While Sasha banged around in the bathroom, Iris put on her lilac Sunday dress and forced Kip and Jack into their navy sailor suits, neatly pressed. They left the building at nine fifty-four, leaving just enough time to hurry around the corner under the shelter of an umbrella for the ten o’clock rites at St. Barnabas, the second and longer service of the morning. Privately she thought Sasha was more suited to St. Mary Abbots up Kensington High Street, which was larger and grander and more High Church than low, lots of ceremony and incantation and that kind of thing, but he seemed to prefer the convenience of a smaller neighborhood church.
The bell tolled gloomily, calling the faithful, or whatever they were. Sasha lengthened his stride and Kip, holding his father’s hand, stepped up his pace—her small determined boy. Iris held tight to Jack’s hand so he didn’t fall behind. When she glanced at Sasha, she saw he’d nicked himself shaving, and the cut was beginning to bleed again. She reached into the pocket of her raincoat for a handkerchief and fished it out just in time to catch the trickle before it landed on Sasha’s shirt collar.
At the touch of the handkerchief, Sasha flew around, throwing out his elbow. Kip stumbled and nearly fell—Iris cried out and stepped back. She clutched the handkerchief with his blood on it.
“Mama, what’s wrong?” said Jack.
Sasha looked at the red stain, then at her. His eyes were bloodshot. Probably he wasn’t even hungover, just still drunk from the night before.
“What’s the matter with you?” she exclaimed.
“Nothing. Nervy, I guess. I didn’t hit you, did I?”
“No.”
He took the handkerchief and shoved it in his pocket. “I’m sorry,” he said. He picked up the umbrella, which he’d dropped on the pavement, and took her arm with his other hand. St. Barnabas loomed nearby, soot-stained and Gothic. In another minute they reached the steps. They trudged up and through the open door just as the organ prepared to lurch into the processional. Sasha folded the umbrella and turned left, as usual, to walk up the side aisle to the pew where they always sat, without fail. The church only filled at Christmas and Easter, and their seats were still empty. Iris filed in silently behind Sasha—settled the boys—picked up her hymnal.
The first time they went inside this church, Iris was pleasantly surprised. Instead of the usual gloomy Gothic nave, obscured by pillars and arches, the space was wide open and full of light. Sasha said this was because the weight of the roof was supported entirely by the external buttressing. Well, whatever. Iris loved this openness because it allowed her to glance around as the hymn droned on and observe her fellow worshippers. She recognized some families from Oakwood Court, although she didn’t actually know any of them, except for the woman who lived on the second floor of their own block and had two small children—a boy named Peter, slightly older than Jack, and tiny, dainty Gladys, who was about a year younger. Their last name was Peabody. Mrs. Peabody caught Iris’s glance and smiled back, a little sternly because they were in church and supposed to be singing a hymn.
Or so Iris thought. But Mrs. Peabody might have looked stern because Jack, at that very second of connection, was slithering under the pew. Iris caught him just in time and discreetly dragged him back upward.
As she straightened, she saw Sasha take a piece of paper from his hymnal and tuck it into his jacket pocket, singing lustily as he did so—Bring me my bow of burning gold, bring me my arrows of desire.
The nick was bleeding again, but this time Iris didn’t try to stop it.
Since the long-ago day in Tivoli, when Iris confronted Sasha about the envelope in his suitcase and the woman he used to meet in the Borghese gardens, they’d only once discussed the subject. That was in December of 1941, after Pearl Harbor, when the US embassy in Rome was hastily closed on account of war, and they’d moved back to the United States in an almighty hustle. On the promenade deck of the steamship bound for New York one stormy afternoon, staring nervously out to sea for the possibility of German submarines, Iris had looked around to make sure nobody could hear them and said to Sasha, “I suppose this makes your work a little easier, doesn’t it? Now that we’re all fighting on the same side?”
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?”