An Unexpected Guest (14 page)

“Of course,” Marco agreed, giving a last twist to her hair.

She could see the embassy’s car pull up outside, a dark shape like the shadow of a sand shark beneath a dock. Her driver was back, waiting. Marco held up a hand mirror so she could see the back of her hair, and she nodded her approval and thanked him. At the reception desk of the salon, she tapped in the code for her bank card and reinserted her earrings. In her purse still was the USB stick containing her translation. Looking at it, she thought, I need to step out of this day for a moment.

She dropped her wallet back into the bag and fished the stick out, slipping it into her pocket. She checked her watch. 5:02 p.m. She was back on schedule. She would steal a few moments to visit the publication office at the Rodin Museum.

T
he driver whipped them around the Place de la Concorde. From the backseat, she watched a throng of cars in all shapes and sizes join them into the centrifugal force exuded by the traffic circle, pulling them in too close to one another, then flinging them out along the Rue Royale or the Champs Elysées or, in their own case, the Voie Georges Pompidou. This was where Louis XVI and, shortly after, Marie Antoinette lost their heads, when the Place trembled not from the weight of small speeding cars but the ill-shod feet of angry republicans. Clare rubbed her neck. The guillotine wasn’t supposed to be painful. But still.

They were out now, over the Seine, on the Pont Alexandre III, heading for Place des Invalides. The sudden sense of space here was uncanny, the monumentality of Paris at its most extreme. Cupids frolicking in the buff, horses with gilt wings thrust into the Parisian firmament. A
bateau mouche
appeared from under the bridge, making its way down the Seine like softened butter being spread on bread, tiny ripples following its wake.

“Je descends devant la Musée Rodin, s’il vous plaît,”
she told the driver. The entrance to the Rodin Museum was literally steps from the Residence. She shouldn’t lose more than fifteen minutes by stopping there to drop off the translation. As soon as she’d left the hairdresser’s, she’d called Amélie; everything was going according to schedule at the Residence.

The car zoomed towards the face of the Invalides and zigzagged, left, then right, then left again, onto the Rue de Varenne. The driver pulled up in front of the museum.
“Merci,”
she told him, looking around this time before stepping out into the open to see who might be on the street. Just a steady trickle of office workers coming out at the end of their workdays and a few tourists wearing fleece jackets. She shut the car door behind her.

The French Ministry of Culture had recently redone the museum entrance. She missed the shabby old entry as it used to be: a crumbling stone cubbyhole that spilled out directly into the gardens, manned by a makeshift wooden ticket booth. The magical instant of stepping through an unprepossessing break in the old stone wall surrounding the property to find oneself amidst eighteenth-century splendor. The monolithic new entrance, incorporated into a nineteenth-century chapel, looked modern in a faux-Egyptian way, a smooth, slick style that had become only recently popular amongst museums. It made her feel old. The museum entrances she’d floated through as a student trying out her nascent French, Italian, and Spanish skills on the European continent had been completely different.

The ticket seller who always wore a dark-colored turtleneck, no matter the weather, was stationed at the first cash register. He raised an eyebrow at her.

“Bonjour—”
she began.

“C’est dix-sept heures seize,”
he said and pointed to the clock on his cash register.
“Dernière entrée à dix-sept heures quinze.”

5:16 p.m. Last entrance was at quarter past five.

“Thank you,” she responded in French. “But I am not here for the museum today. I am here for
le service culturel.
”

By now, back at the Residence, the flowers had been delivered, which Amélie would have put around in their vases. No more deliveries expected. No more surprises. Just her clothes to change, and the dinner preparations to be finished. Mathilde was giving the dinner roll dough its second pounding. Amélie’s cousin had arrived, and she and Amélie were peeling potatoes to soak in cold, salted water.

She waited as the ticket seller called the museum’s publication office.

“Personne ne répond.”
He set his phone back down and pointed again to the cash register’s clock.

Everyone in the office had left for home already. At least—closing up the files on their desks, the files on their computers, smoothing their skirts, sealing the envelopes of their day’s correspondence—they weren’t answering phone calls. Delivering the translation would have to wait after all. Not a big deal, as Sylvie wasn’t expecting it until after the weekend now. Certainly not worth arguing over with the ticket seller.

She couldn’t bring herself to move away, however. The light shining into the entryway from the gardens was mesmerizing. All that rain, finally stopped, had brought flowers, and the air was full of their perfume. How glorious the museum gardens must have been all day under the bright sky, with the light breeze of spring rippling through them. With all that had happened since, she’d almost forgotten the morning sunlight slanting into the apartment, the fragrance of blossoms wafting in through the Residence’s open windows, the thrill of a rain-free day in springtime. The wild wisteria brightening the Residence’s courtyard.

The gardens stayed open later than the museum. Just five
minutes
—the time she would have spent delivering the translation. Just one quick turn, to see whether the wild cherry trees were in bloom yet. With all the rain and drizzle Paris had had, weeks had passed since the last time she’d so much as walked through the gardens.

A desire as deep as breath came over her. She had to go in.

“C’est pas grave,”
she told the ticket seller.
“Merci et bonne journée.”

Instead of turning back out the entrance, she searched inside her wallet for her membership pass and flashed it at the guard by the door.

The pale monumental facade of the Hôtel Biron, the chief museum building, stood directly ahead, a maze of symmetrical rose gardens and clipped box trees fanning out in front of it. She passed before them without giving the building a second thought and headed for the main part of the garden, on the sunny southern side. She barely paused before the Gates of Hell, flanking the property’s eastern wall, all those agonized bodies in various aspects of contortion, the heat of their deep bronze reflecting back at her. There was Eve, her plump arms hugging her curvy torso, her head bowed. The catalog Clare had most recently worked on suggested that the model for the statue had been in the early stages of pregnancy and had found Rodin’s studio too chilly. And, yes, even in the spring sun, she looked uncomfortable.

Clare continued around the building into the garden’s large southern end. Deep chartreuse leaf buds were already coursing across the trunks and branches of the linden trees. Jaunty yellow daffodils waved their strange snouts in the afternoon breeze amidst the bright blue bells of grape hyacinths. Along the garden’s central alley, people stood or strolled chatting, talking on cell phones, ogling the bronze sculptures strewn here and there amongst the growth. An elderly trio nodded to her.

She stopped by the Grove of Orpheus. It seemed barren, still bereft of the lavish greenery of summer, the box trees cut low and round, the lilacs not yet in bloom. Only the bare stems and a few random sprouts of medicinal plants poked through the grove’s rockery. The muscular torso of Orpheus, stretching his lyre up towards the sky, looked all the more doomed for the lack of leaves and flowers as buoys. Written by his feet:
Toi qui entre ici abandonne toute espérance—
“All hope abandon ye who enter here”—lifted from the entrance to Hell in Dante. Doubt had destroyed Orpheus and condemned his wife to return forever to the underworld, but also greed. He had wanted too much, too badly. He’d tried to insist that the pleasures of love last forever.

She continued south along the garden’s central alley until she reached the path that led east to the section known as the Woods, which would take her on a loop back towards the museum entrance. Here, chestnut trees replaced the linden, perhaps the same ones whose fragrance had filled the Rue de Varenne as she’d walked along it to buy flowers and had wafted into the Residence’s study when she’d opened its windows this morning. She breathed in deeply.

There, between the trees, was the huge bent torso of Andrieu d’Andres, the one of the six burghers of Calais doomed to be known through history, thanks to Rodin, not for his act of extreme bravery but for the distress he felt over his act of self-sacrifice. She moved towards the statue, as she always did when she reached this part of the garden. The college professor from whom she’d first heard the story of the Calais burghers had been a square-headed Italian who had somehow ended up teaching French history. His face had always been faintly red, and he’d worn a moustache that bobbed when he spoke. She could see it now, responding to seminar discussion with a little bounce, as she and the other Harvard and Radcliffe undergrads tried to make sense of self-sacrifice in another era. During the Hundred Years’ War, in the mid-fourteenth century, King Edward III of England had laid siege to the northern French town of Calais. After eleven months, with the town’s food and water supplies depleted, six of the town’s most illustrious citizens agreed to offer themselves up as ransom to the king in return for his freeing their city and its people. The six burghers presented themselves on the appointed morning, divested of their rich robes, before the city gates, and the king proceeded to call his executioner. He was swayed at only the last minute by his pregnant wife, Philippa; she decided that the burghers’ slaughter would be a bad portent for her unborn baby.

Most of the other students in her seminar had found the men’s surprise release a letdown. Over the same semester, the class had been through the Norman Conquest and the slaughter of the Cathars. They’d come to expect tales of immolation and beheading. One girl went so far as to suggest that the Burghers’ escape lessened the bravery of their action.

Clare had laughed along with the seminar group’s increasingly boorish discussion, although secretly she’d found the burghers’ unexpected survival all the more proof of their patriotism; to her, the arbitrariness of their deliverance served to underscore its unlikelihood. When she’d begun translating museum and art exhibition catalogs and seen Rodin’s famous depiction of the burghers’ arrival at the city gates, she’d realized just how foolish she and her classmates must have looked to their professor, the boys in their hardy rugby shirts and the girls in their neat Fair Isle sweaters, sitting around an oak-paneled study hall discussing sacrifice. Since moving into the minister’s residence, she’d returned to their tortured hypercorporeal figures in the gardens of the Rodin Museum over and over. A full rendition of the sculpture—as Rodin, under commission for the city of Calais, had designed it to be displayed, all six burghers clustered together, of equal height, of equal stature—stood farther on in the Rodin Museum gardens, closer to the entrance. Individual casts of each burgher were strewn amidst the lindens and chestnuts and peonies. The most exalted, Eustache de Saint-Pierre, the burgher who had agreed first to surrender his life for the good of his city, stood square in the middle, looking grave but determined, a beacon for French pride. But the figure that magnetized her was that of poor Andrieu. Rodin had buried Andrieu’s bronze face in enormous tinny hands, bent his dark gleaming neck with mortal sorrow; he had chosen Andrieu to represent a different side of self-sacrifice. One she thought might be more realistic. Sorrow. The quiet half-hidden bench beside him was her favorite place in the garden to sit and think.

The young grass felt soft under her loafers. The afternoon sun danced on Andrieu’s dipped head and flirted with his agonized metallic fingers. She reached out to touch them.

He was there. On the bench, sheltered by a giant holly, its leaves dark and razor-sharp.

Her hand fell on the statue’s hand. Her wedding ring made a ping against the bronze, into the stillness. This time he was no mirage, no fleeting vision. He was as real as the iron bench beneath him.

“You…,” she said, just as she’d said so many years ago. Her voice trailed off.

The fading sun, as hot-cold on her neck as the way he was looking at her.

“How about ye?” he said.

The ticking of her watch, the ticking of the day as it passed, of the years that had passed.

“Niall.”

He slid a few inches to his right, leaving a space for her on the bench.

She sat down.

He did not move to take her hand. She did not offer it. But she felt as though he’d slipped his whole body around her, not just an arm over her shoulder or a cheek next to her cheek. It was summer again, and she felt the heat of him.

“Poor bastard,” he said. “Known forever as the one who choked at dying for his people.”

How strangely familiar his voice was, still low and almost rumbling, still that distinct rhythm that rolled along, then lifted at the end of a sentence. “There was a lot of controversy over that figure,” she finally said. “A real uproar. The city of Calais thought like you. They thought it wasn’t respectful.”

“You’re not of the same mind.”

She shook her head. “Andrieu wasn’t a coward: he offered his life up willingly, no one forced him. He simply was human. He wept over the impending loss of it.”

Niall leaned back into the bench and breathed the air. He surveyed her profile. “You’ve become a talker, Clare.”

“No,” she said. She viewed him from the sides of her eyes. “Eloquent.”