That kind of thing. Doesn’t that kind of thing include delivering lectures to intelligence officers at the KGB? The nerve of him! But of course he spoke—like we all do—to the microphones listening silently in their hidden corners. Back in Rome, Fox had assured me that Digby wanted out of the Soviet Union. But as I sit and listen to Sasha rattle on about his life in the Soviet Union, it seems to me he’s awfully cool. He’s as cool as ice. Probably you have to be, doing what he did. But the Digby of Rome—the ardent Bolshevist delivering secrets to the Soviet Union because he believed so passionately in world communism—wasn’t cool at all. He was a drunk. He argued his politics out loud, where anyone could hear them. He spilled his secrets to women, just to get them into bed. He’d only gotten worse after the war, by all accounts.

This Digby seems . . . well, happy.

I turn back to Iris and ask how she’s feeling. How much longer until the baby flies the coop? She puts her hand on her belly, the way expectant women do, and says any day now.

“You look well. You look exactly like one of those women who gives birth in the hayfield and gets right back up again.”

“Well, I’m not,” she says, a little cold. “I’m not at all. God knows, I wish I were.”

I open my mouth to ask what seems to me a logical question—namely, why she keeps having them, in that case. But Digby rises from his chair and wanders over to put his hand on her shoulder, and I suppose he knows what I’m thinking.

“The trouble is, she forgets. They get to be a couple of years old and she wants another one, and I haven’t got the heart to say no.”

“I don’t think it’s your heart that can’t say no,” I tell him crisply, and for an instant nobody says anything. Then Digby bursts out laughing.

“They’re a lot of trouble, all right, but they have a way of reminding you of the future, and what’s important. And they’re a hell of a lot of fun, too. Why—”

As if on cue, the youngest—her name is Claire, I’ve been told—toddles charmingly into the room in her yellow dress and makes straight for her daddy’s leg. He bends down so she can whisper in his ear. The expression on his face is so earnest, so devoted to what she’s telling him, it stops my heart. Then he rises and takes her hand. He says solemnly, “If you’ll excuse me a moment. Claire and I have something important to attend to.”