He’d looked down at her incredulously. “What work?”
“I mean what you were doing with the envelopes and the . . . the woman you used to meet.”
He hadn’t answered at once. They were leaning on the railing and little Kip, only a year old, lay snug in his perambulator, bundled up in blankets and fast asleep. Iris remembered how taut Sasha’s face looked. He’d worked without sleep for days, rolling up all the affairs at the embassy, and now he seemed to have fallen out of the habit of sleeping. He would go to bed long after Iris and wake up earlier, and during the night, if Kip stirred, he told Iris to go back to sleep, he would take care of the boy. So he was tired, but he wasn’t exhausted; it was the insomnia of the newly awakened, of somebody too thrilled with the possibilities of life to waste valuable minutes unconscious.
“Listen,” he’d said at last, “I was wrong to tell you about that. You should just forget we ever had that conversation.”
Iris was devastated. “I don’t understand. Don’t you trust me anymore?”
Sasha had turned and gathered her up against his thick, damp overcoat. “Darling, I trust you more than ever. You mean more to me than ever, a thousand times more. It’s why I can’t say a word to you. Not even if it kills me to hold back.”
“You need to talk to somebody,” she said. “You can’t do this all alone.”
“Just forget I ever said anything. Forget you ever knew anything. That’s all.”
Iris had stared at the perambulator, which they’d set next to the rivet-studded steel wall, sheltered from the wind, brakes on. She remembered thinking she should try harder. She remembered thinking this was one of those moments in a marriage, a crossroads, and she was taking the cowardly fork. If she were brave and clever—if she were Ruth, for example—she would insist he spill the beans and then become some kind of partner to him in all this. She would show him that she believed in what he believed—that she would do all she could to help him bring about an end to war and injustice.
Instead, she’d just said, “What if something goes wrong?”
Sasha had brushed back her hair and kissed her forehead. “Then you’ll tell Kip his father was trying to make the world a better place, that’s all.”
And from that day to this one, Iris had put the whole matter out of her head, as something beyond her control. Soon after arriving in Washington, they were dispatched to Zurich, then Turkey, and now London, and Iris had never seen the slightest clue that Sasha was, or was not, anything more than an ambitious member of the US diplomatic corps, working his way up the service through hard work and brilliance.
Until now.
The service lasted over an hour, and it seemed even longer. Sasha kept fidgeting and looking at his wristwatch. When at last the congregation was dismissed, Sasha hustled them out of the pew and through the door. Iris heard someone call her name as they descended the steps to the wet pavement outside. Sasha tugged her arm, but she turned around anyway to see Mrs. Peabody waving at her, little Peter on one side and Gladys the other.
But Sasha was already hurrying them up Addison Road. His hand still gripped the sleeve of her raincoat. As soon as they turned the corner into Oakwood Court, she shrugged it off.
“What on earth was that about? Why couldn’t we stop?”
“For God’s sake, I don’t have time to dither about after church.” He didn’t pause; if anything, he lengthened his stride as they approached number 10 on the right. Despite the drizzle, he hadn’t put up the umbrella. It poked out from under his elbow as he struggled to light a cigarette.
She tagged along behind, Kip on one hand and Jack on the other, calling over his shoulder, “But they’re our neighbors!”
“We’ve got friends enough already.”
“You’ve got friends! I haven’t got anybody. Just women you know. Women like that blond number last night.”
Sasha spun around. He wore a trench coat, dark with rain, and his wet fedora. He was terribly pale and thin, she realized, as gaunt as a cadaver. “What the devil do you mean by that?”
“Nothing. I just—nothing, of course.”
He tried again to light the cigarette, covering the match with his hand. From the corner of his mouth, he said, “You have no idea, Iris. No idea.”
“Of course I don’t. You don’t tell me a thing. You come and go and sneak notes out of hymnals—”
“What’s that?”
“I saw you. I saw you take that note out of the—” She glanced down at Jack, who dangled from her hand and jumped in an adjacent puddle. Kip had already wandered away to stand against the wall of the building, affecting an air of utter boredom, hands stuffed in the pockets of his suit like a sailor on leave whose trousers had been sliced off at the knee.