An Unexpected Guest (17 page)

She drew off her sweater in the warmth of his room, letting it fall over the length of his bed. Well, Jamie had found his first girl, and lost his head temporarily over her. Maybe he’d enlisted a fellow student to help him get the answers, which would explain why only Jamie was being held accountable. It wasn’t really all that strange. Until now, Jamie had had no experience with girls. Edward had even said, only half joking, when she’d first proposed Barrow, “Maybe an all-boys school wouldn’t be quite the best thing. You know. Things do happen.”

“What are you trying to say, Edward?
Honestly.
Anyhow, I saw Jamie taking a good look at Amélie the other day while she was leaning over a bed, smoothing the covers.”

“Amélie? You must be joking. She has legs like a piano.”

“She’s not even thirty. Anyway, since when have you been checking her legs out?”

“She spends a fair amount of time up on stools dusting the light fixtures,” he’d said and added, laughing, “It’s hard
not
to see them.”

“Not nice, Edward.”

“Yes,” he’d said sheepishly. “You’re right. That was uncalled for.” But she’d sensed his abashed relief.

Amélie must be in the kitchen now, helping Mathilde, wondering what had happened in the foyer. Clare needed to go in, restore Amélie’s faith, let Mathilde know she was paying attention. The guests would arrive in hardly an hour. She rose from the bed, turned out the light, closed the door on the room. Like salt, she’d let Jamie slip through her fingers. After she made sure everything was in order, she’d start the calling around. Embarrassing for him, even more embarrassing for her.

She walked back up the hall. The formal living room looked pristine, its vast space aglow with polished brass and mahogany. Just the sight of it soothed her. This was what she would think about. Her house. Her dinner. This much she could do. A fire had been set, but not lit, in the fireplace. The shiny brass heads of the andirons—“firedogs” Edward called them, using their British name—turned the rest of the room upside down inside their globes; the split logs brought candor to the ensemble. She moved a bouquet from a side table onto the fireplace’s ornate mantel; placing a vase on that table blocked the view from the two chairs beside it to the rest of the room, and people liked to keep an eye on what was going on with other guests, to know with whom everyone else was speaking. She eased a few stems from the vase and reinserted them, causing the bells to face out, pausing to touch their curious domes. Jean-Benoît had done well, as usual. Not only did the combination of the white-and-green bells of Ireland with the yellow lilies convey everything she’d wanted to say about springtime and the bridge between different nations, but they also matched the room.

The flowers perfected, she swept the room with her eyes. Would it pass muster with their illustrious guests of this evening? In their first year at the minister’s residence, with permission and funds from the FCO, she had changed the drapes, the seat covers, the cushions on the settee and matching armchairs from the heavy peach silk favored by the previous inhabitant to a swirl of cool blues and pale browns. She’d bought the fabrics in England and had them sent over, spending hours combing through the samples in Harrods, Osborne & Little, and Chelsea Textiles. For the cushions she’d used woven fabric from Normandy. She had set about sleek pieces of silver from Edward’s family and classic pieces of crystal from her family on the room’s heavy dark furniture, inlaid with golden trim. Under the elaborate chandeliers, and amidst the heavy gilt-framed portraiture belonging to the Residence, she’d hung the large abstract painting by Farouk Hosni they’d bought during their posting in Cairo and the small Sam Gillian they’d purchased while they were first living in Washington. Shortly after the renovations had been completed, she’d straightened up from arranging a vase of simple yellow tulips before a cocktail party to find Jamie standing in the doorway, watching her. “Hey, Mom,” he’d said, his young forehead pleated with puzzlement, “this room matches you now.” She’d laughed, but secretly she’d wondered at his precocious perspicacity.

Yellow tulips symbolized hopeless love. Thank you, Jean-Benoît.

The door to the dining room was open. The table dazzled with fourteen settings of china, crystal, and silver. Amélie had used the pale gray jacquard as instructed, and the royal crest on the plate gleamed against it. Three small bouquets dotted the table. A fourth perched on top of the sideboard. These vases were just right. She didn’t need to readjust them.

She extracted fourteen silver place-card holders from the sideboard and dropped them the length of the table, as though creating a trail. In a short while, her guests would follow them, observing what status they’d been awarded. She did not plan to put up a seating chart outside the door; a seating chart felt too stuffy. For the place cards themselves, she would have to return to the study. She couldn’t hear any sound from the kitchen—
usually
a good sign. No explosions from Mathilde. After she put out the place cards, there was still her suit to slip into and evening makeup. She’d best check the cheese plate, too, to make sure Mathilde had used the cheddar as directed.

Then she would set herself to locating Jamie.

“Plus doucement!”
she heard Mathilde bark as she passed through the kitchen door. The room’s vibrant jumble of odors, industry, and color came as an assault after the regal serenity of the reception rooms. Copper-bottomed pots and smooth gray pans with angular rims, and mounds of green, white, red, and yellow on fat brown cutting boards. A pasty mound of dough covered by a cloth, a second darker mound beside it. A cloud of steam from a pot, a small twister of smoke from the saucepan beside it, the splatter of butter. An aroma of parsley, lemon, and garlic. The scent of chocolate.
“Vous les massacrez!”

Amélie was seated at the long central table with her cousin, a twenty-something who wore her frosted hair on top of her head in a vertical ponytail. Stacked rows of asparagus flashed chalky white in two rectangular bowls of water, floating with ice cubes: one with the spears that had already been denuded of their thick exterior and the other for those awaiting disrobement. Clare couldn’t see Mathilde’s face, but she did catch a glimpse of Yann, the waiter sent over from the embassy to stand in for the butler, raising his eyebrows while lining up wineglasses on a tray.

Mathilde cut the air above Amélie’s cousin’s head with a thick red-stained hand. “You’re useless,
donnes-moi,
I’ll do it!”

“Everything all right?” Clare asked.

Mathilde favored her with a brief glance and practically spit.

“Très bien, Madame Moorhouse,”
the waiter responded.

Amélie echoed,
“Oui, Madame.”
Her cousin made a face into the asparagus and said nothing. Mathilde turned, threw her hands up in the air and retreated to the other end of the table.

“These girls haven’t the faintest idea how to wield a knife,” she said, returning to fashioning rosebuds out of a grasp of strawberries, with a tiny but very sharp-looking paring knife. White and dark chocolate peels curled on a plate beside them. Husked pistachios waited in yet another dish for their turn in the cakes’ assemblage. The cakes would be a masterpiece, like all of Mathilde’s desserts. “They’re making a mess of the asparagus.”

“Et depuis quand ou la Suisse ou l’Ecosse informe le monde gastronome?”
muttered Amélie’s cousin, whose grasp of docility did not match her comprehension of the English language.

Since when does either Switzerland or Scotland have the last word on haute cuisine? Clare couldn’t believe her ears. Amélie’s cousin had helped out many a time before. She knew Mathilde’s temper. Was she
trying
to ruin dinner?

“I heard that!” Mathilde growled, dropping a strawberry. Red liquid dripped from her short, strong fingers and the paring knife. “I heard that!”

“I didn’t hear anything,” Clare said, quickly. She looked around at Yann. “Did you say something?”

“No,
Je n’ai rien dit. Ni entendu.
” He pointed to an ear and shook his head. He’d also served at their house tens of times.

“Good heavens, that is going to be incredible,” Clare continued, stepping in between the two ends of the table, blocking Mathilde’s view of Amélie’s cousin at the same time as gesturing towards the fourteen little cakes and the mounds of homemade chocolates and strawberries and pistachios waiting to join them. She suspected there was a freshly blended red-fruit
coulis
waiting in the refrigerator as well. “You’ve outdone yourself again, Mathilde. Honestly, you make me the envy of every hostess in Paris.”

“I know,” Mathilde said, sniffing. “It’s a wonder, too. Without any decent help. And those pills you bought haven’t done anything for my fingers. Plus, working one extra evening this week.”

“Oh, Mathilde, we are so grateful. I will definitely make it up to you. And the pills, you just have to hang in there a little longer. Homeopathic medicine works a little slower. But you know that. The Swiss are masters of homeopathy. Very medically advanced people, the Swiss. Very advanced period. As well as wonderful cooks.” Clare had to avoid catching the waiter’s eye, or they both might burst out laughing. The cousin bent lower over her stalks. “I’ll go get dressed now. Send Amélie back if you need anything.”

“I don’t need anything from you, Mrs. Moorhouse,” Mathilde said. “You’re the one who keeps needing things from me.”

Clare sighed and left her staff to finish the dinner.

S
he closed the door to her bedroom and sat on the stool before the rectangular mirror on her vanity. She rubbed the crow’s feet beside her eyes and the crease that separated the top and bottom halves of her high forehead.

She laid her hands on her waist, pressing in against her
abdomen
. Real children had nestled within her, Edward’s
children
—not just pounds of paper, dollars destined someday possibly to have other children’s blood on them. Those were the only children Niall had offered her. A British diplomat’s wife with two British sons—that’s what Niall had seen today, what he’d been seeing all this time that he’d shadowed her. That’s what she saw now in the mirror. She turned her face one way and then another. The world she’d inhabited with Niall had seemed so alive, so physical. Yet what she’d had with Niall paled beside the reality of bearing children within one’s body and into this world. She wasn’t sure how it stood even against the mundane profundity of daily life. As a twenty-year-old, she wouldn’t have understood such a thought, but when she’d accepted
Edward
’s marriage proposal, she’d stepped through a passageway into a parallel universe where the consequences of her every action rolled out in front of her like a carpet. Wars were not fought and won based upon the countless phone calls and lists she made or instructions she issued. Multitudes of faceless souls were not saved or lost in response to her actions. But the very real people who spent their days beside her—her children, her husband, her staff—would be happy or unhappy, would be hungry or tired or satisfied or distraught. The tiny gestures that she repeated day after day sustained them.
That
was reality. The world Niall had shown her was a dream world that had sucked her in, in the way a nightmare does, leaving you confused in the morning as to whether you are awake now or were awake then. Niall’s world possessed a hatred too big for her heart.

You surely have beautiful hands, Clare
.

She stretched out her fingers, slipping her wedding and engagement rings off, and examined the whorl around each knuckle. Two decades had passed since she’d seen Niall. He still sat with his thighs apart, his hands clasped between them. When he leaned forward, the strange streak of shiny scar tissue that ran up the back of his neck, like a sickle cropping the edge of his hairline, still pulled tight, a scar she’d always yearned to caress. The scar that had eventually betrayed him to his countryman.

“Don’t touch it,” he’d told her once. “It’s bad luck.”

“Like stepping on a crack?” Their vehicle was stopped on a highway in Maryland alongside the shore, waiting for a drawbridge to come down, third in line. She peered into the rearview mirror. Cars unwound behind them like a string of Christmas lights.

“Stepping on a crack?”

“Break your mother’s back.”

“My ma’s back already broke. From working double shifts at the shirt factory after my da was sent up. No, bad luck like the guy who tossed the petrol bomb what caused it.” He rolled his window down farther and tapped his cigarette ash onto the street.

“He got blown up with it?” she asked, resting her hands on the steering wheel, keeping her voice level. A warm wind stirred the air between them.

Niall smiled at her. “No. I broke his front tooth when we were in school because he was kissing my sister.”

She’d known he would have sisters. The Irish all had sisters. But he’d never mentioned any of them before. His words felt like a present.

He drew on his cigarette. “End of story,” he said.

The drawbridge came back down. She put in gear the little Toyota camper they’d rented under her name and inched it forward. A yellow light flashed at them as they passed over the bridge, glinting off the gold-plated band he’d given her to wear on her wedding finger. She could smell the dark water of the Atlantic.

“Go right here,” he said.

She spun the steering wheel and edged the camper out of the main stream of traffic onto a long straight road along the seaside. They headed out of the town into a sort of no man’s land, populated by grocery stores advertising beer and fireworks, and run-down motels with neon vacancy signs in pink or yellow.

The last moments of dusk dropped down over their car. Seagulls swept around them and landed on litter by the side of the road. They passed a boarded-up vegetable stand. It looked as though years had gone by since anyone had stood there. A calcified pumpkin lay riddled with holes on the ground before it.

“Should I put on the radio?” she asked.

He shook his head. In the seaside dark, she could feel his movements more than see them. But any changes of position were rare. His body had become a repository of calm in the squall growing over the Atlantic, as still as the darkness that was deepening around them. She knew him well enough now to recognize that this was his attitude of extreme concentration. She squinted at the road and kept driving. Wind pushed against the camper.

After another twenty minutes had passed, a long ugly building came into view, the worst-looking motel of all.

“Here,” he said.

“Here?” she asked.

He pointed to the motel’s vacancy sign, swinging in the Atlantic wind. “We’ll be sleeping the night here.”

She swerved into the parking lot. There were ten doors, not including the door of the reception. Only two had cars parked before them.

He was mixed up with things back home, his home, far beyond her experience, and she felt sure his unexplained absences from her aunt and uncle’s weren’t to shack up with other girls. When she’d descended the bus in New Jersey to pick up the vehicle he’d reserved and seen it was a camper, she’d felt a whisper of relief—he’d rented them a mobile hotel room. They climbed onto the thin mattress in the back of the camper, shedding all their clothes, that first night, and she’d decided: it’s just a vacation as he’d said, and she’d twirled the gold-plated ring he’d told her to wear around her finger. Each day, as they’d zigzagged the coastline, she’d permitted herself to fall further into this fantasy.

Now, though, when he told her to go into the reception and get them a room, she felt no surprise. She tucked her long blond hair up into the scarf he handed her, and put on the tinted glasses he pulled out of the bag at his feet. They smelled of his cigarettes.

“They won’t ask for your ID,” he told her.

The wind had died down. The outer door to the office was open to the warm night, but a locked inner metal guard door kept her from entering. A man with a heavy face and wearing a turban sat behind an old desk, his feet up on a crate, watching a portable TV. The only other light in the room came from a desk lamp. The turbaned man narrowed his eyes and laid one hand on a half-open drawer when she knocked on the door. His eyes squinted into the night at her.

“Yeah?”

“Do you have any rooms?” The question was ridiculous, but she felt no temptation to laugh. Laughter didn’t exist here.

He showed no sign of getting up to let her in. “How many?”

“Just one.”

He dropped his feet to the ground. She saw there was a second man sitting behind him in the corner. His eyes were riveted to the television.

The first man fumbled in a box on top of the desk and lumbered towards the door. He did not unlock it. “That your car?” he asked and pointed to the camper.

She nodded.

He nodded back. “I see. Number ten.” He held a key up. Its silver face slipped and dangled in the fluorescent lighting over the entrance. She put her hand forward to take it, but he kept it out of reach. “Twenty-five,” he said.

“Oh, yeah.” She felt her face go warm. “Hang on.” She fished around in her little sack for her wallet, and extracted two tens and a five-dollar bill. He accepted them through the metal bars and slipped the room key back through them to her.

“Thank you.”

The man waited until she was behind the steering wheel before turning his back on her. She handed the room key over to Niall. In the obscurity of the parking lot, she could hardly make his face out, just the light of his eyes. He lit a cigarette.

“He gave me the very farthest room,” she said. “I don’t know why. They’re not busy.”

Niall didn’t reply, but she felt his hand slide onto her thigh. Warmth slipped through the skirt she was wearing. He squeezed.

She turned the ignition back on and drove to the bottom of the lot. Their room was almost barren: a large bed covered with a cheap, worn orange bedspread, a bedside table with a clock on it, a linoleum chest of drawers with a television on top. The tiled floor was rugless. She didn’t like to take her shoes off; she didn’t want the feel of the floor on the soles of her feet. When she went to flip on the light in the bathroom, the bulb burned out in a pop and a fizz.

“I’ll walk over to the office and get a new one,” she said.

“Leave it,” he said. He came up behind her, his body so similar in height and size that it felt like a shadow, and ran his hands under her T-shirt and over her chest. She turned to him, forgetting about the burned-out lightbulb in the bathroom.

She woke in the night to the sound of cars pulling up, farther down the parking lot. She could hear what sounded like a black man’s voice and then another’s, car doors opening and closing. Drug dealers, she thought, then chided herself for being racist. She crept to the window.

“Come away,” he told her.

“I thought you were sleeping,” she said, climbing back into bed beside him.

He didn’t answer and she fell back to sleep.

She awoke again what must have been a couple hours later. A sense of emptiness had penetrated her dreams, disturbing her. She lay quietly and listened. The men’s voices were gone. Niall also was gone. The room was so dark that she could only feel his absence. She could see nothing. She sat up, waited for her eyes to adjust to the dark, and when they didn’t, realized that the shutters on the room’s window must have been closed from the outside. She felt her way to the door, banging one of her knees against the foot of the bed. The door was locked, and the key was missing. She couldn’t leave if she’d wanted to.

She made her way back to the bed, because there was nothing else for her to do. She lay there awake, reminding herself over and over that Niall would never let anything bad happen to her, until, overwhelmed by heat and exhaustion, she fell into a sweaty stupor. Then it was morning and Niall was back in bed beside her.

“Mommy?” A voice broke in through her memory.

She almost jumped out of her skin. She swiftly slid her rings back on her fingers and turned around. Jamie was sitting on the end of her bed.

“James.”

“Don’t get all mad. Dad didn’t see me.”

“You’ve been here this whole time?”

Jamie shrugged. “I got back around five. When I heard Dad come in, I hid.”

The drapes were open, and the last moments of sunlight illuminated her son’s pale face. He looked so much like her as a teenager for a second there that she was startled. There it was: the same taciturn but curious hazel eyes, same hesitant upper lip. She could almost see how others must have looked on her as a fifteen-year-old.

“You don’t need to hide,” she said.

Jamie shrugged. “Whatever. You’re the one who said Dad had some big dinner tonight, and I shouldn’t mess it up for him. I was just trying to be helpful.”

“Helpful?” Clare stared at her son, trying to figure out whether he was being sincere. “Well, Jamie, I wouldn’t say that ‘helpful’ is the first word that came to mind regarding your recent behavior.” She glanced at the clock on the bedside table. 6:48 p.m.

“You’re busy,” Jamie said.

“No, I’m not.”

“I saw you look at the clock.”

“I’ll dress while we talk. You’re not going anywhere,” she said. “What about this girl?”

Jamie flopped backwards onto her bed. “Hmph.” He had been a wakeful baby, and many were the times Clare had profited from one of Edward’s work trips to bring him into their bed. He would giggle in his sleep, even before he was old enough to say “Mama,” and she’d hear the sound as part of her dreams. Sometimes, she still heard it in her sleep.

She sat down on the bed beside him. “You didn’t mention her.”

“Whatever,” Jamie said.

“‘Whatever’? Are you kidding? What’s going on, Jamie?” When he pulled away from her, she added, “The school called your father.”

Jamie flipped up beside her, so violently his face almost hit hers. She had to restrain herself from recoiling. “It’s a whole class thing! It’s because she’s
Irish.
”

She bit her lip. A “whole class thing” could only mean a Catholic from Northern Ireland. She’d never engaged in any discussion with her sons about the Troubles or any part of Irish history. On the contrary, she’d spent two decades avoiding all discussion of Ireland, except as pertained to leprechauns, four-leaf clovers, and claddaghs. But she knew how a Catholic from Northern Ireland would be viewed at Barrow, and she knew Jamie would refer to a Catholic girl from Northern Ireland not as British but as Irish. Despite how it might gall his father. Perhaps because of how it would gall his father.