Iris drank her champagne and continued. “Anyway, all will be forgiven in August, if the three of us can survive that long. Will we see much of you?”
“That’s all up to you, my dear. Generally I go down after Ascot and don’t come up to London again until after Boxing Day. But I wouldn’t dream of intruding on your summer holidays.”
“You wouldn’t be intruding at all. How far away is the main house?”
“About a mile, I should think. Enough we shouldn’t be on top of each other.”
“Oh, but I’d be delighted if we were on top of each other!” Iris said, without thinking. Philip turned a little red and started to laugh, and Iris clapped her hand over her mouth. “I didn’t mean—”
“Of course you didn’t. It’s part of your charm.”
Iris looked away and said, “What were the three of you talking about when I came up? You were awfully engrossed in each other.”
“Oh, just business. These hearings in Washington, you know. The—what do you call it?—the Un-American Activities Committee. Such a typically American name. There’s a woman testifying right now who claims to have run a Soviet spy network in the State Department for years.”
Iris didn’t flinch, though her blood ran cold. “Soviets in the State Department? That’s nonsense.”
“It’s all these chaps, you know, bright young things who radicalized at university in the thirties, when the capitalist economies went to pieces. They very fashionably joined the Communist Party as students and wound up recruited by the NKVD, or whatever they called themselves back then, the Soviet intelligence service.”
“But surely they all shed their illusions as they got older?”
“Most of them, of course. I daresay the Nazi-Soviet pact did for a great many. Stalin’s thuggery, the famines. But it’s like a religion, you know. To the true fanatic, everything and anything can be twisted around to prove what you believe in.”
Was it her imagination, or did Philip stare at her with particular focus as he said this? Iris forced a smile, a hopeless shake of the head. “Well, I certainly hope it isn’t true. I hate betrayal of any kind.”
“Yes, you do,” Philip said kindly, “which is why I confess I’ve been dithering a bit with you. Wondering whether to bring the subject up.”
“The hearings, you mean?”
“Not the hearings. It’s about your husband, I’m afraid.”
Iris swallowed down the rest of the champagne. “Sasha? Goodness.”
“Do you mind if we sit?” He gestured to the nearby sofa—a deep, worn leather Chesterfield flanked by a pair of mismatched lamp tables. Iris followed the direction of his arm and sat on the edge of the cushion, holding her empty glass. He sat next to her, against the back of the sofa, more relaxed, at a respectful distance but still close enough to be private.
“I hope it’s not something serious,” she said.
“You may kick me if I’m being officious. It’s only because I consider you a friend, Iris, whom I admire very much. I wouldn’t dream of coming between a man and his wife—”
“Goodness,” she said again.
“—but I’ve watched your distress in silence for the past few months, and I feel the time has come for me to butt in, as they say, because it may do some good. I beg your pardon. I’ll come to the point. We are all sinners, and I don’t judge a man for his sins, and we all drink perhaps a little too much in these circles, yours truly among the guilty. But Digby—stop me at once if I distress you—seems to have, shall we say, passed some point of no return, in recent months.” Philip peered into Iris’s face. “Do you hate me?”
“No. I’d be an idiot to tell you it’s not true.”
“I suppose what I’m asking is whether there’s anything I can do to help. Whether you’re aware of how much, and how dangerous—There’s talk of indiscretion, the kind of thing that can ruin a man’s career.”
“I’m . . . I’m so sorry.”
“For God’s sake, it’s not your fault. Frankly, I think the man’s a fool to go out drinking all night with the lads, when he’s got a woman like you waiting for him at home, and the children, too—wonderful boys. And I wouldn’t have said a thing—I didn’t mean to say a thing, not a word, but—well, there’s a story from a reliable source—the other night, at the Gargoyle—I’ll spare the sordid details, but perhaps one might be wise to convince him to spend all of August down in Dorset. Keep him away from chaps like Burgess and that sort. Good fresh air and family life, I think it would do him a world of good.”
Philip stopped and caught his breath, like a man relieved of a burden. He looked at her anxiously, and Iris gathered herself, because she hated to see Philip so uncomfortable.
“Yes, thank you. I think so, too. I’ve been trying to convince him, really I have. Because of course—well, I’m not a fool. You’re very kind, you’ve been so tactful, but I’m not a fool.”
Philip reached into his pocket and gave her a handkerchief.
“You see I’m arguing nobly against my own interest, because I should very much rather have you all to myself,” he said.
“You’re too sweet.”
“I hope I haven’t been a bother.”
“No, no! You’ve meant well, you’ve been so kind. I know how difficult it must have been to say anything at all—such an awkward—a terrible thing to have to say to a-a wife.” Iris kept the sobs under control, just a dab or two at the corners, though what she really wanted was to lock herself in a closet and bawl buckets of humiliation.
“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.