An Unexpected Guest (3 page)

So Clare had made a study of how to work with Mathilde, learning to check in often but gently, without ever appearing to interfere. And, above all, never to underestimate Mathilde’s sense of self-importance. As for the other stuff—the fits of temper, grunts, and snorts—Clare ignored it. She
needed
Mathilde. Especially on a day like this.

“What a formidable diplomat your mother would make,” Edward had joked to the boys this past New Year’s Eve after she’d earned a spontaneous rendition of “Auld Lang Syne” from Mathilde over a cooling pot of cabbage, “If only she showed the slightest interest in politics. Really, it’s thrown away, spending her days translating museum catalogs.”

“I think it was the bottle of Madeira I brought in while she was cooking,” she’d said, but secretly she’d been pleased with her accomplishment.

“Oh, Mathilde,” she said now, entering the kitchen. The cook was standing by the back door, her apron flung across the kitchen table—a favorite symbolic gesture. Clare picked up the apron and smoothed it as though she were petting the head of a child. “I’ve just had to add two more guests! Thank heavens I can count on you to manage.”

“Two additional? Right good of you to let me know.”

Clare held the apron out. “I put in the extra orders right away. I know you have enough on your hands without having to start calling around to the fishmonger.” When Mathilde didn’t move, she added, “Oh, I know you’ll make me look a better hostess than I deserve. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

Husbands and wives were teams in the Foreign Service, although only one got to wear a mantle, and a spouse’s ability to put on a good dinner was a crucial part of the package. No one at the Foreign Office would soon forget France’s President Chirac pronouncing food from Finland the only thing worse than British cooking. If humoring Mathilde’s conviction that she was the most important personage in the Residence kept the kitchen working smoothly, Clare was happy to oblige.

Mathilde rubbed a thick arm. “Spring weather’s murder on my rheumatism. All that air moving around. And me in here by the cooker.” She marched over and closed the window. Then she came and took back the apron.

“I’ll stop in the pharmacy and see if I can’t find something for you,” Clare promised.

In the front hall, Amélie was balanced on a step stool, polishing the crystal chandelier. The glass glistened in the sun streaming in from the study, splashing prisms of light all over Amélie’s sturdy calves. She peeked down at Clare questioningly, and Clare nodded. Crisis averted.

“Behn…,”
Amélie said.

“Mmmm…,” Clare said. She felt inside the Regency console in the foyer, where she always stored her handbag, taking in the marine landscape by Turner that hung above it. An early watercolor of breaking dawn, the Turner was even more precious to her than its pedigree might warrant, for reasons she’d never been able to pinpoint; she hung it by the door wherever they lived so it would be the first or last thing she saw as she exited or entered. “I shall be going out now. While I’m gone, can you go through the liquor cabinet, please, and make sure there’s Somerset Brandy and at least twenty-five choices of whiskey? If there isn’t, call Jane in housekeeping at the embassy and ask that a car bring them over.”

“Ze Zomerzet Brandy and twenty-five whiskey.”

“Exactly. I have a few quick errands to run. Unless something unexpected comes up, I will be back within a couple hours.” To make certain Amélie had understood, she repeated, slowly: “I-will-come-back-soon. Nothing-will-happen-when-I-am-out.”

Amélie’s English skills left much room for improvement, but Amélie was keen to improve them and Clare felt she had to support her in the effort, even at moments as critical as this. Maybe, to build her confidence, especially at moments like this.

Amélie squinted at her from above. Clare refrained from repeating herself one last time, in French. It would be so nice to feel sure she’d been understood. “And, if ze new
Madame Conseiller
does not speak French so well as you? She will cut me!” Amélie had burst out a few months ago, anticipating the end to Clare’s time in Paris. They’d already been there three years, and regardless of whether or not Edward got an ambassadorship, they would be reposted somewhere new soon. That’s how it was in the Foreign Service: never too long anywhere. Amélie knew the score.

“Not cut. Not
cut,
Amélie.”

“I must make better my English,” Amélie had announced, nodding. “Now, I speak
only
English.
C’est bien?
”

So, Clare left the English words hanging between them and hoped Amélie had understood everything. The door to the apartment thumped shut behind her; there was the twang of the elevator cage, starting its way up. She set her wicker shopping basket down on the inlaid tile of the landing and loosened the thick silk scarf she’d knotted over her sweater as she waited for its arrival. Today was a beautiful April day in Paris, filled with promise. Jamie was in trouble yet again, but she’d accomplished what she’d needed for right now. The silver would all shine. Bread dough would soon begin rising in a basket. Fresh herbs would be cut and pounded into a pesto.

She wouldn’t think about where all these dinner preparations might propel her. She had to believe everything was going to be fine.

Composure was a quality like gold in the diplomatic world, and she had built a reputation for having it in spades. She wouldn’t let it now fail her.

C
lare stepped out into the gated courtyard that separated the Residence’s building from the pale stone-lined walks of the neighborhood and swung her shopping basket into the crook of her arm.

“Bonjour, Madame,”
she said to the woman polishing the front door handle.

“Bonjour, Madame.”
The woman stepped to one side and nodded. Clare stopped to button up her cardigan and tried not to feel the woman’s eyes taking in every garment she was wearing, noting that Clare hadn’t had her hair done this week.

Hairdresser—4 p.m.
She had it on her to-do list.

Running a diplomatic residence was easy, but living in it was harder. In addition to the loss of privacy was the shortage of free will—so many things that had to be said and done each day, no matter how she might feel about them. Then, the constant menace of relocation and the conservation of a pristine public image. Not to forget the security issues—always be on guard, a fellow ex-pat wife had told her during the Cairo posting, stirring a spoonful of sugar into her coffee cup. A few years after, Clare had picked up the morning paper to see the same woman’s face staring back at her from beneath the fold; she was being held for an undisclosed ransom by kidnappers in Venezuela. The kidnappers had gotten the wife by mistake when she’d picked up her husband’s car after a routine check at the garage.

“My God, Edward,” she’d said, holding up the paper to show him.

“They weren’t Foreign Service. They were oil,” he had pointed out, after taking the paper and studying the article. “Much more money.”

Still, Jamie had
had
to be sent away, to someplace with gates, someplace culturally welcoming. While the chances were greater that one of them would get hurt falling down stairs in a crumbling building in Paris than that one of them would be
kidnapped
, the peril of terrorism seemed all the greater for its intimacy and immensity. Nine eleven had changed everything, throwing the already fragile balance between estranged worlds into both disorder and relief. She overheard the hostility in both the
tabacs
and from well-dressed professionals at multinational cocktail parties.
“Americaine?”
a key cutter had asked the day before, lifting an eyebrow in a way that conveyed a thousand words of disapproval. There’d been sympathy for a while, but the war in Iraq had changed that.

The joyous wave of wisteria against the building’s facade caught her eye. Yet, she had to consider herself lucky. Paris was beautiful. The creditability of Edward’s work made hers feel like a treat rather than a duty. And, in the end, what was the use in worrying, particularly on days like this one, when the sun’s rays were borne lightly about by a spring wind and even the plane trees outside their apartment building seemed to be dancing? The breeze caught in her hair and caressed her cheek, coaxing a younger Clare to step out from her middle-aged shell. She could almost feel a heavy braid swing against her back as it had during the days when she was a student at Radcliffe, and for a moment she allowed herself to revel in the phantom sensation. At Harvard, she’d padded her long frame with woven Aran sweaters in honor of her Irish heritage, played Ultimate Frisbee on the campus quad barefoot, and pulled overnighters with her roommate during exam periods. Never one to proclaim her views loudly, she’d nonetheless emptied her pockets for any worthy-seeming cause, offered her floor to anyone visiting the campus for a valid-seeming protest. She’d believed the world could be better. Only after she’d met Niall had she learned to be suspicious, and
that
was the real reason for her innate apprehension; she was expecting the past to raise its angry head, hoary and covered with the cobwebs of recrimination, to point its finger at her. Neither 9/11 nor Edward and the lifestyle he’d brought her was to blame. If anything, that was
why
she’d married Edward. She had hoped the profundity of his decency might shield her.

Clare touched the fragile flat bell of a purple blossom with the tip of her finger and turned to address the charwoman, who she knew would still be staring at her.

“Très jolie,”
she said.

“Oui, Madame.”

She adjusted her scarf and basket and continued across the courtyard. Every morning, she managed to push Niall away, his phantasmal arms still clasped tight around her from the night’s dreams. Now, buoyed by the spring breeze, she willed him to leave her entirely, until she was just another well-dressed middle-aged woman in a solid marriage with two almost-grown, healthy children. She wasn’t going to allow Niall to recede quietly into the back of her thoughts today. She wanted him out completely.

She nodded to the concierge, who stood talking with a coworker in a corner of the entrance gateway, both wielding brooms like medieval soldiers ready to sally forth in battle, and let their sudden silence glance right off her. Not gossiping about us, at least, she thought. What would there be to say? By now, they knew she was an American. Other than that, she’d made sure that she and her family would make disappointing fodder for chatter: the children were reasonably well behaved, at least in public; the father spent nights in his own bed; she came home with shopping bags from the right boutiques, neither too many nor too few. The previous inhabitant of their apartment had enjoyed his drink more than was customary even for a diplomat. Worse, his wife, though only in her forties, had been at least fifty pounds overweight and, of marginally aristocratic country stock, had donned galoshes whenever it was wet, which in Paris was often. Even being American seemed mild next to such transgressions.

The Rue de Varenne was empty, as usual outside rush hour, but for the pairs of gendarmes stationed along it like pats of butter on bread plates the length of a formal dining table, assigned to guard the many buildings like theirs on the street that housed governmental offices or official residences. The French prime minister lived in the grandest building of all, at number 57; the Italian Embassy in Paris stood at numbers 47–49–51. The French minister of agriculture and French secrétariat général du gouvernement occupied, respectively, numbers 78–80 and 69. The rest of the seventh arrondissement hummed with visitors, thanks to the Eiffel Tower and Les Invalides, but on the Rue de Varenne, her street, tourists stuck to the beginning stretch by the Rodin Museum, wandering on and off the narrow sidewalk before it in the dazed manner so particular to the idle in Paris, returning to reality only at the chiding of a taxi or limousine horn but rarely making it as far even as the front gates of the building that housed the British minister’s residence, just a coin’s throw down from the museum.

From the Residence, the street continued in a long, nearly straight line, the cobblestones of the sidewalk just slightly uneven. Solemn gray and beige stone facades flanked either side of the road in a unified front. Edward had once commented on how well Clare fit in here, and she’d known he meant this as a compliment. She was pale, smooth, beige, a sea pebble of the kind one picks up along the beach and slips into one’s pocket to run one’s fingers over while pondering the meaning of life—or where to eat dinner. She knew it, she had even cultivated it—as much as she had ever manufactured anything about herself, for her development had been more like an act of erosion, a sanding away of all extraneous or undesirable elements, and this was how she felt more and more, as though each year were a grand wave washing away a little more of her. But something in her had begun to balk at the sentiment. Edward’s compliment had left her feeling deeply wounded, and she’d never forgotten it.

Now, however, she looked up and down the Rue de Varenne, not to judge the validity of Edward’s remark, nor to see if anyone was hovering about, as had been suggested as a simple precaution in one Foreign & Commonwealth Office post report, but to soak in the sunshine and attendant feeling of optimism. She left all second thoughts behind her, forced aside anything negative. The only things on her mind were the flowers and cheese and new asparagus from Alsace she needed to buy. She’d heard from other wives that there was a daily covered market in the Marais district that attracted vendors of fresh produce from all over France, but its name, Marché des Enfants Rouges, troubled her; translating as “market of the crimson children,” the name left her with visions of an enormous cage filled with children stained red, as though their little bodies had been dipped in blood. In the almost four years they’d now been living in Paris, and in the three years they’d lived here back in the ’90s, she had kept her distance. She would count on finding the asparagus at Le Bon Marché department store’s food hall, as well as the oatcakes and
Irish
cheddar she planned to serve as a subtle reminder to the P.U.S. of her heritage and confirmation of Edward’s Irish interests.

But ordering the flowers came first. An excellent florist stood on the Rue Chomel, near the end of the Rue de Varenne. She started down the street, nodding as usual to the first group of gendarmes she passed. The young gendarme with apple cheeks and a knobby neck was in his shirtsleeves in the brisk spring sunshine, an act of bravado that did not surprise her. He and his partner nodded back at her; the guards always did, except for whichever duo might be stationed in front of the prime minister’s residence. One or two might even touch the small blue box with a visor they wore atop their heads in guise of an actual cap. “They’re flirting with you,” Edward had commented one obscure Sunday morning when they had breakfasted at a café. Mathilde, perhaps in an act of vengeance, had used the last of the milk, leaving them either to face Edward’s tea and her coffee black or go out for breakfast. “They stay poker-faced for me, I can assure you.” For a few weeks after, she’d avoided walking down the street and stopped greeting the guards when she did, fussing with her handbag or buttons as she passed by them, until she’d woken up to the absurdity of such behavior. She was forty-five, a wife and a mother. She was past feeling shy or flirtatious.

She quickened her pace. Of course, she could have called in an order to the florist, but as with the asparagus, choosing them herself was better. That way she could be assured of their quality. The first time Edward had visited her after they were introduced over an uncomfortable luncheon with her father and one of her father’s Irish-American colleagues, he’d brought a large bouquet of lilacs to the dilapidated town house she was sharing with other recent college graduates in Washington, D.C. He was living in Washington then, too, posted there for the Foreign Office and already in his thirties. Though she’d hoped he wouldn’t realize it, she’d seen right away that the flowers were no good and would never be any good; to this day, she remembered how sad they’d looked on the table. It had been March and too early for lilacs, even from a hothouse, and though the carefully trimmed and sprayed sprigs might endure without wilting, their delicate blooms would never open nor exude the sweet scent that makes lilacs precious. She’d cut them at a forty-five-degree angle and placed them in a vase filled with lukewarm water, but her heart had sunk even as it had risen at the promise of Edward’s gesture.

“Lilacs were amongst the very first flowers that the colonialists brought over from England,” he had said, watching her set them down on the center of her dining table. “But they originated farther east, in eastern Europe and Asia. Just one of the scores of wonders spread throughout the world by international trade.”

“They have lovely lilacs at George Washington’s old home, Mount Vernon.” She’d been there just a few weeks earlier and read a pamphlet on the garden that had explained that the Dutch brought the first lilacs over to the New World—not the English. But she wouldn’t say so. Nor that the lilacs there hadn’t even begun budding. “It’s not far from here. Have you visited it?”

“I haven’t had the pleasure. Perhaps you will take me on a tour there sometime?”

“If you’d like me to.”

“I would consider it a great favor.”

How foreign Edward had seemed to her then, and how instinctively this had pleased her. Not just his gentlemanly form of courtship but everything about him: his neatly groomed short hair, his array of dark-colored wool suits, his self-assured long-legged stride, his feet armored in polished black-leather shoes. He was thirty-two to her twenty-three, nine years that somehow seemed more like nineteen. His careful British accent went down like ice tea, cool and smooth. She couldn’t claim to have been sexually attracted to him from the start, not as she had been with Niall at least, but the response she’d felt to him was certainly physical; she’d wanted to burrow within his discreet tailored clothes, ruddy skin, clear gray-blue eyes, substantial hips. In the disorder of her earlier youth, she’d confused conviction with strength. On meeting Edward, she’d understood it was the absence of mania that guaranteed potency. Edward was the personification of solidity.

The night he’d proposed, he’d taken her hands but skipped right past their extravagant beauty and looked straight into her startled face.

“You are ideal for this life,” he’d told her.