Anne Korkeakivi - An Unexpected Guest

“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.

“I don’t know if I’m…chatty enough. I mean for the wife of a diplomat.”

“The wife of a diplomat is a diplomat, too. And a chatty diplomat is a hazard. The thing is to know when to speak and when to listen.” He’d given her the look of careful esteem she would come to see daily over the next twenty years. “You do yourself discredit, Clare.”

Suddenly, she’d understood that her self-perceived faults — her intuitive reserve, emotive pallor, innate discretion — were virtues in his eyes. He’d been admiring her newly sheared shoulder-length hair, the cool beige she’d begun using to cloak her own long limbs and secret emotions, and her ability to appear neutral at all times, at all costs, before anyone. “If you are sure,” she said, and he’d slipped the platinum engagement ring that had once belonged to some illustrious ancestor of his onto her slender finger. Its weighty diamond had caused it to slip sideways. The following week, he’d taken the ring to a jeweler’s to be resized. Five months later, in a church filled with her family and a few members of his, he’d slid a diamond-encrusted wedding band next to it. There were no tears, no sighs nor moans nor shouting, in their new life together, just a great calm that fell over her like seaside dusk. Exactly what she wanted.

Every morning since, when they awoke, in whatever bed, in whatever country, Edward reached over to lay a hand on her back and wish her good morning. He’d done it again this morning. And, all day long, she’d feel the reassuring weight of his trust guiding her forward.

This was why she could not let Edward down; even more than the love she felt for him, this was what made her so determined to ensure that this evening succeeded. Of course she believed he deserved the ambassadorship and wanted him to have all he had worked so hard for. Of course she loved him and wanted him to be happy. But above all, he had offered her a share in his future, she had accepted his offer, and she had never given him any reason to believe this trust was misguided.

Boxes of red and yellow and orange and purple tulips lay strewn across the floors of Fleurs Richert. A thin young man in a smock bent over them — the shop assistant, Jean-Benoît. Seeing that he was alone in the shop, she resisted an urge to walk right back out and return later.

“Ah, Madame Moorhouse!” Jean-Benoît twisted his head around at the sound of the door. Rising slowly to his feet, he wiped his hands on the apron and pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “ Quel dommage! Madame Richert is just go out.”

Jean-Benoît’s insistence on speaking English with her was different from Amélie’s. Her housekeeper was desperate to learn the language to keep her job. Jean-Benoît was desperate to keep French out of a foreign mouth. However, Clare had long come to understand that being condescended to in barely intelligible English, with labial contortions beyond imagining, was the price she had to pay for having a mother tongue that also was the international language of communication. All over the world, people had made English their own; it had spawned bastard children on six continents.

“Oh, well, I know you will find something wonderful for me,” she said. “We have an unexpected guest this evening.”

Jean-Benoît led her around a stand of ranunculus, their plump faces looking like the layered tulle skirts of old-fashioned coming-out gowns, in brilliant yellows, pinks, whites, and oranges. Clare had been to a ball once in England where half the girls were wearing similar items, remembrances of another, more optimistic century, when girls were eager to look like candy packages. She couldn’t imagine either of her sons dating a girl like that. Peter’s girlfriends always were stylish in a discreet expensive manner. They wore luxuriant corduroy pants cut just a bit lower on the hips than their mothers would wear, wool jackets in black or brown or navy and tailored close around the bosom. Jamie hadn’t had a first girlfriend yet in Paris, and the all-boys Barrow School seemed to offer little opportunity to find one now. But the girls he’d been friendly with at the International School in Paris had worn studs in their eyebrows and relegated bright colors to streaks in their hair. Particularly the ones she’d seen him eye wistfully.

“Eh, voilà, Madame, zees is what I want to show you! ” Jean-Benoît pointed to three large vases filled with tall white calla lilies. Behind them, a fourth vase held yellow callas. “Zees is nice, very nice.”

“No, no, Jean-Benoît,” she said. “They’re beautiful. But I already have an idea of what I want.”

“No, you don’t.” Behind his glasses, Jean-Benoît didn’t blink, his arms stayed pinned close to his sides.

Clare smiled. “Well, I was thinking of dog roses. Could you get any dog roses?”

“Dog ro-zes?”

“Rosier des chiens.”

He shrugged. “Of course. Dog ro-zes. But zees is not a flower to ’ave in a nice réception. It is for ze outzide.”

“Could you get them for me?’

He shook his head. “But ze lilies, zees is elegant. ”

“Well, then, how about dog violets?”

“Dog violets!”

Clare nodded her head. “Dog violets.”

“You ’ave zomezing about dogs, Madame Moorhouse? You are ’aving the British minister of dogs zees night?”

Clare laughed good-naturedly and thought to herself: If they don’t have asparagus at Le Bon Marché, it will mean carving out some extra time to go hunting for it. She also had now promised to pass by the apothecary to find something for Mathilde’s rheumatism. She could cut out delivering her translation for the Rodin Museum today; even though she had promised the head of the museum’s documentation center, Sylvie Cohen, to put the translation on a USB stick and drop it to her personally, and she did hate to go back on a promise, she had sent that e-mail last night from the reception saying she might not be able today after all. Sylvie would understand. She and Sylvie had become friends of a kind, and with the museum right down the street from her house, the publication office just behind it in the museum gardens, it had started to feel awkward for her not to pop in to drop things off or pick things up. But while translating museum catalogs was all very well, it could not compete in importance with the rites of international diplomacy, and she knew Sylvie accepted this would always be Clare’s priority.