The flat was typical of London. It was both grand and shabby and smelled of coal smoke. The ceiling was the color of tea and mysteriously stained. The wallpaper curled from the corners, and the plasterwork was liable to crumble from some noble design above your head and into your hair—or worse, your drink. Speaking of drinks. Those were all right, at least. They flowed abundantly from bottles of wine and champagne, bottles of scotch and gin and brandy and so on, mixed—if they were mixed at all—in straightforward, no-nonsense combinations. As for food, well. You might be offered tinned mackerel on crackers, or a square of rubber masquerading as cheddar cheese. But it was best not to think too much about what you were eating, Iris had learned. Three years after the end of the war, Great Britain was a cramped, bland, ungenerous land of ration cards and making do.

Iris glanced down at the tidbit between her index finger and her thumb—some kind of colorless, elderly olive stuffed with pink matter. The old Iris would’ve tossed it into a houseplant, but Iris was now a seasoned diplomatic wife, so she knew the trick of chewing and swallowing food without quite passing it over your tongue. Then she drank champagne to chase down the olive—not bad—and when she looked up again, the man was still watching her.

SHE FOUND SASHA IN the study, between a bookshelf and a fog of cigarette smoke. She heard his laugh first, deep and abundant, about three-fifths of the way to his usual state of drunkenness at these things. He held his whiskey and his cigarette in the same hand. He was chatting earnestly with two other people—a scarred, silver-haired man named Philip Beauchamp, a friend of hers and Sasha’s; and a handsome blond woman in a snug, rust-colored turtleneck sweater over a long tweed skirt, unfamiliar. The woman sucked on her cigarette and examined Iris as she sidled up to Sasha.

“There’s a man staring at me in the other room,” she told him.

“Is there? I don’t blame him.”

“He looks a little unsavory, if you ask me.”

“Seedy chap, eh?” said Philip. “Must be Burgess. Dark hair, pudgy sort, probably drunk?”

“I think so.”

Philip nodded. “Burgess, all right. If he makes a nuisance of himself, swat him with a newspaper.”

The woman in the turtleneck laughed. “Don’t listen to him. Burgess won’t make a nuisance of himself with you. Perhaps your husband”—more laughter passed among them—“but women only by consent.”

Iris laughed, too, though she wasn’t quite in on the joke. The other thing about the diplomatic service, everyone knew one another—not just the outward man, but all his foibles, his eccentricities, his past indiscretions, things that among women would be called gossip—all shared without words, like a secret handshake.

“Mind you, he’s got a first-rate brain,” said Philip.