An Unexpected Guest (8 page)

“Just one wee matter,” Mathilde said.

Clare stopped short, her hand falling. Mathilde pointed an elbow towards the shopping basket that Clare had left on the floor by the kitchen’s central island.

“You’re forgetting your
reçu.
You’re going to need that for your ledger.”

Clare took care not to breathe out too deeply. She retrieved the receipt from the basket, folded it once and then again, folded it as though she might be able to fold everything that worried her away into that little corner of paper.

One of the things Niall used to say to her—and she’d never known if he was ridiculing Americans or grateful to them—was that without their American brethren and all their pretty green dollars, the IRA would have had to pimp its leprechauns to raise money.

He’d said a lot of things, Niall had. Her first mistake had been to listen to them.

“You come make up my bed for me, why don’t you?”

She hadn’t seen him since that first time, when she’d watched him drink soda in the heat of that summer afternoon, feeling as though she’d been inside that glass, and when he’d consumed all of it, as though she’d also been swallowed. He’d disappeared from her aunt’s place shortly after, and her aunt had been frantic with worry, knitting her brow and fingers as she contemplated whether she’d have to call someone in Ireland, until Uncle Pat had laid down his newspaper and grinned.

“Oh, El,” Uncle Pat had said, “Niall’s a young man, his first time in America. He’s found some friendly American girl. He’ll be back when the beer runs out. Or the loving.”

Aunt Elaine’s eyebrows had lowered into a frown and her hands had moved away from the phone. She’d set down her old address book, with half the pages falling out.

Clare’s stomach had threatened to crawl into her mouth.

And then, there he was, sitting at the breakfast table three mornings later, pointing at Clare’s hands while she buttered her bread. As though he’d never been gone.

“I’d like to see your fingers smoothing back my sheets, wouldn’t I.” But, softly, so no one heard but she, and she had to keep herself from knocking over her orange juice glass. “Spreading. Those beautiful hands, spreading.”

Later, when she began to understand where he really went during those sudden absences, because the first one was followed by more, she was relieved. She was happy. Anything but other girls.

In the dining room, Amélie had already begun unwrapping the plate, and there was Edward filling up the doorway. “I thought I heard a commotion in the dining room,” he said.

“It was the men bringing in the plate. I was…in one of the bedrooms. And then I had to speak with Mathilde.”

“Everything in the kitchen coming along all right?”

“You don’t dare go in.”

Edward laughed, a good sign.

She smiled back. “We had to add de Louriac
fils
and de Louriac
belle-fille,
and then I neglected to tell her straight off. Amélie, did I tell you we need to add two places?”

“Yes, Madame. All is here.”

Clare looked at the table and realized how foolish her question was; the settings were there, the two extra ones included. Amélie had already put them out. She laughed and shook her head. “But you knew that, too,” she told Edward. “You forwarded the message from de Louriac’s secretary.”

“We all have a lot on our minds,” Edward said.
“Amélie, tout est très bien. Comme toujours. Merci.”

Amélie gave a little curtsy, as she would do for Edward, and blushed. Edward slipped a hand around Clare’s elbow. “Come. Tell me where we are with everything.”

Clare gave in to the pull of his hand, so warm and steady through the fabric of her sweater. This was when he was going to shut the door and tell her what had happened. There was some reason he’d come home at lunchtime on such a busy day, some reason for the shut door to the study. She walked with him into the study, sat down in the armchair across from the desk, and pulled out her little notebook just in case something would need to be added to her to-do list. Sitting there, waiting for him to say whatever he was about to say and knowing that Jamie was secretly down the hall, she felt as though she could almost hear Jamie’s breath pushing in and out of his shallow chest, as she’d done when he was a baby, leaning over his crib as he took his afternoon nap. She just had to keep her fingers crossed Jamie would stay put. One of the first lessons one learned in a life of diplomacy was that timing was everything. And now was not the time to break the news of Jamie’s latest disaster to Edward. If Edward found out what Jamie had done—and really she wasn’t sure what was the worst part of it, the cheating or the forging her signature and flying home without permission—he’d consider it his duty to speak with Jamie immediately. Not only did Edward not have time for that today, but Jamie might become defensive, in which case they would not be able to count on him to keep a low profile through the evening. The more she thought about it, the more sure she was that the best thing would be not even to tell Edward for the moment that Jamie was home, much less that he’d been suspended. She could reveal all tomorrow.

Edward closed the door and came around to sit behind the desk. His face looked calm; his expression pleasant and neutral. But she saw the set of his eyes and knew something serious was coming. He folded his hands over one another. “Two more de Louriacs, then?”

“The son and fiancée. They’re in Paris.”

“How lucky.”

“They’ll probably be better dinner companions than the parents.”

Edward laughed. “Oh, well, he’s an all right sort. Where will you seat Madame?”

“You want the fiancée, do you? I’m pretty sure she won’t be in a miniskirt.”

Edward laughed again, this time cracking his wide knuckles. They both knew he wasn’t interested in other women. “Just as long as the mother-in-law isn’t. What are we having?”

“We’ll start with baby asparagus and
jambon de bayonne.
And there will be some nice fish, with new potatoes in a spring-herb pesto, but I asked Mathilde to go very light on the garlic.” Edward wasn’t any bigger on garlic than he was on spices. “I think it’s going to be brilliant. Mathilde’s whipping something amazing up for dessert.”

“Literally, I suppose.”

“Oh, yes. She’s got her favorite instrument of torture going around as we speak. Well, second favorite, after the cleaver. She’s making her chocolates, of course. And fresh rolls. And, for the cheese course, I found some really nice cheddar. I bought oatcakes to go with it.”

Edward nodded. “Sounds super.” She stared at him through the following silence, waiting. This had all been filler. Now, he would tell her what was going on. He tapped his desk a few times. “There’s been an incident.”

Clare nodded.

“An assassination.” He spoke softly now, with the gentleness he always brought to bad news. “Not one of ours. A French parliamentarian, at Versailles this morning.”

“Do I know him?”

Edward shook his head. “I’ve never met him myself.” He ran a hand over his brow, rubbing as though he hoped to smooth it out. “Phff,” he said.

She stood up and touched his knuckles gently, leaving her fingers on his until he stopped rubbing. He caught her hand with his, and pressed the cool skin of her fingers against his forehead.

“Do they know…?” she said. She withdrew her hand and laid it on his shoulder.

“An idea. There have been numerous threats since the French State passed the law officially declaring the Armenian business genocide. Now there’s some talk of making it against the law in France to deny it. A Turkish nationalist group.”

“Oh.” She remembered hearing about the controversy when they first arrived back in Paris; how furious the Turks were that the French, with whom they’d painstakingly cultivated diplomatic relations for centuries, had officially decided to call the death of more than a million Armenians under the Ottoman Empire during and just after World War One by the term “genocide.” The Turks themselves never accepted that this had been a situation of deliberate extinction of the Armenian people, insisting the deaths were a by-product of the war. She recalled a heated discussion at one dinner party, just shortly before Christmas; the British still refrained from using the word, which stance some people had supported and others had considered morally reprehensible.

She sighed. “Dinner tonight?”

He shook his head. “No need to cancel dinner.”

All right, she thought. The guests would be upset, especially the French ones; everyone would be uneasy. Before he returned to the embassy, she and Edward would have to come up with a master plan on how to handle the situation. The correct mood had to be created—sober, respectful—but unbowed.

But they would go on. That was the essential. One had to keep going.

C
lare picked up her and Edward’s dirty lunch plates from the small table in the study and carried them towards the kitchen. She and Edward had spent some time discussing whether to ask Reverend Newsome to lead a prayer for the slain politician when they sat down for dinner. Having decided yes, they had agreed not to allow the assassination to dominate discussion throughout the evening—one of the duties of the Foreign Service was to maintain balance. Then Clare had gone into the kitchen to fetch the lunch Mathilde, before leaving for her break, had quickly fashioned. She must have found her way back into Mathilde’s good graces, because there was a plate of chicken in cream sauce waiting for her also. She and Edward had eaten mostly in silence as Edward went through a briefing he’d brought from the office for a workshop he was attending in the ambassador’s place that afternoon. He’d shuffled the papers into his briefcase and announced he was heading back out.

“There’s a chancery post in Manama coming up,” he’d said as he’d shut the clasp on his bag. “The P.U.S. asked me in passing—I was reading from a French document—this morning whether I still had my Arabic.”

“Bahrain?”

“Bahrain.”

“What did you say?”

“That I figured it was pretty rusty.”

She’d smiled. “I hope you didn’t make any bad jokes about oiling it. How much longer do we have in Paris?”

“We’ve been here more than three years,” he’d said, adding, “there’s also something in Bishkek.”

She wrinkled her brow.

“Kyrgyzstan,” he said. “Between Tajikistan and Kazakhstan. Electricity is a bit of a problem, but there are some lovely yurt stays. The mountain views are probably spectacular.”

She’d kissed him. “Dinner will go well. I promise.”

She’d stuck with her decision not to tell him about Barrow. If Jamie chose to unveil his presence during tonight’s dinner, Edward would be caught out, surprised by his own son. But the assassination had left her all the more loath to introduce Jamie’s latest indiscretion into his day. That was another thing about diplomatic life; the concerns of the wider world put one’s personal issues—especially the humbler ones, such as whether Peter made the First or the Second Senior rowing team at Fettes, or the dry cleaner had left a mark on one of Edward’s best jackets—in perspective. Even the shock of having your fifteen-year-old son suspended from school and left to wander around the airports of Europe slid down a notch when it came up for comparison against irrevocable tragedies such as an assassination—or, after thirty years of service, being relegated to someplace in central Asia without much electricity.

Clare pushed through the doorway into the kitchen with her shoulder, her hands encumbered by their plates. Jamie wouldn’t appear suddenly during dinner. She would speak with him now, try to get some more details and, at the same time, make him promise to keep a low profile until tomorrow. They would be the only ones in the apartment for a little while, with Edward gone and Mathilde and Amélie out for their midday breaks. Moments of domestic privacy had become rare since moving into the Residence; you had to seize them.

She set the plates down and surveyed the kitchen. Everything looked in order. She peeked into the fridge; a colander of deep-red strawberries sat on the middle shelf. She stole a handful with the hope that Mathilde wasn’t planning to use them to garnish this evening’s dessert or, if she was, wouldn’t notice. The first bite burnt into her tongue, a warm sweetness with an acidic edge. Jamie loved strawberries; she’d tote the rest of her handful to him. As a little boy he’d make himself sick eating too many at one sitting. “Moderation,” Edward would tell him, and Jamie would turn his back and pop another in his mouth. “Mommy…,” he’d moan within the hour, “my tummy doesn’t feel good.”

James would never show temperance. “Where does he get it from?” Edward would ask when James flew into a fury over being told to pick up his sneakers from the study floor or rolled off his chair in laughter during the rare state dinner he’d been invited to attend. “Certainly not you or me!”

Clare emptied her handful of strawberries back into the colander and closed the fridge. Mollycoddling. That’s what Edward called her behavior towards the children on the rare occasion that they disagreed over parental decisions.

She wiped her hands with a paper towel and headed down the hall towards his room. There was no longer light streaming out from under his door.

She knocked softly.

No one answered.

Had he fallen asleep waiting for her to return? He would have gotten up at dawn to catch the flight for Paris.

She turned the knob and pushed the door open.

On Jamie’s empty bed lay a note, written on a page torn from the Roth novel. Jamie had folded the page in two, with “Mom” scrawled across the outer flap. On the inside was written “Gone out. Don’t want to make any more trouble. I’ll steer clear of Dad until tomorrow. Jamie.”

Clare sat down on the bed. The warmth left behind by her adolescent son’s lanky body pressed into her thighs, and she ignored the urge to lean into it. She’d told Jamie he was to stay put; why did he have to burrow himself into even further trouble? She didn’t want to have to fight with him. She didn’t want to have to punish him. But these things he kept doing—the forging names, the sneaking around, the coming and going without permission—these couldn’t be excused, in the way even cheating might be, as a foolish act of desperation. They were just plain bad. Dangerous, even. Had she given him some reason to think he was to get out of the house for the evening? Or could she have sounded too unsympathetic to the way Barrow had handled his latest mess-up? What had he said? Something about a Ryan? Had she met a Ryan last time she visited? She looked around the room as though it might hold a clue, but Jamie hadn’t been at Barrow long enough to have brought home a yearbook. Jamie’s duffel bag lay on the floor. She made a move to pick it up, then stopped. She wouldn’t look through it.

Instead, she got up and went back down the hall to the foyer console. She extracted her purse from the console and fished out her BlackBerry. It
was
turned off. She pressed the on button and waited for the sucking sound of its return to power.

The screen saver flashed up. Seven voice messages, three text messages. She scrolled through them, searching. Jamie’s name wasn’t amongst them.

She drummed her fingers on the console. Jamie
hadn’t
called before leaving for the airport. He’d forged a message to the headmaster in her name, then flown back home without her permission. Without even trying to get it. Now he had, again, deliberately ignored her instructions and left the apartment. “You know, I was barely twenty-four when I started with the Foreign Office,” Edward had said this morning, out of the blue. For a moment, she’d been startled from her surreptitious brooding over the thought of moving to Ireland. Edward was so rarely random.

“That’s quite a while,” she’d said.

“Yes, it is.” He’d looked into his teacup as though seeing all the numerous cups he’d drunk since he’d first started out in the diplomatic service. “But I don’t regret it. Not for an instant. I feel good about what I do for a living. What I could still do.”

She laid her hand out flat and took a deep breath. Here was what she was going to do right now about Jamie. Nothing. She wasn’t even going to worry.
Mollycoddling.
She’d babied Jamie too much already, and this was what had come of it.

She slipped her phone into her pocket. She was going to take care of the place cards. Before Mathilde and Amélie returned and required her supervision. Then, with her staff back on track for the afternoon, she was going to leave to get her hair done. Edward deserved what little she could do for him. He deserved an ambassadorship. And he deserved Ireland. For three decades, he had sat through endless meetings and downed endless cups of tea or coffee, and sipped almost as many glasses of wine. He’d nodded at appalling individuals and lent an ear to abysmal reinventions of history while his waistline expanded and his chin dropped and his eyelids grew heavier. And then he’d tried to remold those atrocities into something better—a better world, containing a better Britain. And he’d done it all with such patience, and such aplomb. Just two weeks ago, after listening to a long diatribe from the German husband of a Polish diplomat blaming British colonial policy for the mess in the Middle East, Edward had responded, “Undoubtedly, some may question the efficacy or even wisdom of the Balfour Declaration. But rare are the events in history that have not engendered mixed responses. Rare—although
not nonexistent.
” He hadn’t even had to use the words “World War Two,” the one historical event almost everyone in the Western world could agree upon. The man had reddened and changed the subject to the upcoming World Cup being held in Germany. Edward was fair; if anything, he was calibrated. He knew when to agree and when to put his foot down. And how to disagree.

Thanks to him she’d learn how to disagree also, with her own past—and not just to be ashamed of the missteps she’d taken. At Edward’s side, she’d folded and packed away every part of her past she despaired of, like worn-out handkerchiefs in colors she no longer liked and embroidered with mottos she no longer believed in. He hadn’t asked her; he never even knew of these prisms in her personal history. Meanwhile, he’d given up things also, putting away pursuits he believed wouldn’t suit her. Oh, the folly of
that!
Edward had started out at the Foreign Office in a different direction, choosing Arabic for his hard language training and putting his name forth for Lebanon during the Israeli occupation. He’d lived in Kuwait, too, before he was posted in Washington, D.C., and met her. In another incarnation, he might have been happy to have a chance at Bahrain. But after they’d married, after they’d begun having the children, after Jamie’s ignominious start in Cairo, he’d stopped bringing home books on the Palestine conflict, and stopped checking to see what new postings might be coming up in the Arab world. Instead, building on the part of his portfolio in the States that included Irish Affairs, he’d stacked his bedside table with tomes by Gerry Adams and columns by Gary McMichael. He’d perfected his French and stoked his knowledge of the U.K.’s involvement in the European Union. He became a recognized expert in European defense issues. At the same time, he’d never tried to capitalize on her Irish heritage, and she had easily been able to convince herself it was Europe in general he was after, not Ireland in particular. After one or two carefully fashioned displays of indifference on her part early in their marriage, he’d dropped all talk of even visiting the country.

“How about Ireland?” he’d asked the summer after they married while they were discussing where to go for their upcoming holiday. “Shall we do the ancestral tour?”

“I was thinking something more exotic,” she’d responded, flipping the page in her book. “To be honest, I’ve heard so much about Ireland all my life that I feel as though I’ve already been there many times over. There are so many other places in the world to see.”

And despite the inanity of her excuses—too much rain, she’d said with a shrug the second and final time he’d proposed they tour the country—he’d left it at that. He hadn’t even urged her to join him when he’d had to hop across the Irish Channel during his two postings in London. Instead, just as he’d respected all her other personal inclinations, he’d gone along with celebrating her Irish heritage in the vague noncommittal way she’d developed—making jokes about the gift of gab when she was called out for keeping quiet, attending the works of new Irish playwrights each season, donning a spot of green when St. Patrick’s rolled around—accepting her indifference without discussion. If others, less circumspect, might express dismay, saying, “But no coastal stretch can compare to the Cliffs of
Moher
,” or “But you haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen the lakes of Killarney,” he’d leave her to answer. “Edward already travels so much,” she would say, “and during our holidays, we either go home to visit family in the U.S. or England. What little time we have left, we really need to get some sunshine. But we’ll get there!” And he would smile and nod as she’d start asking about someone’s new book or house or grandchild, deflecting any further questions.

“Ireland at last,” their friends and family would say if Edward was awarded the post in Dublin, and she would have to act as though it was nothing short of a miracle.

“Ireland at last!” she would echo.

She closed her purse back up to be returned to the foyer console, noting the USB stick containing the Rodin Museum catalog’s translation still inside. Oh, to escape into one of her translations, beautiful and belonging to a world of heroes and gods and unambiguously punished sinners.

She sat down behind the big desk in the study, taking over the same space Edward had just a short while ago occupied to inform her about the assassination. The main thing was that Jamie always
meant
well. That was the big difference between her youthful acts of delirium and his. If he’d cheated, it had been to please her and Edward. If he’d forged her name, skipped onto a plane, slipped out of the house now, it was because somewhere in the fog of his adolescent mind he thought these things would make matters easier. Mental note: she had to be sure the headmaster didn’t figure out Jamie had forged her signature giving him permission to leave. Then he might expel him.