An Unexpected Guest

by Anne Korkeakivi

  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.

  Pulling her cell phone out of her pocket, she pressed the rapid-dial for Jamie’s number.

  The ring went directly into voice mail.

  Damn, she thought. Of course.

  “Jamie,” she said on his voice mail, “this is your mother. I need you to call me immediately.”

  She knew Jamie wasn’t going to call her back until he damn well felt like it. He probably was making a point of not even checking his messages. Jamie might mean well in a global sense, and he could be sweet as a charm, but keeping his own counsel just didn’t bother him the way it might other kids. Family members commented on how, like Clare, he looked more like his one Swedish great-grandparent than any of his British or Irish ancestors. Clare thought he had something else of Mormor’s, as they’d called her grandmother, the thing that had allowed her to conceal her true age until her death. But his inner life was unruly, and it was the combination of this trait with his opacity that caused such havoc. She never seemed to know until after the fact the problems he was having, something exacerbated by his adamancy she not get involved in his life without his express invitation.

  There was nothing to do but just get on with things. She assembled pen and card stock, but the still of the room left her feeling pinioned. She got up, walked to the room’s tall windows, and flung them open. Spring came wafting in, lifting the ends of her hair as though her shoulder-length locks were a curtain, stirring the scarf she wore draped around her shoulders. Taking the scarf off now, she laid it over the back of the desk chair. She shed her cardigan as well. She thought she could smell magnolias or maybe hazelnut blossoms. An urge to put her arms around someone surprised her. Why wasn’t Jamie here, where she could talk with him? She went to the small television on a corner shelf and flipped on the power so as to fill the room with the sound of people. She settled herself behind the desk and began engraving.

  Black loops and curls emerged from her fountain pen, and she gave in to the luxury of adding a little swagger: a twist at the end of an “e” and slight flourish at the end of a “t.” Everyone said she had excellent handwriting for an American, and despite herself, despite all weighing on her mind, seeing how beautifully the line
s were coming out gave her a twinge of pleasure. For some time when she was young, she’d harbored the dream of becoming an artist. Through high school, she’d even kept a secret journal of drawings, which she hid under a loose plank in the floor of her bedroom, fearing her family would tease her if they saw it. The long broad back of the history teacher who always called her Karen rather than Clare, the Frye boots of a group of giggling girls she feared, the weeping willow outside the home of a boy she secretly liked, all went in there, carefully dated and captioned. Her last year spent living at home, she’d moved on to unauthorized nudes, disrobing the brittle school principal and bossy captain of the cheerleading squad with her pencil in the quiet of her room late at night. But the figure drawing class she’d signed up for first semester at Harvard, using live models, had been a disaster. She couldn’t get used to having ready and willing animate bodies before her, and the teacher had suggested she might feel more comfortable taking a still-life class the following semester. By the end of freshman year, she’d committed to a Romance languages major. Instead of painting nudes, she’d read of the forever-clothed Laura and frustrated Emma Bovary. She’d followed Don Quixote on his pointless quests and endured one hundred years of solitude with the Buendías.

  A wise decision, as it turned out. Tonight, she would greet her French guests in their own language and chat with Bautista LeTouquet, wife of the director general at the Quai d’Orsay, in her native Italian. Edward would be proud of her, the home office would be impressed, and their guests would all feel more comfortable, even while English remained the lingua franca. People appreciated having a metaphoric hand extended towards them through the use of their own language; it made them feel respected. Americans and Brits, so used to hearing others speak in English, took this for granted. How that poor man, the sick Turkish wrestler, had struggled to make himself understood in English this morning!

  Edward had always insisted that the children not let their linguistic luck breed complacency, and she’d wholeheartedly agreed. Peter was in his sixth year of German and fourth of Russian. Jamie was supposed to be studying Spanish. They weren’t taking classes in French now that they were being schooled in Great Britain, as there’d have been nothing available for them at their levels, but they were both already quite fluent in the language. Native English speakers but born in different countries from one another, citizens of two, schooled in no less than three: where did her sons fit in? Edward would ask, Where does anyone fit in? but nonchalance was easy for Edward, because he did fit in somewhere: he was English from his stately toes to his thinning fair hair. His parents were English, and his grandparents and centuries of generations before them, all living and dying on the same stretch of dirt and rock between the English Channel, St. George’s Channel, and the North Sea, except for one great-great-grandfather who’d spent many years as a colonel in India and a great-uncle who had somehow ended up being buried in Sumatra. And even those peripatetic ancestors hardly counted because they’d brought their Englishness along with them to their colonial postings. “The English manage to import their Englishness,” Niall once said, “to every corner of the globe, like it was a digestive biscuit.” And true to form, the great-uncle had died, of a sudden coronary, in a Sumatran rose garden sipping tea from a cup made of Spode china. She knew this for a fact. She and Edward had inherited the tea set the cup had come from, and the box that had held it had been covered with stamps bearing the abbreviation “Nedl. Ind.,” from when Indonesia was still part of the Dutch East Indies. The set was one cup short.

  “Fucks,” Niall had also said, of the English. “Fucking imperialistic bastards. They’ll get their orange arses off our island, won’t they.”

  The first time she and Niall had spoken about Ireland, not predicting their future, not understanding anything yet, she’d responded as though she were participating in the Harvard debate club.

  “Of course, the Catholics should be treated better. But the Protestants, the ones that have been there for some generations now,” she’d said, “aren’t they Northern Irish now, too? Aren’t they even in the majority? Shouldn’t they also have some say about what country they live in?”

  They were lying on her bed at Aunt Elaine’s house. Everyone else had gone to the Cape for the weekend. Niall had refused—only later would she understand why he avoided the beach, even when the summer heat was beating down on them—and she’d made up some work she’d had to do for her summer internship at the museum so she could appear to have a good reason to stay behind also. This would be her first chance to be alone in the house with him. They weren’t lovers yet, not Saturday morning when the rest of the family’s cars backed down the driveway, but an hour later, when she stepped out of the shower, she’d found him sitting on the sink, unwashed, dressed only in jeans, waiting for her. She hadn’t been astonished.

  “You—” she’d said.

  He’d reached for a towel. “Come here.” He’d begun to dry her, starting with her long hair, which hung almost down to her waist, then moved on to her neck and shoulders, her back, her legs and feet. He’d ended with her hands. He’d dried each finger separately.

  And, later, Sunday afternoon, still lying on her bed in the heat, for they seemed to have hardly left it in the past thirty-six hours, he’d asked what she knew about Ireland. She’d been stupid enough to try to impress him with her meager knowledge of the Troubles, and with her schoolgirl understanding of magnanimity.

  “Shouldn’t they also have some say what country they live in?” she concluded, and he pulled his warm, sinewy body out from under her.

  “You don’t know anything,” he whispered, stepping into his jeans. And then was gone.

  Maybe she hadn’t known anything. Or maybe, as an American emerging from such a different perception of assimilation, she hadn’t been able to conceive of what life could be like for a poor, young Catholic boy growing up in Northern Ireland. The latter was what Niall had eventually decided when he’d apparently forgiven her and decided she was teachable. And taken her under his tutelage he had, telling her how the system had been rigged when he was a kid so the Catholics in Derry didn’t even have as many votes per head as Protestants, and often no vote at all, how someone like him couldn’t hardly get a job, never mind dream of going to uni, as he called college—injustices she’d heard about growing up but that took on sudden dimension when spoken with Niall’s rummaging cadences.

  “My da back in Derry,” he’d told her. “He saw his neighbor’s son, just a lad, shot down on the streets of Bogside on Bloody Sunday. You know about Bloody Sunday?”

  She’d nodded.

  “Lying there bleeding in the street, and Eamon just a boy, barely seventeen. My da and some men got a car and tried to get him to hospital. The Brits stopped them on the way, arrested the lot of them. Called them terrorist yobbos, and Eamon there bleeding to death in the back of the car. And you know what, Clare? They gave all those British bastards medals.

  “There is no solution left but Ireland for the Irish.”

  And she’d believed him; she’d been ready to believe anything he said.

  But, if he was right. If he, Edward, even the Turkish wrestler this morning—who’d told her so proudly of his village where his family had lived for centuries, who’d spoken with such distaste of the French, and, indeed, for Europe in general, excepting her and her dermal texture—were correct in their unfaltering visions of their home countries as unique consistent entities, where did that leave her children? Could the boys belong to both Britain and the U.S.? Where did that leave the hundreds of children forced to lay down new roots in neighboring or even distant nations thanks to wars in Vietnam or Somalia or, now, Iraq? Or by the end of colonization? Was the term “global identity” nothing more than a marketing tool? Were these children condemned to belong nowhere, ever?

  “Back in my own home, I never lost,” the wrestler had told her.

  Clare put down her pen. She tugged on a strand of hair, shivered in the spring breeze. She drew
her sweater from the back of her chair and pulled it over her shoulders. Across from her, the TV was droning. She watched the screen without seeing for a moment, the feeling of spring pushing at her shoulders, the state of her thoughts pushing back against it. The release that the fresh air had brought her just a few moments earlier had mutated into something more melancholy, a bittersweet sense of futility.

  Then, she saw the face on the screen.

  “My God,” she said.

  She rose from behind the desk and moved towards the television.

  His face occupied a blue-background box in the corner. Clare squinted, stepped closer, then back from the screen, trying to shift the lines of the man’s image. Could she be seeing someone else? A relative? A stranger who happened to look so very similar?

  But no matter where she positioned herself, nothing changed: the pocked skin, the heavy build, the half-closed smaller left eye.

  She reached for the remote and raised the volume. A tanned but grim-faced newscaster was talking, his brown eyes level.

  The suspect has been identified, the newscaster announced, as a signatory member of a reactionary nationalist group that has already been implicated in a number of assassinations in its own country. This particular foot soldier has never been convicted of any crime beyond a petty offense as a youth, unrelated, for which he spent three months in prison. He is believed, however, by the authorities to have been circulating in France for some time now and has been photo-identified by an eyewitness of this morning’s murder. The police were actively searching for him.

  Clare clasped the collar of her sweater. In the photo they were showing, he was even wearing a cheap leather jacket.