Anne Korkeakivi - An Unexpected Guest

She rose from the bed and opened the door all the way. There was something happening in the front of the Residence — she could hear Amélie arguing. She had to get out there and ensure things stayed on track for the dinner.

Amélie met her at the mouth of the Residence’s hall, shadowed by a short man in a gray jumpsuit.

“Madame,” he said, folding his arms over his chest, “on régle avant que je pars.”

“Zis man,” Amélie repeated, shaking her head with the special disgust she reserved for deliverymen who spoke even less English than she, “he wants zis house pay him.”

If the butler were here, he’d be handling this — not Amélie and not Clare. And he would do it with his usual aplomb. But what was the point of thinking about that? Gérard wasn’t here. And it wasn’t fair to expect Amélie to manage in his place. Clare would manage.

“Mais non, monsieur, je vous en prie…,” Clare began, trying to explain to the deliveryman their special circumstance. Since they were holding the dinner in the ambassador’s stead, the cost of the wine would go on the ambassador’s residence’s account rather than on theirs, although she’d still have to keep a record of it.

“C’est pas normal,” he interrupted.

“Mais si, monsieur.” Unlike the ambassador’s wife, whose residence had its own huge wine cellar of Pol Roger Champagne and Bordeaux and Burgundies, Clare regularly used this purveyor for the minister’s residence, where they didn’t entertain in such enormous numbers and thus didn’t keep such large quantities of wine always handy. The wine merchant knew her well enough to know she wasn’t going to try to cheat them, even if she were able. “C’est normal pour aujourd’hui.”

The man shrugged and made an abrupt about-face towards the front door. He did not wait for Amélie to let him out or steer him to the service entrance; he twisted the doorknob himself. “Très bien, Madame,” he said. “Je sais où vous habitez.” And with this vague threat, and a dismissive flick of his wrist, he swung the door open, leaving it to thwack shut behind him.

Amélie shook her head and returned to her work in the dining room. Clare made a mental note to check that they had a full selection of single malt whiskies in stock, as well as a few bottles of Somerset Alchemy Fifteen-Year-Old Cider Brandy. If only she’d heard everything Jamie had said.

The phone was still in her hand, and she walked to the study. The last time Edward or she had tried to pin Jamie down over some school infraction, it had taken more than a week to pry any details out of him. The more they would ask, the less he would tell. She sat down behind the study’s large walnut desk and rapid-dialed the Barrow switchboard. Jamie wouldn’t like it, but she’d call the headmaster directly. At least she would both skip the whole part where she had to get Jamie to talk and avert any possibility of the school ringing Edward. If Jamie was being sent home, this was serious.

She heard someone pick up.

“The headmaster’s line is engaged,” the school’s receptionist told her. “Would you like to hold?”

She tapped the broad face of the desk with a fingernail. “That’s all right, thank you. I’ll call back in five minutes.”

She set the phone down and opened the laptop in front of her. As it booted up, she took her notepad out of her cardigan pocket and surveyed her to-do list. Drat Barrow. They should never have sent Jamie there. He hadn’t been a brilliant student at the International School, but nothing like this. The computer screen blinked at her, then stabilized, and she clicked on Outlook.

Like rows of black ants, a slew of new e-mail messages appeared.

Towards the top:

Madame Moorhouse, It is with urgency that I request to know whether you are in knowledge that the Permanent Under-Secretary has expressed great desire to meet M. de Louriac’s son, Frédéric? Monsieur de Louriac le fils and his fiancée, Agathe Gouriant D’Arcy, are in Paris from Bordeaux for this one night. I wait your communication. With my sincerest respect, Mme. Gens, secrétaire de direction, M. Rémy de Louriac, The Ballaut Group.

Clare scrolled down the screen.

A few e-mails farther down, from Edward’s secretary:

Good morning, Mrs. Moorhouse. We received a call from M. de Louriac’s personal secretary this morning…

More portions of fish would have to be ordered, Mathilde would have to adjust her measures.…Why hadn’t Lydia called instead of sending an e-mail? Clare felt in her sweater pocket; she didn’t have her phone on her. She might not have taken it out of her purse the evening before. After Edward had dropped the bomb about Dublin, she hadn’t thought about checking e-mails.

She pulled the laptop towards her and began typing.

Madame Gens, c’est avec grand plaisir que nous accueillerons ce soir Messieurs de Louriac, père et fils, et Madame de Louriac, et l’invitée de M. de Louriac fils…

She finished the note, pressed “send” on the keyboard, and added “order more ham and more basa” to the bottom of her to-do list. She also added “rethink the seating arrangement” and “request two more official place settings from the embassy.” The de Louriacs had owned the same landed estate in Aquitaine since the fifteenth century. De Louriac senior had been the P.U.S.’s tennis partner during the P.U.S.’s years in Paris. They were what passed for intimates in the diplomatic world. Also, he controlled Ballaut, the titanic French aeronautics concern, which was of vital interest to the British government at this moment. Edward had explained it briefly to her yesterday on their way home from the reception. She had not probed the details. They would be fourteen total now at dinner.

9:40 a.m. Time to call Barrow again.

As she reached for the handset, sunshine slashed through the broad windows of the study, impaling her hands against the study desk, translucent in the sharp light, an older woman’s hands. Were they her hands? A touch of freckle sprayed across the top of the right one, the skin so thin the tendons were almost visible. The knuckles rose into a puckered ridge.

Was it possible that someone had once kissed each of these knuckles, telling her how he dreamt of her hands when they were separated? She’d sat down beside him at the kitchen table and watched him drink his Coke and noticed the curl of hair rolling down the back of his neck. He’d plunked down his bottle and, without asking, slipped his palm under hers.

“You surely have beautiful hands, Clare,” he said.

His eyes were so blue that they left her feeling as though she’d stared too long up into the sky. She looked away and was unable to see anything.

She was tall and fair-haired, good-looking without being striking, and plenty of boys had been happy to have her as their date for a movie, on a hike, to a house party. “Why don’t you ask Clare? She’s okay,” she could imagine them saying about her. But she was never part of the golden circle of popular girls, and the boys in the suburbs of Hartford were as vague about their attentions as they were good at playing lacrosse. Not one of them had ever called anything about her beautiful. None of them even seemed to have opinions.

She began to unfurl her fingers, for him.

Clare drew her hands back from the phone, hid them behind her back, brushed them against the front of her cardigan. And if she hadn’t followed Niall into her aunt’s kitchen all those years ago? If he hadn’t touched her hand and she hadn’t looked into his eyes? Would she still have ended up agreeing to help? Would she now be in this predicament?