An Unexpected Guest (20 page)

Edward bowed his head towards her. He spoke very softly, barely moving his lips. “There was no cheating. The girl is part of an antiwar group. They’re planning a disturbance near Ten Downing Street: Chinese party poppers with flash powder for a bang and antiwar flyers shooting out. That’s what the chemicals were for. To create an extra bang.”

“Chinese party poppers?”

“They call themselves the FFF. Fight Fire with Fire.”

There was a buzzing in her head, a lightness. “Fight Fire with Fire?”

“
Yes.
The girl claimed they weren’t planning any actual
damage
—but according to what I’ve found on them, the group’s leader was arrested just before the invasion, on suspicion of attempted arson. At Whitehall. This is no ordinary grassroots student organization. And even if they were just poppers, can you imagine? In this atmosphere? The police aren’t fooling around in these times, especially not around the prime minister. They’re carrying loaded weapons.”

Arson? Explosives? She tried to grasp what Edward was saying.
There will be gates, there will be grounds,
he had said about sending Jamie to boarding school, then reached for the newspaper. Jamie was supposed to be safer over there. That was the whole point of this miserable transfer to boarding school.

“And the girl? This Rian?” she said.

“Ireland. County Mayo. She’s related to one of the teachers, studying art in London, and was granted a staff room in exchange for working as monitor at the sports center. When they found the two of them yesterday evening in her room, they dismissed her on the spot and told her to be off the grounds by nine this morning. Barrow was looking into having her deported on the basis of antigovernmental activity, but when they called me, we agreed, as there wasn’t anything actually illegal in her room, just illegally procured, and not by her but by
our
son—indeed, the only person who’d already broken any laws was our son, stealing from the
laboratory
—it might cause more trouble than it was worth to get the police involved. I’m working on that still.”

She nodded, stupefied. Thank God for Edward; thank God he acted swiftly. Barrow wouldn’t want news of what had happened to get around or their name in the papers.

But. If Barrow decided to bury the whole incident, there’d be nothing to stop Jamie from continuing to be involved with this organization. Certainly not from becoming further involved with this older girl. A week would pass. He’d go back to Barrow. The girl would still be there, somewhere, in London. He would find her. Or she would find him.

“What did they catch them doing? I mean, in her room.”

“Making flyers.” He shook his head, looking at a complete loss, and repeated, “Making flyers.”

He pulled away from her, straightened. “We have to go in there,” he said, adding, “No sign of rain, for a change,” in a normal, louder voice, and she saw him reassemble his face into its usual calm as he turned back towards the room. He tipped his head in the direction of the reverend, who was chatting with the Picqs. The reverend nodded back and his hand went out; he rested it on Christian Picq’s forearm.

They were discussing the slain official.

She should have canceled the whole damn evening after Jamie’s phone call. Or, at least, after the parliamentarian’s murder. All this desperate effort, putting off Jamie’s problems, trying to ignore her own, just to make
this
happen.

She watched the group take an almost imperceptible move in towards one another, then move out, like a heart beating. The reverend was speaking.

But, no. She saw the faces on their guests, turning like buttercups towards the light. She and Edward were carrying on not just for the ambassador. They were proving that life would go on, could remain decent no matter what happened, despite the fact that someone could get up in the morning, go to work, and never come home again, because someone disagreed with their opinions, or race, or religion.

She felt flush. Fight Fire with Fire? Setting off explosions by the prime minister’s residence? How could things have gotten to this? How could Jamie be so
stupid?

“We need to go in,” Edward repeated.

How? There was a filament loose somewhere inside her, and she’d passed the same disorder on to her Jamie.

“An art student?”

Edward looked at her, his expression clear, unreadable. “Not now,” he said.

He went to join their guests. He left her.

She wanted to go back to Jamie’s bedroom and shake him awake immediately. “What were you thinking!” she wanted to shout. “How could you? Do you think it stops with Chinese party poppers? Do you think it
ever
stops?”

She wanted to call Barrow and interrupt the headmaster from whatever he might be doing—eating dinner, having cocktails, settling down to a nice book. “Why didn’t anyone there
see
what was happening to Jamie?” she wanted to say. “What was Barrow doing hiring a girl like that in the first place? At the sports center of all things.” Had she access to the lockers? To the showers? How could they be so stupid as to put young boys together with an unattached girl in that way in such a setting?

Edward had joined the group around the reverend. He was leaning in to listen, looking grave but composed.

“Tout le monde est arrivé?”
Yann said, coming up from behind her, holding a tray of empty wineglasses in his hand.
“On passe à table?”

“En dix minutes,”
she said.

The waiter nodded and returned towards the kitchen.

Chinese firecrackers were a party popper. The Chinese set them off at their New Year: a bit of a bang and then brightly colored streamers shooting out into the sky. Tiny translucent parachutes, like aerial jellyfish floating down against the clouds. Catching the parachutes was considered good luck by the Chinese, and the party poppers were operated even by small children. A toy. That’s how Jamie must have seen it, as though he were playing at superheroes, like he and Peter used to do when they were little, tying towels around their backs as they zoomed up and down the apartment, and the popper would be his magic wand.

A pretty, older Irish girl. The first he’d felt an interest in. Or, perhaps, the first that had shown an interest in him. An antiwar conviction with which he already sympathized, over which he’d even obsessed. Of course he’d agreed to help the girl. Peter wouldn’t have. Edward wouldn’t have. They would have been able to differentiate between what was right and what was wrong—such as stealing from a school lab, such as setting up explosions in central London less than a year after fifty-two civilians had been slaughtered on public transportation—and too sensible to participate during times as troubled as these, no matter how much they liked the girl or agreed with her politics. But not Jamie. Not her Jamie.

“We’ll go for a wee holiday, you and me,” Niall said. He handed her a beer. They were sitting on her aunt and uncle’s patio, and the heat still hadn’t abated. It would turn out to be one of the hottest, driest summers in Boston’s recorded history.

Her heart jumped up. A trip together out in the open, like real couples did?

“To the shore. You’d need to hire the car for me.”

“You don’t have a license?”

“I’m not twenty-five yet. I wouldn’t be old enough as a foreigner. But I found a company that will hire to a twenty-year-old with a license if you are a U.S. citizen.”

She didn’t ask anything more about it. She didn’t even ask where precisely they were going. She followed his directions. She took a one-week leave from her summer job at the museum. She told the landlord of the room she’d rented in Cambridge for the upcoming school year that she’d move in immediately upon her return. She packed a bathing suit, a towel, and a change of clothing. She packed a camera. She did not pack film for it. She put the gold-filled band he gave her into her wallet.

“People pay less mind to a married couple,” he said.

She arrived at the bus station in Boston on the designated day two weeks later. He was there already, lining up to board a vehicle. She shuffled in after him, settled in a separate seat without so much as glancing at him, and got off where he got off in New Jersey, still without saying a word to him. In this second bus terminal, with no one looking, she slipped the false wedding band onto her ring finger. She went to the counter of the car-rental agency without him and filled out the papers for the camper he’d reserved under her name.

“If anyone ever asks where you were,” he’d told her back in Boston while he was explaining how they would travel, “if the car hire comes back to you, you just tell them you were meeting a man and you didn’t want anyone else minding your business. If you put it that way, no one will ask anything more about it, not even your ma and da. They’ll assume it was someone married. And if someone does interrogate you, you just make up a first name, or use the name of someone you know at school, and say he never showed up.”

She hadn’t asked him how or even why anyone would ever find out about her having rented a car in New Jersey. She’d blocked that word “interrogate” right out of her thought processes, though it would come back to her over and over later, like remembering the sound of brakes squealing right before an accident.

She’d just nodded and said okay. She and Niall were going on a trip together. They would be alone, far from the eyes of her aunt and uncle. That was what mattered.

And so, she pulled out of the rental-car lot, mindful to check the side mirrors for incoming traffic—she’d never driven a camper before—and proceeded to the street corner where he’d instructed her he would be waiting. She pulled up to the sidewalk.

“Drive south,” he said, slipping in beside her. Sun beat in through the front windshield; the front seat smelled of chemical solvent. He rolled down his window and flipped down both of the windshield’s sun visors. “Fancy the beach?”

They spent the first night of their trip sleeping in the back of the camper in the parking lot of a public beach, opening up the back doors with slumber still in their eyes and treading down to the lips of the sea at dawn to watch the sun awaken over the Atlantic.

“My green island is on the other side of all that water,” he said.

She whispered, half hoping he wouldn’t hear, “I’d like to go there.”

“You would, then?”

“Of course.”

“Maybe you will. Maybe we will together.” He threw his arm around her and drew her in close to his warmth. She realized he smelled of her. She must smell of him also. “I wonder,” he said, “what it would have been like had my great-granda made the trip to America like yours did, instead of north during the famine.”

“If he had—” she said. The clouds moved above her, huge masses of effervescence. She left her thoughts to billow up to them.

Niall grabbed a handful of sand. He let a few grains run through his fingers before tossing the rest of it towards the ocean. “Ah, I’d probably just turned out another freckled-nose Mick in Boston, tending a bar somewhere.” He laughed and tugged on her braid.

She slipped her braid back over her shoulder. “Let’s go for a swim.”

He shook his head.

Their aloneness, the intimacy of their two bodies out in the world, the night they’d spent in the camper, made her feel bold. “Aw, come on. Are you afraid of the cold?”

“I don’ swim. I don’ know how.”

It was like a precious gift, this confession. She understood why he wouldn’t ever go to the Cape with her aunt and uncle and the rest of the family. What he couldn’t do that she and all of the rest of them could. She also understood why he didn’t know how to swim: his childhood had been nothing like theirs. She said nothing more, gathering in every millisecond of that moment to her: the Atlantic dark and deep gray-blue, the sky a softer gray-blue echo with ribbons of the palest pink and a burning white orb radiating out from its core, its rays tracing a brilliant golden path across the water almost directly to their feet on the shore, the cool feeling of the sand under those feet, the sound of the tide shifting and the twitter of waterbirds wandering the beach disturbed. Their shoulders, side by side, level, his arm around hers. Over and over she would come back to this moment, to this feeling. She understood that in giving her this piece of knowledge of a weakness, he was giving her collateral. A pact was being signed between them.

If only she had it to do over! For twenty-five years, she’d been imprisoned within an invisible vault of guilt and self-hatred. Today had arrived like a miracle. But—why hadn’t she known better then? And now Jamie.
Fight fire with fire.

“She’s not as beautiful in person, don’t you think?” Dr. Lucy Newsome said, joining her in the doorway, keeping one eye on her husband, the reverend, as he approached Hope Childs, the actress. “And yet, you do have to look at her.”

Clare struggled to return to the Residence, the evening, the right now. Her eyes swept around the formal dining room. There was the reverend, standing just slightly too close to the dazzling Hope Childs, and there was the imposing Sylvie Picq, turning away from them. Dr. Newsome, as intelligent as she was, was
detritus
on an evening such as this. “Wives” at these events had limited choices: either they could stay by their husbands’ sides to coach them on other guests’ names and remind them of the ages of their children when asked, or they could congregate with other wives in a corner, like pedestrians caught in a rain shower with only one umbrella between them. But the reverend didn’t need this sort of help, and there wasn’t much in the way of other wives tonight for Dr. Newsome to
huddle
with. One didn’t huddle with Mme de Louriac, and Christian Picq was a husband, not a wife, and not even a trailing spouse, as he had his own established career in Paris. That left only Bautista for huddling purposes, and Bautista was currently engaged with Agathe and de Louriac Junior, whose mutual gloriousness probably intimidated Dr. Newsome.

She gestured towards a collection of eighteenth-century British Romantic poetry perched on a side table close to the entryway, the first thing she could think of. “I’ve been wanting to ask you, Lucy,” she said. “Do you devise your wonderful books longhand or directly on a computer?”