Bordeaux Housewives

‘In fact, Maude, I’m on “having-dinner terms” with anybody, so long as they’re interesting. Even little Eritrean chappies, if they happen to be at a loose end. Bring them all along!’ She gurgles with laughter. ‘But seriously, Maude, are you certain you can’t come? Because if it’s a problem with babysitting –’

‘It’s not a problem with babysitting –’

‘Well then!’ Emma says. She giggles again. And waits. ‘Have I hit the bull’s eye?’ she asks merrily, after Maude fails to come up with anything else. ‘Do you really have a little Eritrean chappie staying with you tonight, Maude? It’s too strange!’

‘Don’t be so silly,’ Maude snaps. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Well then. Come to dinner, Maude. Please. And I promise not to misbehave. I shan’t address a word to your husband. And I shan’t mention Eritreans even once. I’ll talk about nothing but vegetables all night.’

‘…Look…’ Maude hesitates. She can’t leave things like this or Emma will be talking about their ‘funny passports’ to everyone; anyone who’ll listen. It’ll be on the national news by tomorrow night. ‘…I’ll double-check with Heck. All right? I’ll call you back later. But I’ve got to go now.’ It’s taken all Maude’s self-control not to have hung up already. ‘Goodbye,’ she shouts. ‘Goodbye Emma!’ And she slams down the telephone so hard it cracks.

Silence. Except for her pulse thumping in her ears. She glances towards the front door. Mayor Bertinard in still there in his car, engine running, peering out of his window. She waves and smiles, starts making her way towards him. Suddenly his head jerks in shock, as if he’s seeing her for the first time, and before Maude can get anywhere close to him, he accelerates quickly away down the lane.

BABYSITTERS (#ulink_fcf0a0b9-752a-5abe-b7b9-6f07294bac17)

So. It’s not a simple matter at the best of times, leading an innocent life of crime. Obstacles tend to crop up everywhere and often where you least expect them. For example, babysitting. Every time Maude and Horatio go out they have to leave a stranger with free run of the house. They have to be sure they’ve left all evidence of their life as superheroes meticulously locked away. Which is an effort, for a disorganised couple with young children, at the end of a long day. Maude and Horatio only ever employ one girl to do the job, a po-faced sixteen-year-old named Simone, the daughter of a neighbouring farmer, who is unable to speak a word of English and who is only really interested in watching television. They chose her for that reason: it would take a fire, or a bomb perhaps, to get her to venture beyond the TV room, let alone to wander the house poking her nose into matters that very strictly didn’t concern her. Nevertheless, the Haunts don’t like to take unnecessary risks. And the effort of checking over the entire house, checking the bins, unplugging the telephones, locking up the COOP (with or without the sliding bookshelf) – and then, after all that, of making slow, polite conversation with an excruciatingly shy, non-responsive, TV-addicted sixteen-year-old demi-crétine – tends to put them off ever wanting to go out at all.

Tonight, however, they’ve been alarmed enough by Emma’s comments to have got it all together. They have called Simone, who is now in the telly room, watching the French version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Tiffany is in bed, reading Pride and Prejudice, and Superman is tucked up beside her, calculating simple fractions in his head. Maude and Horatio are in their bathroom changing for Emma’s dinner, and both are feeling extremely tense. Nothing about the evening ahead is going to be simple.

As it happens, Horatio Haunt may be one of the few attractive men in the region who has yet to have managed a roll with Emma Rankin in her famously large, soft, comfortable, four-poster, white-muslin-draped bed. Which is mostly due, or so Maude believes, to the fact she’s been careful never to leave Horatio and Emma Rankin on their own, or never for long enough, anyway. Emma’s appetites are voracious, and notoriously so.

Tonight Horatio has put on his linen suit and he looks handsome, sun-kissed, lean and intelligent, Maude notices regretfully. She watches him rummage around in the bathroom cupboard, looking for the aftershave she gave him for Christmas which he so rarely bothers to put on. ‘And please,’ she says, trying to make it sound airy and careless – as only Emma Rankin truly can – ‘don’t make a prat of yourself tonight, Heck, my darling. Try not to dribble when she talks to you.’

‘What’re you talking about?’ he asks indignantly, his nose in the cupboard. ‘Maudie, angel, please. We’ve talked about this so much…By the way, have you seen my aftershave?’

‘She’s got Semtex tits, you know,’ Maude reminds him.

‘Semtex?’

‘They’re not natural, if that’s what you think…Anyway, David’s going to be there. So you’d better behave yourself.’

Horatio turns around, quite irritated. ‘Oh come on,’ he says, ‘this is pathetic. This is –’ He pauses, looks at her more closely. ‘You look lovely, Maudie. You look – Have you done something to your hair?’

Maude smiles at him. ‘I washed it,’ she says. In fact she’s done a great deal more than that. She’s been sneaking off at intervals throughout the afternoon, surreptitiously beautifying herself – shaving her legs, plucking her eyebrows, ironing her hair. This afternoon, as soon as Horatio returned, she dashed off into St Clara under the pretext of going to the supermarket, and bought herself a pale grey silky skirt and a sheer grey T-shirt, which she’s wearing now, with a new pair of unusually high (for Maude) silver sandals. And she does look lovely – sun-kissed and lean and intelligent – and sexy, actually, in a preppy kind of a way. Maude, after two children, ten years of marriage, and all the worries associated with living a life of crime, doesn’t often think of herself as sexy.

She glances at her reflection: at the slim figure, the freshly ironed, shoulder-length, sun-streaked hair, the even features, the clear, round blue eyes…But tonight she looks all right, she thinks. For once. More than all right, in fact. Horatio forgets the aftershave, sidles up behind her, runs his hands down her sides and drops a kiss at the base of her neck – and Maude feels a rush of something very close to tears. She knows that whatever she wears, whatever she does to her even-featured face and her sun-streaked hair, she can’t begin to compete with a woman whose entire life has been dedicated to fine-tuning her own personal delightfulness. Emma Rankin and her Semtex appendages will always be in a league of their own.

Maude brushes his hands away, turns around to face him. ‘Heck. I’m quite frightened, you know. I mean – I think we both should be. Somehow or other, she’s worked out what we do.’

‘She’s guessing,’ he murmurs soothingly, edging towards her again.

‘She’s found something out. She’s going to try to pump us for more information. And she’s going to pump you especially.’

‘Pump me?’ Heck says, licking his lips, trying to make a joke of it. ‘Bloody hell. Are you sure?’

Maude doesn’t smile. ‘Emma’s a lot of things, but she’s not stupid. And if she’s wheedled something out of Jean Baptiste and put two and two together…’

‘Jean Baptiste wouldn’t have told her. Why would he? Apart from anything else, what does he actually know? We told him we had a friend in England who’d been bankrupted by French taxes, who might want to help.’

‘You think he believed us?’

‘Probably not.’

‘And what about the bookshelf?’

Horatio shrugs. ‘I trust him, Maudie. And so do you. If we hadn’t we would never have helped him in the first place…’

‘Well I hope so,’ she says slowly.

‘I know so. Besides which, what the hell’s going to happen to him if it gets out we’ve been providing him with fraudulent –’

‘Shhh! For God’s sake, Heck…’

‘I think Emma’s remark was a shot in the dark. I think it was a one-in-a-million fluke. There are always rumours flying around about us. You know that. Last time I saw her she insisted we were running a brothel up here. She’s fishing, Maude. It’s nothing. We’ll be fine.’

‘You’re quite sure about that?’

‘Absolutely. Absolutely convinced of it.’

Maude flicks him a smile, asks in a small cold voice: ‘So why are we going to dinner with her tonight?’

‘What?’

‘If you’re so certain she knows nothing and that we’re absolutely fine – why are we going to dinner with her tonight?’

‘Well…Because…I don’t know…’ Horatio examines his fingernails. The fact is he’s not certain she knows nothing. How can he be? He’s trying to get Maude to relax. If she walks into Emma’s drawing room looking as uptight and terrified as she does right now, he thinks, they might just as well drive straight on to the police station and give themselves up. ‘Because it might be fun?’ he suggests.

‘You stupid sod,’ Maude snaps.

‘Well it might be. If you’d bloody well allow it to be. If you could stop being so bloody uptight.’

Maude stares at him. There are times, even now, after all these years, when she feels she might be talking not to her closest ally, her lover, the father of her children, her best friend. But to a total out-and-out shit. ‘Don’t you get it? Heck, she doesn’t give a damn about you. Or me. Or anything. Or anyone, and if she –’

‘Oh, don’t preach at me, Maudie. For Christ’s sake. I’m aware of that. But she’s not the devil. Just because you’re a bit jealous –’

‘And I have BLOODY GOOD REASON to be jealous, Horatio Haunt. As you well know –’

‘OK. I didn’t say you didn’t. I mean you don’t. Oh, don’t be stupid, Maudie. What I meant was…’

HORATIO, LADY EMMA AND THE ALMOST-KISS (#ulink_db27c572-4154-5832-9420-368037e27389)

Every year, in early May, the village of Montmaur has a fête in the Place Marronnier, opposite the hotel. Everybody comes, rich and poor, old and young, French and English. The three large chestnut trees in the middle of the place are rigged with coloured electric bulbs, trestle tables are laid out for supper, and a sound system and music stage is built. It is the highlight of the expat social calendar. Apart from the fact that it is lovely to be drunk on local wine, and to dance under the balmy French stars to the music most of them danced to as teenagers, the annual Fête de Montmaur is the one time in the year when they can persuade themselves they are a bona fide part of the local French community. Which they aren’t, of course. Nor, secretly, would they ever really want to be.

What happened at the last fête, just under a month ago, wasn’t all Horatio’s fault. Maude, too, had enjoyed a certain amount to drink, and was very happily occupied most of the night, jiving her slimmish, thirty-something hips to French pop with the flirtatious divorcé and outgoing mayor of Montmaur, François Bourse.

Emma Rankin’s husband David was in London that evening, not entirely surprisingly, since that’s where he generally is. And Maude, much to her delight, had been invited by François Bourse to sit next to him at dinner. It was a place of great honour, especially for one of the English, and when she came over to show off about it to Horatio, he noticed the gleam in her eye and teased her. He was a bit jealous. François Bourse is a very attractive man: tall, slim, cultivated, humorous, and immaculately dressed. Also, at that point, still a mayor: a big fish on that particular night, and in that particular pond. Maude had reason to feel pleased with herself.

So while François and Maude were displaying their foreign language skills to one another, mixing that up with a few delicate innuendoes and accidentally allowing their thighs and knees to rub lightly one against another beneath the long trestle table, Lady Emma Rankin, seated at the far end of the same table and half-hidden in shadows, was working her magic on Horatio. The difference was that where Maude was only having fun, enjoying a harmless, merry, early summer thrill, Emma Rankin, as always, meant business.