Our Woman in Moscow(57)
“It’s not a lost cause. It’s the most important cause in the world.”
Iris closed her eyes.
“Someone’s got to do this. You don’t understand—I’m working to end war, end all this terrible injustice; look what capitalism’s bought us, the means to destroy the whole world! I want to bring about a revolution that—”
“You want to feel important, that’s all. It doesn’t matter how. Communism is just what fell in your lap at the right moment. It might just as easily have been—I don’t know, Hinduism.”
“If you really think that, you’re an idiot.”
Iris sat up again and pointed to the door. “Go. Go sleep on the sofa.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake—”
“Go.”
Sasha stared at her in the light from the lamp on her nightstand. For an instant, she wavered. His blue eyes were wide and hurt, his hair askew. He looked more like a wounded animal than an angry husband. For once, he smelled of nothing but soap and toothpaste and warm, scrubbed skin. He was clean and perfect—uncorrupted. She heard the words again in her head—You’re an idiot—yet even in the full vortex of fury, she saw his beautiful face and the small, beloved fragments of his beautiful soul—her Sasha—and thought, Just apologize, just say you’re sorry, God knows I’ll take you back, I’ll always take you back.
But Sasha couldn’t hear Iris’s thoughts, or he didn’t care. He climbed out of bed, took his pillow and the spare blanket folded at the end, and walked out of the bedroom.
Sasha always locked his study door when he was out, but Iris knew where he kept the key—behind the frame of the mirror above the mantel in the dining room.
The next morning, after Sasha left for work, Iris unlocked the study door and slipped inside. Her husband was not an immaculate man. There was always something slightly askew about his dress, even if you couldn’t quite pinpoint what was out of order, and his study was no different. Except, perhaps, that you could pinpoint the mess, because it lay all around you—the stacks of unfiled papers, the books shoved in odd corners of the bookshelves, the broken lampshade sitting upside-down next to the lamp. The morning sunshine speared through the window and struck a framed map that hung off-kilter on the opposite wall. Mrs. Betts was only allowed to clean the room while Sasha was inside it. He liked his privacy, he always said, and until now, Iris was happy to let him enjoy it. Wasn’t it better not to know?
She didn’t have much time. Mrs. Betts would be whipping up the hot cocoa this moment, and Jack would drink it in the kitchen, legs swinging, asking the housekeeper questions that she’d answer as she finished washing up the breakfast dishes. But Jack’s three-year-old powers of attention were not vast. He might drink half the cocoa and slide off the chair in search of new amusement, probably prodding his brother—currently slumped on the sofa in the drawing room, reading his book—and Iris would have to take them both to the park or something. So she didn’t waste time idling about the room. She went straight to the file cabinet and found it locked, as she expected. To hunt for the key would be time wasted. She turned instead to the desk drawers. There were two on each side—both drawers on the left were locked, and so was the bottom drawer on the right, but the top one slid right open.
Had he left it unlocked by accident, or did he keep nothing important there?
Iris rummaged around the interior. It seemed to be the place where Sasha dropped everything that didn’t have a place—matchbooks and pens, rubber erasers and half-eaten chocolate bars, a pair of scissors and a small pot of glue, a compact flashlight from which the batteries had been removed. Underneath an A-Z London road atlas, she found a pair of snapshots. She took them out and examined them.
The first one was of her. Iris held it close and squinted at the blurred figure, wearing a dark, dowdy swimsuit she recognized as the one she hurriedly packed into her suitcase when she first left New York for Rome, age twenty-one. She was amazed. The Iris in that photograph was so gamine and perfectly formed! You didn’t notice the dowdiness of the swimsuit at all, just the miniature grace of the figure inside it. How had she ever been so doubtful of her appeal? Her short dark hair curled on her neck, her breasts stood out firm and round beneath the swimsuit. Her arms stretched wide on either side, like a crucifixion, but instead of agony she wore an expression of delighted love, as if she were welcoming the photographer into an embrace.
For the life of her, Iris couldn’t remember Sasha taking that photograph. But she did recognize the setting. A couple of weeks after Ruth left for New York, once his workload diminished a little, Sasha had taken Iris away to a resort on the Amalfi Coast for a short holiday—to celebrate, he said. It was a honeymoon in all but name. He booked a luxurious room overlooking the beach, and the days passed in a haze of champagne and salt and sunshine. One afternoon, when they returned from a few hours’ frolic in the sea, Iris discovered vases and vases filled with night jasmine, because she had told Sasha at breakfast that jasmine was her favorite flower. Even now, when she smelled jasmine, she thought of making love to Sasha in a hot, luxurious hotel room. God, that was a lifetime ago. To think the baby inside that flat stomach was Kip! She touched her own joyful, innocent, monochrome face and picked up the other photograph.
Now this. Who on earth was this? Another woman, a dark-haired woman in a plain uniform, casting an expression of resigned amusement at the camera, or the person behind it. Her arms were folded against her chest. She had a tall, rangy look to her, and her face seemed familiar, though Iris couldn’t place her. Her eyes were pale, almost certainly blue. She wasn’t beautiful, but she had a wide-faced, intelligent, animal look to her that snagged your attention. Iris stared at the snapshot, trying to place her. Wouldn’t she remember a face like that?