Bordeaux Housewives Read online

  ‘Like who?’ he asks warily.

  ‘Who? Like your parents, Heck. And mine. And my brother and sister, and Sally and Christian, and Spike and his new wife, who we haven’t even met, and your brother and –’

  ‘OK. All right. OK…But I don’t want anyone to stay at the moment,’ he says. As he always does whenever the subject comes up. ‘It’s too risky.’

  ‘It is – at the moment. But it always will be until we actually decide to do something about it. We’ve just got to lock off that part of the house. Lock off the COOP. And not take on any work while anyone’s staying. We can do that, Heck…Everyone else has holidays once in a while. I don’t see why we can’t.’

  ‘Of course we can. In theory. But if Fawzia suddenly sends us –’

  ‘Well we’re going to have to. That’s all. We’ll just have to tell Fawzia that we’re not – simply not available. We can do that. I’ll do that. I’ll tell her.’

  Horatio lets the comment hang there. ‘OK,’ he says at last. ‘You tell her.’ He glances across at his wife and smiles. Maude smiles. She won’t do it. Or she’ll do it, and Fawzia will concur, enthusiastically, and they will finish their conversation on the usual friendly terms. But it will be meaningless. As long as an emergency arises; as long as Maude (or Horatio) still have a heartbeat between them, they will be incapable of turning away.

  ‘…Anyway, it’s too late,’ Maude says awkwardly. ‘…I’m really sorry, Heck. But it’s already sort of arranged.’

  ‘No! What? What’s arranged?’

  ‘Heck, you know what she’s like. She’s a nightmare. She made it impossible to refuse her. She called me out of the blue. I was completely unprepared. And she was on a mission, I swear. She wants to buy out here, she says. So she wants to stay with us and do some kind of property search –’

  ‘So why doesn’t she stay in a hotel, for Christ’s sake. Who is “she”, anyway?’

  ‘Heck, she had her diary open. She had the Ryanair ticket-booking website online in front of her…She said: “I’m sitting here looking at nothing but blank pages, Maude.”’ She imitates somebody with an ugly voice, loud and very nasal, but Horatio has no idea who it’s meant to be. ‘“So just name a date. Any date. We’re free from now until the end of the year. And any day the year after…” She said that! I said, didn’t the children have to be in school, and she said, “For a chance to see you, I’ll take them out of school!”’

  ‘Jesus…’ says Horatio, quite shocked. ‘Do we know anyone like that? Who is it, anyway?’

  Maude grimaces. ‘She’s also bringing two children and her bloody awful husband. And before you shout at me, Heck, I know it’s a nightmare, and I’m really, really sorry…’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘…Rosie Mottram. She –’

  ‘Noooo!’ Horatio groans. ‘Not Rosie…The Christian. Not her – Of all the people we could have had to stay. She’s awful, Maude.’ He shudders, imagining her canyon breasts, greased with sun oil and splayed out beside their small swimming pool. ‘I mean she’s awful.’

  Maude nods. ‘But the children used to get on so well.’

  ‘Maude, they’ve got plenty of children they get on with here. We don’t have to bloody well import any extra ones from England!’

  Maude doesn’t reply. Horatio looks at her, gazing stubbornly at the road ahead. He sighs. ‘When the hell are they coming then?’ he asks.

  She turns to him. ‘Umm. Next week…So we’re going to have to do something about the telephones, because she’s nosy. She’ll eavesdrop. And I think we’ll need to do more than just lock up the COOP, Heck. We’ll need to disguise it. I thought Jean Baptiste could maybe build a little bookshelf that slides across the door.’

  ‘Maude, with all the best will in the world, he won’t have time.’

  ‘Actually –’ Maude looks sheepish. ‘He’s delivering it next Wednesday. A week today…Rosie and co. are arriving late on Thursday night.’

  FROM DAWN TO DAFFY

  The Hon. Timothy Duff Fielding, forty-six years old, has known for ages that it would be good for Daffy to have a project: a little clothes shop perhaps, or a nice coffee bar, or a new house to do up. And now that the lovely Lucy is so much on the scene, and the young James, just turned seven, is finally away at prep school, there doesn’t appear to be any good reason, so far as he can see, why his young wife’s little project should even have to be in London.

  Ever since they packed the boy off last September, so Timothy complains to Lucy, his wife has been moping around the house like a woman half dead. As if that was going to bring him back. Nothing would, of course. Actually, he’d never seen Daffy fight for anything like she fought to keep the boy at home, but it was too bad. Little Duff Fieldings always went to prep school at seven.

  In any case, her relentless misery, or, more recently, her tortured efforts to hide it from him, have now become a serious irritant to Timothy. He finds it all very unrelaxing.

  Apart from which, she’s always said she wanted to learn French.

  Two months ago, sometime in mid April, an associate at the bank where Timothy works recommended looking for a place around the area just north of Bordeaux, where there is a large expat community. He said he knew of several wives who lived out there very happily. He gave Timothy the name and address of his sister-in-law, one Lady Emma Rankin, whose English husband, David, also worked in the City, and who commuted from London, or rather lived in London and spent occasional weekends out in France with his wife. Emma and David own a beautiful little château just outside the village of Montmaur.

  Timothy liked the sound of that. He ordered Daffy to France at once.

  ‘But what am I to do when I get there?’ Daffy asked him, terror-struck at the thought of going anywhere without him.

  He sighed. ‘Meet up with Lady Emma,’ he said (as if it were the most obvious thing in the world) ‘and ask her to help you talk to the local estate agents. Explain to her what it is you’re looking for.’

  ‘…What am I looking for, Timothy?’

  ‘Something’, he said, with infinite patience, ‘to keep you busy. You need a project, Daffy. We’ve discussed this before.’

  She thought about that. He was quite right, of course. The days did seem very long. Especially now that James and Timothy were both so much away.

  ‘Timothy, I don’t mean to be thick or anything – sorry. But I mean to say, why should Lady Emma Thingummy –’

  ‘Not “thingummy”, Daphne. I don’t know anyone called “thingummy”. She’s called Rankin. As in Castle Rankin, Invernesshire.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  Timothy winced. ‘Rankin, Daphne. Emma Rankin.’

  ‘That’s right. Why should she want to help me? I don’t even know her. We’ve never even met.’

  ‘We always help each other when we’re abroad, Daphne dear. Try to understand. We stick together. It’s how these things work.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really,’ he said, patting her shoulder. They were sitting at breakfast at the time, in their scuff-free Kensington townhouse. ‘Incidentally, I’m due in Berlin tomorrow evening,’ he added. ‘Could you ask Lily to pack me an overnight bag?’

  Timothy, who at forty-six is seventeen years older than his wife, makes a fortune in the City. He’s extremely clever with money. He has jet-black wiry hair, small, dark blue eyes, an unusually straight back – for a man who’s spent so much of his life in large aeroplane seats and swanky swivel chairs – and a mouth, moist and fleshy but slightly pursed, which looks always on the point of blowing a raspberry. He never blows raspberries. Timothy never does anything silly. He never laughs. He rarely smiles. He never fidgets. He never cries. He never raises his voice. Above all, Timothy Makes Money. He’s a money-making machine.

  Nevertheless, he leads a full life. He has his wife – Daphne. His mistress – Lucy. His son – James, away at his father’s old prep school in Berkshire. And his hobbies. Timothy’s a tremendous wine-taster. He also plays
squash twice a week, usually with colleagues from the bank. He returns home to Daffy and their antiseptic South Kensington townhouse with a bag of stinking, sweat-drenched laundry for her to pass on to the housekeeper, and a red face throbbing with triumph, because he never loses.

  ‘Did you have fun?’ Daffy asks with terrible, brittle merriment. Sometimes, unless she’s managed to talk to her son on the telephone, or she’s secretly gone down to Berkshire and delivered him another hamper of food and forbidden mobile top-up cards, or she’s visited one of her numerous beauty therapists, it’s the only conversation she has all day. Daffy has no real friends.

  ‘Highly enjoyable,’ he says.

  They first met, this happy couple, when Mrs Duff Fielding was only nineteen. She was working as a temp at the time, an only child, cruelly mollycoddled by a possessive, bullying mother (now deceased), still living at home in Croydon, and called not Daffy, but Dawn. Miss Dawn Bigg; hopelessly innocent. Her mother never allowed her out at night, never allowed her to bring friends round. She was a sitting duck; longing to escape her claustrophobic childhood and ripe for a rich older man to exploit. Dawn’s temping agency had billeted her to Timothy’s soulless, money-making office for just one week. On the Wednesday Timothy asked her out for a drink.

  She had explained to him why she couldn’t go and, to be fair to him, it touched something in Timothy, since he too lived under the weight of a cold mother’s strict mores and unreasonable expectations. He thought he felt love stirring, so he made a rare exception for her. He cancelled his own lunch appointment and took her instead down to the office canteen, somewhere Timothy had never even visited before.

  She was too nervous to eat – and he liked that. She was too nervous to look up at him across the table, and he liked that too. He felt protective. Or something. Perhaps it was a little more sinister than that.

  So he booked her to stay for another three months, and they lunched together in the canteen at least twice a week, whenever Timothy’s schedule allowed. She never did look up at him across the table; she just answered the questions he put to her, and fell in love:

  No, she had no other relations. Only her mother.

  Yes, her father was dead.

  No, she had no friends from school, not really. Her mother forbade it.

  Yes, she was lonely sometimes…

  She’d been sitting opposite him, crying over her canteen sandwich, miserable at the prospect of a life without him. It was on the day that her three-month booking was due to end. He waited until then; let her weep while he munched on his bread and cold pasta salad. He though it was sweet, the way she cried. No one had ever cried at leaving him. Never before. So he allowed himself to enjoy it; watched the way her little lip trembled and she wiped the tear-snot with the back of her hand. He arranged his bread crumbs into a little pile in front of him and finally he fished a small box out of his pocket.

  ‘Dear Dawn,’ he said. (Quite quietly, in case secretaries on neighbouring tables overheard.) ‘I think you’re – really – a splendid girl. Very sweet. And I’m convinced you could make me very happy…’ He opened the box, revealed a mean little ring; a diamond so small you could hardly see it. That’s how confident he was. ‘Would you kindly do me the service of becoming my wife?’

  Very quick and quiet, the wedding was. Timothy wanted to do some work on her before he introduced her to his friends. And when he did finally get around to it, he introduced her as Daphne. It was as simple as that. ‘This is my wife, Daphne. Mrs Daphne Duff Fielding.’

  He never asked her if she minded the new name, and in a way she didn’t. She was young and rootless – and dazzled by the attention of her rich, worldly, older husband. She would have done anything to please him.

  For the first year or two of their marriage, the knotty task of ridding Dawn Bigg of any embarrassing traces of Dawn Biggness became Timothy Duff Fielding’s favourite project. Even more fun than wine-tasting. He changed her name, of course, and the way she spoke. He changed the way she dressed and sat and waved and blinked; the way she nodded and chewed, and the way she held her knife. Until suddenly, almost immediately after his son was born, he grew tired of it all. However much she changed for him, and she did, it seemed that something about her would never be quite right. ‘You can take the girl out of Croydon,’ he would sigh to his older sister, ‘but you can’t take the Croydon out of a girl.’ Today, ten years on, there is really nothing left of the Croydon Dawn he met and married. There is nothing much left of anyone at all.

  Daffy had never travelled alone before. But two days after that first conversation, she took the plane ticket her husband handed her and flew to Bordeaux. She took a taxi, just as he instructed, from Bordeaux airport to Lady Emma Rankin’s château, nearly an hour away. Timothy’s secretary, Lucy (Lovely Lucy), had printed out David and Emma Rankins’ address on a sheet of bank-headed paper, and Daffy handed the paper to the driver with a helpless smile, and the words, ‘pardon, s’il vous plaît…’ They drove the journey in silence.

  Fortunately for Daffy, Lady Emma Rankin, caught on an empty day, turned out to be as helpful as Timothy had promised. She provided Daffy with delicious thick black coffee, in her outrageously elegant drawing room, and a large glass of the local pineau, which Daffy glugged back eagerly though it was still only eleven o’clock. She felt intimidated by Emma’s grace and watchfulness. She had never seen anyone so seamless, so exquisite, so poised, so perfectly charming. Few people ever have.

  Meanwhile, Emma watched, as is her wont, and smiled, and confided, and decided on one of her whims to tell Daffy about the Hotel Marronnier, which had been for sale in the local village for so long.

  ‘Golly-gosh,’ said Daffy, eyes watering from the pineau, nose and throat threatening to explode into alcoholic flames. ‘You mean run a hotel?…Don’t know. Sounds pretty diffif—diciff—Pretty difficult.’ (After half a glass she had trouble getting her tongue round the word.) ‘I’m not sure what Timothy would say.’ She giggled. ‘Seeing as how I pan’t even seak French.’

  Emma smiled again, a lovely smile that wrinkled her nose. ‘Sweetheart, you can always learn French,’ she said. ‘And don’t you think it would be fun for us to be neighbours?’

  ‘I…Fun?’

  ‘Intelligent, interesting, unusual women like you, Daffy Duff Fielding, are a rare find in this neighbourhood. We need people like you to come and liven things up for us.’

  Daffy wasn’t sure what to say to that. How could someone like Emma Rankin possibly think it would be ‘fun’ to have someone like her as a neighbour? How could anyone? Daffy lifted her empty coffee cup and held it to her mouth for an absurd length of time while she tried to collect herself. Nobody, except possibly her son James, had ever said anything so lovely to her. Never. Behind the coffee cup, her lips were trembling.

  Emma looked on, curious and not entirely unmoved. She didn’t think she’d ever met a woman with so little self-esteem. It was odd, she thought. Manifestly, Daffy was neither intelligent nor very interesting. Of course not. Emma had just said that because that’s what she said. It’s what she always said to everyone, because they liked it. Nevertheless, without those awful Bond Street lady-clothes, and the helmet of tidy dyed-blonde hair, and the immaculate mask of ageing, orangebased make-up, Emma could clearly see that Daffy was at least a lovely-looking woman. Which was half the battle.

  Emma smiled, quite kindly for Emma, for whom kindness has never been a priority.

  ‘Wait there, Daffy,’ she said, patting her knee just like Timothy did. ‘I’m going to call the Marronnier owners, and we’re going to go over and tour the place right now. This minute! And you’re going to fall in love with the place. I know you will.’

  And sure enough that’s just what Daffy did. It was love at first sight. It was the first time Daffy ever experienced love so passionate, except with James, her son, who’d been so harshly taken from her.

  At the end of the tour she thanked Emma Rankin and Monsieur Paul, the bar owner. She th
anked them profusely, with tears of gratitude in her lonely, love-starved eyes. Then she took a taxi from Montmaur village directly to the airport and returned home.

  Two months have passed. Timothy, without discussing it with his wife, sent a private consultant to look over the Hotel Marronnier, a consultant who specialises in finding property abroad for rich men’s wives, and who is, as Timothy would put it, ‘fully cognizant’ of all those subtle requirements such a property search entails. He was sent a report, very thorough, which told him exactly what he needed to know: namely that for a relatively small investment Hotel Marronnier could be made to operate at a perfectly supportable loss for many years to come: a loss which Timothy was more than willing to absorb, having calculated that running a small, inefficient hotel/bar in the Charente Maritime would cost a great deal less than running a wife in London. For a very rich man like Timothy, buying her the Hotel Marronnier was a cheap way to get rid of a wife who, at only twenty-nine, was already past her sell-by date.

  So he bought the place. Secretly. He has agreed to a short weekend in France and is pretending to his wife that he has only come to window-shop. In fact the keys to the property were FedExed to him last week. He looks forward to the expression on her face when he finally hands them to her. She’ll be happy, he thinks. Which is nice. A nice bonus. It’s the closest to feeling affection that Timothy will ever get.

  A fortnight ago, when they were discussing the French weekend, he told Daffy to ask Emma Rankin to invite them both to dinner on the Saturday night.

  Daffy managed it, or thought she did, though the embarrassment nearly killed her. She left a message on Emma’s answering service, the first third of which went like this:

  ‘Oh, hello. Emma. It’s Daffy. Daffy Fielding. Sorry. You probably don’t remember me. I’m Timothy’s wife. Timothy Duff Fielding. Not that you’ve met Timothy. But I believe Timothy works with your brother-in-law Rory, as he’s called. At the bank. And also I think David, your husband, is also familiar to him, indirectly. As I think I explained when you were kind enough to meet me at your lovely, beautiful, amazing, gorgeous château. Anyway. Sorry. You must be so busy…What am I trying to say? My husband was wondering…That is he, Timothy, or rather WE – Timothy and me. I. Timothy and me. Myself. Timothy and myself are both coming out next weekend to have a look at the Hotel Marronnier. Which I simply loved. Absolutely loved it. And you were so kind and took the time to show me round it…Well I was wondering if there was any chance…’