An Unexpected Guest (2 page)

C
lare scanned the guest list for possible food allergies, religious restrictions, or special diets and, finding none, set it down on a counter. A gust of spring wind stirred the chartreuse buds on the linden tree outside the kitchen window, and unfastening the hinge, she opened the window so the scent of blossoms could enter. After weeks of gray and drizzle, the sun was shining on Paris. Morning light spilled over the cobbled courtyard below. Tiny sprigs of green peeked through the crags between the stones, blades of grass too young to be cut down by the concierge’s weaponry. Somehow, overnight, the wisteria had fanned out in a flash of purple against the side of the building, like the imprint of light seen after squeezing one’s eyelids shut.

“You’ll catch a chill like that.”

Clare drew her head back in. “Good morning, Mathilde.”

“Hmph.” Mathilde, who was half Swiss and half Scottish, and always prepared for a sudden snow- or rainstorm, pulled a heavy wool coat off and hung it in a closet by the service entrance. “You have the menu for me?”

“Yes.”

A menu had already been planned for the ambassador, but the
Salon Bleu,
where dinner was to have been held at the ambassador’s residence, was a pageant of sweeping ceiling, gilt wall ornaments, blue satin upholstery, and the tinkling of crystal, with a richly colored rug the size of a small sea. The dining room in the minister’s residence, while handsome with its mahogany furniture and dark-green painted walls, and large enough to seat twenty at dinner, felt intimate by comparison. In other words, what would have succeeded amidst the splendor of the
Salon Bleu
wouldn’t work for the minister’s more discreet residence. Moreover, Clare wanted a meal that would show off Mathilde’s particular culinary talents and make subtle reference to Ireland. If she was going to help Edward, she was going to do it right.

She refined her thoughts as she spoke. “New asparagus from Alsace, wrapped in
jambon de bayonne,
to start. Your lovely Chilean sea bass crusted with almond and bathed in leek and lemon cream as the main course. Salad, and I’ll get whatever we need for the cheese course when I go to buy the flowers. You decide the dessert. Whatever you think fit—your desserts are all brilliant. Just please make it seasonal.”

“You can’t do the Chilean sea bass. Too controversial.”

“Overfishing?”

“Overfishing.” Mathilde shrugged. “Vietnamese farmed basa. I can cook it up the same way as the Chilean, and it tastes almost the same. I’ll dress it with potatoes in fresh pesto.”

“Perfect.” Clare heard the ring of the phone in the study, the sound of the housekeeper’s slippers padding their way down the hall. She paused to listen for the name of the caller.

“
Oui,
wait, please.” Amélie’s voice carried into the room. “I will go to the Madame, James.”

James? Had she heard Amélie correctly?

“
Donc,
asparagus and ham, basa in leek and lemon cream. It’s no bad,” Mathilde said, offering a begrudging nod, “for a spring menu.” She crossed her arms over her ample chest. “All right, then, if you don’t have anything else, I’d best get started. Nae the way one is supposed to do these things. A V.I.P. dinner on one day’s notice.”

Jamie had barely ever rung in the morning since he’d begun at boarding school last autumn. Once, when he’d forgotten to finish an essay for history: “Come on, Mom,” he’d said, “just a short
little
e-mail, saying my computer exploded or something.” Another time, when he’d been called down to the headmaster for throwing a currant bun (that hit a teacher). He normally timed his daily call for early evening, when Clare was most likely to be in but Edward not yet. At fifteen, he didn’t want his father to know how unhappy he was away from home, nor how dependent he was on his mother to stick it out.

She checked her watch: 9:10 a.m.

Jamie
couldn’t
have gotten into some new trouble on this day of all days.

“I’m truly sorry,” she said to Mathilde, “especially after I’d given you the day off. Thank you again for coming in. You’re a treasure.”

Mathilde snorted and began tying on her apron.

“Madame, eet’s James,” Amélie said, extending the phone towards her.

“Oh!” She accepted the handset from the housekeeper with a careful smile on her face. “That’s nice. Thank you, Amélie. I think I’ll just take this back in the bedroom.”

She walked the long hall back to her bedroom, half shut the door, and sat down on the edge of the mattress. The plastic of the receiver felt cool against her cheek, unyielding. It was tricky with Jamie. He wanted her help, and she wished she could do more for him. Things certainly were not going well at his boarding school. But nothing annoyed him more than unsolicited interference from his parents. “Jamie?”

There was a pause.
“James.”

“
James.
Is everything all right?” To herself she thought, Please, at least don’t let any bones be broken. Or any school property.

“Yeah, sure, Mom. Two hundred thousand people died in Iraq this morning. But it only rained three inches in London this week.”

She transferred the phone to her other hand and frowned. “Two hundred thousand? That seems like rather a lot.”

“Okay,
two.
Does it really make a difference?”

“Well, to the other one hundred and ninety-eight thousand, probably. But I see what you mean. Even one is one too many. So, is that what’s up? Are you having nightmares again?”

He sounded so close, she could have sworn he was calling from downstairs. “Oh, Mom,” he said and groaned. “Can you stop with that? I should never have told you.”

“It’s okay, Jamie. I’m not going to tell anyone.”

“Did you tell Dad?”

“No. But is that why you’re calling?” At the other end of the apartment, the service doorbell rang. A delivery; she could hear the soft tones of Amélie’s voice again. A man’s voice; she couldn’t distinguish whose. She checked her watch. It had to be the wine.

She’d missed how Jamie had responded.

“Mom?” he was now saying. “So? Has anyone called?”

“From?”

“From…from anywhere.”

“Oh, Jamie. We have a really big day here. Just tell me. Have you gotten into trouble at school again?”

There was silence on the other side of the line.

“Jamie?”

“Never mind.”

She had a moment of panic. “I didn’t mean that. What’s the matter?”

“I just told you.”

She sat up, alert. Jamie had called a few nights earlier, asking permission to send an e-mail in her name requesting access to the school’s science lab after hours. Something about some homework he and his roommate, Robbie, were doing together. “I’ll write it,” she’d said, but he’d objected. “It’s just a note, Mom. Just tell me the password for the family account. Otherwise, I’ll have to give you all the times and stuff when we want to get in there.” Afterwards the thought had kept coming back to her: since when did Jamie go out of his way to do homework?

“Well, tell me again.”

Her son sputtered so hard into the phone, she had to draw her ear away. “Look, Mom,” he shouted, “I’m just saying, whatever they tell you, it’s not right that only one person carry all the blame! It’s not right!”

She tugged on a lock of hair. “Listen, honey—”

“I gotta go, Mom. I just wanted to speak to you first. Before
they
do.” His voice broke. “I wanted to tell you I’m…I have to come home.”

Christ, she thought. That’s it. He’s going to be suspended. “Jamie—”

But he repeated, “I gotta go. Bye,” and hung up.

She waited, as though some part of her younger son might still linger, ready to talk more, before she clicked off the phone. She’d been apprehensive about sending Jamie to boarding school; their older son, Peter, had been at Edward’s alma mater in Scotland, Fettes, for two years and professed to love it, but Jamie called Fettes “Fat-Ass” behind Edward’s back. “I know you were pleased with your years at Fettes,” she’d said when Edward had first brought the idea up the winter before, “and Peter has done fine there. But Jamie isn’t Peter. Edinburgh only gets seven hours of daylight in winter, and Fettes does have those red-striped blazers. And the bagpipes…”

Edward had squeezed his hands together once in front of him, as he always did when he was about to capitulate. Clare had seen the movement and had suppressed a smile. For a moment, she’d been happy to think Jamie would be spending another year at home and at the International School in Paris.

“Very well,” Edward had said. “I thought he might do well to be near his older brother. But if not Fettes, he will still have to go somewhere. We’ll be leaving Paris soon, and in these last years before university, a child’s education must have continuity. Besides”—and he’d paused to reach for
The Guardian
—“the security risk will be smaller at a British boarding school. There will be gates, there will be grounds, there will be less of a spotlight on him than on a diplomat’s son rambling the
septième arrondissement
with a schoolbag over his shoulder.”

And so, she had come up with the Barrow School, because it was in London and near an airport, and a friend of Jamie’s from their posting in Washington, Robbie Meriweather, had just been sent there while his father was relocated for the World Bank to Jakarta. She’d asked Robbie’s father to write a letter supporting his candidacy and, when Jamie was accepted, had had the two boys placed in the same dorm room.

But being reunited with Robbie hadn’t spared Jamie from homesickness, nor had being just an hour’s flight away from Paris.
Home
-sick? Could she even call Paris his home? Jamie had been born while they were posted in Cairo, but that city had never been home to any of them. When her thoughts returned to those couple of years, Clare
felt
Cairo rather than remembered it: the weight of her belly, then the weight of James in her arms as she’d walked him up and down the halls of their apartment, trying to calm him. The hooded eyes of their nanny whenever she’d hand James over to her, the
siss-siss
sound the woman made between her gapped front teeth. Stepping outside, the sun beating down, bludgeoning the back of her neck and shoulders, the smell of mint and tea and excrement heavy in the still air, the assault of car horns and shouting. Back inside the haven of their apartment, more painful sounds: the ring of phones bearing Gulf War updates, the penetrating silence of whispers and furtive conversations, and, always, the wails of the baby. James had cried steadily for the first six months of his life, his little hands screwed into tiny balls, fighting a war of his own. Why didn’t you go
home
to have him? the other expat wives had asked. But even then, where was home? Hers or Edward’s? Though she was married to a British foreign servant, Clare was still an American.

“Not homesick,
heart
sick,” Edward had corrected Clare the last time she’d brought up James’s struggles at Barrow. His studied patience had weighed on her like a heavy blanket. “Heartsick for the indulgences of his munificent mother.”

Jamie
should
have gone to Fettes. At least Peter would have been there to take care of him. Peter was solid, like his father. If Edward did get posted to Dublin, she’d spend more time in their London apartment and arrange for Jamie to come stay with her weekends.
She
would help him.

For a moment, Clare almost felt positive about Dublin. Then she remembered, and a wave of cold rode over her.

She entered St. Stephen’s Green earlier than agreed, hastening past the fountain with three stoic-faced Fates perched on a slab of stone in its center, tightening her navy sweater around her waist. Who’d think Dublin could be so chilly in August? In Boston, the heat had shown no sign of letting up; by now, even the roses had drooped from heat exhaustion. When she arrived at the memorial to Yeats, she sat down on a bench and pulled the sweater on. A man wandered in—not him—and she hunched over her now flat stomach.

A tiny yellow-and-green finch flitted down onto the bench beside her. He twittered, cocked his head left, then right, eyed her, flew away. She waited. Couples walked by, college kids like herself toting knapsacks, gray-haired men gripping newspapers, a mother with three small children. Even as the park began to fill with workers going home for the day, she waited. She couldn’t believe the person she’d become, and yet the last thing she could do was go backwards.

Still she waited.

Clare folded her hands over the telephone. If Jamie hadn’t been suspended yet, he would be in class now, and they weren’t allowed to have cell phones in class—or anywhere outside their dorm rooms. If she rang him straight back, she could get him into still more trouble.

She rose from the bed and opened the door all the way. There was something happening in the front of the Residence—she could hear Amélie arguing. She had to get out there and ensure things stayed on track for the dinner.

A
mélie met her at the mouth of the Residence’s hall, shadowed by a short man in a gray jumpsuit.

“Madame,”
he said, folding his arms over his chest,
“on régle avant que je pars.”

“Zis man,” Amélie repeated, shaking her head with the special disgust she reserved for deliverymen who spoke even less English than she, “he wants zis house pay him.”

If the butler were here, he’d be handling this—not Amélie and not Clare. And he would do it with his usual aplomb. But what was the point of thinking about that? Gérard wasn’t here. And it wasn’t fair to expect Amélie to manage in his place. Clare would manage.

“Mais non, monsieur, je vous en prie…,”
Clare began, trying to explain to the deliveryman their special circumstance. Since they were holding the dinner in the ambassador’s stead, the cost of the wine would go on the ambassador’s residence’s account rather than on theirs, although she’d still have to keep a record of it.

“C’est pas normal,”
he interrupted.

“Mais si, monsieur.”
Unlike the ambassador’s wife, whose residence had its own huge wine cellar of Pol Roger Champagne and Bordeaux and Burgundies, Clare regularly used this purveyor for the minister’s residence, where they didn’t entertain in such enormous numbers and thus didn’t keep such large quantities of wine always handy. The wine merchant knew her well enough to know she wasn’t going to try to cheat them, even if she were able.
“C’est normal pour aujourd’hui.”

The man shrugged and made an abrupt about-face towards the front door. He did not wait for Amélie to let him out or steer him to the service entrance; he twisted the doorknob himself.
“Très bien, Madame,”
he said.
“Je sais où vous habitez.”
And with this vague threat, and a dismissive flick of his wrist, he swung the door open, leaving it to thwack shut behind him.

Amélie shook her head and returned to her work in the dining room. Clare made a mental note to check that they had a full selection of single malt whiskies in stock, as well as a few bottles of Somerset Alchemy Fifteen-Year-Old Cider Brandy. If only she’d heard everything Jamie had said.

The phone was still in her hand, and she walked to the study. The last time Edward or she had tried to pin Jamie down over some school infraction, it had taken more than a week to pry any details out of him. The more they would ask, the less he would tell. She sat down behind the study’s large walnut desk and rapid-dialed the Barrow switchboard. Jamie wouldn’t like it, but she’d call the headmaster directly. At least she would both skip the whole part where she had to get Jamie to talk and avert any possibility of the school ringing Edward. If Jamie was being sent home, this was serious.

She heard someone pick up.

“The headmaster’s line is engaged,” the school’s receptionist told her. “Would you like to hold?”

She tapped the broad face of the desk with a fingernail. “That’s all right, thank you. I’ll call back in five minutes.”

She set the phone down and opened the laptop in front of her. As it booted up, she took her notepad out of her cardigan pocket and surveyed her to-do list. Drat Barrow. They should never have sent Jamie there. He hadn’t been a brilliant student at the International School, but nothing like this. The computer screen blinked at her, then stabilized, and she clicked on Outlook.

Like rows of black ants, a slew of new e-mail messages appeared.

Towards the top:

Clare scrolled down the screen.

A few e-mails farther down, from Edward’s secretary:

More portions of fish would have to be ordered, Mathilde would have to adjust her measures.…Why hadn’t Lydia called instead of sending an e-mail? Clare felt in her sweater pocket; she didn’t have her phone on her. She might not have taken it out of her purse the evening before. After Edward had dropped the bomb about Dublin, she hadn’t thought about checking e-mails.

She pulled the laptop towards her and began typing.

She finished the note, pressed “send” on the keyboard, and added “order more ham and more basa” to the bottom of her to-do list. She also added “rethink the seating arrangement” and “request two more official place settings from the embassy.” The de Louriacs had owned the same landed estate in Aquitaine since the fifteenth century. De Louriac senior had been the P.U.S.’s tennis partner during the P.U.S.’s years in Paris. They were what passed for intimates in the diplomatic world. Also, he controlled Ballaut, the titanic French aeronautics concern, which was of vital interest to the British government at this moment. Edward had explained it briefly to her yesterday on their way home from the reception. She had not probed the details. They would be fourteen total now at dinner.

9:40 a.m. Time to call Barrow again.

As she reached for the handset, sunshine slashed through the broad windows of the study, impaling her hands against the study desk, translucent in the sharp light, an older woman’s hands. Were they
her
hands? A touch of freckle sprayed across the top of the right one, the skin so thin the tendons were almost visible. The knuckles rose into a puckered ridge.

Was it possible that someone had once kissed each of these knuckles, telling her how he dreamt of her hands when they were separated? She’d sat down beside him at the kitchen table and watched him drink his Coke and noticed the curl of hair rolling down the back of his neck. He’d plunked down his bottle and, without asking, slipped his palm under hers.

“You surely have beautiful hands, Clare,” he said.

His eyes were so blue that they left her feeling as though she’d stared too long up into the sky. She looked away and was unable to see anything.

She was tall and fair-haired, good-looking without being striking, and plenty of boys had been happy to have her as their date for a movie, on a hike, to a house party. “Why don’t you ask Clare? She’s okay,” she could imagine them saying about her. But she was never part of the golden circle of popular girls, and the boys in the suburbs of Hartford were as vague about their attentions as they were good at playing lacrosse. Not one of them had ever called anything about her beautiful. None of them even seemed to have opinions.

She began to unfurl her fingers, for him.

Clare drew her hands back from the phone, hid them behind her back, brushed them against the front of her cardigan. And if she hadn’t followed Niall into her aunt’s kitchen all those years ago? If he hadn’t touched her hand and she hadn’t looked into his eyes? Would she still have ended up agreeing to help? Would she now be in this predicament?

She pressed the rapid-dial button for Barrow on the phone again. She was not going to think about Niall, especially not now. This time she told the main switchboard she would hold; while she waited, she fired off an e-mail to the fishmonger, as well as one to the butcher, ordering the extra portions. She was Clare Moorhouse, wife to the British minister in Paris, cool, collected, the picture of composure. Still on hold, she sent e-mails to the pantry at the ambassador’s residence, requesting the two additional place settings, and to the ambassador’s secretary asking whether either of the two new guests had any dietary requirements. She modified both her guest and her to-do lists.

The switchboard put her through. “Mrs. Moorhouse. Of course,” the headmaster’s secretary said. Clare thought she could hear her reach for the pearls she always wore around her neck and click them together. “Mr. Hennessey just stepped away. But he will call you and your husband back straightaway. As soon as he sorts out this other…business.”

“Mrs. Thomas, I have a busy day. I will be out most of the afternoon. And my husband will not be available at all. Perhaps,
we
could talk now?” Hearing the secretary’s hesitation, Clare continued, careful to be as definite and no-nonsense as possible. This was what worked best with Barrow. “I just spoke with James, and he’s very upset. He really has been trying to make an effort. He may make his mistakes here and there, but he means well.”

The headmaster’s secretary cleared her throat. Clack went the pearls; now Clare was sure she heard them. They must have thumped against the phone receiver.
“Indeed,”
Mrs. Thomas said.

“Mrs. Thomas, I can assure you we take both James and Barrow very seriously. I’m very worried.” She hesitated. “The minister is, too. I’ve spoken with him.”

The secretary was quiet for a moment. “It would be better if you talked directly with the headmaster. But I can tell you that Barrow does not intend to ask for James’s removal. Some type of punitive action has to be taken, a suspension, but there will not be a request for permanent withdrawal. But really, you need to speak with Mr. Hennessey.”

“Mrs. Thomas,” Clare began, buying time to think of the right way to phrase a question without sounding too blunt and, thus, American or ignorant, things that might prejudice them further against Jamie. She didn’t want Barrow to know she hadn’t got out of Jamie in detail what had happened, that Jamie wasn’t easy to handle in his home life either.

The sound of a crash echoed through the dining room into the study. Mathilde! Either the fishmonger or the butcher must have called back on the kitchen line to confirm Clare’s e-mails, and Mathilde was upset that Clare hadn’t gone in there right away to inform her about the additional guests. This could mean trouble for tonight’s dinner. If Mathilde felt really put out, she was liable to burn the fish, or the equivalent, in retaliation. Mathilde’s temper was as impressive as her cooking.

“Mrs. Thomas,” she said. She could hear the pad of footsteps. That would be Amélie fleeing the pantry. “Please tell Mr. Hennessey that James’s father and I will try him back this afternoon. He doesn’t need to try me.”

She hung up the phone and extracted her pad.
Call the headmaster at Barrow again,
she added to the bottom of her to-do list, right after
Check on the single-malt whiskey and the British brandy.
She wouldn’t try to get it out of the secretary. That wouldn’t help anyone.

That call about the science lab—she should have followed it up. Winter term, Jamie had been caught cheating on a science test and he’d been on academic probation ever since. Indeed, the only reason she’d agreed to let him write that e-mail in her name was that she hadn’t wanted in any way to discourage him. Jamie had had trouble with the science teacher, Mr. Roach, from the start. Already in the autumn he had given Jamie a week of detention for spilling some chemical material. “He’s dangerous,” Mr. Roach had said. “He doesn’t think through what he’s doing and could cause real damage.” He’d ragged on Jamie ever since—probably half the reason Jamie had cheated on that test. Jamie had never done anything like that when he was still at the International School. He knew Mr. Roach was looking for any excuse to fail him. And no one else at Barrow would be sticking up for him.

She sighed and stood up. At least he didn’t seem to have hurt himself. Not this time.

“What a busy morning!” she said to Amélie, passing her en route to the kitchen, preparing herself for what she would find in there. She’d have to set Jamie’s problems aside for the moment to sort out whatever had happened to upset Mathilde; the tiniest perceived slight could set Mathilde off, and her means of revenge were typically disproportionate. About two months after Clare had hired her, Mathilde had gone so far as to produce an authentic haggis in response to being asked to do lamb for a member of the Kuwaiti royal family. It turned out she hadn’t liked the way Clare had left a note for her instead of speaking personally to her about the menu.

“Well, you wrote ‘lamb,’
n’est-ce pas?
” Mathilde had said, thumping out the crust for a shepherd’s pie when Clare had gone to speak with her the following morning about having served their royal guests animal entrails mixed with oatmeal. Flour rose like an atomic cloud around her. “You wrote ‘traditional,’ nae? How am I to ken what you mean if you canna take the time to speak with me directly? And,” she added, “it’s no that simple either, producing a good ’aggis here in Paris.”

Now
that’s
a contradiction in terms, if ever there was one, Clare had thought, and for a brief moment, she had considered simply hiring a new chef. But Mathilde had already made them the envy of dinner hosts all over the city, and in Paris that was no mean accomplishment. Moreover, Edward liked Mathilde’s cooking. Maybe because of her curious heritage, Mathilde had an uncanny talent for creating rewarding culinary experiences out of the type of mild simple dish that best pleased Edward.