Also by Jennifer Steil
The Woman Who Fell from the Sky
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Jennifer F. Steil
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.
www.doubleday.com
DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published and unpublished material: Ernest Tubb Music, for permission to reprint lyrics from “Waltz Across Texas.”
eBook design adapted from printed book design by Maria Carella
Cover design by John Fontana
Cover images: woman © Wojciech Zwolinski/Trevillion Images; city © Nadeem Khawar/Moment/Getty Images
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Steil, Jennifer.
The ambassador’s wife : a novel / Jennifer Steil. — First edition.
pages; cm
ISBN 978-0-385-53902-9 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-385-53903-6 (eBook)
1. Ambassadors—Fiction. 2. Artists—Fiction. 3. Kidnapping—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3619.T4485A83 2015
813’.6—dc23
2014018579
eBook ISBN 9780385539036
v4.1
a
Contents
Cover
Also by Jennifer Steil
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue: September 17, 2010
Part One Chapter 1: August 9, 2010: Miranda
Chapter 2: August 9, 2010: Finn
Chapter 3: August 9, 2010: Miranda
Part Two Chapter 4: January 2007: Miranda
Chapter 5: August 9, 2010: Finn
Chapter 6: June 7, 2007: Miranda
Chapter 7: August 14, 2010: Miranda
Chapter 8: June 7, 2007: Miranda
Chapter 9: September 3, 2010: Finn
Chapter 10: June 7, 2007: Miranda
Chapter 11: August 18, 2010: Miranda
Chapter 12: August 30, 2007: Miranda
Chapter 13: October 2010: Miranda
Chapter 14: September 17, 2007: Miranda
Chapter 15: September 17, 2007: Finn
Chapter 16: September 18, 2007: Miranda
Chapter 17: October 19, 2010: Finn
Chapter 18: September 18, 2007: Norman
Chapter 19: October 2007: Miranda
Chapter 20: January 4, 2008: Finn
Chapter 21: January 11, 2008: Miranda
Chapter 22: October 2010: Miranda
Chapter 23: November 5, 2010: Miranda
Chapter 24: July 2008: Miranda
Finn
Miranda
Chapter 25: November 19, 2010: Finn
Chapter 26: September 19, 2008: Miranda
Chapter 27: November 2010: Miranda
Chapter 28: July 4, 2010: Miranda
Chapter 29: November 18, 2010: Finn
Chapter 30: August 11, 2009: Miranda
Chapter 31: November 29, 2010: Finn
Chapter 32: March 17, 2010: Miranda
Chapter 33: December 3, 2010: Finn
Chapter 34: December 1, 2010: Miranda
Chapter 35: June 23, 2007: Finn
Chapter 36: December 7, 2010: Miranda
Chapter 37: December 12, 2010: Finn
Chapter 38: December 25, 2010: Finn
Chapter 39: December 8, 2010: Miranda
Chapter 40: January 2, 2011: Imaan
Chapter 41: January 3, 2011: Finn
Chapter 42: December 2010: Miranda
Chapter 43: December 13, 2010: Finn
Chapter 44: January 13, 2011: Miranda
Chapter 45: December 13, 2010: Finn
Chapter 46: February 14, 2011: Miranda
Chapter 47: February 14, 2011: Tazkia
Chapter 48: February 14, 2011: Finn
Chapter 49: February 14, 2011: Miranda
Chapter 50: February 14, 2011: Tazkia
Chapter 51: February 14, 2011: Miranda
Chapter 52: February 14, 2011: Finn
Chapter 53: February 14, 2011: Miranda
Chapter 54: February 14–15, 2011
Chapter 55: February 17, 2011: Miranda
Chapter 56: March 11, 2011: Miranda
Finn
Chapter 57: April 3, 2011: Finn
Chapter 58: April 29, 2011: Miranda
Chapter 59: May 5, 2011: Norman
Chapter 60: May 5, 2011: Finn
Chapter 61: May 5, 2011: Miranda
Chapter 62: May 5, 2011: Finn
Chapter 63: May 5–6, 2011: Miranda
Chapter 64: May 6, 2011: Miranda
Chapter 65: May 6, 2011: Miranda
Chapter 66: May 8, 2011: Finn
Chapter 67: May 8, 2011: Miranda
Chapter 68: July 14, 2011, London: Finn
Chapter 69: August 11, 2011: Miranda
Epilogue: September 17, 2013: Miranda
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
FOR TIM AND THEADORA, MY HOME
SEPTEMBER 17, 2010
As she curls herself around the wasted body of a stranger’s child, cupping the tiny head in her hand, the remembered glow of a painting emerges unbidden from the gloom of Miranda’s mind. A woman sleeps in a boat, reclined in her husband’s arms and draped alongside the body of her sleeping child, bathed in a benediction of pale light. Around them are dark water and a darker shore. The woman’s body is limp, trusting, abandoned to its fate. Opposite the slumbering family, Fortune plies the oars, with the assistance of a hopeful Cupid. Something about the image—the family’s relinquishing of control over their destiny—fills Miranda with terror. They drift, serenely dreaming, into darkness. Wake, she wants to cry to them. Wake up and take an oar. Fortune and Cupid are unreliable guides. As the baby tugs at her breast, Miranda gazes down at her with dull eyes, trying to remember the name of the painting. What was it? The child whimpers as the nipple slips away from her mouth; she is too weak to suck for long. The Dream of Happiness. That was it. Constance Mayer’s Dream of Happiness. She who had known so little of it in her own life. When Miranda thinks back on her brief life with Cressida and Finn, this is the image that keeps returning to her. A moment of blissful unconsciousness, and then black.
AUGUST 9, 2010
Miranda
Miranda watches her left hand move across her sketch pad as if unsure of its destination. Up it swoops, leaving a sooty trail across the thick white paper. Then across to the right, down again, across. A frame. The pencil lifts from the page for a moment, hovering in midair as her eyes turn toward the window. Dawn arrives abruptly in Mazrooq, the sky slipping from black to gold in the few seconds it took Miranda to pour a cup of coffee. Their garden is already gilded, its vast lawn glittering with last night’s rain, its neat rows of flowers unclenching and tilting toward the sun. Along the periphery is a procession of crooked trees, leaning against the iron spikes of the gates like tired sentries. Bougainvillea crawls up the walls and thrusts its blooms through the bars, unwilling to be contained. Across the far end of the grass stretches the pool, as yet undisturbed by morning swimmers. The sky, as always at this hour, is a relentless, cloudless blue.
Miranda’s view of this paradise, this oasis of theirs in this desert c
ountry, is partitioned into eight nearly equal parts by wrought-iron bars. Painted white, they form a lacelike scrim across the window. The ornate metal curlicues strive to disguise their utilitarian nature, but fail.
Her hand has gone back to work. The iron bars unfurl across her page, but as they would be seen from outside. For behind the bars is not a garden but a girl. A woman, vivisected, her head framed here, her heart here. Here her hand and here her mouth. Drawing, Miranda often feels like an adolescent toying with a Ouija board, wondering to what degree she subconsciously controls the movements of its indicator. Simultaneously creator and conduit, she can rarely predict exactly what will emerge.
So absorbed is she in her puzzle pieces that she doesn’t hear the alarm at first. How long has it been buzzing? She hasn’t yet touched the mug of coffee on the table in front of her, or made Finn’s cup of tea. Barefoot, she runs down the hall to their bedroom and lunges for the alarm on Finn’s bedside table. Why had they set the alarm? They have a child. They do not need an alarm. Then she remembers: The policemen. The policemen are still here. Which means she has to dress for breakfast.
Pausing by the bed, she listens. Nothing. Cressida still safely asleep. “Sweetheart.” Gently, she shakes Finn’s shoulder, kisses his eyelids.
“I’m awake,” he says.
“Clearly not.”
“I am, I’m wide awake.” He says this without moving, without opening an eye. Finn is not a morning person. On weekdays he rises at 6:00 a.m. to eat breakfast before heading to the embassy by 7:30. But on weekends he’ll sleep all day if she doesn’t wake him.
“I’ll get your tea.” In the little private kitchen between their room and Cressida’s, where she habitually spends the first hour of the day with her sketch pad, Miranda brews a mug of Earl Grey. Finn won’t drink her coffee; she makes it too strong. After leaving his tea on the side table by his still-motionless head, she returns to the kitchen for her own mug.
At best she gets an hour of blissful solitude, but today she has only twenty minutes before she needs to scramble into a sundress. She rarely has the luxury of solitary mornings once she leaves the relative privacy of their upstairs suite. By the time she slips down the marble staircase, their Ethiopian housekeeper, Negasi, will be busy in the kitchen, slicing mangoes and melons, peeling pomegranates, and brewing coffee. Birdlike Desta will have already begun polishing the downstairs bathrooms. And Yonas and Semere will be pulling up weeds in the flower beds and tending to their vegetable patches. Miranda wouldn’t have thought much would take root in the cracked earth of this arid city, but their figs, lettuce, broccoli, tomatoes, and rhubarb thrive. By the time Miranda and Finn have finished their muesli and fruit, swallowed the last of their coffee or tea, and wiped their mouths with the rainbow-striped cloth napkins, Teru will be in the kitchen, slowly turning the pages of their cookbooks as she writes her shopping list.
Though often deprived of solitude, Miranda is awash in other luxuries. She doesn’t have to cook. She doesn’t do her own laundry. And best of all, she doesn’t have to leave the house unless she wants to. She can paint all day. Or play with her daughter. Or stare out the window and daydream.
But there’s no more time for dreaming today. Miranda finishes her coffee, then pads to their bathroom to brush her teeth. There are two sinks, two cabinets, two toothbrush holders. His and Hers everything, plus a bath (Hers) and a shower (His). She wakes up every morning and cannot believe this is her life. Sitting on the toilet, she thinks, My god, I live here. Even after three years, it still hasn’t sunk in. Though it should, when she has a choice of seven or so toilets to use. Still brushing, she wanders down the hall to their daughter’s room. Cressida lies on her back in what Miranda refers to as the “surrender position,” her arms thrown above her head and her chubby knees splayed open. Insulated from the chill of the desert night by her blue-and-white checked flannel pajamas, she breathes deeply, her round little tummy straining against the buttons at regular intervals. She is a good sleeper, Cressida. Has been from her fourth month, when she began sleeping through the night. Miranda was prepared for years of interrupted nights, but it hasn’t happened. She finds herself keeping this information from other mothers, feeling guilty for having such an easy child. And not only does she have an easy child but she has help whenever she wants it. She makes a mental note that she must never allow herself to complain about anything, ever again.
Back in the bathroom she washes her face with frankincense-scented soap and runs wet fingers through her tangled curls before Finn finally staggers in, spiky-haired and sleepy. “Policemen this morning,” she reminds him. “Last day!”
“Romantic dinner for two tonight, then?” He smiles, his arms circling her waist.
“I wish. But you’ve got the EU ambassadors tonight, remember?”
“Damn ambassadors.”
“I don’t know. Some of them aren’t so bad.”
Finn turns her to face him, and she presses her cheek against the soft hairs of his chest. She has never felt so lucky.
—
CURRENTLY, THERE ARE three policemen—Scotland Yard hostage negotiators—in their guest rooms. Not the kind of company she’d had in her old life. In her old life, in the house she’d once shared with Vícenta in the Old City, she had taken in students, writers, photographers, rock climbers, adventurers, and the occasional tourist. They filled the void Vícenta left in her wake. Her guests came from all over the world, drifting in and out of her house, staying for days, weeks, months. Sometimes one of them would make dinner. Sometimes one would share a bottle of bootleg Scotch. But they were generally self-sufficient souls, content to wander out to the souq for a plate of beans and bread or to pour themselves a bowl of muesli for dinner.
Here at the Residence—a shiny white fortress in a city of gray rock—their company is of a different caliber: ministers, policemen, intelligence officers, politicians, journalists, academics, businesspeople, development workers, and military officers. And they all require three full meals a day plus tea and biscuits, guidance around the city, hours of polite conversation, an open bar, and usually, protection. They occupy the five en suite guest rooms, furnished with an eclectic mix of British and Mazrooqi beds and bureaus, and decorated with mismatched curtains and carpets chosen by a succession of ambassadors’ wives with divergent tastes. “It’s like a high-end bed-and-breakfast furnished by someone’s eccentric but wealthy aunt,” Miranda once said to Finn. None of this bothers her; she loves the constant flow of new faces.
Alastair is the most senior of the current three cops (Miranda had to know this sort of information in order to figure out who got the “Minister’s Suite,” their largest guest room), then Mick, and then Gary (called Gazza). They’ve been living in the Residence for nearly three weeks now.
Police and military officers are Miranda’s favorite guests. Which surprised her, given her lifelong bias against anything to do with the military-industrial complex. But the British officers she has met since moving in with Finn have been kinder, more polite, more interesting, and more articulate than just about anyone she has ever met. The night Alastair, Mick, and Gazza arrived, she entertained them in the front sitting room alone for several hours while they waited for Finn to return from the embassy. As the pistachio shells piled up on the glass coffee table and the gin glasses were refilled for the third time, the men leaned back in the arms of the fat, white sofas and regaled Miranda with stories of hostage situations in Iraq, Nigeria, even back home in Britain. Miranda had forgotten that the West had its share of hostage takers. They avoided discussing why the policemen had come. Miranda knew she shouldn’t bring it up without Finn around, and the police didn’t broach the subject themselves. Of course, she couldn’t help but notice their bulging bags of equipment. Mick had snapped his open while she was in the kitchen preparing tea, and as she came back through Miranda had caught a glimpse of latex gloves and plastic bags stamped with the words FORENSIC EVIDENCE.
“We had a suicide once, a man
threatening to drive off a cliff in England. A high cliff. He’d had some sort of domestic dispute with his wife, been arrested the night before, and spent the day in the bar drinking,” said Mick. “Had a bottle of wine with him, if I recall correctly.” Mick had been talking to the man through the window of the car, trying to convince him to get out and live another day, without making much progress. The man had become sullen and silent, refusing to speak. But one of the car doors was left slightly ajar. With his gloved fingers, Mick quickly pried it open, leapt into the car, pulled the emergency brake, and grabbed the keys. The would-be suicide was apprehended and taken to a psychiatric institute. “I got an award for that intervention,” said Mick, “even though it was probably one of the daftest things I’ve ever done in my career. Who gets into the car of a man about to drive off a cliff?”
“If I were your wife I’d kill you,” Miranda said.
“She tried.”
The policemen, who travel constantly in and out of the UK, have just come from Uganda. “Tough on a marriage,” said Miranda. Gazza said his wife was in the same line of work. “Doubly tough, then.”
“Yes and no….At least she understands what I’m doing.”
It’s not the time away that causes problems, said Mick, but the shift in priorities. When he got to Baghdad in 2003, he had telephoned his wife to let her know he was okay. Shells were exploding all around him as he dialed, standing in a building missing a wall. His wife was crying when she answered the phone. “What is it?” he’d asked, alarmed. “The Hoover!” she’d wept. “It’s not working!”
Mick hadn’t known what to say. “Do you know where I am?” he’d finally asked. “This building is missing a wall. People are dying all around me. But hey, with the hazard pay I’m getting, you can buy a new Hoover!”
They all laughed at the Hoover story, but Miranda wondered how long a marriage could last between people inhabiting such radically different mental spaces. The story reminded her of a New York firefighter’s description of the collapse of his marriage after September 11, 2001. He was no longer able to work up an opinion on what kind of curtains to hang in the living room.
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