An Unexpected Guest (19 page)

She put the certificates back into the safe and opened the ring box. Granda had been first generation in America, born on a dirty street in Brooklyn, but he grew up to be a baseball star of sorts in addition to a canny businessman. He’d kept his baseball jacket, Phineas O’Donnell printed across the back, in a glass case in his den and, until the year he died, would take Clare’s brothers out into the backyard of their house in Greenwich, Connecticut, and throw a ball around with them. He met her future grandmother just off the boat from Sweden, working days as a clothier’s model and nights at a nightclub as a coat-check girl. She was just taller than he was, with a twenty-two-inch waist and icy blond hair that she wore in a neat chignon at the nape of her long neck. He found out when she’d be working at the nightclub and reserved a permanent table for those evenings. He sealed the deal by offering her the grandest emerald she’d ever seen, held in place by a Celtic trinity knot in 18-carat platinum and two diamonds.

“Go Irish,” he famously told her.

“Yah,” she said. “I better.”

Granda’s cheeks turned fatter and redder with every year they were together. Mormor stayed as tall and sleek and taciturn as when she graced the pages of the Franklin Simon & Co. catalog. She outlasted him by a decade, growing paler every year, until one morning she simply didn’t wake. Their descendants received two surprises at the reading of her will. The first was that Mormor had been six years older than she’d told everyone. The second was that she’d bequeathed her famous emerald engagement ring to Clare.

Clare closed the ring box and slipped Mormor’s ring on her finger. She wouldn’t fuss over not having time left to clean it before the dinner. The emerald, cosseted by the diamonds, sparkled on her finger, casting deep green-blue prisms of light over her thin skin and polished fingernails. Delicate coils of platinum wove around it, shooting pinpricks of silvery light, like moonlight breaking over the crests of waves. It was a ring that demanded to be looked at by everyone who came near it.

“It’s a dinner ring, in truth,” Mormor had once said to Clare. “Your silly Granda, always making a big show. You can’t wear a ring like this daily.” But she had.

The clock in Peter’s old room chimed once, marking the quarter hour. Clare laid the stock certificates back into the safe, placed the empty ring box down on top, and swung the door shut, turning the knob. She needed to get the place cards out before their guests arrived. And she needed to wake Jamie, bundle him off into his room before Edward and the rest of them got there.

W
ithin five minutes, she had slipped the place cards into their little silver holders around the table. She peeked into the kitchen. Amélie and her cousin were finishing a quick supper. Mathilde was standing over them, ladling out potatoes like a character from Dickens. Half-readied plates of starters marched up and down the other side of the long central table, waiting for the asparagus to be added to them. Yann, the waiter-cum-butler, was out of sight—on the little kitchen balcony having a last smoke, no doubt.

Just enough time to nip back into the bedroom and wake Jamie. She strode back down the long hall, listening to the sound of her heels. The efficiency of their
clip-clip-clip
reassured her. Everything else was crazy, but she’d managed to get dinner in place.

She sat down on the bed next to her son and brushed aside the hair that had fallen over his face. The scent of his breath, warm and slightly rancid, wafted up to her, clashing with the coolness of the coming evening. “Jamie,” she said, and patted his shoulder. When he rolled away, she shook him a little harder. Then she left him to brush her teeth.

When she came back out of her bathroom, Jamie was awake but not up.

“You need to go to your own room,” she told him, sitting down beside him again. “Daddy will be here any minute.”

Her son stood. He rubbed his eyes.

“Are you hungry?” she asked.

“I had pizzas with Marc and some other guys. I met them after they got out of school. I had to borrow some euros from them…”

“Okay, then. Just stay in your room. You can see Daddy afterwards.”

Jamie wavered before her. “Mommy?” he said.

“Yes?”

“I love you.”

“Why, Jamie,” she said, reaching towards him, but he was gone.

She swam her hands up and down the length of the coverlet. And if they did end up in some place like Kyrgyzstan? What then would happen to Jamie? The emerald snagged on the fabric, and she carefully disengaged it. All those Thanksgivings Clare and her brothers had seen it winking from their grandmother’s hand as Mormor carried out the turkey she would never learn to make correctly, which, in fact, Clare’s mother would arrive in the morning to dress and put in the oven to keep them all from being poisoned. But still her grandfather would take the heavy platter from Mormor’s hands and kiss her cheek admiringly. “My bonny Swedish prize,” he would announce, even as her blond hair faded and her shoulders tumbled inward. Clare had always planned to pass the ring along to Jamie; she wanted him to be able to share it with a wife who would protect him as well as she had tried, or maybe a daughter who would clutch at his heart the same way as he had at hers. Peter would have the Turner, which he’d hang on the wall of a well-appointed home, wherever around the world it might be, and feel at ease on the honorable path he would undoubtedly take. Peter had already made his choice—he belonged to England. But Jamie? England, so far, clearly wasn’t working out for him. Maybe he would find his place in Ireland, if Edward got the posting there. Maybe he’d be able to feel a pride and even comfort in his Irish ancestry. From what she’d just learned, Ireland already seemed to hold its appeal for him.

The way he had said her name—
Rian,
with that lilt—as though the girl’s very name held magical properties.

Clare stilled her hand and stood. She went down the hall, and surveyed the formal living room. Amélie had set out silver plates of nuts and tiny burnished crackers. She had also closed the windows, so Clare went in and reopened them. She wanted the spring air of Paris. The night’s chill hadn’t settled yet, and the light evening breeze carried in a remembrance of the warm scent of earth awakening and blossoms opening.

The house bell rang. That would be Edward, arriving with the first guests, undoubtedly the P.U.S. amongst them. He wouldn’t open the door with his key, not when accompanied by guests. For one thing, it wasn’t dignified. For another, it didn’t give the household—
including
her—proper warning that guests were about to enter.

She could hear Yann’s footsteps heading for the door, echoed by those of Amélie’s cousin. The cousin would hover in the background, helping Yann hang up coats and pass out cocktails—her own hair neatly arranged now, her T-shirt and jeans traded for a white blouse and pair of black trousers—after the guests had passed through the front hall, Clare there to greet them. It was a science. They were all cogs in its machinery.

She still had a few seconds to run the guests through her mind, matching mental snapshots of their faces with some piece of information about them that would separate them from the scores of other individuals whose hands she shook or cheeks she kissed weekly, a trick she’d learned from Edward. If she did it quickly—

The P.U.S., Toby Pessingham, whom she’d met only a few times and who had been wearing a red tie each time. Perhaps he would be again this evening.

Alain LeTouquet, tennis-loving director general at the Quai D’Orsay, and his wife, Bautista, who was Florentine and took a great personal interest in art. Clare would speak Italian with her, at least initially. They would discuss Clare’s latest translation for the Rodin Museum.

Those de Louriacs—Rémy, Cécile, and what were the son and fiancée’s names? Clare fished around in her memory, saw her own hand inscribing their names this morning. There the names were: Frédéric de Louriac and Agathe Gouriant D’Arcy. Someday soon, especially if Edward got the Irish ambassadorship, she and Edward were likely to see their same names engraved on a creamy wedding invitation delivered to their doorstep. Recognizing them at tonight’s gathering would be simple. They’d be the young ones. The de Louriac seniors she’d run into at a reception just the week before last, and she could picture them all too easily. He’d kissed her hand, with emphasis, and Madame’s laugh had sounded like a tuberculin cough, low and puffy. She would ask them about the cave paintings in Dordogne, not so far from their estate. She’d read recently about a new exhibition opening.

Sylvie Picq, ministre délégué au commerce extérieur, blond, sharp, and frighteningly effective, be it at arguing a point over dinner or simply answering her cell phone, and her self-
important
husband, Christian Picq, from whose latest tome on sociology Clare would have to pretend to have read at least an excerpt. Or else pretend it was too above her to attempt reading. Edward had read most of it. She’d leave it to him to do the
requisite
flattering.

Hope Childs, the British actress now living in Paris, whose thin face and mysterious hooded eyes everyone knew from her movies.

And the bespectacled Reverend Newsome, John, and his wife, Lucy, whose latest book for young adults Clare
had
read. Lucy had been a pediatrician, specializing in adolescent health, before John had been named chaplain at St. George’s in Paris. She’d leaned into Clare after church services last Easter and, eyeing the well-heeled crowd milling about the church steps in their well-tailored spring suits, whispered, “If
I
had gobs and gobs of money, I’d invest in acne cream. Adolescent complexion crises are one thing, like death and taxes, you can always be sure of.” She’d said it with a straight face, but Clare had seen her brown eyes sparkling under her Easter bonnet. Clare had ordered the latest of Lucy’s novels online that very evening.

Toby, Alain, Bautista, Rémy, Cécile, Frédéric, Agathe, Sylvie, Christian, Hope, John, and Lucy. She had them now in her head. The front door clicked.

The first group entered and, shortly after, the second, like a ringlet of hair uncurling in water, strands separating and fanning out, spreading over the furniture in the reception room. She ushered everyone in, became a high-stepping waterbird, showing them towards the formal dining room, asking after children, the P.U.S.’s wife, the weather. With each cluster, she exchanged words of regret and condolence about the assassinated minister, but only gently so as not to engender deeper discussion or dampen the atmosphere.

Third came the de Louriacs with their next generation, as shiny and burnished as she had expected.

“You are
Americaine!
” said Agathe Gouriant D’Arcy, the fiancée, looking confused, as she flipped a lock of long, lustrous brown hair behind one shoulder. “Not Eengleesh!”

“But, of course,
cherie,
” Frédéric, the son, chided her. “
Maman
told you in the car. Weren’t you listening?”

“Bien sûr,”
the young woman answered, her eyes shifting over the rest of the room in embarrassment,
“je lui écoute toujours,”
and Clare had to suppress a smile.

Aperitifs were passed around but not hors d’oeuvres, as these had already been served at the embassy cocktail party beforehand and they would sit down to eat shortly. Reverend Newhouse grappled nuts into his hand from one of the silver trays on a side table. His wife helped herself to a few also. Clare saw Amélie slip from behind the kitchen door into the dining room. She looked at Clare across the rooms, and Clare nodded. With dinner preparations completed and her job done, Amélie would go home now and soak her sturdy legs in the half tub her apartment probably sported, or whatever she did when she was away from the Residence. Her cousin and the waiter would stay until the end of the meal, helping Mathilde prep, serving the meal, clearing the table, and seeing that the last of the dishes were washed and restacked in boxes. Like the captain of a ship, Mathilde would not leave until the very last course had gone down and all that was left of her glorious meal was a wreckage of cake crumbs and lettuce.

The bell rang again. Unlike cocktail parties, where she and Edward would stand near the butler as he opened the door and retrieved outerwear throughout most of the evening, so as to greet guests as they filed in and thank them as they left, dinner parties required a continuous stirring of the pot, with both of them at the soiree’s center. They couldn’t afford to linger in the hallway in between arrivals, but they reconvened in the foyer to greet the last of the evening’s dinner guests, the ministre délégué au commerce extérieur and her husband, Sylvie and Christian Picq. Pleasantries were exchanged, and kisses and handshakes. Clare noticed a strain on their faces; undoubtedly the assassination.

Still, the evening was going well. People needed to gather when they were in shock or mourning, and why shouldn’t this be at the Residence? What mattered was that no one was giving off an air of wishing to be elsewhere. She moved to join them in the living room.

“Clare,” Edward said in a low voice, stopping her at the living room’s threshold.

She started. Edward wasn’t supposed to speak to her one-on-one like this once they had guests. They were to radiate through the group, maximizing their resources. “Jamie’s still not answering his phone,” he whispered.

She smoothed her suit and exchanged a smile over Edward’s arm with Bautista LeTouquet, wife of the directeur général at the Quai d’Orsay.
Tutto è bello!
Bautista mouthed from across the room.
Grazie mille,
she mouthed back. Bautista was gathered by the mantel with the permanent under-secretary, the directeur général, and Hope Childs. The P.U.S.
was
wearing a reddish tie; a fat petal from the calla lilies, radiant in the evening light, brushed his eyeglasses. Theirs wasn’t the ambassador’s breathtaking residence but, as Bautista said, everything did look beautiful.

“I’ve talked to him. Don’t worry. He’s squared away for the moment.”

He shifted, blocking her view of the living room with his shoulder. “I don’t see how you can be so blasé. He was caught in her room. He had the key to the lab. The school is sure he stole the chemicals.”

Clare felt the air swish out of her, as though she’d been punched in the stomach. She swept the room with her regard, trying to slow things down, like dropping a sailboat keel. Madame de Louriac was standing empty-handed, and she caught the eye of the waiter and gestured. What was Edward
saying?
“Chemicals? You mean drugs?”

“Clare!” Edward caught himself. He glanced at the room over his shoulder to make sure no one had looked their way. “
Clare.
I thought you said you had spoken with him.
And
Barrow.”

“Yes, but—”

“Did you?”

“Yes. But…not about everything. He just told me he had been caught cheating again, and hadn’t been allowed to hand in his science lab. That’s about all.” She hesitated. “And that this girl’s name is Rian.”

“
Cheating?
Who said anything about cheating?”

“Jamie. I mean—”

“This had nothing to do with cheating. Did he say that?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, yes. I mean, I thought so. Look, you know Jamie. He didn’t want to tell me anything. I couldn’t get anything out of the school either—I called but the headmaster wasn’t there, and I could only get the secretary. And then I didn’t want to call back before I’d heard Jamie’s side of the story. I did my best, Edward. It was a busy day; I was really trying to make this dinner work. And…” It all raced through her head: Finding Jamie lying on his bed, reading; seeing the Turk’s face flash up on the television screen; Niall sitting there waiting on that bench for her. She leaned a hand against the wall. “And, things didn’t go quite as planned.”