Anne Korkeakivi - An Unexpected Guest

“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?”

Dr. Newsome laughed. “Are you thinking of taking up writing, Clare?”

“Good heavens, no. What sort of story would I have to tell?” She cupped a hand behind Dr. Lucy Newsome’s upper arm, guiding her back into the formal living room. “Tell me, have you met Bautista LeTouquet? May I introduce you?”

She attached Dr. Newsome to Bautista and the affianced couple and began making the circuit, stuffing her own thoughts back down, allowing her guests’ conversations to weave a tapestry in the chilling spring evening air around her, the daytime smell of blossoms ceding way to the scent of candles and wine and cologne. Still, all the while, she kept one eye towards the hall. Jamie was in his room; they were in between him and the door. This time he couldn’t slip out without her knowing. She exchanged glances with Edward, and then with Yann. She nodded to Amélie’s cousin, who stood waiting in a corner of the dining room.

“Shall we go in to dinner?” she said, scattering the phrase amongst the guests like rose petals at a wedding.

At the table she was flanked by men, the permanent under-secretary on her right, Directeur Général LeTouquet on her left. Edward faced her, down the long, dark length of wood at the other end, the rest of their dinner companions between them. She pressed the bell attached to the table leg by her knee. Instantly, their servers appeared, bearing plates of tender white shafts of asparagus and thin pink cuts of ham, decorated with a buttery vinaigrette and clusters of round mustard seeds and rose peppercorns.

“Ah, les asperges!” LeTouquet intoned as Clare’s plate was set down, and Clare knew she’d made the right choice. And here were the dinner rolls Mathilde had stalwartly made herself rather than order from Poilane’s or one of Paris’s other excellent bakers, pounding that pasty dough into the clouds that Amélie’s cousin was now carrying around the table in a silver bowl. Beside each dinner guest she stopped and proffered a selection from the bowl; only the fiancée could resist taking one. Would she be able to resist Mathilde’s dessert?

“Yes, a moment of silence,” Reverend Newsome was saying.

Clare’s emerald sparkled under the candlelight, and she turned her palm upwards to quiet it. Who had brought the assassination up? Could it have been Newsome? But that’s right — she and Edward had agreed to ask Newsome to give a blessing when they sat down. Edward must have spoken to him about it privately, probably over the phone this afternoon. Of course he had. She lowered her head.

Newsome’s elegant British voice rolled over all of them, quoting Donne’s famous words, like a tonic: “‘One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally/And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.’ Amen,” he eventually said and looked up.

“Amen,” Edward said and looked up also.

“Amen,” she and the others but Hope Childs added.

“Amen,” Hope Childs said, her voice deepened.

Clare paused before lifting her fork, to make sure everyone was ready. It was her and Edward’s job now to move the conversation forward to another topic, but tactfully.

“Thank you, Reverend,” Edward said. “John Donne. Lovely.”

“I wonder if children still read him in school,” Reverend Newsome said.

“Sometimes I wonder if children read anything in school these days,” Lucy Newsome said. “I mean other than computer programs and about biogenetics and all these things that didn’t even exist in our day. Certainly, I could bear to sell a few more of my books.”

The table laughed, a little. It was weak, but the others appreciated her effort.

“The asparagus arrived early this season,” Clare said, to keep things going, having swallowed her first bite of the starter and before taking another. “Despite all the rain.”