Anne Korkeakivi - An Unexpected Guest

“I found some nice cheese at Bon Marché,” she said, and prayed for Mathilde to pick her whisk back up without further remonstration. “Some very nice Irish cheddar.”

“Well, Irish is better than English,” Mathilde said, eyeing Clare. A Scottish nationalist when she wasn’t being a Swiss loyalist, Mathilde enjoyed taking whatever swipe she could at England. Not that she had any reservations about working for the British Crown. Clare wouldn’t be surprised to discover she had heard about the post in Dublin opening up and was worrying it, in her mind, just as she was the eggs. Mathilde seemed to know everything, especially anything that might pertain to her own work status. After all, this evening had its meaning for Mathilde as well. Unlike Edward’s secretary, for example, who was within the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office system, if Edward and Clare left for Dublin, Mathilde might well be out of a job, as would Amélie. They’d been independent hires by Clare, and the next minister couldn’t be counted on to hire either of them.

Clare was careful to keep her face as neutral as possible, until the whisk resumed its rounds. “You won’t get any argument here, Mrs. Moorhouse,” Mathilde said. “But, the minister might find Irish cheese strange, no? A bit of an unusual choice? Instead of English? By the bye, I checked the wine boxes myself this morning. All the wine’s there. The right wine.”

There were moments when Clare worshipped Mathilde’s uncanny ability to read her mind, but most of the time it frightened her. She picked up an eggshell, examined its thin bluish edge. Mathilde was right about the eggs, too; the shell looked unpromising. She would have to speak with the grocer tomorrow. Thank heavens Mathilde was able to scare anything into rising.

“I like a little Irish cheddar every once in a while. My family was Irish, remember.”

Mathilde stopped beating her yolks long enough to pour in a large measure of sugar. “Well, isn’t that right, nae? You were a young Irish lass when your English husband plucked you from the tree. County Clare, I reckon?”

Clare laughed. “I’m from Connecticut, Mathilde.”

“Aw, go on. I know how ’tis stateside. They had all those I.R.A. supporters coming out from there, didn’t they now? More Irish than the Irish themselves. They’re the ones half kept the movement funded.”

Clare backed slowly from the table. “I better see whether Amélie has everything sorted out.” She stretched a hand behind her for the door, missed it, reached again.

“Just one wee matter,” Mathilde said.

Clare stopped short, her hand falling. Mathilde pointed an elbow towards the shopping basket that Clare had left on the floor by the kitchen’s central island.

“You’re forgetting your reçu. You’re going to need that for your ledger.”

Clare took care not to breathe out too deeply. She retrieved the receipt from the basket, folded it once and then again, folded it as though she might be able to fold everything that worried her away into that little corner of paper.

One of the things Niall used to say to her — and she’d never known if he was ridiculing Americans or grateful to them — was that without their American brethren and all their pretty green dollars, the IRA would have had to pimp its leprechauns to raise money.

He’d said a lot of things, Niall had. Her first mistake had been to listen to them.

“You come make up my bed for me, why don’t you?”

She hadn’t seen him since that first time, when she’d watched him drink soda in the heat of that summer afternoon, feeling as though she’d been inside that glass, and when he’d consumed all of it, as though she’d also been swallowed. He’d disappeared from her aunt’s place shortly after, and her aunt had been frantic with worry, knitting her brow and fingers as she contemplated whether she’d have to call someone in Ireland, until Uncle Pat had laid down his newspaper and grinned.

“Oh, El,” Uncle Pat had said, “Niall’s a young man, his first time in America. He’s found some friendly American girl. He’ll be back when the beer runs out. Or the loving.”

Aunt Elaine’s eyebrows had lowered into a frown and her hands had moved away from the phone. She’d set down her old address book, with half the pages falling out.

Clare’s stomach had threatened to crawl into her mouth.

And then, there he was, sitting at the breakfast table three mornings later, pointing at Clare’s hands while she buttered her bread. As though he’d never been gone.

“I’d like to see your fingers smoothing back my sheets, wouldn’t I.” But, softly, so no one heard but she, and she had to keep herself from knocking over her orange juice glass. “Spreading. Those beautiful hands, spreading.”

Later, when she began to understand where he really went during those sudden absences, because the first one was followed by more, she was relieved. She was happy. Anything but other girls.

In the dining room, Amélie had already begun unwrapping the plate, and there was Edward filling up the doorway. “I thought I heard a commotion in the dining room,” he said.

“It was the men bringing in the plate. I was…in one of the bedrooms. And then I had to speak with Mathilde.”

“Everything in the kitchen coming along all right?”

“You don’t dare go in.”

Edward laughed, a good sign.

She smiled back. “We had to add de Louriac fils and de Louriac belle-fille, and then I neglected to tell her straight off. Amélie, did I tell you we need to add two places?”

“Yes, Madame. All is here.”

Clare looked at the table and realized how foolish her question was; the settings were there, the two extra ones included. Amélie had already put them out. She laughed and shook her head. “But you knew that, too,” she told Edward. “You forwarded the message from de Louriac’s secretary.”

“We all have a lot on our minds,” Edward said. “Amélie, tout est très bien. Comme toujours. Merci.”

Amélie gave a little curtsy, as she would do for Edward, and blushed. Edward slipped a hand around Clare’s elbow. “Come. Tell me where we are with everything.”

Clare gave in to the pull of his hand, so warm and steady through the fabric of her sweater. This was when he was going to shut the door and tell her what had happened. There was some reason he’d come home at lunchtime on such a busy day, some reason for the shut door to the study. She walked with him into the study, sat down in the armchair across from the desk, and pulled out her little notebook just in case something would need to be added to her to-do list. Sitting there, waiting for him to say whatever he was about to say and knowing that Jamie was secretly down the hall, she felt as though she could almost hear Jamie’s breath pushing in and out of his shallow chest, as she’d done when he was a baby, leaning over his crib as he took his afternoon nap. She just had to keep her fingers crossed Jamie would stay put. One of the first lessons one learned in a life of diplomacy was that timing was everything. And now was not the time to break the news of Jamie’s latest disaster to Edward. If Edward found out what Jamie had done — and really she wasn’t sure what was the worst part of it, the cheating or the forging her signature and flying home without permission — he’d consider it his duty to speak with Jamie immediately. Not only did Edward not have time for that today, but Jamie might become defensive, in which case they would not be able to count on him to keep a low profile through the evening. The more she thought about it, the more sure she was that the best thing would be not even to tell Edward for the moment that Jamie was home, much less that he’d been suspended. She could reveal all tomorrow.