Bordeaux Housewives

by Daisy Waugh

  It is Monsieur Bertinard, sounding confused. ‘I beg your pardon. Who is this I am speaking with?’

  ‘Never mind that,’ snaps Skid. ‘What do you want?’

  He wants to know at what time he should expect the Haunts and the film crew for lunch. He would very much like to speak to one of them.

  Skid seems to choke. Murray and Len look at him, vaguely concerned. But the choke turns into dull laughter, and then Skid, in his immaculate French, explains to M. Bertinard the situation. There will be no lunch. No moment-in-the-sun for the Bertinards after all. They, like the rest of the village, have been victims of a grand hoax. The Haunts are not melon farmers but international criminals, and they have taken their evidence with them, and they are gone.

  ‘We must call the police,’ declares the Mayor, when at last he finds the presence of mind to say anything at all. ‘Wait there until I come.’

  ‘Certainly,’ says Skid, and hangs up. And thinks again. ‘The police are coming,’ he mutters casually. ‘I think you two should stay here and help them out. All right?’ He strolls towards the door.

  ‘Oh no you don’t!’ Len says. ‘You’re not leaving us here to clear this mess up. Not on your nelly. This is your mess, Skid. You’re going to stick around and face the –’

  Suddenly, Skid breaks into a run.

  The police vans whiz through the quiet, sunny lanes, their sirens roaring. They shoot right past Jean Baptiste and his cargo, heading slowly through the village towards the motorway. As the officers skid to a halt outside La Grande Forge, they spot three figures chasing one another across the cornfield away from them.

  It would be hard to find three potential culprits less fit for a midday foot-chase than Len, Murray and Skid, and within minutes they are apprehended – thrown to the ground and restrained by harsh metal handcuffs. They are led roughly back into the house, thrown onto chairs in the kitchen and guarded over by one policeman, sullen and apparently mute, sweating like a pig under his tight policeman’s cap, while the remaining three search the empty house.

  And so they sit there, Murray and Len shouting their innocence at the mute policeman; Skid sullen and silent by now. (He has enough experience of police and police cells to know when it’s worth speaking and when it’s not.) Five minutes pass. Maybe ten. Occasional loud crashing noises can be heard from the upstairs, as Superman’s mattress is tossed to the ground, his toy chest tipped inside out, his and Tiffany’s small wardrobe pulled apart…And then Olivier Bertinard bursts into the kitchen.

  He looks over the scene. ‘Mais qu’est-ce qui se passe?’ he demands impatiently. The policeman shrugs. ‘Mais où sont Maude et Horatio Haunt? Ceux-ci ne sont pas les vrai prisonniers!’ The policeman only shrugs one more time. ‘Tu es stupide, quoi? Tu perds le temps! Où sont les vrai prisonniers?’

  ‘They’ve gone,’ drawls Skid. ‘I’m not entirely certain these fine gentlemen know what or who they’re looking for. Would you mind very much explaining to them that it was I who informed you of the situation, and that there is really no reason for us to be restrained any longer.’

  He turns to the sullen policeman. ‘Il faut les libérer tout de suite!’ he shouts. But the sullen policeman only looks at him and shrugs.

  They hear the clump clump of urgent feet making their way down the stairs towards them. They hear the men shouting, and the hiss of their walkie-talkies. The policeman push through the door, excitement gleaming beneath the sweat. They have Ahmed’s briefcase with them.

  They lay it carefully onto the breakfast bar, just beneath the kitchen extractor, and slowly pull back the lid. No one in the room, except possibly Skid, has ever seen so much cash before. A low whistle, a sigh, a gasp, and a –

  ‘Bollocks!’ from Skid. Who could have kept it all, if only he’d kept his head.

  ‘Oh, my giddy aunt Jemima,’ mutters Len, licking his lips. ‘How much d’you suppose they’ve got in there?’

  ‘Tiens –’ The policeman pulls out a crumpled sheet of paper. ‘Pierre,’ he says, handing it over to the mute guard. ‘C’est en anglais. Tu peux le lire? Qu’est-ce qu’il dit?’

  Slowly, Pierre takes the sheet:

  ATTENTION HORATIO AND MAUDE HAUNT YOU HAVE A SIMPLE CHOICE. €50,000 TO BE LEFT IN THE HOUSE, AS DIRECTED. OR WE GO TO THE POLICE. WE AWAIT YOUR RESPONSE: CALL MOBILE 0574 623 544

  Monsieur Bertinard picks up the Haunts’ telephone and dials the number, and a ringing sound can be heard at once, coming from Skid’s pocket. Skid jumps. Swears under his breath. A policeman steps forward, delves into his pocket. Produces the mobile, still ringing. The photocopy of Fawzia’s passport…And then, between his fingers, Emma’s stash of cocaine.

  ‘Ah ha!’

  ‘But they’re not mine!’ Skid says, frightened now. ‘The passport – that’s theirs for Heaven’s sake. It’s proof! And the – that’s Emma Rankin’s. She sent me to get it. And that – I mean the telephone belongs to Horatio. It’s not mine, is it, Murray?’

  Murray’s jaw hangs slack. He has nothing to say for the moment. Nothing at all.

  ‘It’s Horatio’s!’ Skid says again.

  Pierre, the previously mute policeman, takes the phone from his colleague’s hand, and answers it.

  ‘Oui, allô?’

  Monsieur Bertinard holds his own telephone receiver to his ear, nods, and hangs up.

  Pierre offers a mocking, querying look at Skid. ‘It’s not your phone?’ he says. ‘You are sure of this?’

  ‘Well of course I’m bloody sure. It belongs to Horatio!’

  Pierre says, ‘Well then, you won’t object if I call your answering service? If it is Horatio’s telephone perhaps there will be some messages left there for him?’

  ‘Absolutely!’ says Skid, his thin face lightening with relief. ‘A brilliant idea. I must say you speak very good English. Very good. Excellent.’

  ‘Merci,’ says Pierre. ‘You said the same thing to me when I cautioned you in St Clara the other night.’

  ‘What?’ And it looks, almost, as though Skid were blushing. ‘I don’t remember. I have no –’

  The policeman raises an eyebrow. ‘My mother is an Irish lady.’ He dials the answering service. ‘…In any case, we must hope – he – doesn’t have a code on his answering service.’

  ‘He doesn’t,’ Skid says, ‘because –’ and then he remembers. ‘Oh. There were messages there, from Maude to Horatio. Very incriminating. She was actually talking about smuggling a family onto the ferry – but they got rubbed off. Didn’t they, Len?’

  ‘This was your evidence to blackmail them with?’ asks Pierre. ‘And the paper here?’

  ‘No. Certainly not. Of course not. We weren’t trying to blackmail anyone. I’m just trying to tell you there’ll be no messages on the answering service because bloody Len –’ Skid sends a him a look of purest hatred ‘– rubbed the bloody things off.’

  Pierre holds up a hand for quiet. ‘Pourtant,’ he says, looking down at the mobile, a sly smile spreading over his face. ‘Il y a un texto…’

  DEAREST SKID, MURRAY, LEN [he reads aloud] €s in location as agreed…But did you find it before the police arrived???? xxxx H, M, S, T

  ‘Bastards!’ mutters Skid. ‘Bastards! What are they playing at?’

  Pierre snaps the phone shut. Closes the briefcase, picks it up. Looks across at his colleagues, and the three of them move at once. Each one grabs an Englishman, hauls him from his seat and leads him towards the front door.

  ‘BERTINARD!’ shouts Skid, as he is bundled into the police van. ‘For Christ’s sake, do something! This is prepos-terous! Bloody outrageous! We’re innocent, for Christ’s sake. You ought to be chasing after the Haunts, not us. You should be chasing after the Haunts!’

  But Monsieur Bertinard stares at him, too confused to respond.

  ‘You should be tracking down the fucking Haunts,’ yells Skid as the back doors are slammed in his face. ‘For fuck’s sake, they’re the criminals. What about the Haunts?’

  M. B
ertinard watches the scrawny, livid face mouthing inaudibly on the other side of the glass. He watches as Pierre and his colleague climb into the front of the van, start the engine and drive away. He watches the three English faces slowly fading from view, and quietly, with a sigh full of disappointment and uncertainty, turns back to his own car.

  Nothing makes sense in this life, he thinks, as he pushes the key into the ignition. All is confusion. Nothing can be relied upon. Except, of course, the treachery of les Anglais. He looks at his watch. Feels his belly rumble, and the Frenchman’s attachment to his lunch. He starts his car, takes a final look at La Grande Forge, empty now, and heads back to the village.

  ONE YEAR PASSES

  There has been not a squeak from Timothy Duff Fielding. Not a squeak – and not a bean, either. Daffy and her son James have been surviving, partly from the small income brought in by the hotel, mostly thanks to Jean Baptiste, who lives with them now, works on sites or from his half-built bungalow and returns in the evenings to be fellow chef, along with Daffy, for the hotel’s growing number of dinner guests. Hotel Marronnier, thanks to Daffy’s warmth and hard work, Sara’s solid dependency, and Jean Baptiste’s excellent cooking, is developing a small name for itself even beyond the village. It has been a good year. Peaceful, quiet, happy, for the most part – if a little bereft.

  Skid never returned to the Marronnier to pick up his things. And Lady Emma Rankin, after the humiliation and trouble of bailing him out of the St Clara jail, only to have to watch him head directly from cell to train station without even pausing to thank her, has packed up her beautiful château, her beautiful children, her beautiful, listless existence and shifted it all to Mustique. She sent a postcard to Jean Baptiste not long ago, offering to pay his flight out to come and join her.

  ‘Poor Emma,’ Daffy had said, full of feeling. ‘I know what it’s like. She must be so terribly lonely…’

  ‘Jean Baptiste had tossed the postcard in the bin. He’d gazed at Daffy, amazed – as he always is – by her generosity. He’d put both arms around her, kissed her, and Daffy had wrapped her arms around his neck and held him there…James was at school. Sara was at the shop, and Jean Baptiste was already late for work. She had smiled at him. ‘Are you in a hurry?’ she’d whispered, ‘because I’m not…’ And he had scooped her up and carried her upstairs. And they had started the day all over.

  But just outside the village, with shutters that have peeled and broken loose over the long, cool winter, La Grande Forge stands empty and abandoned. Daffy and Jean Baptiste walk past it every now and then, and always feel a pull of sadness. They used to hope there would one day be a sign – some sign of life, however cryptic; some small piece of news. But there has been nothing. Fawzia Islam, at least, sent a long letter, offering no forwarding address but informing them that the family had finally settled in Canada, where Ahmed has started a new business under a new name, and Hassan works seven nights a week in a late-night bookshop, and studies, as he had wanted to do in England, for a degree in medicine.

  From the Haunts, though, there has been nothing. Silence. Jean Baptiste, especially, misses his friends. He misses the children pedalling wildly up and down the lanes, and he often remembers the lonely evenings, when he longed for family life and would drop in at La Grande Forge, always confident of a warm welcome. Jean Baptiste doesn’t have those lonely evenings any more of course. He has Daffy and James, not much older than his own son would have been. He has a family of his own.

  TAX BILLS AGAIN

  The three of them are eating a picnic Saturday lunch at the kitchen table – goose rillettes sandwiches and tomato salad. They are a little subdued. A letter has arrived this morning, addressed to Daffy, and signed by Jean Baptiste’s old friends from répression de fraude. She owes them several thousand euros – several thousand she doesn’t have. Now they want to come round.

  ‘Mais ce n’est pas juste! Il me demande plus que ce que j’ai gagné pendant toute l’année!’ she says, her head in her hands. ‘Pourquoi il me demande –’

  ‘Don’t worry, Mum,’ James says, who, after a year in the local school, speaks French as fluently as his mother. ‘I’ve got money. In England. I’ve got a bank account, remember?’

  Daffy stretches an arm out towards him. ‘Darling, even if you had twenty million sitting in a bank in England it wouldn’t be any use to us. We’d still have to get a signature from your father…’

  ‘I can sell the bungalow,’ Jean Baptiste suggests. ‘It would be very simple. First I have to finish building it…’

  ‘But if you do that, and then Timothy turns up and chucks us out of here, we won’t have anywhere else to go. And if we have nowhere to go they’ll take James away with them. Non.’ Daffy shakes her head with certainty. ‘Cela nous laisserait beaucoup trop vulnérable. Merci, mais ce n’est pas possible. Absolument pas.’

  And so they sit, munching half-heartedly on their sandwiches, wondering what else they might sell to raise the money. They hear a voice outside, yelling for Daffy; aggressive, demanding, angry and English. It is Timothy. She jumps. Looks at James. His face has completely drained of colour.

  ‘Hide,’ she says immediately. He leaps to his feet. ‘Quickly. Anywhere.’

  Jean Baptiste stands and opens the window. ‘Go out this way, James. He won’t see you. Va te cacher chez moi. I leave my back door open. Stay there until we call you.’ James clambers through the window. They wait until his footsteps have faded.

  ‘Right,’ Daffy says, reaching out to touch Jean Baptiste’s hand. ‘Here we go…Will you stay with me? Please?’

  ‘Of course!’ Jean Baptiste laughs. ‘Daffy, I’m not going anywhere.’

  She pulls at her T-shirt, automatically pats her hair, takes a deep breath, and pushes open the door.

  But he’s already standing there, waiting for her, surveying the bright, clean bar with the usual revulsion. He looks older, Daffy thinks. And smaller. And plumper. His shoulders look hunched, and his neat black hair has a new hint of grey at the parting.

  ‘Hello Timothy,’ Daffy says, standing still, several feet in front of him. ‘I’m surprised to see you here.’ And she’s surprised by the coolness in her voice. By the lack of terror in the pit of her stomach. He glances at her and quickly, shiftily, looks away again.

  ‘I decided,’ he begins, ‘that since I owned the building there was no reason whatsoever for me to have to stand outside and await your permission to be allowed in.’ He flicks her a smile, and again looks away at once.

  ‘Well, of course,’ says Daffy. ‘…What a – nice – surprise. I hope you haven’t come to see James, though. Because he’s away. Isn’t he, Jean Baptiste?’ She turns to him. ‘James is away in – Switzerland – at the moment, isn’t he? He’s gone to stay with a friend.’

  Jean Baptiste says, ‘We were just eating lunch. Perhaps you would like to join us?’

  Timothy looks a little confused, glances from his wife to the builder and back again. ‘You’re inviting me to lunch,’ he says with a little laugh. ‘In my own house? With my own wife?’

  Jean Baptiste shrugs. ‘So it appears.’

  ‘A little impertinent, don’t you think?’

  Just then, behind him, the bar door opens once again, and a woman walks in, young, beautiful, impatient, and heavily pregnant.

  ‘Timothy?’ She makes his name sound more like a whiplash, and he cowers accordingly.

  ‘Hello, my angel,’ he says to her. ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart. Were you getting a weeny bit bored? This won’t take long, I promise.’

  ‘I wasn’t bored,’ she says crisply. ‘I wanted to be present. Hello Daphne. How are you?’ Luscious Lucy gives Daffy a brisk, imperious nod.

  ‘Hello Lucy,’ Daffy says faintly. ‘Gosh. I had no idea – are you and Timothy –?’

  ‘He hasn’t told you then?’

  ‘Well, no, but –’

  She turns to him, and he hunches noticeably. ‘He said he had.’

  ‘Well!’ Daffy laug
hs, embarrassed. ‘Well, anyway. Congratulations, I suppose I should be saying…Something like that…I don’t know what I should be saying really. What do you want?’

  ‘…As you’re probably aware…’ begins Lucy carefully ‘…real estate on the continent is currently going through the floor.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘…And I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand to see Timothy’s money not earning its keep.’

  ‘Oh?’ says Daffy politely.

  ‘So we’re selling.’

  ‘…Selling what?’

  ‘The hotel, Daphne.’

  ‘My – this – you mean my hotel?’

  ‘It’s not your hotel, Daphne,’ Timothy says. ‘You should be aware of that.’

  ‘No – but…I know, but…You can’t sell it. I love it here.’

  ‘…Sorry,’ Timothy mutters. Daffy’s never heard him say the word before.

  ‘What? Timothy – sorry? But this is my home. This is –’

  ‘But the good news is,’ Luscious Lucy continues, ‘Timothy’s going to put you and James in a super little development in the Docklands. You’re going to love it. There’s a gym in the basement. And an indoor pool, I think. I don’t remember. Was there an indoor pool down there, Timothy. Did I say?’

  ‘I’m not certain you mentioned a pool, my angel.’

  ‘– And some marvellous restaurants absolutely minutes away. Half a minute’s walk away. You’ll adore it.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘It’s all decided, Daphne. Please – don’t try to make things difficult.’ Lucy smiles, as if she were being nice. But there is flint behind her beautiful eyes. ‘Don’t make it worse for yourself than it already is. Where’s James?’

  ‘I said –’ instinctively, Daffy reaches for Jean Baptiste’s hand ‘– he’s not here.’

  ‘Mmmm,’ Lucy says softly, looking at the joined hands. ‘…We’re going to need you out of here by the end of the month so we can give the place a polish.’ She pauses to look around her. ‘Bit of a mess, isn’t it?’