An Unexpected Guest (6 page)

He drained the contents of the bottle in one go, set it back on the table, and belched. Then he looked at her. She looked down at her hands. He looked at them also.

She raised her head. Their eyes met, and she saw that his were very light blue, and as cool and glittering as winter. Despite how they’d burned into her earlier, there was nothing sunny about them.

“I’m Clare.”

“I know who you are.” Niall reached out and lifted one of her hands. He turned it over carefully before setting it back down on the table.

“You surely have beautiful hands, Clare.”

She’d unfolded her hands in front of him. One by one, her fingers; long, thin, pale. The gentle lift around her first knuckle and slender knob of the second knuckle, the soft mound of the third, and then the broad, flat, pearly nails, fingers longer than the palm, tapering only slightly, graceful without appearing fragile. First her thumb, then her index finger, then her middle finger, her ring finger, her pinkie. They stripped for him without having worn clothing.

“Thank you,” she said.

The heat had gotten to her. The heat, and she’d been too hot to eat breakfast that day. It had weighed down on her, drowning her better judgment, had drowned it that whole long hot summer. She wiped her brow and realized she’d been clutching Patricia’s arm.

“Heavens,” she said, loosening her scarf.

There was no Niall here, just row after row of tins and cardboard boxes and rounds of cheese and bundles of asparagus. Still, she had so thought she’d seen him this time for real, and then she had grabbed Patricia Blum’s arm. She didn’t even like Patricia Blum. She stepped back from her.

“Hey, that’s okay!” Patricia patted her. “I’ve been there. Hot flashes?”

“No, no, nothing like that. It’s just…Oh, too much to do today.” She smiled and tried to erase her foolishness. She was barely forty-five. Hot flashes? Did she seem older to Patricia? “Please pass along greetings to Em on Jamie’s behalf. It was lovely to chat.”

She pushed off from Patricia, like a canoe from a dock, backwards, wobbly but sliding, trying to hide her embarrassment. The false sightings had begun the first time she and Edward lived in London, continuing after they were subsequently posted to Paris. Not all the time, but in random flurries—months would go by, even a year, then for a few weeks she’d be sure she saw him almost daily. They’d subsided when she and Edward had been moved back to Washington and had remained dormant upon their ensuing return to Paris, and she’d thought finally she was done with thinking she saw Niall in a crowd when she was just seeing another pale blue-eyed man disappearing into a sea of people. Now, lately, they had returned to her. And, like today’s, they’d become so real.

The problem was Ireland. Just the thought of moving there and already she was losing her grip.

She lifted her shopping basket sternly and, in the aisle devoted to imported British foods, collected all the boxes of oatcakes on the shelf. As she waited by the checkout, she tried not to peer around her, tried not to use her height to glance over the heads of the others. She busied herself instead by verifying the expiration date on the biscuits. The point was to stop struggling with regret. Niall would never seek her out. Niall couldn’t seek her out. His body had been lowered in a casket into the moist earth of Derry the November after she met him. Niall was long dead and buried.

S
he reached the courtyard of the Residence, basket of cheese and asparagus hanging over one arm, homeopathic drops for Mathilde tucked away next to the to-do list in her sweater pocket, just as the men delivering the official plate and silver crested with Her Majesty’s royal emblem from the embassy pulled up. She checked her watch: 11:45 a.m. Too late to call Barrow before lunch.

She nodded and slipped past the men, into the building’s downstairs foyer. Outside, the sun was still shining, the wind still light and playful, but upstairs would soon be the table settings to unpack and lay out, and she was going to make sure that was done correctly. Her determination to make this dinner right had started to feel almost religious, like an act of penance. They were in the first decade of the third millennium, nearly three thousand people had been killed on one day alone in New York City by lunatics, some forty thousand civilians had since died in Iraq, more were dying daily, maybe right at this very moment, due to a war begun by British and American politicians, a war that neither she nor Edward (although he took care, like any good British foreign diplomat, never to promote his own political leanings) supported but that had affected their personal lives to the degree that they’d felt compelled to exile their younger son, and she was fixating on silverware. She couldn’t be stopped for directions by an innocent stranger on the street without scanning for escape routes—she did wonder what had happened to that man, if he’d found his doctor, and if so, if the doctor had managed to help him; he’d looked so ill—but aligning china plates was her mantra. And there was her youngest son, imploding at school, and she’d had to put off speaking with the headmaster. It sounded ridiculous. But upholding standards was part of Edward’s job, and she believed in Edward. Edward furthered the cause of civility. He would not bring anger to Dublin if he got the top post there. He would bring discussion. So she would let the building’s door swing shut behind her, closing out the breeze and sunshine as well as the disorder and chaos of the external world, and train her thoughts to tableware and wineglasses.

Her next set of business would be to inscribe the place cards; years of experience had taught her to wait until now to get started on them, because of the real possibility of last-minute changes to the guest list. Usually it wasn’t a question of gaining new guests, as with the de Louriacs, but losing one. Numbers had then to be swiftly made up—most often with someone “below the salt,” as they called a guest recruited from amongst the embassy personnel, typically one of the first counselors, referring to where protocol would put them around the table—and the seating arrangement rapidly reconfigured to adjust for the difference in clout between the person who dropped out and the person who’d been added. And all the above meant that if the place cards had already been done up, some would need to be discarded and new ones written, a needless waste of both card stock and effort. Despite what most people seemed to think and newspapers liked to print, “thrift” was a byword for diplomatic personnel and their spouses, both regarding time and materials, even as they spent hours of each year entertaining lavishly. One was just not to show it.

There was a delicate rhythm to the whole thing. Living within the diplomatic world wasn’t just a matter of smiling, shaking hands, and wearing attractive clothing. That’s what most outsiders didn’t realize, and that it was possible to take pride in the skill it required, even when it came to something as trivial as knowing how and when to do the place cards. A few years ago there’d been a big stir in the British papers over the revelation that the embassy in Paris spent more than any other British embassy in the world. But did they have any idea how difficult it had become to keep the whole thing going? With the emergence of instant global communications, some pundits had even begun to question the modern-day relevance of diplomats. A clerk was all that was required to authorize passports and sign birth certificates, the argument went, and individual experts could be sent here and there, as needed. Clare thought these were the opinions of people who never traveled.

If anything, today’s world required on-site national representatives more than ever. She had seen firsthand how difficult relations had become with the French for Edward and his colleagues since Britain had joined the U.S. in invading Iraq. The man at the
tabac
once told her to her face he believed the U.S. was asking for more 9/11s to occur; obviously, the politicians he voted into office weren’t going to be the ones eager to make deals with Americans or their staunch ally, the British. Captains of industry had to be constantly reminded, too, why doing business with the U.S. or U.K. was still in their interest. And these same dynamics were true in countless permutations around the globe, involving countless other combinations of countries. There were layers of ill will out there, and it took ceaseless effort within the diplomatic sphere to keep the machinery of détente from collapsing. Dinner after dinner, lunches and breakfasts, receptions, conferences, workshops, one-on-one meetings; Edward was always busy. Meanwhile, trouble percolated as pervasively as global power was restructured: between India and Pakistan, between Pakistan and Afghanistan, between North Korea and everywhere. There was even talk that new splinter groups of the I.R.A. might rise up against the Good Friday agreement.

The elevator was already waiting on the ground floor, and she stepped into it, swinging the door shut after her. She pressed the button for her floor. And if some radical elements began taking up arms again for the union of Northern Ireland with the rest of Ireland? Would she in some way still be implicated? She leaned against the elevator cage. At least her guilt remained her own; surely no one in Dublin could recognize her. Niall was dead, and she’d given her real name to no one at the hotel. Only the one guy had seen what she was carrying. Was there any chance in a million she could run into either him or the desk clerk anyhow? Or that if one of them saw her photo in a magazine or
newspaper
, wife to the new ambassador to Ireland, he would recognize her? She looked utterly different than she had then—a middle-aged woman now, well-groomed and confident, transformed by the mantle of respectability and societal stature. Besides, even if one of them did claim to recognize her, she could deny it; airlines didn’t keep records that long of their passenger lists. There was nothing to disprove her claim she’d never been to Dublin.

The elevator rose so slowly, so noisily. She resisted pressing the button for their floor again; it wouldn’t make the old cage rise more quickly. Instead, she adjusted her scarf and sweater. Had she remembered everything for the dinner? But of course, she had. There’d been so many distractions already this morning, and here she’d missed calling Barrow. Still, she was efficient. She could lay claim to that. She took care of things.

“Whenever I think of you, Mom,” Peter had said while home from school over Christmas, “I think of you in beige cashmere, leaning over the dinner table, refolding the napkins while Amélie’s in another room, not looking.”

She hadn’t known whether to be pleased or insulted. She did take a certain pride in the way she’d learned to marry tact and precision.

“Not folding the napkins, dumb shit,” Jamie had said. “Sitting behind the big desk in the study, writing something, making a list or something.”

They were in the car, on the way to a party. Edward had craned his neck around from where he sat beside the driver in the front seat. “It’s not necessary to address your brother like that.” Tiny drops of drizzle competed with the wipers on the windshield behind him.

“And, anyway, Jamie, who are you to say how I remember Mom?” Peter had objected, and the whole question of how Clare was to be remembered was forgotten, except by Clare, who’d since returned to it in private from time to time when she thought about her children and how far away from her they were now. Somehow she’d been unprepared for the inevitable separation that maturation had wrought between them; their healthy arrival into the world had filled her with such astonishment that she hadn’t been able to bring herself to think of them as someday moving on. As expats you were on a magic carpet, you and your spouse and children, floating through the world together, unable to get off individually, not quite of the world around you. Clare sometimes felt she’d leaned on her children, when they were still living at home, as much as they had on her. She’d
needed
them, anchors in the floating world. Just as they’d needed her to provide a wharf, a common ground, a pillar.

“Your mum is like that lovely column over there, boys, don’t you think? Tall, cool, white, smooth, and wonderfully classic,” Edward had said during a visit to the Acropolis seven years ago. He’d said it with a straight face, but to this day she asked herself: Edward had a sly sense of humor, but had he really once compared her to a caryatid on the Erechtheum, holding up the firmaments of the British Foreign Service? The caryatids were voluptuous, and her chest barely offered cleavage enough to console dinner-party décolletage, much less support the workings of the Queen of England. So many things she was beginning to forget, or at least question her memory of. Most of all she seemed to keep forgetting her sons had left home. She sometimes caught herself up short, rushing back from a reception to check they were safely in bed, with the realization that this was something she couldn’t know about them, might never know about them again on a regular basis, their beds being from now on distant. If only people could choose what to forget and remember; how curious that we often remember what we wish we could forget, and forget what we seek to remember.

The elevator stopped on the third floor with a thud that rocked Clare forward on her feet. She would have preferred to take the stairs, but walking up instead of riding the elevator might seem indecorous, more suitable to a schoolgirl than a diplomat’s wife, the sort of thing only an American woman would do. Not on the same level as wearing galoshes, but still. When they moved on from the minister’s residence, she didn’t plan to leave any gossip behind her. She pushed on the cage, and the door clicked open with a big clank and a thud. She thought it all too noisy, but that was how elevators were in Paris. If no one else minded it, why should she?

“The men are on their way up with the plate,” she told Amélie, finding the housekeeper in the dining room giving a last polish to the heavy mahogany table. It would soon be set with delicate china trimmed with the golden standard of the British Crown. A few hours later, she and their guests would all be lined up around it, the P.U.S. to her right, Edward facing her from the other end of the table, everyone in their evening finery, expectant. “Are we okay with the liquor?”

“Oui, Madame.”
Amélie made one last concentric circle on the table with her cloth and looked up. “Ze table, she is rea-dy.” She hesitated.
“Madame?”
She pointed towards the hall, in the direction of the bedrooms. She raised one hand to chin level and shook it.

Clare handed her basket over to Amélie, taking the homeopathic drops out of her pocket and stacking them on top. “Please tell Mathilde the chemist said to put three drops in a glass of juice, twice daily.” She made a squeezing motion with her hand to demonstrate. “Three drops in juice. Two times a day.”

The service doorbell rang. This would be the men with the plate.

“I open the door,” Amélie said.

“Thank you.”

She turned towards the bedrooms.

A few rays of electric light squeezed out from under the door to Jamie’s room. Clare knocked and pushed the door open. Sprawled the length of the bed was her oversized fifteen-year-old, reading, she noted, a Philip Roth novel. Jamie pushed the book under an arm as she entered.

She took one fast step forward, then stopped herself. Instead, she said, “Jamie! How did you get here so quickly?”

“That’s nice, Mom. I mean, hi and everything.”

She sat down on the edge of his bed and tried to kiss him. He shrugged off her embrace but, as she straightened away from him, continued to hold on to her, grabbing one of her arms. With her free hand, she ruffled his hair. There was a faint scar still visible along his hairline from the time he’d woken from a nap in the London town house where they’d lived after the Cairo posting, heard her voice downstairs, and tried to join her while clutching on to a stuffed bunny. They’d had a nanny back then named Nia, a young woman from Wales, who was supposed to be watching him. Edward had dismissed her as soon as they’d returned from the hospital, maybe the only time he’d ever taken on a staff decision. “The point is that she wasn’t doing her job. It’s not an act of vengeance,” he’d said. She’d nodded, relieved. She hadn’t wanted to see the woman again herself, not even long enough to fire her.

Jamie released her arm and shook his hair back over his forehead.

“I was already in Paris when I called,” he said. “I was at the airport.”

Her young son, alone in an airport. Had he taken a bus in? A taxi? She folded her hands over each other. “How did you leave school grounds without first getting my permission?”