An Unexpected Guest (10 page)

A terrorist.

Thank God she hadn’t said anything about the children. Thank God she hadn’t given her name either, or told him her nationality. She’d left him nothing to trace her by; all he had on her was where she shopped for flowers.
Used
to shop for flowers—she wouldn’t patronize the Rue Chomel flower shop anymore. Or if she did, she would call in her orders. And Le Bon Marché? She’d waited until he’d disappeared from sight before heading into the food hall. If he was about to execute a murder, he wouldn’t have bothered to double back to see where she was going. Would he have?

She had to be rational. This man hated the French, not the British or Americans. He was no threat to her or her family. He’d had other things on his mind; maybe the address he’d shown her hadn’t even been for a doctor. Maybe he’d just told her that. Maybe that’s where he’d gone to pick up his weapon.

The police. Could she remember the address where he was going?

She closed her eyes, tried to visualize the map he’d handed her. Rue de Vaugirard…but that street was long. She couldn’t begin to remember the number.

She lowered the sound on the television and replaced the remote on top of it. She returned to the window, shut it, sat back down behind the desk, and picked up the landline.

No. She set the handset back down. She wouldn’t call Edward right now. Edward didn’t need to be interrupted by this. She stared at the phone. She wouldn’t call the police either. She wouldn’t call
anyone.
What would she have to say? A man looking like the man the police were seeking had asked her for directions to an address that she couldn’t remember, before any crime had been committed. Calling about this would be like bragging she’d been in the Twin Towers the day before they were atomized. It would be self-aggrandizing. Petty. She hadn’t seen the man commit any crime, he hadn’t been anything but pleasant to her, and they already had a witness to the murder, someone who’d given his description to the police and had even picked out his photo.

This was a weird anecdote she would share with Edward over a weekend, over a private dinner. As for the police, she had nothing to offer them.

She heard the soft thud of a door. She cradled the phone back up into her hand and tiptoed towards the doorway, keeping to one side, out of view, and listened. A few moments later, the pad of slipper-shod feet in the dining room.

Amélie returning from lunch. Clare shook her head at her own absurdity. If anyone had reason to be worried, the eyewitness should be. Returning to the desk, she set the phone firmly back down again. She picked up her pen. Three place cards were still waiting to be finished. It was a crazy coincidence, the type that happened only in novels, but that was all. She didn’t need to get involved. She
wasn’t
involved.

Amélie knocked on the half-open door before stepping into the study. “I fineesh the dining room, Madame?”

She smiled and nodded, setting down the fountain pen, as though she’d been in the middle of writing. “Yes, Amélie, please. You can get out the vases also. We will need four large ones for side tables and two small ones for the dinner table. The flowers will arrive at four.” She checked her watch again, out of habit. “The flowers will be delivered in about two hours.”

“Yes, Madame.” Amélie dipped her chin. “All is good?”

“Yes, everything is good.”

“Yes, Madame.” Amélie shut the door behind her, making a soft clicking sound.

In movies, jail cells clanked. They didn’t click.

Clare looked again at the TV screen; the regular programming was back on.

There was nothing on the screen, no sign of there having been a news flash, or of political turmoil. On 9/11 four years ago, and last summer on 7/7, the coverage had been inescapable—the hunted, haunted faces of people wandering Wall Street or emerging from the London Underground by Russell Square. But, here, on the screen, she was looking at three men and one woman, all dressed in either gray or black, as they sat around a table discussing something, a book one of them had recently published, as though nothing beyond the norm had happened to anyone.

Of course, it was just one individual, not a mass slaughter. Still, it had been a parliamentarian. Maybe she’d imagined the whole thing, or at least, maybe, in the same way as she kept thinking she saw Niall, dead these two decades, she hadn’t really brushed shoulders this morning with a political assassin. Maybe their contact was equally illusory. Maybe she was cracking up already, even without having moved to Dublin.

The map.

She reached into her sweater pocket and pulled out the piece of paper the Turk had thrust at her. There were the dim street names, faded from being photocopied. There, at top, was the address of the health clinic. There was the phone number.

A part of her wanted to throw it out right then and there, and in doing so wash her hands of the whole encounter. The dinner, Jamie. Dublin. She couldn’t cope with a murder. But something stopped her, a sense of justice bigger than herself. She folded the paper back up, doubling the sheet once and then twice and then a third time, and returned it to her pocket.

She got up and shut off the TV, came back to sit down behind the desk.

Enough.

She looked at her watch. 2:25 p.m. Five more hours.

She took out her to-do list and checked off everything she’d accomplished. She read the newly shortened list through and replaced it in the pocket that did not have the map in it. She extracted a sheet of paper from the desk drawer, drew a large rectangle and, on top, wrote, “Seating for Dinner.” At one end, she wrote Edward’s name. At the other, she wrote her own.

She set her pen back down. She picked up the phone and dialed. Three rings, and he answered.

“Edward?”

“Hold on, just one moment, I just need to—” There was the sound of shuffling papers, the scratching of a pen. “Yes, what is it?”

“Edward…” She tapped the paper on the desk before her. He sounded so preoccupied. This day meant everything to him. This appointment.

She looked around the room. She smoothed her pants legs. “I meant to ask. The green-and-white silk?”

“For dinner?”

“You know, with the wraparound waist. The background is green, the white is flowers.”

“Not green. Just wear your emerald.”

The emerald, of course. She would have to clean it. “That beige suit, then?”

“Clare, darling. I’m awfully busy. Did Mathilde make a fuss about the strawberries?”

How did he know she’d dipped into the strawberries? “I don’t think she’s back yet.”

“Cover for me, will you? We don’t need the wrath of Mathilde tonight. Shouldn’t she be back from lunch by now?”

“You stole from her strawberries?” Clare tugged on a loose strand of hair. She touched her pocket. “Edward, you know what you were telling me? You know that man?”

“A strawberry man?”

“At Versailles.”

There was a silence, then a sigh. “Oh, yes. Versailles.”

“They think they know who did it.”

“Yes, I heard. Wait, hold on a sec—”

She could hear the sound of his secretary’s clipped tones in the background. “Edward,” she said into the receiver, “are you still there?”

“Yes.”

“The man. At Versailles.”

“Yes. Bruno Molyneux. No, no, that’s all right,” he finished by saying, but not to her. She again heard the distant voice of his secretary.

She stared at her hands. A wisp of blond hair was caught under a nail. She disengaged the strand and let it flutter from her fingers into the wastepaper basket. Once she told someone about her encounter, that strange episode would become reality. Until then, their meeting was a truth only to her and her Turk. If one of them denied they had ever crossed paths, it might as well have never happened.

“Never mind,” she said. “It’s nothing. I’ll wear the beige. And the emerald.”

She replaced the phone and took out her list. The emerald was her most tangible link to Ireland. The ring everyone wanted; the ring she wore as seldom as possible because it meant too many things to her. Her wealthy Irish grandfather had used it to woo Mormor—a platinum claddagh with a spectacular 5.5-carat emerald and two enclosing diamonds.

“Why did she leave the emerald to Clare?” her sister-in-law, Amy, had asked at the luncheon after the reading of Mormor’s will. “She could just as well have given it to Rachel.”

Clare had been upstairs changing Peter’s diaper in the guest room bathroom, directly above the kitchen. She’d heard the whole conversation through the grating. Rachel was the firstborn of the next generation, Clare’s brother Luke and Amy’s daughter, then five years old.

Her other brother, Aidan, who wasn’t married back then and still wasn’t married now but was always very mindful of the politics of family order, had said, “Probably she figured there’d be more granddaughters to follow. She didn’t want to seed any future jealousies amongst them.”

“Or to the estate. She could have left it to the estate. That would have been the normal thing to do. The estate sells it and divides the proceeds equally amongst the heirs,” Luke had said.

Silence had wafted up the vent. A metal door had gone clunk—the oven.

“Because,” her mother had said, “Clare’s got those hands.”

“What about her hands?” her sister-in-law had squeaked.

“Haven’t you ever noticed them?”

Clare had thrown a towel down over the duct so she couldn’t hear the rest of the conversation. No one other than Niall had ever mentioned her hands. She didn’t know why if her mother had noticed them, she’d never said anything about them. Mormor neither. She’d looked down at them, water spilling over them, and wanted to clothe them. It had taken her a long time after that to get over her feeling of nakedness about them.

Clare stared at her hands, now slightly veined, the skin just beginning to thin on them—these hands that had gotten her into so much trouble. Then she picked up her pen and across the bottom of her pad, wrote, “Clean emerald.”

She shoved the pad away. She would make a few necessary phone calls, complete this week’s expense report, then head out to the hairdresser’s. Was Mathilde back from lunch? Did she dare go check up on her? Only Mathilde could manage still to inspire fear after all else Clare was facing. If only Mathilde had become a nursemaid instead of a chef. She would have sorted Jamie out in a way Clare never was able.

Yet again Clare pulled the BlackBerry from her pocket. Nothing. Even as he became in many ways more dependent upon her, Jamie was spiraling further out of control. He would falsify a message from her and jump on a plane without any adult’s knowledge, much less permission. He would come and go when he wanted, and explain himself only when he was good and ready. What did she know about what had really happened? She’d told Barrow she’d call them rather than the opposite; she had to try now to put this conversation off until she’d managed to rein Jamie in enough to find out why he’d done what he’d done.

And she wasn’t going to talk at all, to anyone, about this latest strange encounter, with the Turkish stranger. She’d file it away amongst the other experiences in her life she didn’t intend to reveal to anyone.

C
lare closed the door to the study softly behind her as she stepped into the hall, and paused to listen. There was no sound coming from the kitchen. Either Mathilde wasn’t back yet or she was back but wasn’t unhappy.

She headed down the hall towards the bedrooms. She’d check just once, on the off chance Jamie had snuck back into the Residence while she was in the study with the door closed, as quietly as he’d snuck out while she was having lunch with his father.

She stopped at Peter’s door first. Maybe it would be a better place for hiding. Or maybe Jamie’d looked for inspiration in the way his careful older brother differed from him, so apparent even in the state of his bedroom. When Peter had left for Fettes, he’d folded every article of clothing he wasn’t taking with him, sorted them by season, and placed them in separate drawers in his room. He’d cleared his desk of all paraphernalia, tossing into the garbage anything less than vital, and organizing whatever was left into boxes that he labeled and lined up along the top shelf of his room’s armoire. Looking around, the week after she had returned from delivering him to Scotland—not to snoop, but to check whether he’d left anything important behind—Clare had been struck by how similar the interiors of his desk drawers now appeared to those in finer hotels. A few neatly piled notepads, a handful of sharpened pencils and capped pens, the leather-backed Bible he’d received from his American grandparents for his first Communion, a box of throat lozenges, and a flashlight. Only a teenager like Peter would leave a room like that. “I am in control,” the room said. “I don’t require—or wish—anyone else’s help to keep my life in order.”

Peter’s room looked as clean and organized—and empty—as ever.

She shut the door again.

When Jamie had banged out of his room for the last time before heading off for boarding school last fall, he’d left dirty pajamas in a tangle on top of his bed and an explosion of books shooting out from under it, along with a few unmatched socks, a half-drunk bottle of water, and a bent ruler. Opening the door to peek in upon returning from dropping him off in London, Clare had almost been able to believe Jamie had gone just for the night, for a sleepover at a friend’s, and would be back in the morning. In some way, the casual mess he’d left behind had made Clare feel better.

“Do you think it made Jamie feel better, too, a way of pretending he wasn’t actually leaving?” she’d said to Edward over their third or fourth solitary dinner together. Of course, she and Edward didn’t usually dine as a duo; most nights brought some sort of engagement, or else Edward might be traveling.

“Oh, it’s James, that’s all,” Edward had said. “Not the most orderly boy, is he?”

Clare had cut her veal cutlet, releasing a trickle of blood towards her potatoes. Pink had swirled into white, laced the taupe edges of mushroom sauce. “He’s not used to having no one around to care for him.”

“All the more reason for him to start learning,” Edward had said, reaching for his water glass. He was compelled to consume so much alcohol during work-related lunches and cocktail parties and dinners that he stuck to water when it was just the two of them. “And he will. I wouldn’t worry. Not about Jamie’s housekeeping, I mean.”

“I won’t. I’ll let his roommate do that,” she’d said, and they’d both laughed. “Can you imagine?”

She’d never mentioned Jamie’s empty room to Edward again. Increasingly, she and Edward avoided the topic of Jamie altogether, other than the inescapable, such as any report that had been sent home from Barrow. Edward had suggested early on that it wasn’t helpful to Jamie to be able to return home from Barrow whenever and as often as he wanted—it wouldn’t aid him in adapting to becoming more independent. Having made clear his thoughts on the subject once, he was not one to harp. She persisted in allowing Jamie to return as often as he wished anyhow, and Edward greeted him on each visit with affection and no outward hint of disapprobation. She knew Edward called Jamie from the office once a week to chat, too, and she supposed Edward had figured out that Jamie called her nearly every evening. But she and Edward never discussed the contents of their separate phone calls with each other, any more than they returned to the subject of Jamie’s lack of self-sufficiency, except when she had something very specific to relate. And even then, sometimes she didn’t. Instead, they talked about Peter’s college search or where they should take their annual summer holiday as a family.

She pushed open the door to Jamie’s room. There was his duffel still on the floor, inked up with phone numbers and names. On top of his desk lay a jumble of flyers. She tapped the papers into a neat pile without reading what they announced and put them back on the desk. Here’s how she’d handle it. She’d phone Edward around 6:00 p.m., before he headed for cocktails at the embassy, to explain there’d been some new trouble in school, and she wanted Jamie to come home for the weekend. She’d claim she was the one who’d made the decision. She wouldn’t specify when Jamie was scheduled to arrive, and Edward wouldn’t ask—he had other things to think about. Then, if Jamie did come back during dinner, Edward wouldn’t be startled to see him, although he might feel frustrated. Edward didn’t fall apart; Edward compartmentalized. In the morning, he would ask, “So, what is going on with Jamie now?” They would go in together to wake Jamie and speak with him briefly but somberly before Edward headed in to his office. When Edward heard that Jamie had been caught cheating again, he would tell him he was sorry Jamie felt he had to keep doing this, but he had no choice but to take his punishment. They would not ask about nor listen to any claims regarding anyone else’s involvement; Edward would insist whatever anyone else had done was irrelevant. And they would not discuss Jamie’s unauthorized flight. This last could remain between her and Jamie, something for her to deal with separately and in confidence.

“I do clean linen, Madame?”

Amélie stood behind her, viewing the duffel bag. It lay there in the center of the room like an enormous telegram, heralding the arrival of its owner. In one hand, Amélie held a duster. In the other, the phone. She held it out.

Was it Jamie?

“Madame Gibson,” Amélie said.

Clare took the phone, cupping her hand over the mouthpiece. “Draw the curtains and open a window. But no need to change the sheets. They’re clean, aren’t they?”

“Oui, Madame.”
They left unspoken the fact that enough time hadn’t elapsed since Jamie’s last visit for the sheets to have grown musty. Clare would miss Amélie when they went to Dublin, for the opposite reason she would miss Mathilde. Mathilde kept the household on its toes, and life interesting. Amélie was safe. She was kind also. Never grow too close to the staff was one of the first rules of diplomat living but when they were the people who knew her family’s secrets, when they were the people she saw day in and day out, the people she sometimes saw more often than her husband, substitutes for the spinster aunt or longtime neighbor or friend from grade school or widowed grandma, becoming attached to them was difficult to avoid.

In Dublin, there would be a whole new set of staff members to get to know, then have to say good-bye to. If they went to Dublin. There was tonight’s dinner still to get through. Plus Edward knew of other rumored candidates for British ambassador to Ireland.

“But none,” he had pointed out this morning, as they dressed, “is married to a girl named Fennelly. If nothing else, that should prove my commitment to continued good relations between the Crown and Ireland. You are my trump card, Clare. As always.”

“You mean continued domination,” she, at that moment crouched down giving a last-minute buff to one of his shoes, had said.

“I mean continued subjugation,” he’d answered, reaching over her for the violet tie she’d given him for his last birthday, which they both knew he hated, and looping it around his neck. She’d stood up to knot it for him. Then she’d turned her back, and he’d closed the clasp on her necklace, his warm fingers brushing her neck. That might have been the real moment she’d committed herself to getting him Dublin.

“Hello, Sally,” Clare said into the phone.

Sally Gibson’s son, Emil, had played soccer with Peter at the International School during their first posting in Paris. She and Sally had ended up manning many a soft-drink stand together and chaperoning numerous bus trips. Ever since their return to France, Sally had been after Clare to help with every committee she herself got involved with. Her latest was the Paris chapter of Democrats Abroad.

“I’m sorry, Sally, I really can’t join,” she said. Sally was a very nice person, and much too smart to be nothing more than a soccer mom in Paris, but she had the habit of acting like a dog with a bone when she got her mind set on something—maybe because she was too smart a woman to be simply a soccer mom in Paris. She and Clare had had this same exchange enough times already; Clare might have to tell Amélie to say she was out next time Sally called. “Never mind my own personal inclinations, which I’ve already told you are zero when it comes to politics, for me to join wouldn’t be right. The Foreign Office is devoutly apolitical, and expects its personnel, and their families, to be that way in public also.”

She checked her watch. 2:55 p.m. She’d lost too much time on all this other stuff already.

“Everyone is political, Clare. Especially in these days. You can’t avoid it.”

“Well, I am not.”

“You’re holding out on me. I know where your loyalties lie. And, Clare, this is important. We’re heading towards disaster. The sanity and safety of our entire globe could depend on this.”

Clare sighed. “Listen, Sally, I just can’t. I’m sorry. But are you running something for the school
kermesse
this year? Maybe there’s something I could do for that, even though both the boys are gone now. Maybe Mathilde can send over a couple cakes.” That sounded bad. She added, “I mean, maybe we could still contribute something.”

After she hung up, she headed down the hall towards the kitchen. She hoped Sally wouldn’t go talking behind her back, saying she was starting to act snobbish. People forgot—or maybe never knew in the first place—that none of the pomp and circumstance that surrounded a diplomatic family’s daily life actually belonged to them. The splendor belonged to the Crown; she and Edward were just staff (and she unpaid staff, at that). If anything, she and Edward belonged to the Residence more than it belonged to them. Not only would they pack up their things when Edward’s job in Paris was finished and move on as though from a hotel, she didn’t have much say about life within the Residence now.

“Attention!”
Mathilde hissed before Clare managed to clear the kitchen doorway. She pointed a finger towards the oven then raised it to her lips.

“Is there a baby sleeping?” Clare said and immediately regretted her flippancy. She lifted the cloth covering the asparagus to check that the stalks hadn’t begun to yellow. They lay there like a mass of entwined lovers, lovely shades of white and purple. “They’re nice, aren’t they?”

“Hah, hah,
très amusant,
Mrs. Moorhouse, but
un bon gâteau
is as delicate as a baby.” Mathilde swiped the platter of asparagus from under Clare’s eyes and whisked it over to the sink. She ran water from the tap until she was satisfied at its chill, collected a few drops on her naked fingertips, and shook them over the stalks as though she were a priest anointing them. “Tastes
better
, though.”

“How do you know that, Mathilde?”

Mathilde laughed, not with her usual loud bark—so as not to disturb the cakes—but in a sort of silent version of it, hacking at the air. “A little backjaw from the minister’s wife, nae? A little cheeky? You feeling yourself, Mrs. Moorhouse?”

Despite her determination not to think about him anymore, the image of the wrestler’s shiny forehead rose in her mind. Clare looped a strand of hair behind an ear and crossed her arms across her chest. “
Can
an employer be cheeky to an employee, Mathilde?”

Mathilde wiped her damp fingers on the apron covering her broad chest and straightened the kerchief she wore over her graying hair. Then, gathering herself up as high as her diminutive height would allow her, especially when confronted with Clare at well over half a foot taller, she answered, “Anyone can be ill mannered. Even
Monsieur le Président
to a street cleaner.”

She looked fierce, and Clare remembered what Edward had said:
We don’t need the wrath of Mathilde tonight.
Besides, Mathilde was right. Everyone deserved respect. Even if that hadn’t been what Clare had been asking, and Mathilde knew it.

“You’re right.” She left the asparagus and peered into the fridge. The strawberries had been impounded. She shut the door. “Although, somehow I can’t imagine a French president chatting up a garbage collector.”

Mathilde snorted. “Neither can I. The French wouldn’t have it. So, I’ll be putting an orange Bundt into the oven tomorrow,
n’est-ce pas?
”

Orange Bundt cake was Jamie’s favorite. This was Mathilde’s way of making peace, at the same time as keeping the upper hand; tendering both a spontaneous offer to please Jamie and evidence of her awareness of his mid-school-week arrival. She probably also thought Jamie had eaten the strawberries. Well, good. Let her. She would forgive Jamie for it more easily than if the thief were she or Edward.