“Caught these drunkards coming up the beach! Trespassing on the terrace!” yelled the other man.
“For God’s sake, Houlihan!” Abingdon shouted. “If I wanted you to call the constabulary, I’d have done it myself!”
“It’s my duty to protect this property, sir, and by God—”
“Oh, shut up, you idiot!” Sasha yelled.
“Shut up? I’ll not be told to shut up by some bloody American!”
Sasha lurched forward, grabbed the baton from the constable, and started to beat Houlihan about the shoulders.
Burgess shouted to Davenport, “For God’s sake, take him down!”
Davenport made a lunge for Sasha and the baton, but Sasha had several inches on him, to say nothing of all that pent-up drunken fury. He roared in rage and turned on Davenport. They crashed to the stone terrace together in some kind of struggling, punching tangle—not unlike last night’s lovemaking, Iris thought loopily—then she screamed and reached for Sasha’s shoulder. He rolled away from her, right on top of Davenport.
A sickening crunch escaped one of them.
Davenport howled in agony and went limp.
Abingdon let Iris use the telephone, not because he was any less angry but because he wanted them gone. They carried Davenport into the nearest room and laid him out on a sofa, where Sasha sat beside him, apologizing and berating himself. She dialed the operator and asked for Highcliffe. The operator asked her name and she said simply, “Iris.”
A moment later, Philip Beauchamp’s voice came down the line. “Iris! What’s the matter?”
“I can’t even begin to tell you. I don’t suppose you’ve got some kind of motorboat handy, have you?”
The thing about Philip, he didn’t ask why, or how. He gathered the necessary details and told Iris he’d be there as quickly as he could. He showed only a single sign of humanity—or maybe this matter-of-factness was itself one giant example of humanity—when Iris, by now on the brink of tears, thanked him for his kindness.
“All you ever have to do is ask me, my dear,” he said.
Iris, Sasha, and Aunt Vivian returned to Honeysuckle Cottage just as the sun cracked pink above the eastern horizon. Aunt Vivian climbed the stairs without a word and found her bedroom. Sasha had already downed most of a bottle of gin from Abingdon’s private stock, and Iris had to support him up each step—not an easy task.
For once, shame had silenced him. Davenport declined to press any charges. He was at the hospital now, having his leg set, while Burgess and Philip Beauchamp dealt with the telephone calls and paperwork, to ensure there was no international diplomatic incident. There was nothing left for Sasha to do but sleep off the champagne and the gin and the shame and then figure out how to salvage what was left of his career.
Iris guided him into the bathroom first and told him to use the toilet, to change his clothes. She left to fetch his pajamas from the dresser and handed them through the crack in the door. As she turned away, she heard him vomit.
Eventually he staggered to the bedroom. She rolled him into bed and threw the blankets over him. Though she was exhausted, she didn’t climb in beside him. What was the point? The children would be up soon, and anyway he stank of vomit and piss and gin and shame. Instead she turned for the door. The sound of her name stopped her.
“What is it? Do you need something else?”
Sasha stared at her with bleary blue eyes. His cheeks were streaked with tears. “I need to tell you something.”
“Tell me tomorrow.”
Sasha shook his head painfully and beckoned her close. “Can’t wait.”
Iris trudged back to the bed. He crooked his finger and she leaned a little closer, though the stench of him turned her stomach.
“Well?”
“I slept with Ruth.”
Iris’s head jerked. She stepped back. “What did you say?”
“The night you were in the hospital, after the accident. The first night. And the one after that. Maybe another time? I can’t remember, sort of blurs together now. Not sure why, it just happened.”
For some reason, Iris didn’t feel anything at all. The night had numbed her—so many shocks—this was just another one. It just happened, he’d said. Maybe it was a dream. She tilted her head and stared at him as if he were a foreign object in her bed, a bug or something.
“It was you I really wanted,” he said. “If that makes any difference.”
Iris lifted her hand and slapped him once on the cheek. His head snapped back and he smiled at her, pleased. She slapped him again and walked away—returned to the bathroom and cleaned up the mess—he’d aimed for the toilet, at least, and mostly succeeded—while she ran a hot bath.