An Unexpected Guest (16 page)

She heard the lock-release click of the Residence’s downstairs foyer and leaned her weight against the heavy oak front door. Before stepping in, she took one last look around the courtyard. The day was fading. The blue of the sky was thinning. Niall was somewhere out there.

“Bonjour, Madame.”
The door swung open behind her to reveal the concierge’s husband.

She caught the jamb to keep from tumbling.
“Bonjour, Monsieur.”
She regained her balance as he held the door open for her and, stepping inside, nodded.
“Merci.”

He cradled a lightbulb in one hand.
“Il fait très beau aujourd’hui.”

“Oui, il fait beau.”

“Le Ministre va bien?”

“Oui, merci.”

“Et les enfants?”

“Oui, merci.”

“Ah, bien. Alors, tout va bien.”
He climbed up onto his step stool under the entryway light fixture.

She pressed the elevator button. When she didn’t hear the cage begin its noisy descent, she pressed the button again. She could sense the concierge’s husband look up at the sound. In the Residence, there was still the same dinner to put on, still the same problem with Jamie. But a different woman would be handling them. She could even go to Dublin now. A new, limitless world expanded before her.

Niall hadn’t betrayed her. And together they hadn’t
done
anything.

“Will you help?” he’d said, and unzipped a corner of the duffel.

The euphoria she’d felt evened out. Yes, she could go to Dublin now with impunity. Yes, she hadn’t provided money that was then used to buy guns or explosives. But she had still agreed to bring it over. The intention had been there. Plus, she’d rented that camper. She’d made that trip to the Eastern Shore. Niall, at least, had considered himself a soldier. And she? Just a pliable schoolgirl.

Her phone hummed to signal a text message. She extracted it from her pocket.

Edward using multiple question marks? She checked her watch: 6:10 p.m. He would be clearing off his desk, readying to head over to the cocktail reception being held at the embassy before the P.U.S.’s more intimate dinner.

Home,
she typed back.

But her phone showed
three
missed calls. She quickly switched to the voice mail, skipping over Edward’s to get to the other two.

Jamie had called but had left no message.

She rapid-dialed his number.

His voice-mail message pounded her ear:
“‘Don’t want to be an American idiot….’
This is James. Leave a message. Or don’t. Like I care.”

She clicked off. If she didn’t find him at home now, she was going to call the house of every single friend he had in Paris until she tracked him down. Enough was enough.

She could hear the elevator clanking its way down, but it still had not descended to the foyer. She drew her sweater close. The air was getting crisper as day walked into evening, in the treacherous way a warm spring day had; a cool shock that creeps up and, before noticed, has already invaded the body. Like aging: the world seemed so warm, and then suddenly was chill.

The past twenty-five years felt like a dream. “Did you hear Niall’s disappeared?” her cousin Kevin had said, stopping by her room in Cambridge a couple months after she’d returned from Dublin. “Dad thinks he went home and picked right back up with what he’d been doing. You know. With
them.
And, sure enough, something went wrong.” She’d gone straight to the library after he’d left and checked every newspaper Harvard subscribed to, hoping in vain to find some additional information. Failing there, she’d been forced to get it out of her aunt and uncle. “Thank you again for last summer,” she’d said, making a special trip to see them, a Sunday before Christmas. “We all had such a nice time here. Do you think Niall will be coming back next summer?” And her aunt had buried her face in her hands, and her uncle had shaken his head and explained why that was never going to happen: Niall’s people had wound in a sheet what was left of his corpse after the fish and tides had got to it, and closed it up in a coffin. And so, over the years, she’d seen his face in the crowds and had thought she was seeing the memory of what she herself had been. But she
had
seen him. Just this morning, even, at Le Bon Marché, peering at her over the canned goods from Britain and the cheese from Ireland. Without doubt, also many other times. He’d been following her. She was
not
crazy. She mixed numbers up but not faces.

The Turk. He, too, was still out there.

The elevator clunked to a stop in front of her. She stepped in, rattled the door to the cage shut, pressed the button for their floor.

She hoped there really had been a doctor and that he would come forward.
Punto.
She wouldn’t give another thought to the Turk today.

But she couldn’t ignore Niall. He would be waiting for her.

The elevator began slowly to rise. Upstairs were Amélie, Amélie’s cousin, Mathilde, this evening’s waiter. Maybe, if she was lucky, Jamie. They would all be expecting something from her. There was the rest of everything else waiting for her as well, the rituals—birthday celebrations, anniversaries, weddings, the baptism of grandchildren—and the attendant smaller routines, like straightening Edward’s ties in the morning. All the things that kept daily life in order and outlined her existence like the penciled edges of a still life, giving constant definition to what otherwise would seem like an endless tunnel, would feel like the same vacuum that had sucked her into the vortex of the Dublin airport two decades earlier and now was pulling her at every moment one minute closer to life’s inevitable conclusion.
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
How wise she and her classmates had felt back in college when they’d studied T. S. Eliot. They’d torn
J. Alfred Prufrock
to pieces until they’d unveiled every nuance—without having understood a thing. “Can you read aloud and then translate Eliot’s epigraph from Dante’s
Inferno
for us?” the professor had asked her, she that class’s resident Romance language major, and she’d picked through Dante’s Italian like it was something she could defeat:
“Ma perchiocce giammi de questo fondo/Non torno vivo alcun, s’I’odo il vero/Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.”

And then she’d repeated, in English, “But since never from this abyss has anyone returned alive, I’ll answer you without fearing infamy.”

She would walk through the front door of the Residence as she had a thousand times before. A marine landscape by Turner that greeted her every time she entered the apartment, hanging over the dark rosewood Regency console in which she would store her purse. The elegant silver bowl they’d received as a wedding gift from Edward’s scull mate at Oxford, now a powerful barrister in London, and which—like the Turner—they carried from apartment to apartment, where she would place her keys, then remove them, knowing Edward would worry they would scratch the silver. The small inlaid box acquired during a holiday in Croatia, hidden from sight within the console, where she would deposit her keys instead.

A home, a spouse, children, a vocation if not a real career. She had all of these. Could Niall have somehow, along the way, picked up some version of these things also? A woman who was willing to know nothing about the father of her children? Maybe, a voluptuous forgiving Italian, with a long nose and laughing lips and thick, dark shiny hair, full breasts and hips. Or a young, independent-minded Scandinavian. Or both of the above, and many others?

A surge of jealousy rocked her body, followed by a rolling wave of self-loathing. How petty she was! How foolish!

A church next to the Centre Pompidou….Tomorrow I’m gone. That’s how you want it, you’ll ne’er lay eyes on me again.

He hadn’t abandoned her. Could she now abandon him? Didn’t she owe him if not the money, at least the succor he’d now handed her?

The elevator clinked to a stop.

She remembered her unsent text—
Home—
and clicked “send.” She opened the front door; the foyer assailed her with its resplendence: the incandescent burst of the crystal chandelier, the gleam of the dark Regency console, a brilliant splash of yellow and green in a vase on top. She closed the door softly behind her, walked over to the console, leaned down to place her keys in the box from Croatia, not in the silver bowl.

“
There
you are.”

The broad forehead, the gray eyes, looking down at her, over her shoulder. “Edward!” she cried, knocking against the console in her confusion. She dropped her purse and grabbed for the vase of lilies and bells of Ireland, a massive green-and-yellow shudder in the corner of her eye, just before it fell. Water sloshed around her, on the shining wood, onto the floor.

“I rang the landline,” he said, ignoring the flowers, looking right past the water, gesturing to the BlackBerry still in her hand. “Amélie said you’d be here.”

“I was delayed—” she began.

Amélie appeared from the direction of the kitchen, her thick legs moving swiftly. She blushed and stopped short.
“Excusez-moi, j’ai entendu…”

“It’s all right. Everything’s all right,” Edward said, stepping back, rubbing his hands together. Amélie withdrew a cloth from her apron pocket and began to wipe furiously at the spillage, careful to keep her eyes from either of theirs.

Clare slipped her phone into her purse and stuck her purse in the console. “At least the whole thing didn’t fall over.”

“Oui, Madame.”

“How clumsy of me.”

Amélie said nothing, wiped.

“That’s good now.”

“Oui, Madame. Excusez-moi, Madame, Monsieur.”

“For God’s sake, Edward,” she said, once Amélie was gone. “You startled me. What are—”

“I had a call from Barrow,” he said, cutting her off. “You
knew?
”

She shoved Niall from her thoughts. All the twisting and turning she’d done to keep Edward from getting involved in Jamie’s mess before tonight’s dinner. She looked around the foyer for telltale signs—a knapsack, a sweatshirt, a bottle of Orangina—abandoned on one of Amélie’s well-polished surfaces. Nothing. “I spoke with them…,” she said.

“Bloody Hell! And you didn’t tell me? Clare!” Inside his jacket, his own BlackBerry buzzed. He withdrew it, read the half-truth she’d sent before entering the front door. “Right,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “Did you speak to James?”

“He’s upset,” she said, still trying to figure out how much to reveal about Jamie’s whereabouts. “I told him to come home.”

“As though we have a choice! When will he arrive?”

She turned and busied herself with resettling the flower arrangement. She could tell Edward how Jamie had arrived unexpectedly this morning, how he’d flown over without even telling her beforehand, how he’d written a request in her name without telling her either. But if Edward had no inkling of any of this, to whose benefit would be telling him? Not his own. Certainly not Jamie’s.

“He’ll be here on the weekend,” she said, moving a stem, adding softly, “They’re called bells of Ireland. Do you see? Green bells with white clappers? They’re supposed to bring good luck. That’s probably why so many brides carry them.”

“Clare! Don’t change the subject. What about that girl Barrow sent away?”

She dropped the flower back into the vase and swiveled to face him. “There aren’t any girls at Barrow.”

“There aren’t
now.
” That buzzing sound from somewhere on Edward’s person. “Hell!” He withdrew his phone from his inner jacket pocket again and surveyed the text. “The P.U.S.’s car is downstairs. I have to go.”

“What girl?”

Edward stopped putting his phone back into his jacket long enough to look at her. “I thought you said you’d spoken to Barrow.”

Right.
She was supposed to know this already. She was supposed to be on top of everything. She nodded and stepped back. “Yes, I meant was there another girl?”

“I’d say, in this case one was enough, wouldn’t you?”

She processed all the possibilities as quickly as she could. In the overall scheme of things, getting caught with a girl was less serious than cheating, although how those two things related she didn’t see. Maybe he’d gotten so caught up with the girl, he’d neglected the lab. Then cheated on it to catch up. “Yes, it certainly is…,” she said.

“Did he give you any explanation? What in all hell happened? What was he thinking?”

Not thinking. Kids aren’t
thinking
in those circumstances. She lifted her hands, helpless.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “that I got back so late.”

He opened the door. “We need to talk about this.” The elevator was already there, fresh from her arrival. He unlatched the cage, stepped in, turned to face her, frowning. “I can’t keep the P.U.S. waiting.” He clanked the door shut.

“I’m sorry,” she said again as the elevator began descending.

She closed the front door to the Residence. If Jamie had been caught breaking two rules simultaneously, he really was damn lucky he hadn’t been expelled. But how did this relate to the other kid? What was his name—Ryan?

She stopped short under the chandelier. An image came to mind, and she winced. No, the other boy would have been caught
cheating
with him, not being with the girl with him.

She hurried down the hall to Jamie’s room, flipped the light switch on.

“Jamie?
Ssss.
Jamie?”

There was no one in there. The pale reflection of her face stared back at her from the window. The sun had almost set now. She pressed her hands together and sank down on the bed. Jamie, hardly more than a baby himself. The hours Clare had spent walking up and down their apartment’s hall in Cairo. He’d cried endlessly any time she surrendered him to the baby nurse. She’d take him back in her arms, and his sweet smile, toothless and trusting, that milky smell. Sometimes she still caught a glimpse of that smile underneath the adolescent hint of stubble and the slogan T-shirts.