“You’re the most considerate husband in the world, and I’m so glad I married you.”
Fox winks a pale eye. “Sleep well, buttercup.”
He reaches out to flick off the lamp and rise from the bed. I feel him move about in those un-Foxlike maroon silk pajamas that make me smile, just thinking about them. He gathers a pillow and blanket. As soundless as a cat, he walks back across the rug to the chaise longue next to the wall, where he arranges himself without a single creak.
Iris
August 1948
Dorset, England
Over drinks in the library of Honeysuckle Cottage, Iris worked up the nerve to ask Philip Beauchamp about his children.
“I have three. Two girls, Dorothy and Hannah. A boy, Philip. He’s the youngest. A bit of a surprise. We hadn’t been trying for another. They are magnificent, of course. Above average by every possible measure.”
“Children always are. Do you see them often?”
“Not any longer, I’m afraid. My wife took them to Canada with her. They’re supposed to spend summers with me, but I’m afraid it didn’t work out this year.”
“Why not?”
He swirled the sherry in his glass. “She had some excuse, I forget what. I don’t mean to speak against her. It was a disappointment. I’m taking leave in September. Sail over and see if she’ll let me—if I can visit with them for a bit.”
“It’s outrageous. The government should do something. To keep a father from his children, it’s terrible!”
“The government takes the view that young children are almost always better off with the mother, which I imagine is quite true in most cases.”
“But you’re a wonderful father. I can just tell—the way you play with the boys and with Aunt Vivian’s girls. I think it’s wonderful the way you pay attention to them. God knows they—” Iris bit off the end of the sentence. From the kitchen came the faint, happy noise of the children helping Mrs. Betts with the dinner—certain kids more helpful than others. Aunt Vivian stretched out on the chaise longue, deep in conversation with a neighbor of Philip’s, some army major who saw action in North Africa and the Italian campaign and loved to talk all about it with pretty women. Iris sat with Philip on the sofa next to the bookcases. They were filled with old, musty Victorian novels that Iris read after the children were in bed, and the house was quiet, and there was nothing to do but commiserate with Aunt Vivian and wait for the telephone to ring with some drunken, incoherent confession from Sasha, or else the policeman who’d found him on a London park bench at six in the morning.
“We do write frequently,” said Philip. “She’s been good about that.”
“But naturally she reads your letters first, before handing them over.”
“One must assume so.”
Iris laid her hand on his knee. Philip turned his face away.
“If you’ll excuse me a moment, I think I’ll have a smoke outside before dinner.”
A half hour later, Iris found him beyond the lawn and the shrubbery, all the way near the sea cliffs. He stood with his hands in his pockets and stared over the Channel waters, pink and purple with sunset.
“You almost had me for a moment,” she said, “and then I remembered you don’t smoke.”
“Ah, foiled again.”
“Dinner’s ready, if you’re ready to come in.”
He held out his elbow. “Shall we?”
Iris took his elbow with her hand, but she didn’t turn back to the house. “Philip, I’m so sorry. I wish I could help.”
“Iris—”
“I hope—I’ve been worried—I hope it doesn’t hurt you, seeing all of ours all running about—”
“No! God, no. The opposite. I can’t tell you what it means to me. Your taking me in like this, like a stray uncle.”
She couldn’t help it. She lifted her hand and found his mauled ear, the scars on the side of his face. “Not like an uncle at all,” she said.
The scars were softer than she expected—like touching a palm, lightly calloused. Philip didn’t flinch, even when her finger traced the ridge of mangled cartilage that was once a perfect ear. He lifted his fingers and touched the back of her hand.
“Do you know something, you’re the only woman who actually looks at me. Straight at me, I mean, not sideways.”
“I love to look at you.”
Where did those words come from? Some other Iris must have said them, some Iris she didn’t even know. The real Iris adored her husband, in spite of all his flaws and his anguish; the real Iris never dreamed of looking at another man. The real Iris kept her husband’s secrets. The real Iris was loyal only to Sasha, and the things that Sasha was loyal to; she understood that he did what he did—drank what he drank—because he was torn apart.