“Celui-là,” she said. “Deux grands morceaux, emballés séparément, s’il vous plaît.”
An expression of approval flitted across the vendor’s face. “Bien sûr, Madame.”
“Good choice,” a voice said from behind her in American English.
Clare turned around to find Patricia Blum, the mother of one of Jamie’s former classmates, standing behind her; tiny, round, and always cheerful, with dark hair and an extraordinarily beautiful face. For reasons she herself didn’t understand, Clare found Patricia alarming. Patricia’s daughter, Em, had been one of the most popular girls in the class and had never had much time for Jamie.
“They’re always trying to sell us the sucker slices,” Patricia whispered. She flashed a brilliant smile at the vendor. “They think that’s what we want.”
The vendor smiled back. She handed the cheese over, wrapped and ticketed. Clare laid it in her basket and wondered whether the vendor understood English.
“How’s James doing?” Patricia asked. “Em says he’s gone home for school this year.”
Jamie is probably going to flunk right out of that damned boarding school, and this failure would stay on his permanent record. Unless she managed to do something about it, something that wouldn’t drive him crazy for its intrusiveness. And not in a million years did Em bother to tell her mother about his having left the International School. Jamie’s absence would barely have registered on Em’s radar. Jamie would conquer his long frame and fair surprised face someday, but he was too obscure, too erratic, to rate amongst girls like Em at present.
“Very well, thank you. Yes, he’s gone to England,” she said, exchanging first one and then a second cheek kiss. Patricia had probably learned about Jamie changing schools from another parent. There was a lot of talking within the expat community. Although true intimacy was rare, everyone knew everyone else’s business. She’d just have to hope word wouldn’t get around about the troubles he was having. At least he hadn’t been kicked out—yet. Suspension wasn’t expulsion.
“Ahhh, his father’s school, I bet,” Patricia said. “What was it? Like, Eton?”
“No,” she said. “I mean, my husband didn’t go to Eton.”
She shifted the basket in her hand. She wanted to call Barrow by 11:40; any later than that and she might catch the headmaster just as he was heading out to eat, which was never the best time to catch anyone.
“He’s at Barrow, on the outskirts of London,” she added. “How’s everything at the International School? James misses it. I mean, he didn’t leave because we didn’t like it. We just thought it was the right time.”
Patricia laughed. “I understand. Well, everything’s fine. They had to cancel the annual class trip to London. You know, security reasons. But I’m taking Em and a couple of her friends up there, anyway. Week after next. Maybe we’ll even run into James!”
“Maybe.” This was neither within any realm of likelihood nor particularly to be desired, and Clare knew that Patricia knew this. “Well—”
Over Patricia’s shoulder, she glimpsed a familiar face disappear behind a row of juice bottles.
Her heart froze up inside her rib cage. His face, thinner, grayer, but him. The same pale skin and hollow cheeks, the same high ridge of cheekbone buttressing a stare so brilliant it entered her in a way no one ever had before or after.
Niall.
The first time she saw him, he was standing atop the stone wall surrounding her aunt’s house in Newton, outside Boston, and she’d ever after have an exaggerated sense of his height.
The face didn’t reappear. Her breath caught in her throat, and she felt her hand reach out.
I must not be alone, she thought. He won’t come to me if I’m not alone.
He’d been standing atop the stone wall, chewing on a stalk of grass while he watched her cousin Kevin change the oil in his car, in the driveway. “You aren’t going to get nowhere like that,” she’d heard him say, and she’d known he was different. Not Irish-American like her or Boston-Irish like Kevin, but Irish-Irish.
She gripped the closest thing to her, Patricia’s arm. But she couldn’t have seen him. Already she was going crazy. And yet, it had looked so like him.
“Come on, Clare. Hand me that wrench, will you,” Kevin grumbled, and she understood her cousin was trying to ignore the stranger. Beads of sweat rolled off Kevin’s dark blond hair and jiggled on his earlobes. One dropped onto the tar of the driveway. The heat was a net, trapping everything and everyone. The temperature must have been about ninety degrees.
She was twenty years old, and the summer seemed to drag as heavily on her limbs as the heat wave. The summer internship she’d been so happy to land at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston had turned out to be hours of cataloging in an office with a small window and even smaller fan, and sometimes the days felt so heavy and still, she could hardly bear it. Even the green of her aunt’s suburban lawn when she returned in the evenings provided no relief.
“Which one?” Tools lay sprawled out across the drive. She spotted at least three wrenches, each slightly different.
“Fuck if I know,” Kevin had said. “That one.”
She picked up the one Kevin had indicated, trying to ignore the stranger as well, but his eyes bore into her. She let her hair fall over the wrench and stole a glance, not towards his face but at the rest of him: he had on threadbare corduroy pants that seemed impossibly heavy for a day this hot. The skin of his knees, visible through the worn cloth and almost at her eye level, was white as birch. He looked unlike anyone she knew, not least because of the blunt way he was examining her.
Kevin grunted and threw the wrench back at her. She had to hop to one side to avoid being hit. “Too big. Give me another.”
“You aren’t going to get nowhere like that,” the stranger said, after she’d handed over the second wrench. His voice was soft but not gentle. He jumped down from the wall, and using one booted foot—despite the heat, he was wearing leather boots—kicked the remaining wrench towards Kevin. “You need that one, you stupid feck,” he tossed over his shoulder, sauntering towards Aunt El’s kitchen. The door slammed shut behind him.
Clare sat down on the wall where he had been. “Who was that?”
“Aw, fuck. Him? Some cousin. Some ten-times-removed fucking cousin. One of my mom’s charity cases.”
She tried not to cringe. Aunt Elaine had had her move in with them in Newton after seeing the dank, cramped room Clare had planned to rent for the summer in downtown Boston, not far from the museum. Aunt Elaine had a big heart for everyone.
Kevin reached out for the final wrench, the one the ten-times-removed cousin had kicked, and applied it to the gasket. Oil came rushing out. He cursed and grabbed for a bucket. “Motherfucker!”
She got up and went into the kitchen.
And there he was, seated in the kitchen alcove, one hand clasped around a glass bottle of Coke. A film of condensation had developed around its neck, and water sweated down its sides. He flicked a few drops from his fingers and lifted the bottle to his mouth.
She sat down beside him on the bench and watched his Adam’s apple as he drank. He was barely older than she was, maybe twenty-one or twenty-two. He wasn’t taller either. They were shoulder to shoulder at the table, and she could feel his exposed knee beside hers. The smooth heat of his skin penetrated through the stupor of the summer, through her lanky, indolent limbs. She had to move her leg.
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.
&nbs
p; “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.
Seven
She 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.
An Unexpected Guest Page 6