the hall toward the kitchen, where the boys were making the usual joyful racket—take that, Mrs. Bannister in the downstairs flat—as Mrs. Betts flitted around the room getting breakfast. Jack spotted Iris first.
“Mama! Mrs. Betts said I could have hot cocoa with breakfast! Because it’s Sunday!”
“That sounds like an awful good idea.”
“Good morning, Mrs. D,” Mrs. Betts said cheerfully. “Coffee’s in the pot.”
Iris sat in the chair next to Jack and reached for the coffeepot. “You’re an angel.”
“I’ve gone ahead and laid out their suits for church. Master Kip’s going to need a new jacket soon, he’s grown that fast. I do believe he’ll be tall, like his father.”
Mrs. Betts had come to them through some reference at the embassy. She was about fifty, extremely slender, with blue eyes and graying blond hair she kept tidy in an old-fashioned bun. She’d previously worked for a large, wealthy, traditional English household, and Iris couldn’t break her of certain habits, like calling a seven-year-old boy Master Kip. Still, she appreciated the efficiency with which Mrs. Betts approached her job. Some of the other wives complained about the help—this was a common pastime, apparently—and how you couldn’t get a housemaid to cook or mind the children, or a cook to clean the parlor or wash the laundry; ask for a housekeeper and you’d get a woman who expected to run the other servants, not to do any real work herself. But Mrs. Betts did. Iris considered the family lucky to have her. Mrs. Betts could get away with murder and keep her job, but she only asked for a half day off every week, Sunday morning to Sunday afternoon, so she could visit her mother in Clapham.