An Unexpected Guest (22 page)

Clare felt dizzy; she felt breathless. She saw the calm gray-eyed face she woke next to in bed all these years. Then she saw the slightly doughy, creased face of a stranger with a British accent and receding hairline. Was this what life came down to? A succession of shadows, each darker than the last, masking the consummate isolation of human existence. Puff, you dissipated like the sprung seeds on a dandelion weed, one last shadow obscuring the garden furniture.

“You checked up on me? You checked up on me behind my back? And you never told me?”

“That’s a bit like the pot calling the kettle black, isn’t it?”

He was right. He had married her in good faith and she had lied to him, and lied to him again and again. She’d been far more deceptive than he’d ever been, and than he realized. And in addition to all the rest, she’d pretended she was unattached when she’d still been as attached to Niall as the rusty unbending clasps on an attic trunk. Every waking hour, every night, she’d thought about him. And so she’d stretched her fingers out to Edward before a linen-draped altar and let him slip his family’s rings on her fingers and swore before God and their families and a church full of witnesses that she would love and cherish him till death parted them without letting him know that she’d already done the same in an imaginary world over guns and blood money with someone else. As though, with Niall’s disappearance, she could make that whole summer evaporate into nothingness by pretending to the rest of the world it had never happened.

“Edward, I—”

“Wait, Clare. Think. You can tell me whatever it is you are about to say. I will listen. But, for the more than two decades of our life together, you have not wanted to and once you’ve told me, you can never
not
have told me. I do not want you to wake in the morning regretting anything, and I do not need you to explain to me. I
trust
you.”

There was Niall, sand in his wavy hair, the freckles popping out of his fair skin, the sound of the Atlantic at their feet, the way their same-size bodies had curved into each other. There he was, disappearing into the crowd at the airport in Dublin, like the last drops of water plunging into a funnel, her trying to cling on to them.

His scent, the heat of him sitting on the bench next to her
today
.

There was Edward, undressed but for his socks and underpants and unbuttoned dress shirt, with a fat golden band on his ring finger. He thought she was going to tell him about something personal, something intimate; he had no idea the enormity of her betrayal. If she told him now what she’d done all those years ago in Dublin for Niall, he would be worse than betrayed. He would be forced to become an accomplice.

She shook her head. “How can you be so accepting?”

Edward sat down on the bed and pulled off a sock. “It’s simple, really. Look, I don’t know why suddenly, at almost midnight, after two decades, you have decided to admit to me you have been to Dublin any more than I understood why you felt obliged in the middle of dinner to ask after the well-being of an accused assassin of an important government official. But I do know—whatever it is you are trying to sort out in your heart and head at this moment—in the end, you will do the right thing.” He pulled off the other sock and held them in his hand. “Actions mean something. You’re a good person.”

She felt like crying out. There he was, Edward. The face she saw each morning, the hand that rested on her shoulder came back into focus. She sat down on the bed beside him and slid her arms around his broad chest, laid her head against his neck. He wrapped his arms around her and held her. She looked up into his face and kissed him.

“Jamie’s here,” she said. “He’s in his bedroom. I hid him.”

Edward sighed and released her. “Well, at least he’s safe. You better go make sure he’s sleeping and not waiting up for us. It’s too late to talk sensibly with him.”

She hesitated before Jamie’s door. If she knocked, she might wake him up. But she didn’t want to step in on him unbidden, possibly embarrass him, a teenager. She laid a hand on the door as though by doing so she might be able to feel whether or not he was awake. She hoped he wasn’t. Edward was right—talking with him would have to wait until morning.

Edward was right about so many things. He was wiser even than she’d given him credit for. She’d done everything in her power to make herself as unnoticeable as possible, swathing herself in beige cloth and neutral opinions. She’d buried the pivotal choice of her life, like the city of Troy, under layers and layers of sediment, even as she carried the remembrance of it with her every minute. And still she hadn’t managed to fool him. He had watched her lie, year after year of their marriage, and had never said a thing to her about it.

Was he right also in thinking he could trust her?

Actions mean something.
Sitting beside Niall on the bench at the Rodin Museum this afternoon, she’d felt as though they knew each other better than anyone because they’d shared this one thing that no one else on earth knew about and that had defined her every waking moment since it had happened. But she didn’t even know where he’d slept the night before. And people weren’t just their pasts, or their dreams for the future. They were the drugstore where they went to purchase shampoo, and the shampoo that they purchased. They were the jobs they got up and went to in the morning or didn’t get up and go to, the movies they chose to watch, the magazines they read. The way they dealt with the people they employed or the people who employed them, whether or not they enjoyed the scent of calla lilies. Whether they brushed their teeth before or after breakfast, or both. When you are young, you can believe you still are your dreams. Then you
become.

She pushed open the door to Jamie’s room. The desk lamp cast a dim halo over the edge of Jamie’s bed, its neck stooped down and forward like a swan’s. Jamie lay just out of its reach, asleep. He’d pulled her sweater, which she’d shed on his bed and forgotten earlier in the evening, over his shoulders, so that one arm flung out around him in an empty embrace. She lifted it from over his neck and chest and drew the afghan on the foot of the bed over him. His long, thin limbs shuddered; he groaned and sleepily pulled the blanket in around him.

No one planned to grow up and become a bad person. As a young girl, she’d cried over a neighbor’s three-legged cat and tried to stanch the bleeding of an injured chipmunk. She’d been horrified by the televised images from Vietnam. Then, one day, she’d found herself combing the dunes of the Atlantic for seashells while her Irish lover was probably delivering guns, and smuggling dollars in a bandage around her midriff.

She understood the source of Jamie’s confusion. He had picked up her ambiguity. But she was not going to be ambiguous anymore. She wasn’t going to allow the sum of her life to be based on one sole defining moment that had happened when she was too young to know better. Maybe there was no going back, but there still could be going forward. People had to be able to change. A better world had to be possible.

Jamie’s face looked flushed, but when she laid the back of her hand against his cheek, his skin felt cool. A wisp of night flew in, and she rose and shut the windows, carrying her sweater over her arm. She returned to the bedside and tucked the afghan in still closer around him. She stood looking at him a few minutes longer, twisting the emerald ring on her finger. Then she kissed him softly, so softly he’d be sure not to awaken.

Edward had drawn a bathrobe on over his pajamas, making him look strangely formal for being in his nightclothes.

“He’s fast asleep,” she said, “and so should you be. You look exhausted.” She slipped her sweater over her shoulders.

He sat down on the bed, swung his long legs onto it. “Aren’t you coming to bed?”

She came to the edge of the mattress and smoothed the hair back from his brow. “I have some things I need to do. Don’t wait for me.” In the silence of the night, the sound of heavy, even breathing from Jamie’s bedroom grew like a heart between them.

Edward propped himself up on his elbows.

She withdrew her hand. “Just a couple of chores. Cleaning up. You should take off your bathrobe before you fall asleep in it. You’ll be too hot otherwise.” She leaned down to kiss him also, and he pulled her down to him.

“Thank you, Clare, for this evening.”

“It was a good dinner.”

“Yes, it was.”

She turned off the overhead light, closed the door to their bedroom, and continued down the hall. She stopped in the formal living room to turn off a lamp that had been left on. In the dining room, she closed a door of the buffet that had opened. She checked that the china plate, with the queen’s crest printed around the rim, stood neatly washed and all in its crates, ready to be picked up as soon as the sun rose. She slipped into the kitchen and made sure the back door was double-locked.

Returning to the front hall, she opened the heavy door as gently as she could.

Outside, the courtyard was slippery with darkness. So bustling in the day, the Rue de Varenne yawned before her, a stretch of crooked teeth in the moonlight. She wrapped her sweater closer and wished she’d put on a coat. The early hours of the morning would come before her so-called chores were finished.

T
he taxi couldn’t fit into the narrow streets behind Beaubourg, the futuristic modern art museum plopped down amidst the ancient houses of the fourth arrondissement, so she had to get out and complete the last two blocks on foot. Young couples, bound in skintight black or purple jeans, cropped leather jackets, sneakers or boots, pushed by her, the girls swinging their purses, the boys throttling the necks of wine bottles. A busker wearing a bowler hat and ripped jeans played his guitar to the night, with a dog draped over one thigh, a mostly empty paper plate in front of the other. Two girls, their young faces studded with silver knobs, shared a cigarette. All the activity was disorienting after the desolation of the seventh arrondissement at night; she was flotsam, slapping back and forth against the sand, tossed by tiny but continuous breaking waves, splashed around with pieces of bark and shell and seaweed. Decades had passed since she had had a place in the chaotic nocturnal world other than in taxis or limousines. After she’d returned from Dublin, the pubs of Cambridge might as well have taken flight. That last year at Harvard, she’d hunkered down in the little room she’d hoped to share with Niall, night after night, alone, reading French and Spanish and Italian for hours. Her youth had ended when he’d asked her.

“Turn off the light,” he said.

They were sitting on her mattress, on the floor of the little room she’d newly rented. It was far from the campus, in a part of Cambridge where she normally would never have ventured, but she’d signed the lease thinking it was a place where Niall could come without being seen by any of her classmates. If she wanted him, this was the requirement.

“We’re cousins,” she’d said, the first and only time they’d ever discussed being seen around Boston in public together, “aren’t we? Not blood related, but still. We could go to a bar just like that. You know, like family. We could at least act like friends.”

“And watch some other feck looking at you like a piece of skirt?”

She turned off the light and settled back next to him. She waited for him to ease her down on the bed where she would feel his taut contained energy against her. But he didn’t. He looked at her for a long time, holding her gaze in his sharp blue eyes.

“Clare,” he finally said.

“Yes.”

“You’ve heard of Bobby Sands.”

“Yes.”

“They said he and the others were nothing but common criminals, and the screws treated them worse than that. Even after Bobby was voted MP of Fermanagh and South Tyrone. Even after he starved to death.”

She watched his face, waiting for him to continue. He seemed to be deciding something.

He got up and extracted the duffel bag from her closet. He’d stashed it there the day after they returned.
Don’t you be opening it,
he’d told her. She hadn’t.

He grasped the zipper hook between his thumb and forefinger and pulled. The hook slid along the tracks of the zipper, allowing the lips of the bag to part. When he’d opened it about two inches he stopped and looked at her.

White paper printed with green. The corner of a bill. A “1” followed by two “0”s.

“Ordinary, decent people. That’s all it comes down to. They stole our country from us, Clare.”

He clasped the bag in his two hands and placed it between them.

“It’s up to yourself,” he said. “You can say yea or nae.”

She saw the way his Adam’s apple rose and fell as he said it. She had laid her cheek against it, smelling the salt air on his skin, while seagulls picked around them.

She nodded.

She’d made the choice. No one had forced her. He’d said it was to help regular people, but, as a linguist, she knew better than most how any given phrase could have numerous interpretations. She’d believed what she wanted to believe, when in her heart of hearts, if she’d asked herself any hard questions, she’d have understood that that money wasn’t intended to be distributed through any church’s coffers. Just as she’d known that whatever she wasn’t supposed to look at in the back of that camper had been contraband. Ignoring wasn’t the equivalent of ignorance.

But that was long ago.

Clare gathered her sweater around her and quickened her pace. After twenty-five years, there had to be some hope for clemency.

A guardian stopped her at the door to the church, gesturing over his shoulder into its darkened cavity. Billows of clear music echoed out from behind him. Just visible under the dim light cast by a wall sconce, a sign read
IIIème Festival de Musique Ancienne, 22.00.
Clare checked her watch. It was nearly midnight; they must be playing an encore.

“J’ai oublié quelque chose dedans,”
she told the guard, to gain entry. She
had
forgotten something inside or, if not forgotten, mislaid it. She took a twenty-euro bill from her wallet and placed it in the contribution basket.

The guardian looked her up and down. She knew what he was seeing. She was foreign but not touristic. She was well kept, dressed expensively. She was tall and naturally blond.

He shrugged and waved her in.

Cold rushed her as she entered the church’s ancient interior. Centuries of unheated winters seemed to have settled into its stones, a chill that no amount of summers would ever dissipate. She waited for her eyes to adjust to the dimness, then let them sweep the pews, raking the audience. Only a smattering of people were there, tossed amongst the front half of the pews like droplets of rain. A few were gray-haired, but most seemed of that indeterminate age around twenty when teenagers discover they’ve somehow become adults. Music students, probably; friends of the performers.

She sorted through them until her eyes located an older, sparer figure.

He was on the far left, in one of the last pews, several rows back from anyone else. He didn’t look up when she tiptoed in beside him. He moved over to accommodate her, as though she were returning from having stepped out briefly to make a call or use the lavatory. Chanting echoed around them, and she felt she knew this song; it was the story of her years of waiting. The sound filled her body with a supreme sadness. Defying the skeptical look of the peaked arches above them, he took her hand in his, cradling it as though it were a fragile, curious object left tossed up on the banks after the tide receded.

The music stopped and people clapped, but still he held on to her hand. People rose, some to depart, others in order to view the bowing musicians over the heads of the people already leaving. Niall stayed seated, and so did she.

People began streaming back towards the doors. He lowered his face from any hint of light.

“What kept you?” he said with a bit of a smile. He was dressed in the same clothes as earlier in the day but wearing a worn leather jacket. It looked soft against the sharp lines of his body, as though it would melt against her cheeks if she were to bury her face in it. Looking down, she could see the edges of his knees pressing through denim. He was still so handsome. That would have been another one of the reasons they’d sent him to the States to collect the money.

“I never knew you liked music,” she said. There was so much they had never talked about. They’d shared so little except for that most intimate act, a crime.

“All Irish like music.” He laughed. “I saw you were having people coming round for dinner, and there was a notice for this concert at the museum. I didn’t know it would be so bloody cold. I could have just as well waited on a park bench.”

She shook her head. “The Luxembourg Gardens would be closed. The Rodin also.”

Up against the nearest wall stretched a heavy stone tomb, its contours rubbed away from centuries of frigid obscurity. This was Niall’s life, shadows and austerity. The first time she saw him, he was standing on top of a stone wall in a comfortable suburb outside Boston, the sun playing on his hair, and ever after, she’d had the feeling he was taller than he really was. He hadn’t bothered to hide his disgust for her and her cousin’s ignorance, and she’d taken that to mean he himself knew everything. Sitting beside him in her aunt and uncle’s kitchen, she’d been surprised to look into his face and realize he was barely older than she was. He’d been so young and full of life and promise, not much older than Jamie was now. She’d gained much in the years since—
Edward
, her children, a world so much bigger than the cloistered one she’d begun with in Connecticut. A world she understood so
differently
. If only he had.

This is a war,
he’d said. He still believed it.

“I need to tell you something,” she said. “I’m glad I lost the money. I’m not saying you were on the wrong side of the argument. I’m just saying I’m glad I don’t have that at least on my conscience.”

Niall let go of her hand. He nodded. “Right. You married a Brit. And not just any Brit either, but a feckin’ servant of the Crown. Diplomatic service.”

“That has nothing to do with it. Edwa—my husband’s a good person.”

“They all…” Niall stopped. “Well. I hope so.”

The church was nearly empty now. Up by the altar, the musicians had returned from the vestry to fold chairs and gather their music stands. The guardian was with them, helping. The church’s bell rang out: midnight.

“Do you know that’s the oldest church bell in Paris?” she said.

Niall studied her. “You always were a clever one,” he said softly for the second time that day. He rose and she followed him out of the pew, out of the church, into the street. The inky night air felt gentle and smooth now, after the cloying damp of the church interior. They walked silently through a narrow alley, absent of street lamps, away from the random sounds of motorcycle and car engines and nightclub music, falling back into a long-buried habit of not speaking until they were no longer within view of others. A stray cat ran in front of them.

I never knew you liked music.

All Irish like music. I saw you were having people coming round for dinner.

She stopped. “What did you mean you saw I was having people round for dinner?”

“I figured you weren’t buying all that cheese and asparagus just for you and your husband. He’s a Prods. You can’t have too many children.”

He had never seen her sons. He didn’t know anything about them. She brushed the air with her hand. “Did you see me buying flowers before that?”

“I saw you come out of a flower shop.”

And so had her Turk. Niall must have seen the Turk also, there, with her, at 10:29 a.m.

“Did you see me talk to someone?”

“A man. And then you were in the shop with a woman. But I’d seen how you go about the city. I thought of the flowers and how they’d come out with the sun shining. I knew this was the day I’d find you in the garden, alone by the statue.”

Niall had seen the Turk, too, yet another horrible quirk of fate. There couldn’t be a worse witness on earth to corroborate her word. Niall. A
dead
man.

“Never mind him right now,” she said. “Look, I want to help you, and your cousin. But if I gave you money, how could I know it wouldn’t end up in the war coffers now? I mean, if things started up again.” How could she explain to him? The weight that had been lifted from her shoulders this afternoon, all those years of thinking about what she’d helped do. What they’d helped do. “We’re so lucky. God, Niall, we are
so lucky.
”

“Lucky? Are you taking the piss out of me?”

“Yes, lucky.”

Niall stopped. He stepped in towards her, letting a bit of the streetlights glance off his profile. He seized her hands and held them to him. In the moonlight, the emerald on her finger sparkled, dark and green as the Atlantic under a troubled sky. “I’m not lucky, Clare. I’m not even
alive.
”

The feel of his skin against hers, so rough against her smoothness, the energy within them. Twenty years of his life, wasted.

My green island is on the other side of all that water,
he’d said. Then another voice, a smooth, calm one:
I trust you.

She withdrew her hands.

There was a flurry of dark wings in the street, only roosting pigeons awakened by their passage, but Niall shied away, receding into a doorway. He was hiding, forever hiding. A younger Niall, with the summer sun bouncing off his dark hair, his white skin; his every movement an expression of committed, concentrated energy. A Niall who, already as a teenager, was prepared to risk his life for what he believed in. She and her youthful crowd had learned to play tennis competitively and read the important tomes by the important Johns: John Maynard Keynes, John Milton, John Quincy Adams. They’d worn the right clothes, seen the right movies, and supported the right political causes. But if something went wrong, it had always been someone else’s mess to clean up.

She stretched her right hand back out.

They both looked at it.

“Take it,” she said.

“Are you trying to buy me off?”

“No. I want to give you something of mine. Because…” She looked away. “I want some part of me to go with you. Look, I know nothing I can give you will equal twenty years of your life. But this is what I have that is mine and mine alone to give. For the first time in decades, I feel hopeful, and I want you to have some hope, too.”