Anne Korkeakivi - An Unexpected Guest

She adjusted her basket onto her left arm and lowered her eyes so they’d be less likely to fall upon the gaze of another shopper. Le Bon Marché’s food hall doubled as a haven for expats hoping to encounter other aliens in the hunt for marshmallows and pumpkin pie filling. There was a pleasant feeling of camaraderie to be found in spending a few chance minutes poring over fruits and imported crackers with similarly inclined hostesses, but she didn’t have time to spare today getting caught up in any extensive conversations. Adjusting her pace, she skirted the islands stacked with foreign preserves, and zeroed in on the produce stalls on the far side of the food hall. One was piled high with asparagus. She lifted a couple of stalks and examined them. Delicate lavender crept up towards their tips, a pinkish shadow on one, a splash of purple on the other. There was something animate about asparagus, the irregularity of each spear.

She brushed the thought away and began filling a paper bag, selecting only the thinnest spears, which were the most tender — and also required less peeling. With Amélie’s cousin coming in to help, there’d be enough hands to manage the asparagus, but Mathilde might still get fussed about it.

The cheese counter held a fresh supply of Irish cheddar. Clare requested two small wheels, ruddy yellow cakes sheathed in red wax. When she was a kid in suburban Connecticut, she and her friends used to buy a candy that looked like that casing, ruby lips of wax that they would chew on, not for the flavor but for the delightful sensation of their teeth sinking into the pliable plastic unsticky substance.

“Est-ce que ça sera tout, Madame?” the white-coated vendor asked. All the servers at Le Bon Marché’s market wore thin white cotton jackets, as though they were working in a pharmacy.

She shook her head and surveyed the other cheeses in the counter. She’d heard that the ambassador’s wife had cheeses sent over direct from Neal’s Yard Dairy in London every fortnight, but, though she and Edward entertained constantly, they hosted such lesser numbers than the embassy that ordering cheese in bulk made even less sense to her than wine. She pointed out two large wedges of Stilton and considered whether she should ask Mathilde to defrost some tayberries and fill a few small pots with chutney to decorate the cheese plates. Her free hand strayed towards the pocket holding her list. But, no, she didn’t need to direct Mathilde. She’d given Mathilde the guest list, which was all that was necessary. Mathilde understood who the guests were, and she’d know to do up the cheese in a suitably British fashion that wouldn’t shock the handful of French guests. That was the thing about Mathilde. Other than her personality, she was perfect.

“Prenez ceci, Madame,” advised the vendor, when Clare asked for two triangles of Brie de Meaux. She directed Clare to a too-firm semicircle with a chalky off-white interior. “Celui-ci sera bien pour vous.”

Whether it was unripened or not, Edward would not touch the brie. He’d take a respectable portion of the Stilton for the sake of decorum and, perhaps, a slice of the cheddar as well. Or maybe not, as he wouldn’t want to be seen as taking everything but the French cheese. She pointed to an adjacent brie, creamier in color and leaking onto the cheese counter. She herself loved the French cheeses, the smellier the better.

“Celui-là,” she said. “Deux grands morceaux, emballés séparément, s’il vous plaît.”

An expression of approval flitted across the vendor’s face. “Bien sûr, Madame.”

“Good choice,” a voice said from behind her in American English.

Clare turned around to find Patricia Blum, the mother of one of Jamie’s former classmates, standing behind her; tiny, round, and always cheerful, with dark hair and an extraordinarily beautiful face. For reasons she herself didn’t understand, Clare found Patricia alarming. Patricia’s daughter, Em, had been one of the most popular girls in the class and had never had much time for Jamie.

“They’re always trying to sell us the sucker slices,” Patricia whispered. She flashed a brilliant smile at the vendor. “They think that’s what we want.”

The vendor smiled back. She handed the cheese over, wrapped and ticketed. Clare laid it in her basket and wondered whether the vendor understood English.

“How’s James doing?” Patricia asked. “Em says he’s gone home for school this year.”

Jamie is probably going to flunk right out of that damned boarding school, and this failure would stay on his permanent record. Unless she managed to do something about it, something that wouldn’t drive him crazy for its intrusiveness. And not in a million years did Em bother to tell her mother about his having left the International School. Jamie’s absence would barely have registered on Em’s radar. Jamie would conquer his long frame and fair surprised face someday, but he was too obscure, too erratic, to rate amongst girls like Em at present.

“Very well, thank you. Yes, he’s gone to England,” she said, exchanging first one and then a second cheek kiss. Patricia had probably learned about Jamie changing schools from another parent. There was a lot of talking within the expat community. Although true intimacy was rare, everyone knew everyone else’s business. She’d just have to hope word wouldn’t get around about the troubles he was having. At least he hadn’t been kicked out — yet. Suspension wasn’t expulsion.

“Ahhh, his father’s school, I bet,” Patricia said. “What was it? Like, Eton?”

“No,” she said. “I mean, my husband didn’t go to Eton.”

She shifted the basket in her hand. She wanted to call Barrow by 11:40; any later than that and she might catch the headmaster just as he was heading out to eat, which was never the best time to catch anyone.

“He’s at Barrow, on the outskirts of London,” she added. “How’s everything at the International School? James misses it. I mean, he didn’t leave because we didn’t like it. We just thought it was the right time.”

Patricia laughed. “I understand. Well, everything’s fine. They had to cancel the annual class trip to London. You know, security reasons. But I’m taking Em and a couple of her friends up there, anyway. Week after next. Maybe we’ll even run into James!”

“Maybe.” This was neither within any realm of likelihood nor particularly to be desired, and Clare knew that Patricia knew this. “Well—”

Over Patricia’s shoulder, she glimpsed a familiar face disappear behind a row of juice bottles.

Her heart froze up inside her rib cage. His face, thinner, grayer, but him. The same pale skin and hollow cheeks, the same high ridge of cheekbone buttressing a stare so brilliant it entered her in a way no one ever had before or after.

Niall.

The first time she saw him, he was standing atop the stone wall surrounding her aunt’s house in Newton, outside Boston, and she’d ever after have an exaggerated sense of his height.

The face didn’t reappear. Her breath caught in her throat, and she felt her hand reach out.

I must not be alone, she thought. He won’t come to me if I’m not alone.

He’d been standing atop the stone wall, chewing on a stalk of grass while he watched her cousin Kevin change the oil in his car, in the driveway. “You aren’t going to get nowhere like that,” she’d heard him say, and she’d known he was different. Not Irish-American like her or Boston-Irish like Kevin, but Irish-Irish.

She gripped the closest thing to her, Patricia’s arm. But she couldn’t have seen him. Already she was going crazy. And yet, it had looked so like him.

“Come on, Clare. Hand me that wrench, will you,” Kevin grumbled, and she understood her cousin was trying to ignore the stranger. Beads of sweat rolled off Kevin’s dark blond hair and jiggled on his earlobes. One dropped onto the tar of the driveway. The heat was a net, trapping everything and everyone. The temperature must have been about ninety degrees.