But there he’d been, leaning against one of the counters as though he’d been leaning against it all along, knocking back a mug of thick black coffee. Wearing his same worn-out old corduroys, which she now knew he wore without anything under them, and a sleeveless undershirt. She’d had to look away. He’d kept looking at her.
“Some Harvard bastard wearing a sports coat and driving a Mercedes,” he’d said. “Don’t they know how to ask a girl out there?”
“That’s no way to talk,” Uncle Pat had scolded him, coughing into his fist, a glint of smile appearing over his closed knuckles, checking over his shoulder that Aunt Elaine wasn’t within listening distance.
Clare had poured her own cup of coffee and slipped onto a chair by the kitchen table, across from her cousin Kevin. “Pass me the milk and sugar?”
“Why? You like her yourself?” Kevin had pushed the sugar bowl and a carton of milk in her direction. He’d grinned at her and shoveled a spoonful of cornflakes into his mouth, leaving tiny flakes of cereal on his upper lip. She and Kevin had grown up side by side, just five months separating their birth dates. Until they were fifteen, she’d been taller than he. She could remember the first Thanksgiving they’d spent together when he’d shown signs of whiskers. It hadn’t been that long ago. “Kind of sea level up top, isn’t she?”
“Don’t you think it’s time you got your own place, Kevin?” Uncle Pat had said, whacking her cousin on the head. Her uncle had peered into the cereal box, crumpled it up, and thrown it in the garbage. “Help yourself to toast, Clare. Looks like your aunt made a loaf’s worth this morning.”
Clare had dutifully begun chewing on a piece of toast, dry, without jelly.
“Personally, I don’t fancy the heifers,” Niall had replied, eyeing her up and down as though she were some sort of livestock. “But Clare’s too rich for my blood, cousin. I could never have myself a woman like that.”
Kevin had pushed his empty bowl away. “You never know, Niall.” He’d pronounced the name like it was a long Egyptian river. “Those Harvard girls have been known to go slumming. And all American girls are suckers for a foreign accent.”
Clare had finished her toast, the last bits gripping her windpipe, and stood up. “Have a great day, everyone.”
“And a lovely day to you, too, Clare,” Niall had said, as though they’d just run into each other at the drugstore. As though she were a girl he’d been trying to pick up in a coffee shop. As though she could have been any nice-looking girl, anywhere.
But now they were alone together again, and he slithered in next to her where she was sitting on the porch soaking in the evening smells of grass and old-fashioned roses and rhododendron, a cool glass of ice tea at her feet, a copy of Pablo Neruda’s recently published Para nacer he nacido idle on one knee, and slid a hand onto her warm thigh. He removed the book from its perch, placing it on the ground next to her drink, and picked up her hand. He turned it over and over again. He separated one finger out and ran it down his cheek and neck, over his chest.
“You’re different from other girls in America,” he said.
“I am?” Was she supposed to run her finger down over his body now? No longer manipulated by him, her finger seemed powerless to move on its own. She left it where he’d left it, on his collarbone, pressing against his white skin.
“You don’t squeal. They’re like baby pigs in the slaughterhouse, some of the girls here, the way they will be squealing all the time.”
The image of a girl, screaming with pleasure beneath the weight of Niall’s dense white body appeared before her eyes. But he was talking about how so many of the girls she knew, especially before she arrived at Radcliffe, responded to any new information. High-pitched. Loudly. She didn’t like it either. She’d never been able to bring herself to follow suit.
“Did you grow up on a farm, Niall?”
“Why are you asking?”
“You seem to think a lot about livestock. Heifers. Piglets.”
He laughed. “Come on. We’ll have something for the thirst.”
“There’s beer in the fridge.” She poked her feet into espadrilles. He was already over the stone wall and waiting by her little Ford Fiesta.
“No, not that.”
She drove in the dusk until they saw a cavernous liquor store, cars tethered around the front of it like nurslings around the teats of a sow. But she wasn’t like a squealing piglet any more than she was like a cow. She was different. She felt his compliment settle over her shoulders, around her nape, like a silken mantle that elevated her from all the others. He liked her impassivity. He liked her reserve and quiet. He liked all the things that were supposed to be stumbling blocks for her.
“Maybe you shouldn’t let her spend all that time alone up in her room, drawing,” Granny Fennelly had remarked to her parents when she was still in high school. “Get her to sign up for the school musical or something.” And her father and mother had guffawed at the very thought of Clare performing in public. But Niall wasn’t laughing at her.
“This will be the one,” Niall said, tipping his head towards the package store before she could pass it. “Have you any money on you?”
Neither the thin cotton tank top nor the Indian wrap skirt she’d been wearing had pockets. She hadn’t thought to fetch her wallet before climbing into the car. That meant she wouldn’t have ID to buy the liquor either. She was legal, but only just; no one would sell alcohol to her without first checking. Niall would have to go in. No one would think to card him.
She shuffled through the hair clips and sunglasses on the dashboard, coming up with a few coins. “I—”
“Keep the engine runnin’.”
There was a song on the radio she recognized from hearing it on the quad, and she tried to sing along as she waited, for distraction. But she didn’t know the words, other than “Celll-e-brate,” and she couldn’t sing well anyway and was scared he’d hear her. Another song followed on its heels, which she also recognized but didn’t know the words to either, other than something about “the border of Mexico.” All memories of another world, the one on campus.
Before the song could end, he had slipped back into the car. She shifted into gear and pulled out of the parking lot. He waited a few blocks before removing the half-pint of Jameson from his shirt front. He took a plug and put the top back on without offering her a sip. Instead, he settled into his seat and studied her profile.
“If you don’t have your wallet on you, you don’t have your driving permit on you, now, do you?” She shook her head, and he clicked his tongue. “Isn’t that illegal in the States, driving without your permit on your person?”
They drove another block in silence.
He screwed up his mouth, made a little popping sound. “That’s how people get caught, Clare. They don’t pay attention to the wee things. They get tripped up on something ejeet.”
“If I’d known what you wanted, I could have told you. Uncle Pat has Irish whiskey back at the house.” Her words came out so soft that she herself could barely hear them.
He heard her, though. He clicked his tongue again. “Can’t stroke my own uncle.”
He studied her a moment longer, then nodded, as though he’d made up his mind about something. She felt his hand take hold of her thigh. Heat spread through her leg, into her groin, through her abdomen, and she had to focus her energies on not pressing down on the accelerator pedal. Or letting it go altogether.
“But you’re all right,” he said. “Why don’t we go to the left up there? To the forest.”
His hand gripped her thigh. The liquor store had been a test. And she had passed it. He’d taken a risk for her because he’d wanted to know whether he could trust her. Heat rushed through her arms down to her fingers, up her neck into her cheeks, burning away the swelter of the evening. She put on her turn signal and rotated the steering wheel.
“Lovely quiet here,” he said.
He snapped off the car radio, even before she cut the engine. The
evening was silent in the state park, so silent she imagined she could hear the trees breathing. She dropped her eyes down on his bare forearms. For the first time, she noticed that his pale skin was freckled.
“Voilà,” the assistant said, as though she’d just finished explaining something to a child. “J’ai fait un bon conditioning aussi.” She wrapped a towel around Clare’s shoulders and, with a solicitous gesture, gestured towards Marco’s hairdressing station.
Clare followed the assistant, one hand clasping the two ends of the fresh towel, the other her purse. There was noise, the sounds of pop music and hair dryers and people chatting. She slipped into a chair and set her purse down by her feet. She looked into the mirror.
“Come on.”
The car doors made a click as they opened. They walked single file, he in front, until they reached a gentle clearing, off the forest road but within sight of the car. He settled down amongst the grass and pine needles and drank from the bottle. She sank down beside him. He offered her the bottle, and she shook her head. He put an arm around her and pulled her onto her back. They lay there, under the pines and oaks and maples and dying elms, their uppermost branches scattered with yellow leaves that gleamed in the moonlight, in silence except for the sound made by the bottle when he tipped it backwards.
“You like it here,” he said, more an acknowledgment than a question.
“Yes.”
“You’re always sittin’ in the garden, or puttin’ flowers on the table.”
He placed a hand on her hip, and she felt as though they were carbon copies, side by side, their breath rising and falling together.
“You ever have the feeling there’s something you fancy saying, but no with words?”
That was exactly how she felt, had felt, almost every day of her life.
In that pale light, she fell asleep. She woke at dawn, startled by a shaft of sunlight breaking through the tree boughs. He was already awake, staring up at the tip of morning. He got up and kicked the empty bottle of Jameson into the brush with the toe of his boot. Before following him back down the path, she stooped to retrieve it.
She only meant to keep him from littering, but it took her a long time to part with the bottle. After they got back to the house, he disappearing into his bedroom to sleep through the rest of the morning, she went into her bathroom and rinsed it out. Once everyone else in the house had gotten up, she filled the bottle with wildflowers and set it on her little bedside table. The bottle stayed there through the rest of her stay at her aunt and uncle’s. It followed her to her new room in Cambridge. Until the day she returned from Dublin.
“Café? Un jus d’orange?” The assistant laid a new dry towel around her shoulders and pinned it together with a large silver hair clip.
“Oui, merci. Un café.”
Marco appeared, armed with a comb in his right hand and an enormous blow dryer in the other. He was a terse man, a quality Clare appreciated in a hairdresser. With Marco, she didn’t feel required to make conversation over the roar of a hair dryer. That alone was enough to make her a loyal customer.
They exchanged a few civilities, always in French, as he ran through her hair with the comb.
“Les enfants vont bien?” he asked.
“Oui, très bien. Il fait beau aujourd’hui, n’est-ce pas?”
He nodded. “Il va faire chaud en juin.”
When her hair was smooth, parted, and combed forward towards her brow, the conversation stopped. He dropped the comb into a net and enveloped her head in a cloud of hair spray. From an array of hair utensils, he selected a long and thin round brush and switched on the blow-dryer, applying all his attention now to the task of making her hair flip back from her face.
The assistant returned with her coffee, and Marco waited, blow-dryer in hand, like a gun cocked and ready to go, while she took a sip. She laid the cup back down on its saucer. Black coffee, cola, and beer. That summer, she’d watched Niall gulp down gallons of all three. But, though she kept the empty bottle from that night by her bedside, she never again saw him drink Irish whiskey. The next time she could remember seeing anyone drinking Jameson whiskey was the first time she met Edward, three years after Niall’s disappearance, three years since another man had managed to arrest her attention.
The man from the British Consulate—“Hello, my name is Edward Moorhouse,” extending a hand in her direction when she’d walked into the restaurant—waited for her to pick up her ginger ale. His fingers were smooth and full on his glass of whiskey, and one bore a heavy gold ring embossed with a crest. Niall would have spat at such a ring, but she’d promised herself not to think about what Niall would think ever.
“Ireland,” the man said to her father, “gives us so much that is lovely. Even the names.” He took a sip, placed the glass back down on the pale damask tablecloth, and smiled at her. “May I ask whether you have a second name, Clare?”
“Clare Siobhan,” she said blandly. It was on the tip of her tongue to add: “But I’m American, not Irish.” But she didn’t.
“Clare Siobhan,” he’d repeated after her, thoughtfully.
“Clare Siobhan Fennelly,” her father said, with a bit of a lilt and smiling at her. She smiled back at him. She was home visiting for a long weekend, and he’d asked her to join them for lunch straightaway when he’d picked her up at the Hartford train station the evening before: “Kennedy and I are going to the Coach House tomorrow with some British guy, Edward Moorhouse, up from Washington, like you. It’s bound to be a bit dull but the food’s good.” She’d agreed, mostly because she didn’t know how not to without displeasing her father. At least if the guy was British, no one would be trying to fix her up with him—she was growing weary of her parents’ not especially subtle efforts to find her a husband, or at least a boyfriend. “Are you sure?” her mother had asked when she’d called to say she had Thursday and Friday free and would come up to Connecticut. “Isn’t there anyone down in Washington you’d like to spend your days off with?”
How could she explain that, no, there was no one she wanted to spend her days and especially her nights with, how the idea of being with another man had come to seem ridiculous to her after Niall? They knew nothing of her and Niall.
“This man Moorhouse wants to talk to us about investing in Northern Ireland,” her father had continued as they’d driven along the familiar streets home from the station. Barry Kennedy and her dad were on the board of a company with considerable interests in both London and Edinburgh. “That’s what he does, goes around the States trying to get U.S. companies to invest, despite the MacBride Principles. You know the MacBride Principles?” Clare had shaken her head, although she had heard talk of them, so her father had explained how a movement towards legislation was growing, newly backed by the Nobel Peace Prize winner Sean MacBride, to discourage U.S. companies from investing in Northern Ireland on the basis that employment policies there were prejudiced against Catholics. She’d listened with half an ear, never wanting to hear a word again about the Troubles and having understood the essential: she was definitely safe from any awkward attempts at matchmaking. No way would her dad be hoping to fix her up with this guy. Not if this Mr. Moorhouse was trying to convince them to invest in British interests in Northern Ireland.
Still, when she’d seen the visitor from the British embassy waiting for them in the Coach House restaurant in his well-buffed black shoes, she couldn’t help but feel bad for him; he looked so decent. A nice-looking man in a smooth, well-kept way, tall, solidly built, and fair, with calm, thoughtful eyes. A part of her wanted to warn him. She knew full well how her father and Kennedy were going to respond to any overtures regarding investment in Northern Ireland. Clare’s father was as strong a believer in Ireland for the Irish as the next Irish-American, even if he professed to oppose the current Provisional I.R.A.’s more radical methods. She wouldn’t want to ask where Kennedy stood on the subject.
“Jamesons all around! Straight up.” Kennedy ordered three Irish whiskeys
for the men without asking anyone’s opinion. Kennedy’s maternal grandfather, James O’Malley, fresh in Boston from County Cork at the turn of the century, had been a well-known pugilist. Clare had often heard her parents remark on how closely Kennedy had inherited his temperament. “How about you, Clare? What will you have? A nice Guinness?”
Edward Moorhouse waited while she ordered a glass of soda. Then he said to the waiter, “I’ll have my whiskey on the rocks, thank you.”
She bowed her head, waiting for Kennedy to spew forth reproach at this despoilment of good whiskey, but the Brit continued right along, in that even, elegant voice of his, giving no one the chance to get a word in: “I read a fascinating article about the Connecticut River on my way up here. It said that there were three kinds of trout living in the river, and that Atlantic salmon is currently being reintroduced. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing a bit of America over the past few months of being posted here, and it’s rewarding to read so often about such efforts to reclaim your land back from post–Industrial Age pollution. You have an extraordinarily beautiful country.”
Clare watched her father and Kennedy rendered wordless, unsure whether they were being complimented for having a handsome country or insulted for having allowed it to become polluted. In the confusion, the sacrilege of spoiling good whiskey with ice was forgotten.
My, she thought, this Edward Moorhouse is good. And she’d taken him for a pushover. Normally she would walk a mile out of her way to avoid being party to conflict, but something in her awakened. She sat up straighter.
An Unexpected Guest Page 13