Bordeaux Housewives

‘…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 (#ulink_f6c038b2-a877-5dde-bc3f-7f4fcff13221)

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?’