Bordeaux Housewives

Dinner was finished. The tables had been cleared for dancing. Maude was still with François Bourse, waiting for the music to begin and jabbering happily to anyone who came over. With her easy laugh and brilliant French, she was doing excellent ambassadorial work for the expat community. Meanwhile, Emma and Horatio were sitting just where they’d been sitting all evening, apparently unaware that every other chair in the place had been cleared away, and even the table between them…

‘…You’re so clever,’ Emma was murmuring to him. ‘So intelligent and unusual and fascinating and alive. You must be so bored out here, living out your bloody Good Life…’

‘Must I?’ he laughed.

She laughed too, a lovely soft laugh, barely audible. ‘Well of course you must, Horatio. I think we both know there’s a great deal more to life than growing potatoes.’

‘Actually, I’m not convinced there is,’ Horatio said mildly, feeling the moonlight on his back, the soft air on his skin, the cool pink wine washing through his veins…‘One should never underestimate the importance of potatoes, Emma. Ask the Irish. Passionate about potatoes, poor old sods. Or they used to be.’

‘Well of course,’ she replied, faintly confused.

‘But what about you, Emma, anyway? Don’t you get bored?’ Horatio smiled. ‘If I get bored growing potatoes, or whatever it is you seem to think I do –’

‘Isn’t that what you do, Horatio?…Tell me. I’m intrigued. I see you whizzing around in that car of yours. Like a man with a mission…and I just keep asking myself – what does he do all day, with that amazingly clever brain of his, always whizzing this way and that. What else does he do? What does he really, really do?’ At that point Horatio was hazily aware of three things: that she kept asking him the same question, that she seemed to fancy him almost as much as he fancied her, and that her breath smelt of freshly cut grass and spring roses.

‘I told you,’ he said dreamily. ‘We have the gîtes. Sort of…Or we would, if we could ever persuade any guests to come and stay with us. And I grow potatoes…among other things.’

‘“Other things.”’ She waved one of those tiny wrists, one of those long, thin, aristocratic arms, and wrinkled her nose disdainfully. ‘So you grow carrots, then, too?’

Horatio smiled, a quiet smile. His and Maude’s aim had always been to make their lives seem as boring as possible to the outsider, so that nobody would be tempted to take a closer look. But Emma Rankin isn’t quite as simple as ‘nobody’. She has a way with her, a way of allowing her scorn to seep softly through the most innocuous of comments, and those two words, ‘carrots, then’, scented as they were by grass and roses, rattled Horatio more than he liked to admit. She doesn’t know, he thought. She thinks all I do is grow vegetables. She doesn’t know how much we risk, the number of people we save…And for once, just for once, he felt, not grateful, but a little bitter about it.

Not that she would honestly have cared. Even if he’d told her. It’s been a very long time since anything has genuinely moved or impressed Emma Rankin – least of all something which involves computers, laminating machines, flat scanners, and a nameless mass of impoverished, dispossessed foreigners.

‘So what about you, Emma?’ Horatio asked her again. ‘Don’t you get bored, doing whatever it is you do all day. What do you do all day, anyway?’

‘Aaah,’ she said, breathing roses. ‘What do I do? Well, I have the children…’ she reminded him airily. It was true, there were the three of them back at the château; very pretty little girls they were, aged between six and ten. There was also a full-time English nanny and a live-in French au pair. Emma bumped into them all sometimes, splashing about beside the swimming pool, or on the gravel in front of the house, and she was always very soft and lovely to them. They adored her, all of them did, including the staff.

She chortles wickedly, ‘…And when I have time, I like to investigate local rumours, Horatio. There are lots of rumours about you. Did you know? You can’t imagine what people say.’

‘No.’ He smiled at her. ‘Really?’

‘Really. A lot of rumours…’ She sat back, waiting for him to ask what. When he didn’t she gave an impatient little shrug. It made Horatio smile.

She was wearing something orange and flowing; coarse Indian orange cotton it was, with embroidery at the neckline to show off her long, thin, light brown neck. Her beautiful wild hair was pulled up somehow, twisted into a haphazard mass of browns and golds at the back of her small round head. She had pencilled a single black line above the upper lashes of each light brown eye, arranged a string of fat Indian silver beads from neck to midriff, and everything, everything she wore, every move she made, perfectly emphasised her long, slim-limbed, aristocratic exquisiteness. ‘Well,’ Horatio said, gazing weakly at her, at her staggeringly pert, round, beautiful breasts…Her nipples, he noted, on this balmy night, were showing through the orange cotton. She wasn’t wearing a bra. ‘I imagine you’re a wonderful investigator, Emma,’ he sighed. ‘It would take a hard man to keep a secret from you.’

‘Hard men tend to be the easy ones, sweetie,’ she drawled. Bored by her innuendo before she’d even finished making it. ‘…And I imagine you’re a wonderful carrot grower, are you, Horatio? Or is Maude more the carrot grower?…Perhaps you do the paperwork? There’s always so much paperwork in this country.’

That stung, unfortunately; pierced right through the befuddled haze of his adoration. ‘Actually, I don’t – simply “grow carrots”. OK, Emma?’

‘Oh!’

‘And I don’t do the carrot-growing paperwork, either.’

‘Oh!…So? So you change the bed linen? In the gîte? Must be fun.’

‘That’s right.’ He hesitated. ‘Let’s drop it, shall we?’

A tiny beam of triumph in her doe-like eyes. ‘Of course, Horatio. I’m so sorry…It’s only that I’m intrigued. You understand that, don’t you? You’re so mysterious…’

‘Am I? I don’t mean to be.’

She laughed. ‘Mathilde, my housekeeper, is convinced you’re running a high-class brothel up there at the Grande Forge…’ She looked at Horatio, again waited for him to respond. He didn’t. She gave another tiny impatient sigh, lit herself a cigarette, and he watched her thin fingers, her tiny wrists, her throat as she breathed in the smoke…‘Which actually makes perfect sense, if you think about it,’ she added. ‘After all, it’s certainly secluded enough.’

Horatio smiled quietly. ‘Well – you can tell Mathilde, from me, that we don’t run a brothel at La Grande Forge. High class or otherwise. What we do is we grow vegetables. And we run the gîtes, of course. Not very glamorous, I’m afraid. I apologise for the disappointment.’

‘Really? And that’s it? Horatio, I’ve never even seen your vegetable stall.’

‘Well. That’s because we move around,’ Horatio said, with practised ease (he’d said it many times before). ‘We go to different markets. Plus of course we don’t actually do it every week.’

‘So far as I can tell, you never do it. Nobody I know has ever seen your vegetable stall.’

Horatio shrugged. ‘I don’t know what to tell you, Emma. It’s there. You must all be looking in the wrong place.’

Emma clicked her tongue, clearly unconvinced. ‘Actually, it occurred to me you might have a cannabis farm up there

– which, by the way, if you do, I think it’s a bit mean to keep secret. It would be incredibly convenient –’

‘Nope. No cannabis farm.’

‘Well then, Horatio. What?’

‘Nothing…Except boring bloody vegetables. Emma,’ he tried to laugh, ‘darling. I have no idea why you’ve got these ridiculous notions in your head. I’m sorry, but I’m – we’re – just not that glamorous. We grow vegetables.’

She left a long pause after that, looked into his warm blue eyes and smiled. ‘I don’t believe you, Horatio.’

‘We grow vegetables,’ he said again.

‘Oh well.’ She sighed again, much more loudly this time, and Horatio could hear the boredom, the quick shift in her delicious, undivided attention. He became aware, suddenly, of music blasting. It was Chris de Burgh. Lady in Red. Of all idiotic songs. Otherwise he might have asked her to dance. ‘…Well,’ she said again. Suddenly restless. Looking over his shoulder – and still breathing roses somehow, in spite of the cigarette. ‘Well, Horatio. It’s been so lovely – Perhaps I should –’

‘Shall we dance?’

She looked at him coolly, on the point of saying no.

‘Dance with me,’ Horatio teased her. ‘And who knows? I might even let you in on the big secret. You might win a lifetime supply of cannabis. Imagine that.’

She put a hand on his knee and he felt a thousand volts jump through it. ‘Horatio,’ she said seriously, ‘you know, don’t you. I wouldn’t tell a soul…’

And something about her vast, light brown eyes, her delicate limbs, her rapt attention, made him almost believe her. They gazed at each other, over the space where the trestle table had been.

‘…Not a living soul…’ murmured Emma again.

Horatio cleared his throat. He stood up and held out a hand towards her. ‘Come on then,’ he said.

She smiled serenely. ‘With pleasure.’

And they glided onto the dance floor, bumping gently into Maude and Mayor Bourse en route, who were dancing arm in arm. Horatio didn’t even notice.

‘…Seriously though,’ whispered Emma, arms coiled round his neck, pelvis to his thigh, rose breath whispering upwards. ‘Seriously. If you did…happen to tell me…and by the way, Horatio, whatever you say, I know you’re up to something…’