Bordeaux Housewives Read online

  ‘You don’t have to take it, you know,’ Maude hears herself saying. ‘…Daffy?…Not just because he says so…You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do…’

  Daffy glances at her, unseeing, unhearing. Such talk could be in Japanese for all Daffy understands. Or French.

  ‘I mean –’ Maude is embarrassed. Horatio scowls at her. She’s not helping, and she knows it. She really wants to take the poor, skinny, idiotic woman and give her a big hug. But that probably wouldn’t help much either. ‘Sorry. Sorry Daffy. I’ll shut up. I only mean – well – welcome to France!’

  ‘Welcome to France!’ everyone repeats. It sounds painfully flat. They raise their glasses and drink without anyone looking anyone in the eye.

  Daffy nods dumbly. Tugs her trembling mouth into a terrible smile, and turns back to her husband. ‘Thank you, Timmie,’ she manages at last, trying to pull herself together, desperately trying to sound like an adult; not afraid, in control, like the sort of woman who renovates rural French hotel/bars all the time. ‘And thank you everyone. For a lovely dinner.’ And she disintegrates into tears.

  It seems to take Timothy by surprise.

  COFFEE AND PETITS FOURS

  As soon as Daffy has wiped her eyes and apologised to everybody, Timothy announces it is time for them to leave. He is embarrassed and angry and it’s obvious to everyone that he can hardly wait to get his wife alone. The guests feel a united blast of pity as they see her tripping along behind him, saying her feeble goodbyes. He’s going to give her hell in the car. Emma – rather more lively now, after the mini-drama – suggests that remaining guests should move from the terrace, where it has grown a little cool, to the drawing room, where Mathilde will soon be laying out coffee and home-made petits fours.

  ‘I told you he was gruesome,’ she announces, to no one in particular, as she returns from waving them both goodbye via the downstairs lavatory and one of her briskly administered sharpeners. ‘I just knew he was a bully.’ But no one pays any attention. They have already settled themselves into little groups and are doing quite adequately without her.

  Horatio is nowhere to be seen, having mumbled something about a football match, or possibly the news, and needing to find a television with satellite.

  Madame Bertinard, fat, middle-aged, and hopelessly intimidated by her smart surroundings, sits perched like an eager parrot beside her liverish and sulky looking host, Mr David Rankin. She’s sliding most of Mathilde’s petits fours into her mouth and nodding earnestly at her husband, seated on David’s other side, while he expounds on the civic value of his new position.

  ‘Fascinating,’ murmurs David Rankin. Not even bothering to look at him. ‘Fascinating. Fascinating.’

  To Monsieur Bertinard there are two types of Englishmen: the ones who come here, push up the property prices, clutter up the schools with their English children, and then go slowly broke. And then the others. Who don’t. The smell of money which exudes from David Rankin’s fat, spoilt body is intoxicating to him. It’s actually making the Mayor’s hands sweat.

  ‘…And I am presently in the situation, Mr Rankin,’ he is saying, leaning a little closer, so that his knees and Mr Rankin’s thigh are touching, ‘I am in the situation of comprehending that you are someone who is involved, on a day-to-day foundation, in the business of the high financial world. This is very, very interesting to me.’

  ‘Jolly good,’ says David, throwing back the remainder of his brandy. (Not for David anything so rough as the local pineau. David only drinks the best.) ‘Well – Monsieur…Monsieur…If you’ll excuse me.’ He begins to lever himself forward and upwards, but it’s hard work climbing out of Emma’s deep sofas. Especially when a man like Olivier Bertinard is working against you.

  ‘You will allow me to observe, Mr Rankin,’ continues Bertinard blithely, ‘that you must be superbly proficient in this department. This beautiful château has certainly costed a little more than the purchase of a small caravan! Yes, I imagine so! It’s a correct supposition, David, non?’ He roars with laughter and Madame Bertinard – spraying her lap and David’s florid face with crumbs as she does so – laughs nicely along with him…

  Emma watches the scene, notices her husband’s thunderous expression. She wonders, half-heartedly, whether she oughtn’t to rescue M. Bertinard from her husband’s very imminent loss of temper, before all possibilities of her tennis court are lost.

  But she’s distracted, for the moment, by the drama apparently unfolding on the opposite sofa. Sitting close together and deep in half-whispered conversation are Maude and Jean Baptiste. Both looking very intense. They’re speaking in French just – slightly – too quickly and quietly for Emma to be able to understand. But she can see that Maude looks angry, that Jean Baptiste has turned towards her, and is now – clutching – her by both shoulders. He’s looking into her eyes with a good deal more feeling than he has ever looked into Emma’s.

  And it occurs to Emma, in a cruelly misguided flash of clarity, that he and Maude must be having an affair.

  It would explain several things: his prickly reticence whenever she tried to gossip about the Haunts; his frustratingly laissez-faire approach to their own delirious writhings on her large, muslin-covered bed; his insistence on setting aside the work on her children’s hacienda while he built the Haunts a bloody bookshelf; and finally, of course, Maude’s obvious anger at what she witnessed under the dining table this evening; anger to which she is clearly giving vent, now that her husband is safely out of the room.

  For a moment Emma, standing there prettily by her candlelit fireside, gazing down on her guests with that thoroughly benign smile, is too stunned to think; too stunned to breathe. She is nothing more than the bones that are keeping her upright, the rictus grin, the gently running nose and the angry, thrashing heartbeat pulsating at the back of her throat. Something like this has never happened to her before. Since the day she was born, Emma Rankin has always been the heartbreaker, the cheater, the first one to move on. And so she continues to stand there, too wired to do much else – looking but not wanting to look. It has never happened before. Not to Emma. I’m getting old, she thinks, again and again. I’m getting old. I’m losing my touch…

  ‘I say, Emma darling!’ Her husband’s booming voice pierces through her consciousness. She jumps slightly, turns to him with a more friendly expression than she’s spared him for years.

  ‘Yes, my love. How can I help you?’ she asks.

  ‘Hm?’ He frowns at her, faintly suspicious. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing!’

  ‘Your husband and I,’ breaks in M. Bertinard, ‘are enjoying a most interesting discussion on the subject of your beautiful château, Lady Emma –’

  ‘Oh, really, please, Monsieur Bertinard. Do call me Emma.’

  He bows his head in acknowledgement. ‘I shall be most honoured,’ he says. ‘Your husband tells me you are contemplating the installation of a tennis court!’

  Emma’s benign smile flickers, just for a moment. She’s astonished David had even absorbed such an unimportant piece of information, and livid with him that he should have blurted it out to the one man who could put a stop to it. She wonders vaguely if he’s done it on purpose, to punish her for inflicting Bertinard on him for so much of the night. Probably.

  ‘Goodness!’ she says sweetly, walking towards them, and then seating herself on the coffee table directly opposite the Mayor. ‘David told you that, did he?’ She wrinkles her nose, folds herself forward, squeezing together her improbably perfect breasts as she does so. M. Bertinard can’t help it. He peeps down through the moon glasses, feasts his furtive little red eyes. ‘I had no idea he’d even registered that I wanted a tennis court…But you never know with you men,’ she says, breathing those roses again. ‘We girls twitter on, don’t we, always imagining you’re not paying the slightest attention and then – bam!’ It’s the sweetest, softest ‘bam’ anyone has ever uttered. ‘Bam!’ she says again. Monsieur Bertinard
nods, quite like a dog, eager to lap up whatever she offers next. ‘Bam!’ she offers. One more time for good luck. But she’s a little too wired to remember where it was all headed, back at the beginning. ‘…And there you have it!’ She beams at Monsieur Bertinard. ‘…So tell me, Olivier – may I call you Olivier?’

  ‘Mais bien sûr, my dear Emma. But of course you may!’

  ‘Olivier…Tell me all about being the new Mayor. I know so little about the French system, and it’s disgraceful. I know I should. But will you teach me? Will you tell me everything? I must say it always seems so outrageously glamorous. The French always manage to make doing one’s civic duty appear so incredibly noble and glamorous…I think we English have a lot to learn…’

  …And so it is that while Madame Bertinard and Mr David Rankin sit beside one another on the fat sofa, drowsy with petits fours and cognac and enveloped in a silence which neither has the slightest inclination to break, Olivier and Emma get down to business. Before the evening is through Emma will of course have his assurance that her tennis court can go ahead. First, though, she must nod politely and bite back her twitching, wired tongue, while the Mayor describes to her, in excruciating detail, the myriad requirements of his posting.

  ‘How glamorous,’ she says intermittently.

  He finds that he touches, in passing, on his slight resentment of the English who have lately flooded into the area.

  ‘Not yourself, of course,’ he assures her. ‘I am really talking of the ones –’ and then he glances across at Maude, still deep in conversation with Jean Baptiste. He drops his voice. ‘– the ones who come here, and they think it is the perfect life, to be growing their vegetables and so on. But they’re not spending any money in the community…’

  ‘Mmm,’ says Emma. ‘Dreadful.’ Not really listening.

  ‘So I ask myself – really, what is the point? What are they all doing? They place their children in our schools…’

  ‘Ghastly,’ murmurs Emma, concentration torn between when next to exit for another sharpener, since she can feel things beginning to slow down a bit, and when next to check out activities on the opposite sofa, where Jean Baptiste and Maude are still whispering angrily to one another.

  ‘…Whereas your children attend the private school in Bordeaux, and that is excellent. I have no argument. But these children are occupying places in our government schools…’

  ‘Outrageous…’

  ‘It is a great strain on our economic resources.’

  ‘Nightmare…’

  ‘For example, Emma,’ says Olivier Bertinard, sensing her unequivocal support and feeling sufficiently emboldened to start naming names. ‘Take Monsieur et Madame Haunt, whom I mentioned earlier. I am very fond of them. Of course. I don’t need to say this. And of course you are too. But I ask myself – what do they contribute to our community? I am informed they grow and sell vegetables, but I have never seen it. And frankly, Emma, we already have enough vegetables in France. We don’t need any more vegetables…You understand what I am saying?’

  She understands that he’s complaining about the Haunts, at any rate. And it piques her interest. At last. She leans towards him, drops her soft voice to a low, sweet whisper: ‘Tell me, Monsieur Bertinard. Olivier. Tell me,’ she says. ‘Do you seriously believe that growing and selling vegetables is the only thing the Haunts do?’

  Olivier Bertinard pulls back to examine her face, and Emma looks back at him and they stay like that for a beat, maybe even longer.

  ‘You are asking me this?’ he answers softly. Carefully. ‘Honestly, Emma. I am asking myself this also. I am asking myself this,’ he says again. ‘Because between you and myself,’ he says, ‘I think there is some funny business at La Grande Forge.’

  ‘…Well!’ says Emma triumphantly. ‘Well!’ It’s the first time anyone, apart from Mathilde, the housekeeper, has positively confirmed her suspicions about the Haunt family, and even if Maude and Jean Baptiste hadn’t been sitting on her sofa, humiliating her as the very conversation took place, it is unlikely her response would have been any different. Emma loves nothing more than malicious gossip. ‘Olivier, this is what I’ve been wondering,’ she says. ‘But tell me first – what makes you believe so? What have you seen that makes you suspicious…?’

  Monsieur Bertinard has not seen a great deal, as we know, but he feels loved and encouraged in the warm glow of Emma’s gleeful enthusiasm. ‘Well,’ M. Bertinard begins, ‘for commencement, I know that these children, Superrrman and Tiffany, they often fail to attend their school.’

  Emma chooses not to highlight what a relief that must be to the French government’s resources. ‘Yes, I’ve noticed that,’ she agrees instead. ‘I often see them skidding around the village on their bicycles. But they’re freakishly clever, apparently. They are. You can notice it at once. Maybe they don’t need to go to school as much other children…’

  He shrugs, as if to imply that such information provided only more fodder for his suspicion. He tells her about the occasion with Jean Baptiste, when the children appeared at his bungalow with the suspicious bundle of papers.

  ‘Papers, you say…Well, it’s very intriguing.’ She glances around the room; notices David, with head flopped forward and mouth half open. Fast asleep. ‘David!’ she murmurs, giving his leg a shove with the end of her lovely brown foot. ‘David!’

  ‘Mmhh?’

  ‘Wake up, darling. Your guests all have empty glasses!’ She turns back to the Mayor. ‘Wait Right There,’ she says to him, patting his knee. ‘I want to show you something…Something – a piece of paper – which belongs to the Haunts. Which I found when I was…Which I found in the…’ She stops, realising she hasn’t thought of a satisfactory end to this statement. She leaves it as it is. ‘Funnily enough, I was only looking at it this afternoon, wondering to myself…It’s upstairs in my bedroom.’

  ‘Mais qu’est-ce que c’est?’ he demands.

  ‘Well. That’s what I’m hoping you’ll be able to tell me. I think’, she says, standing up, smiling at him, ‘you’ll find it extremely interesting…’

  But first, of course, Emma takes a quick detour to the lavatory, to powder her nose. And when she’s done that, and she’s skitting up the stairs in search of her secret evidence, she discovers Horatio, whose presence in her house, funnily enough, she had vaguely forgotten about. He’s been gone well over half an hour.

  ‘Horatio!’ she says. He’s standing on the gallery above her, his hands in his pockets, his back to the hall, examining the vast wool-woven orgy which hangs off the bare stone wall. He’s been listening to Emma skitting up those stairs with that telltale sniff. He has his back to her, but he’s heard her coming. He turns round.

  ‘Hey there,’ he says. He thinks he sees a flash of guilt; possibly fear. But whatever it was, it’s gone before he can be sure.

  ‘Horatio – angel,’ she says smoothly. ‘How very lovely to bump into you. Are you admiring my wicked tapestry?’ She giggles. ‘Isn’t it naughty?’

  ‘It is,’ he replies. ‘It’s rather beautiful, I think.’ They look at each other. From the far end of the enormous airport terminal beneath them there drifts the muted sound of their spouses’ conversation. It seems a long, long way off. ‘What are you doing?’ he asks.

  ‘Me? – Well, I was – I was just on my way up to fetch something. What about you?’

  ‘Me? Well. Actually, I was just about to come down. I think Maude and I should really make tracks. Got to think of the babysitter and everything. So. Er. Thank you –’ He edges towards her and she notices, as he draws closer, that there is a nervous muscle ticking just by his jaw. He pauses as he reaches her step, and she stands back to let him pass, and he looks at her; searches her face.

  ‘Heck?’

  He and Emma turn. Together, they peer down over the bannister.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Nothing,’ says Heck. ‘I was just coming to find you…I think we ought to get going.’

  Ma
ude stares at him, and then at Emma. She’d been so deep in conversation with Jean Baptiste it had taken her a minute or two to notice that he and Emma were both simultaneously out of the room. Maude says, very coldly, ‘Yes. I think we ought, Heck. I’ll get my jacket.’

  So Maude and Horatio walk across the moonlit courtyard in silence, thundering silence, both of them waiting to be out of earshot for a chance to speak.

  ‘Christ almighty, Heck. You must think I’m –’

  ‘Wait. Shh. Wait,’ he whispers urgently. He pulls open the passenger-seat door. ‘Get in the car.’

  When she hesitates he puts an impatient hand on her elbow, and she snatches it away so fast she stumbles. ‘Don’t,’ she snarls at him. ‘Don’t touch me. Don’t ever tell me what to do.’

  He looks at her, astonished. ‘What?’ he says.

  ‘I want a divorce.’

  ‘What? Why? Maude, what in God’s name are you talking about? Get in the car. Quickly…Please.’

  She stands there, not moving.

  ‘…Please… Maude, the thing I said earlier – about us not having anything to worry about. I was wrong.’

  She looks at him, taking a minute to register the abrupt change in conversation, his sense of urgency. She gets into the car.

  ‘On the contrary,’ she says, as they sit there in the darkness, side by side. ‘I was wrong. While you were upstairs having it off with Emma Rankin –’

  ‘Oh for God’s sake!’

  ‘– I had a long conversation with Jean Baptiste. He swears he’s not said a word to her. And I believe him.’

  ‘So do I. I told you. Jean Baptiste has nothing to do with anything. And by the way, Maude, how could I possibly have been “having it off” with Emma Rankin, as you put it, when – as you know perfectly well – she only came up those stairs thirty seconds before you did –’

  ‘Well isn’t that unfortunate?’

  ‘Maudie –’ He moves to touch her but stops, seeing the look on her face. He sighs. Delves in his pocket for a sheet of paper and hands it to her. ‘…Remember this?’