Bordeaux Housewives
Bordeaux Housewives
Daisy Waugh
Introducing the perfect Summer read for 2006. Bordeaux Housewives is a romantic comedy combining a heady mix of sunshine, sex, Sancerre and secrets.When an ordinary English family swap dreary suburbia and the rat race for the glorious countryside of France they have no idea just how much their lives are going to change.For in addition to the culture shock, they have been selected to appear in a reality TV show about their Good Life lifestyle. But they also have a secret life which they need to hide from the cameras…Meanwhile, at the local bar, another expat is finding that local attractions amount to more than wine, cheese and sunflowers…
Bordeaux Housewives
Daisy Waugh
Zuberzonic Zebedee
Maths Genius, Life Enhancer and Very Good on Penguins
This one’s for you XXX
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#u0adcaef4-38e9-5106-8c3a-03732cdd4ebd)
Title Page (#ua8e501ee-6e69-5870-8bd9-99dc80da10f8)
Dedication (#u35951eb8-ca77-5913-ade4-abc2607302f6)
BUSINESS AS USUAL (#u37417de9-2dbb-5645-a753-b489ece6c8ed)
HOW IT ALL BEGAN (#u5f283a22-eab1-57a9-ba92-94197fe1725e)
FINDING THE WILL (#u08666177-306b-5bbb-9877-46d6cd0a65a2)
FINDING THE WAY (#u98742459-923f-5b23-abfe-1452e357a081)
CATCHING JELLYFISH (#uf5fc6244-e056-52fb-9eee-91974de9572a)
EATING MOULES (#u21326b45-2ba6-5119-96fd-79ddff3deb3b)
FROM DAWN TO DAFFY (#u9d002090-ef60-53b9-b8f8-9e42d8a30b48)
DAFFY’S LITTLE PROJECT (#u0feaec1e-f90b-58f7-aaac-1df9e376684b)
FEELING THE FEAR AND DOING IT ANYWAY (#u40ebe484-065f-552e-a63d-ff26200ad7a6)
VERTICALLY CHALLENGED ERITREANS (#u46cc969c-800e-5f53-88ca-345c01aa13ff)
BABYSITTERS (#u56be823b-117d-5783-83b9-d3d867abd1ac)
HORATIO, LADY EMMA AND THE ALMOST-KISS (#u7502feab-baf7-5fd6-b4ee-7f4af0c1bc0b)
LOBSTER WITH MAYONNAISE (#ua920303f-09a3-53f6-b95b-85e670db2178)
COFFEE AND PETITS FOURS (#uc2beefb3-a398-5ed2-b57f-dd63fe61b211)
A LAST BREAKFAST (#u283d3bbb-61d2-54fe-9c95-9aaaa2532ca7)
TWO STRAY CATS (#u38d31ca2-ad24-535f-b3e2-8c1e0f798224)
HOW MANY BEANS MAKE FIVE? (#u61dd72bd-2f7c-5c7e-9fd5-82007837abb0)
DAY FOUR (#u696adac3-0af7-5aaa-b8ea-f882f9842494)
FINAL DAY (#u0d9acf98-03a4-5eb6-bee8-fe479205707a)
PERMISSION TO SHOOT (#uf9b656e9-a19f-5aa5-bc44-9ab3cd9a1a33)
ENTENTE CORDIALE (#ub67fc599-2e9e-5131-9a6a-7b619aa161f2)
DAFFY’S LIST (#u673a2db5-8b24-5a71-9860-275abdd38bb5)
ELECTRICITY (#u136aeeac-487a-568d-8422-f1a7edb5b824)
EMMA RANKIN’S RECOMMENDATION (#u2a377de2-6e21-5d61-964b-29001683fea4)
VERY OLD FRIENDS (#u5700ce85-ab35-51a1-8c31-b7647655a583)
SMUTTIE FORMS A PLAN (#ua26ff93e-5360-5a51-b97f-98078b6c2a14)
SKID START (#u59940279-1396-558a-a99d-54716f029a9b)
MURRAY, LEN AND THE SONY PD150 (#u8daff901-a5c3-5f93-b84d-623a90398dbc)
TEAMWORK (#u15d37b03-e157-5108-8aaa-9680e0bc0201)
SCREEN-TEST (#u1d810958-0034-5919-9779-110484db3a2a)
MAKING A PITCH (#uad32bd59-b18e-5e5f-b35b-5525dd5ea5b5)
FRENCH LESSONS (#u5811fc3c-9d15-5b92-967f-b2db081e635d)
GRAND OPENING (#u4f34e82f-966a-5ae1-b84b-45bf3b4b58bd)
COURT SUMMONS (#u5d3a5c44-6a7d-580e-828e-be2ce5c22340)
RURAL BLISS (#u0b1d21f9-1f2a-5bd2-92f8-2c3ea6876d79)
MONEY, SEX AND MORE BABIES (#uf9167c9f-ffb4-530f-9c83-bd92e9b05847)
INVESTMENT MONITORING (#ua52257bf-cec0-595c-9062-4fbf9d7af979)
TREATS (#u1a41e5b5-bafa-575d-8018-cff7d074774e)
OLD MAID (#u8ca4f998-6d21-5f33-8752-ca75d0300ac7)
KITCHEN FURNITURE (#u16092ce8-0a26-5b8a-9375-ec0531fdb630)
DIFFERENT KINDS OF FRIENDSHIP (#u1bf4ff3f-dbb1-561d-abbd-a7b2841a973a)
TOWN SHOES (#uf7c4f38c-a766-5776-ac8f-5739e3b2360a)
PENELOPE WHATNOT (#uf272d356-4d27-5a45-8498-593a8ffb7aea)
FIFTEEN MINUTES (#u7eeaa8f6-c176-55d3-84fb-cd84f85aa758)
PARTY PLANNING (#udb373d11-3422-5d78-96d5-f9820250889c)
GETTING DRUNK (#udc4c6376-3a2d-5a28-abe8-770fd4f24436)
SKIDDING AROUND (#u6b94ad9d-c48e-5bb0-b5de-98a85b5b7a06)
STRAWBERRY TARTLETS AND OTHER PLEASURES (#u51406168-6c21-5239-a05c-f34c48d92bcf)
TIMING (#ufc7003f1-286c-5e21-87fa-bb7db14a4499)
HOLD UPS (#ub79fef32-d8d9-5166-8ed8-93306ef8a742)
TRAVELLING ALONE (#u36490efa-7411-510a-af99-53cccac0fc3f)
MORNING HAS BROKEN (#u0ac683f2-8115-5e6e-9811-68091e298626)
MAX FACTOR (#ub426c57b-fda1-51bf-9e54-e3c1327d2899)
A LITTLE LIST (#u2d6c369d-b20f-59ed-a93b-4950dd5f7ea3)
UNDER THE YEW TREE (#u9f287f8c-12f2-587a-a32e-2f648324e560)
LONG DRIVE HOME (#u619a9003-a367-5d4b-8782-3db9364eeafe)
NAKED TORSOS (#u6ddb3bf0-0ed3-5f0e-b212-3e5e537b7ce2)
WHEN THE KISSING HAD TO STOP (#uda927aeb-257f-52d5-adfe-acff0c2e22e6)
KEEPING A TAB (#u405ebdd2-64aa-53b8-9d63-97deda1b9eb5)
BONNE NUIT (#u8fc29797-2988-5b5a-b1a1-45d7c04b1c41)
SUNDAY MORNING (#u6767543f-8437-561f-9e30-e513085d02cb)
SKID STIRRING (#u79c250d3-8ecb-59ad-8cc3-610823c1303f)
TEAMWORK (#u2aa06b41-e2f8-507b-8fcc-38599a0b5d98)
MONEY TO BE MADE (#u30613394-3819-5b14-8c75-515681129508)
MESSAGE BREAKDOWN (#uef4e6b77-03ba-59d0-bb69-be777d8d865d)
KIDS ALONE IN KITCHENS AND ALL THAT (#u73dcf94a-f5e9-5dac-932a-f3bf0a6a1f65)
MAKING PANCAKES (#uee52b95c-9b91-5e45-bf27-6efd3ae8213d)
WAITING (#ue417ffd9-a5a7-5f0c-b3d9-353612e074f3)
UPSTAIRS (#u55a5cfe9-7329-5a2d-aa98-799279dc22ec)
DOWNSTAIRS (#u04512789-d7ae-56c7-83e3-1309436789b7)
BUTTERFLY WOOD (#u96b8802c-440b-5313-8d9c-3c908c6ddfd7)
KEEPING DATES (1) (#uc396eb2f-2353-5d3e-b1a8-c283cbac9b2e)
KEEPING DATES (2) (#u2f40ef54-54f9-5be9-be69-3ba6fd9c6748)
ONE YEAR PASSES (#ucce8d8a4-8245-52a6-8902-e03a6922a21d)
TAX BILLS AGAIN (#uc4400226-fab3-5080-8e8c-87ab64cb5fee)
Acknowledgements (#ue3921aea-2680-5455-8dbd-782da799b9d2)
About the Author (#u3c89289a-1d8a-5529-9c3f-cd87a0b49950)
Also by Daisy Waugh (#u3833b44c-de42-5b31-a69b-192b3ab9d296)
Copyright (#uc446b99c-c6ba-5d95-91f3-d48eac8651f1)
About the Publisher (#u2a8cb5c8-d73a-59c6-b1a8-47254afc40ba)
BUSINESS AS USUAL (#ulink_691155a3-eb7b-576b-8f15-df22f80207ca)
The family Haunt moved to France for the same reason as most English people. Three years ago they lived in a tiny terraced house in Brixton, South London. Now they live surrounded by sunflowers, in a long, white cottage with pale blue shutters, and they eat fresh oysters every Sunday for lunch. The cottage, aptly named La Grande Forge, is barely half a mile from the small village of Montmaur, where the Haunt children attend school, and a little more than an hour from the beautiful cosmopolitan city of Bordeaux. It stands alone in the wide, flat landscape, pretty as a fairy tale, twinkling with innocence and promise. It has its own vine-covered terrace, its own small orchard of plum trees, even its own small swimming pool.
La Grande Forge was lavishly converted from several ruined barns into one comfortable modern dwelling by the previous owners, who also happened to be English, and whose dream of living the French idyll turned sour at some point, as so many do, for reasons the Haunts assume to have been financial. The region is chock-a-block with courageous, naive English people going slowly broke. Happily the Haunts are not among them. They’re not rich by any means but they can afford to continue, for the moment at least. What with everything else, money is one thing they don’t much tend to worry about.
Today it is Wednesday. An ordinary, sunny Wednesday in late June at La Grande Forge, southwest France, and Tiffany Haunt and her brother Superman – or Superrrman, as the French insist on calling him – are meant to be at school in Montmaur completing their projects on Napoleon. Mr Horatio Haunt (Père) is meant to be in the garden digging up organic new potatoes for Montmaur’s twice-weekly market, where he sometimes tells friends he has an organic fruit-and-vegetable stall, and Mrs Maude Haunt (Maman) is meant to be doing something delightful with the kitchen Roman blinds, which she’s been constructing from flat-pack entirely without help for the last two and a half years.
But with the Haunt family there is always a Plan B. As there has to be. Organic vegetables, even when combined with the income from a yet-to-be-realised family gîte, are never going to keep shoes on anyone’s feet, least of all the French taxman’s, whose appetite for shoes, and anything else for that matter, is notoriously insatiable. So Plan B has the Haunt family in a low-key, business-as-usual kind of panic. They have things to do, people to see, and they are lagging behind again.
They also have another Plan for later today, once business is completed, to drive to the coast on a quest for pet jellyfish and a good lunch. Maude and Horatio (38
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each, and both meandering inexorably toward their own personal mid-life crises) believe their strangely clever children know more than enough about Napoleon as it is, and since Tiffany (8) and Superman (5) are already bilingual, better at maths, geography, history and poetry than anyone in either of their classes, it seems to the Haunt parents that they would benefit more from catching jellyfish in the sun, followed by a healthy lunch of moules à la crème and profiteroles.
But first Mr and Mrs Haunt have some documents to see to. It’s going to take them at least a couple of hours to perfect them and, as always, it is essential no mistakes are made. The documents need to be FedExed to a Rwandan water engineer hiding out in Nuneaton, England, and they have to reach him by noon tomorrow or he and his wife may have to be sent home to Rwanda, where they will possibly be killed, probably be tortured, and where they most certainly do not want to go.
Important work, then, in a small, small, secret way. Not only that, their neighbour and good friend, former Parisian chef Jean Baptiste Mersaud, now Montmaur’s favourite builder (and, coincidentally, a strapping man; breathtakingly attractive with that torso, and that dark hair curling at the nape of his neck and those green eyes, and that outrageous accent français), has, in desperation, also appealed to them for some small, small, secret help.
The Haunts had never intended to help him, having long ago made it a strict policy to keep the nature of their real work hidden from all neighbours and friends. Apart from which, Maude and Horatio suspect it may be wrong to offer what is, after all, an illegal service to anyone unless they feel them to be in the utmost, deepest and direst need.
But a week ago, last Wednesday evening, when Jean Baptiste came by to fix the kitchen French window he himself had built and installed three years previously, and after he had refused to take payment for it – as he often did – they asked him – as they often did – to stay for supper. Jean Baptiste said yes. He has always liked the Haunts, the air of functional, unsentimental family life which permeates their household. It makes him feel a little less empty, at least for a while. Four years ago, soon after they had moved from Paris back to Montmaur, Jean Baptiste’s girlfriend and their two-year-old child were knocked over and killed by a speeding police car. For a short while the three of them – Jean Baptiste, beautiful Julie, and the curly-haired child – had been a familiar sight in the village square; an outrageously loving threesome; a sight for sore eyes. And now they were gone. He still doesn’t talk about them much. He goes about his business as usual, smiling, even laughing, but their absence seems to drip from him. Nobody can look at Jean Baptiste without seeing the suffering.
In any case, it wasn’t until after Superman and Tiffany had gone to bed, and the bottle of pineau (a local blend of wine and cognac, lethal but popular) was brought forward, that Jean Baptiste, in his usual mixture of broken, effortful English and very eloquent French, mentioned his other, more worldly, troubles. And he only mentioned them because they were on his mind, and it filled the silence which would otherwise have been filled with his own sadness, which – he was acutely aware – always seemed to bring everyone down. It didn’t occur to him that his good friends, the mysteriously unproductive jardiniers anglais, might actually be able to help. But, one way or another, and entirely inadvertently, by the end of the evening he had persuaded Horatio and Maude to think the unthinkable…to do the undoable…to jeopardise their entire international operation for the sake of a few French business receipts.
Jean Baptiste is many things – a talented chef and a fine builder, and a keen student of English – but he is disorganised. He works hard, six days a week, long hours a day, and yet barely, in an expensive country and with all the tithes and charges made on him by a bloated government, manages to make enough money to survive. It’s a dilemma so common as to be almost tradition among self-employed small French commerçants. Like the English migrants who come out to try their luck, they are constantly broke or on the brink of bankruptcy.
Late last Wednesday evening, as the three of them were nearing the end of their bottle of thick and very strong pineau, it became clear that Jean Baptiste was on the brink not only of bankruptcy but of jail. The men from répression de fraude, a.k.a. the tax inspectors, were on to him. They were coming on the following Wednesday to inspect his paperwork, the same Wednesday that this story begins.
‘Mais le problème est,’ he said, shrugging his broad builder’s shoulders, staring philosophically at the empty pineau glass in his brown builder’s hands. They were perched, the three of them, around the large kitchen table; the mended French doors to the terrace pushed wide open, and the soft breeze and the sound of crickets filling the warm evening air. ‘My big problem,’ he continued, ‘it is…que je n’en ai pas.’
‘Tu n’en as pas?’ repeated Maude incredulously. ‘No paperwork at all?’ She frowned at him. He looked green, she thought, beneath the golden brown skin. He looked exhausted. Terrible. ‘Mais dis donc, Jean Baptiste. Qu’est-ce que tu vas faire?’
‘Je ne sais pas,’ he said simply. He shrugged again. He was out of ideas. Out of even trying to have any.
A silence stretched before them. Maude and Horatio glanced at one other, already nervous at what the other might be thinking. They scowled at each other. Shook their heads. Then Horatio stretched across the large kitchen table and carefully refilled Jean Baptiste’s glass.
Jean Baptiste looked at it, slugged it back in one, stood up, bumping his head on the kitchen extractor fan behind him as he did so. ‘En tous cas – I am too boring for tonight,’ he said, rubbing his head. ‘Je m’en vais. C’est la vie, eh?’ He smiled at them both, but it was clear the smile was a strain.
He was on his way out, at the front door and casting a casual, professional eye over a small splinter in the door frame when Maude and Horatio broke. Simultaneously.
‘Jean Baptiste. Wait!’ they cried. Jean Baptiste turned. ‘When did you say he was coming, this répression bastard?’ demanded Horatio. ‘How long have you got?’
‘…Because the thing is,’ said Maude, ‘…C’est possible qu’on peut t’aider, Jean Baptiste…I think we may be able to help.’
Over the weekend, and greatly against their better judgement (if not their better nature), Maude and Horatio knocked up a cargo-load of receipts for Jean Baptiste, and also, while they were at it, various other forms that were missing from his répression-pleasing portfolio. Combined, the Haunts’ illegal paperwork would place Jean Baptiste Mersaud squarely back on the right side of the law. Which place, considering how hard he works and how much the Monsieur from répression gets anyway, is exactly where the Haunts – and Jean Baptiste – believe he belongs.
So. Now the job is almost done. Their work only waits to be delivered. Jean Baptiste has of course been sworn to secrecy; Maude and Horatio have of course refused to accept any payment for their work. And since they are both intelligent, educated people, who believe a moral code is something to be worked out by an individual, not by an avaricious government, or by any government, their major dilemma this morning, as ever in a modern family, is not one of ethics but of time. Tiffany and Superman, the Haunts’ beautiful, matching children – round-eyed, round-faced both, with untidy mops of light brown hair and noses freckled by the sun – are impatient to leave for the beach. They want to have a go at catching the jellyfish before lunch.
However:
it is already ten o’clock.
the best beach for jellyfish is a forty-five-minute drive from the house.
the Rwandans hiding out in Nuneaton need their papers dispatched from the FedEx desk in St Clara, eighteen kilometres away, by noon.
Jean Baptiste Mersaud, who also needs his papers this morning, lives a kilometre or so in the opposite direction.
It seems obvious to most people concerned that, rather than hanging about in their parents’ workplace whining about the delay, Tiffany and Superman should try to help out.
‘Have you finished the stuff for Jean Baptiste?’ Tiffany inquires. ‘Is it all ready for him?’
Mr and Mrs Haunt don’t reply immediately. In fact, though she’s standing directly behind them, and in a very small room with a very low ceiling, they don’t even notice she has spoken. So intense is their concentration they may not even have noticed she’s in the room. They’re upstairs, working side by side at one of IKEA’s cheapest kitchen tables, in the room they call the COOP (Centre of Operations), which was meant to have been the new baby’s bedroom, except Mr and Mrs Haunt haven’t got around to having the new baby. They’re beavering away on their desktops like the pair of computer whizzos they are, utterly deaf to the world.
‘MUUUMMMMMM!’ yells Superman, so loud it gusts the papers off their table. They don’t respond. Absently, they hold the papers down, and continue working. ‘MUUUMMMMMM! TIFFIE ASKED YOU –’
‘Forget it, Superman,’ Tiffany says calmly. ‘This is Jean Baptiste’s stuff, I’m sure of it.’ From the corner of the messy little room, between light box and the new laminating machine, she picks up a wedge of papers with a yellow Post-It on top, labelled ‘J. B. MERSAUD’S STUFF’. She holds it in front of her father so it rubs slightly against the end of his nose.
‘Dad? Is this it?’
‘Yup,’ Horatio says, swatting it away. ‘Thanks, baby. Can you and Superman drop it off? You know where he lives?’
‘Sort of,’ Tiffany says.
‘I know,’ Superman says. ‘But first I need somebody to help with my puncture. Tiffie, will you help me?’
‘He’s on the road to Saujon,’ Horatio explains, blowing a molecule of dust off his 36-bit flat scanner, reaching for an eyeglass, which he thinks has slipped somewhere behind the machine. ‘Head south. It’s a bungalow. Not quite finished. More like a building site. You can’t miss it…Anyway, you’ll know it when you see it, I’m sure.’
At this exchange Maude is lulled from her highly focused work-trance. ‘Heck,’ she exclaims. (Maude always calls Horatio ‘Heck’. No one remembers why.) ‘Heck, for heaven’s sake, we’ve talked about this. I don’t think it’s right or fair or appropriate that our beautiful, innocent children…’ She tails off, unwilling to elucidate for fear of Tiffie understanding more than she ought. She shoots a meaningful scowl at her husband, who isn’t looking. ‘C’mon,’ she says. ‘We’ve talked about this. It’s out of the question. The children cannot be dragged into all this…any more than they are already. It’s wrong.’
‘What’s wrong?’ Horatio asks, all innocence.
‘You know perfectly well.’
‘Nothing’s wrong,’ he says brightly. ‘Anything wrong, Tiff?’
‘Huh? I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ says Tiff, perhaps just a little too quickly. Tiff may be only eight years old, but she’s sharp. She doesn’t miss a thing.
‘Really?’ Maude turns to her. ‘You honestly don’t know why I should object to you delivering this stuff to Jean Baptiste?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Do you have any idea what you’re delivering?’
‘Eh?’ says Tiffie. Maude looks at her carefully. Tiffie shrugs. ‘Stuff he wants, I expect.’ She smiles, as if she’s been struck by a new idea. ‘Maybe it’s stuff he left behind?…Anyway, who cares? Only you said he wanted it before lunch and Superman and me –’
‘Superman and I,’ Maude corrects her automatically.
‘Superman and I want to go to the sea.’
It is a source of constant surprise to Maude that her daughter, so intelligent in so many other ways, should continue to be so trenchantly, wantonly ignorant – and incurious – about the true nature of her parents’ work. What does she think her parents do all day, stuck up here in this tiny room with all this state-of-the-art machinery? Maude smiles at her, half relieved by it, half irritated. ‘Well. But even so. Even if you don’t know –’
‘Tiff and her brother have very kindly offered to deliver some stuff to our friend Jean Baptiste. Which he urgently needs, by the way…’ Gingerly, Horatio lifts a small PVC sheet from beside the laminator and carries it to the light box in the corner of the room. He has his back to his family. ‘I mean, before noon…’ he adds vaguely, lifting the retrieved eyeglass, squinting into it. He clicks his tongue. ‘…S’no bloody good, is it?’ he mutters, more to himself than anyone else. ‘Bugger! Maude? Come and take a look at this. Dyesub’s damn well playing up again. It’s not bonding.’
‘Honestly, Mum,’ says Tiff, watching her mother crossing the room to Horatio, bend over the light box, noticing with familiarity the instantaneous switch in her concentration. ‘…I don’t see what you’re fussing about,’ Tiff continues soothingly. ‘We’re just giving Jean Baptiste some bills or something, aren’t we? Because we want to get some jellyfish. I don’t even know what…I’ve no idea…Mum?…Mum?’
‘Christ!’ mutters Maude. ‘That’s no good, Heck. It’s no good to anyone. Wouldn’t get past the people at bloody Blockbusters. Forget the dye-sub. Don’t you think? Go with the Teslin sealer. Teslin should be fine. Hurry up, though,’ she adds edgily. ‘How much time have we got?’
Horatio turns around while his wife is still tutting over the failed document, signals for Superman and Tiffany to take the package and run. Tiffie winks at him, covers her mouth to stop herself bursting with the excitement of it all. She and Superman carefully, quietly tiptoe over to the open skylight and onto the small, flat, hidden roof beyond.
‘Use the door!’ Maude calls pointlessly after them as they scamper quickly over the roof pretending not to hear her, scramble down the vine at the far end of the building and leap to the garden below. She clicks her tongue. ‘Why can’t they ever use the bloody door?’
It takes the children twenty minutes to mend Superman’s puncture. Tiffany accidentally catches Superman’s little finger between the wheel and the tyre, and Superman thumps her, and then they roll around in the grass for ages, punching and kicking, until one or other remembers the endgame. The jellyfish. They stand up. Dust each other down and get back to work.
Tiffany slides the ‘J. B. MERSAUD’ package into a plastic shopping bag and then slides the shopping bag into the purple rucksack which is meant to be her school satchel. And they set off, pedalling merrily through the lanes, discussing names for pet jellyfish. Wondering if there is a word for jellyfish in Russian. Discussing, in a roundabout way, the etymology of ‘jelly’, and then ‘fish’, wondering if they’ll have to share a plate of frites with their moules today, or if their parents will be generous for once and let them each have a plate of their own.
‘Because it’s not like we actually wouldn’t finish them,’ complains Superman. ‘Sometimes I really hate Mum and Dad. Do you, Tiffie?’
A screech of brakes. (They need oil, Tiffie remembers.) ‘Superman,’ she whispers, ‘Shhh!’
They have turned a bend in the sunny lane. The field of maize that has been obstructing their view has turned now into a stretch of vineyard, and at last the half-built wreck (work stopped the day his family was wiped out by a police car) that is Jean Baptiste Mersaud’s bungalow is upon them. As is the fact that he has a visitor. Jean Baptiste drives a white van and, when he’s not working, a moped. Everyone in the neighbourhood knows that. But this morning, parked neatly between the moped and the white van, is a smart, metallic green Renault. A saloon car.
‘I’ve seen that Renault before,’ whispers Superman. He is crouching close to his bicycle handlebars to evade detection. ‘…It’s that man from our shop. Who hated us. Remember, Tiffie? When he did a stinky old fart and then he just knew we smelt it. That’s why he hated us.’
But Tiffie doesn’t remember. At least she remembers the incident, of course. It had been killingly funny. But she doesn’t remember noticing what car he climbed into after the event. And the problem with being called Superman and only five years old is that people are sometimes not inclined to take your observations seriously. ‘I think you’re wrong, Superman,’ Tiffie whispers back.
‘No I’m not,’ Superman says. ‘It’s definitely him.’
‘Anyway, what are we going to do now? You think we can just go up there and deliver the stuff? Even though he’s got visitors?’
‘Of course we can.’
Tiffie shakes her head. ‘I don’t think so. What if it’s the man from répression?’ In the mid-morning heat, the purple plastic rucksack is beginning to stick to her back. She yanks it off, the better to think, and drops it onto the ground between them. ‘We need some kind of reason to be there.’
Superman sighs, slightly bored suddenly. He looks up at the clear blue sky, notices a falcon hovering above, circling them. ‘Look, Tiffie,’ he laughs. ‘I think he thinks I’m a mouse.’
‘No he doesn’t. Be quiet, Superman. I’ve got to think…What if we say…’ She frowns. ‘What if we say we heard he wanted to learn English so we’ve come to give him some English books?’
‘Very stupid,’ Superman says succinctly. ‘Anyway, I’ll do it.’ And before Tiffany can stop him, he’s picked up the rucksack and is pedalling wildly, past the white van, past the smart Renault saloon, all the way up to the bungalow’s front door. Tiffany screams at him to wait.
It’s just as they’re both reaching for the doorbell, and Tiffany is still screaming and yelling, that Jean Baptiste (strong naked brown torso glistening in the hot summer light: he’s clearly been chopping wood or something equally fortuitous) meanders around from the back of the bungalow to find out the source of all the racket.
‘Ahhh!’ he says, smiling very warmly. ‘C’est Superrrman! Et ta soeur! Bonjour, Tiffany!’ He ruffles their heads affectionately. ‘Alors les enfants…’ He bends down to be level with them, throws a nervous glance over his shoulder, ‘Vous avez quelque chose pour moi?’ He holds his hand out. ‘Allez. Vite! Vite! Sinon, le monsieur –’
Just then the Monsieur, the very same stinky old farter Superman had been identifying moments earlier, appears from the far side of the bungalow. He’s in his early fifties, fat, very small, with rimless half-moon glasses and iron-grey hair, oiled into an astonishingly neat parting. His beaky nose is quivering, or so it appears, with curiosity. He is carrying a clipboard.
A silence falls. The man with oiled hair considers the three of them – guilty faces, all of them, he thinks – rocks on his small, well-shod feet, and scowls. He recognises the children. Les petits Anglais. With the manners of cochons. Bien sûr. Comme tous les petits Anglais.
‘Bonjour Monsieur,’ Superman says, passing the rucksack to his sister and stepping sedately around his own bicycle to shake the stranger’s hand. Behind him, he assumes his sister is handing over the papers. He understands instinctively that he must keep the man occupied for just a couple of seconds, until the transaction is complete. ‘Je ne sais pas si vous vous souvenez, Monsieur, mais je vous ai déjà rencontré il y a quelques jours. Au village. Dans le Co-Op…’ He can’t help grinning, remembering the time they last met. ‘…Je m’appelle Superrrman.’
‘Hmmm,’ says the man, folding his arms over his clipboard. It’s clear that young Superrrman speaks excellent French, and the man feels vaguely patronised by that. He chooses to answer him in English. ‘Unfortunately,’ he replies, noticing Tiffany out of the corner of his eye, wondering what it is about that bundle of papers which makes Jean Baptiste Mersaud grasp for it with such alacrity. ‘I have no memory of this occasion at all. However, I find myself wondering why a young man like yourself isn’t in the classroom this morning?’
‘He’s feeling poorly,’ interrupts Tiffany briskly, before Superman has a chance to respond, or to say anything unhelpful regarding jellyfish. ‘We both are. Very infectious.’ She zips up the empty rucksack with a businesslike flourish. ‘Anyway, we’d better get off. Come on, Superman. I think we should go back to bed before we start spreading our germs to other people. Au revoir, Monsieur. Au revoir,’ she says, nodding to Jean Baptiste.
Jean Baptiste winks at her, and quickly, before the other man can say anything more, she and her little brother are bicycling full pelt back up the lane again.
HOW IT ALL BEGAN (#ulink_74a2c476-9da6-575c-bcb0-cb6fcb503e60)
It all began, this life of crime, while Maude and Horatio were still living in South London. Superman must have been only five or six months old. Mrs Haunt had just returned to work at the vast graphic-design company where she and her husband happened to rediscover each other, and they were celebrating said return – or marking it, anyway – by providing dinner for a bunch of their friends. It was not a good dinner. The Haunts were – still are – strangely disinterested cooks, in spite of all the magnificent French ingredients now surrounding them. Neither of them is particularly bothered about food.
So dinner was finished without much regret, and the Haunt parents and four or five others, most of them new parents themselves, were flopping about at the cramped kitchen table, glugging back wine and discussing the things new parents in South London tend to discuss: local schools, and so on; Tesco’s delivery service. It was all OK, all quite pleasant, because the Haunts, being nice people, had (with a few exceptions) nice friends. But it wasn’t an evening anyone would be likely to remember. Or it wouldn’t have been. Until boisterous, big-breasted Rosie Mottram put her oar in. Rosie had been in the same antenatal class as Maude when Maude was pregnant with Superman, and had somehow inveigled her way into the Haunts’ lives ever since. She lived only three streets away and seemed permanently to be sitting at Maude’s kitchen table. Here she was again. Since giving up joint partnership with her husband, Simon, in their TV production company, to become what she insisted on calling a ‘full-time mum’, Rosie had also proclaimed herself member of some trendy subdivision of a Born Again Christian group. In any case, that evening Rosie decided to perk things up a bit by starting another argument about the Haunt parents’ choice of name for their baby son.
Maude and Horatio were already tired of having to justify it to people. Maude’s mother had actually sobbed when they first told her, and though Horatio’s parents, who were very English, never voiced their objections, they had so far noticeably failed to call their only grandson anything more specific than ‘the baby’.
Rosie squeezed her boisterous bosoms together (always on show, regardless of the weather), making the body glitter shimmer around her canyon cleavage, and she said, because she was a bit drunk, fuelled with low-level dinner-party boredom and a lot of Dutch courage, ‘No but come on,’ (an annoying way to begin) ‘you’re not actually going to christen the poor sod “Superman”, are you? For Christ’s sake! Apart from anything else, no church would allow it.’
‘The church doesn’t need to worry about it,’ muttered Maude. ‘Heck, could you pass me some more wine?’
‘No but seriously, Maude,’ persisted Rosie, like a dog with a bone. ‘I know I’m not his godmother or anything. A-hem. You might say it’s none of my business. But you haven’t gone and put that idiotic name on the birth certificate. Have you? I mean you can’t. It’s just too bloody cruel.’
‘Of course we have,’ snapped Maude. ‘It’s his name, isn’t it?’
Horatio glanced at her, slightly shocked. Actually ‘HUCKLEBERRY’ was the name on Superman’s birth certificate: ‘Huckleberry Dorian Philip Haunt’. But then a few weeks after registering him, Maude and Horatio had agreed HUCKLEBERRY sounded too effete and they had over-compensated, most people agreed, by calling him Superman instead. At any rate he was listed for a place at Tiffany’s nursery school under the name of Superman. Superman Huckleberry Dorian Philip Haunt – and that, to Maude, seemed more than official enough.
‘It’s probably illegal, anyway,’ Rosie said. ‘I bet you’re not allowed to register someone under a silly name like Superman.’
‘Of course you are.’
‘Show me!’ she exclaimed. ‘Go on, show me his birth certificate. You must have it around here somewhere.’
‘Show you?’ repeated Maude. ‘Certainly not.’
‘Why not?…Otherwise, how can I believe you?’
‘Well – you can believe me or not –’ By this stage Maude was beginning to feel quite uncomfortable. She had lied without thinking, just to avoid a drawn-out conversation. It clearly hadn’t worked.
Rosie chortled. ‘I bet he’s actually called Vernon or something…Vernon,’ she said again, very pleased with herself. ‘I bet he’s bloody well registered as Vernon.’
Horatio followed this to and fro with some interest. He noticed his wife’s earlobes were turning red, and also the edges of her nostrils – as they did, he’d come to notice, whenever she felt cornered, or was about to lose her temper. Maude was – is – notorious for her temper.
‘Of course he’s not called Vernon,’ Maude snapped. ‘You’re being incredibly boring, Rosie. I told you. He’s called Superman.’
‘Liar, liar,’ Rosie sing-songed, giggling drunkenly. ‘Pants on fire! You must have his birth certificate in the house somewhere. So show me. Come on! I’m interested. I want to see an official document with the words “SUPERMAN HAUNT” printed on it. It’ll be funny. And I want to see it.’ She banged the table, trying to be amusing but only succeeding in spilling coffee and making everyone jump. ‘I insist on seeing it right now!’
At which point Horatio decided to step in. ‘Wait there,’ he said suddenly, ‘I’ll go and find it.’ He stood up. ‘Maude –’ he turned to his wife. She was staring at him, aghast, and he had to clear his throat to stop himself from laughing. ‘Darling. Can you remember where it is?’
‘N-N-NO! Heck, of course I bloody well can’t.’
‘I’m pretty certain I saw it up in the office. Somewhere. In your desk, or mine. Come and help me find it.’
‘W-well…’
‘Come on,’ he said, smiling that nice, lazy smile. He turned affably to his wife’s friend, keeping his eyes averted from her cleavage, so vast that just looking made him want to gasp for air. ‘Anything to shut you up, Rosie.’
And that’s how it all began. That’s how the seed of an idea was first planted. Because a Born Again Christian called Rosie from the Brixton Antenatal Natural Birth class chose to taunt them one night about their decision to call their son Superman.
Maude and Horatio disappeared from the kitchen for almost half an hour. Giggling like teenagers, they dug out Huckleberry Dorian’s genuine paperwork and copied it, using their joint skills in desktop graphic design, changed the name and printed out a replica – or something similar enough for the drunken party downstairs, none of whom had made a particular study of birth certificates and would have been satisfied with just about anything, so long as the ink was dry.
So. And that was it. Nothing much. They kept the phony birth certificate because it reminded them of a funny time – and also, in truth, because it was surprisingly good and they thought it might come in handy if the conversation regarding Superman’s name were ever repeated. It taught them they were natural counterfeiters, even when drunk. It also taught them what they had both suspected all along:
That these things are possible.
That almost anything is possible, with a little nerve and a little will.
The thing the Haunts lacked, at that stage, was the will.
FINDING THE WILL (#ulink_5a007a73-1478-5e33-b68f-f378210d342a)
In fact, Mr and Mrs Haunt had always had fire inside them. Only the London parking regulations and the birth of their two young children had temporarily dampened the flames. They met, the first time round, sometime in the early 1990s, when they were both aged twenty-one. They met at a Somali refugee camp on the Kenyan-Somali border, where they both briefly happened to be working as volunteers; volunteers whose youthful idealism was already beginning to curdle with experience. They spent a week together near a hot, dry place called Wajir, drinking Tusker beers around desert campfires, smoking Sportsman cigarettes and mulling over the world’s evil ways – and they liked each other very much. Actually, they already loved each other. But Maude had a journalist boyfriend she’d left in Mogadishu, Somalia and, at the time, Horatio was more or less meant to be living with a US Peace Corps girl based in Nanyuki, Kenya. It wasn’t, they agreed, meant to be. Or not then.
But time passed. They returned home, both of them to London, to noisy bars and mortgages and numerous beige-coloured offices with mini dividing walls. They forgot about each other. They forgot about the desert nights and the starry desert sky and all the magic of Africa – until one day, at one of their beige-coloured offices, they bumped into each other again. They were in the same lift. They were on their way to the same seventh floor, and the same afternoon course, called Successful Interfacing with Clients. Seven years had gone by. Long years. They almost cried with happiness.
Marriage quickly followed, and then Tiffany and then Superman and that strangely dreary dinner party with bigbosomed Rosie, the Born Again. Mr and Mrs Haunt continued with their not-very-exciting lives, full of love for each other and their children, but overshadowed by something intangible: boredom, guilt, disappointment, exhaustion. They lived like this, going to work and going back again; rejoicing in Superman’s first tooth, in Tiffany’s never-ending stream of bons mots; occasionally going out and meeting new people but mostly putting the children to bed and falling asleep in front of the telly.
And then the thing happened. Maude Haunt’s thirty-fourth birthday, and Horatio was taking her out to dinner. The minicab driver who came to pick them up bore all the fine-boned features of a man from the Horn of Africa, and because the Haunts already had a bottle of champagne inside them, and the sight of anything or anyone from that part of the world tended to make them nostalgic, they struck up a conversation with him.
At first he wasn’t enthusiastic. He was cagey. But when they told him they’d met each other working at the Somali refugee camp near Wajir in Kenya, he seemed more interested. They told him Maude had been working on a health project in Mogadishu and he seemed more interested still. That was when he turned around to take a better look at his passengers without even stopping the car.
War-torn, lawless Mogadishu was his own hometown, he told them. They learnt that he’d been a doctor there and that he too had worked for a while at the refugee camps. His wife had been a midwife at Mogadishu’s only maternity unit, delivering babies while gun battles raged outside. Until the day the hospital itself was attacked. She was raped, battered, left for dead. When she didn’t die she and her husband decided, finally, to follow the exodus, and so they took their surviving three children and fled, arriving in Britain without papers, unable to prove who they were or what they did. Asylum was refused. Appeal refused on a technicality. The doctor, his wife and three children had been in hiding, without identity, ever since.
A horrible story. Another horrible story. Awful. Terrible. Unimaginable. Sometimes we forget how lucky we are. We do. But anyway. It’s second on the left. After the traffic lights…Except on this occasion Maude happened to know the hospital. She knew the midwife.
A small world. That’s what changed everything.
It cast a pall over the birthday celebrations. Horatio had booked a table at a restaurant in Soho with a Michelin star. It was cripplingly expensive, and neither he nor Maude would have fully appreciated it even at the best of times, but he loved her. He wanted her to feel spoilt. They sat facing each other over the crisp white linen tablecloth, and chewed on their food without tasting it. The minicab driver and his wife had reminded the Haunts of a world they had allowed themselves to forget. It reminded them of their past, of how they used to be, how much they used to care about these things. Anyway, they didn’t bother with pudding.
And then, back at home, when they both assumed the other was in the bathroom brushing teeth, or downstairs locking robbers out, they bumped into each other in the loft; both, so it happened, in search of the same thing. By the time Horatio appeared Maude already had it in her hands.
CERTIFICATE OF BIRTH
‘Ahhh,’ said Horatio contentedly. ‘Great minds…’
‘Exactly,’ Maude replied. ‘Don’t you think we can help?’
‘If they’ll allow us.’
‘They’ve got nothing to lose.’
‘No. Not really. But he seemed like a nice guy. I mean, honest. Didn’t he? He might feel bad. Wrong, I mean. Getting involved in fraud.’
‘We could give them new identities,’ she said. ‘A chance for a fresh start.’
He took the certificate from her, held it up to the light.
‘…Just a couple of pieces of paper,’ he muttered. ‘It’s not much, is it?’
‘You kept their telephone number, didn’t you?’
He smiled. ‘Of course I did.’
FINDING THE WAY (#ulink_9526a419-1b1b-5a1b-9326-b09c951d6adc)
It was surprisingly easy. Maude and Horatio searched the Internet.
They found books for sale on Amazon with titles like DIY Documents and How to Make a Passport on your Home Computer. They even found a training course: ‘WANT A NEW IDENTITY? CLICK HERE!’ After that, they upgraded their computers and their printers, exchanged their sheet-fed scanner for a flatbed, downloaded the necessary computer programmes, mostly illegally, and set to work. Every evening for about a month, after putting the children to bed, they climbed up to the office in the loft and honed their skills.
The copies they made, after numerous false starts, were good. Five British passports; five birth certificates; two new National Insurance cards. The minicab driver, Doctor Ahmed Hussein Mohammed Islam, and his wife Fawzia might never quite work as medical professionals inside Europe – the documents couldn’t help them do that. But at least they could work. At least they could be allowed to exist again.
In fact they did more than exist. The doctor started his own driving school, which has grown steadily ever since. His instructors’ cars, with their distinctive logos (incidentally designed by the Haunts), are hard to miss around London nowadays, and he’s considering opening another school in Manchester. Meanwhile his wife volunteered as an unpaid ‘Listener’ for a large private charity, offering tea, soup, ping pong and advice to asylum seekers from all over the world.
A happy ending. Or beginning. These days, of course, the Haunt counterfeiting rescue system is much more streamlined. They act less on conversations with random minicab drivers, more on specific, well-planned and highly secretive commissions from Fawzia, the wife. Fawzia, as a Listener, hears hundreds of immigrants’ tales every day; many of them truly tragic, some less so, some very obviously made-up. She only refers the most desperate, hopeless, unjust cases to Maude and Horatio. And even then, occasionally – very occasionally – Maude and Horatio will hear a person’s story and decline to help. It’s a small, compassionate and, on the whole, an efficient operation. Even Fawzia’s bosses at the charity have no idea what goes on.
Maude and Horatio, it’s important to realise, are not political people. They simply understand that whatever bureaucratic system for immigration is in place – be it too harsh or not harsh enough, or corrupt or simply incompetent – there will always be individuals in genuine, desperate need of help. Help which, for the time being at least, Maude and Horatio are willing and able to provide.
The Haunts refused to accept payment for that first good deed – and they still do, for similar assignments. But often, when the people they’ve helped are back on their feet, they send them money anyway. Sometimes quite a lot of it. Fawzia’s husband sent them £100,000 two years ago. They opened a numbered bank account in the Cayman Islands where they now have a back-up Family Fund, which grows in ungainly fits and starts, and which has recently topped £130,000. Much less than the value of a terraced house in Brixton, or a long, white cottage with a swimming pool in southwest France, but enough, at least, to start again, should the need arise. The Haunt parents understand the nature of their work means that one day they and their children will probably have to disappear themselves. Drop everything and go. But they have the money saved. They have alternative IDs ready and waiting. Actually, they have several of them.
CATCHING JELLYFISH (#ulink_eae3961d-7a72-5e2d-8f01-6cadf51d4ae1)
Late last summer on the beach at St Palais-sur-Mer, Superman and Tiffany were tipping plastic buckets of seawater into a rubber dingy, when Tiffany suddenly let rip with a horrible scream. Swirling around inside the dingy was a live jellyfish: they must have scooped it up by mistake.
‘Do you think we should warn people?’ Tiffany said, staring at it. ‘There must be hundreds of jellyfish out there. People are going to get stung.’
‘How do you know?’ asked Superman, taking his plastic spade and giving the jellyfish a whack.
‘Stop it!’ Tiffany yelled at him. ‘You’ll hurt her.’
He did it again.
At which point a monumental fight ensued, ending when both children somehow got sand in their eyes and Maude, fed up with all the noise, scooped the jellyfish into a bucket and released it back out to sea.
The children have never forgiven her for it. They had, they said, grown to love that jellyfish, and nothing, except possibly another one, would ever fill the void. Hence the outing today. It has taken the Haunt parents almost nine months to get around to it.
The beach at St Palais-sur-Mer is more or less empty, in spite of it being such a lovely day. But the task they have set themselves turns out to be more difficult than they had all imagined. Live jellyfish don’t often float into children’s plastic buckets, it turns out. They don’t even seem to float nearby.
‘You should never have let that one go, Mum,’ says Superman, scowling at her. He’s said it about once a minute ever since the outing began. After an hour of fruitless searching the Haunts are beginning to feel hot and hungry, and though Tiffany is being surprisingly stoical, Superman is close to tears. ‘You should never have let that one go, Mum,’ he says once again. ‘How could you do it?’
‘I’m sorry, darling,’ Maude says automatically. ‘Right, then. Who feels like some lunch?’
‘That poor jellyfish probably really wanted to come home with us,’ moans Superman. ‘And now he’s out there, floating about. He’s probably still looking for us.’ At the thought of that – of his jellyfish, lost and lonely, floating about – Superman’s eyes once again begin to fill with tears.
‘Look out, Dad!’ screams Tiffany suddenly, pointing at something just in front of Horatio’s foot.
There on the sand lies the largest jellyfish any Haunt has ever before set eyes on. It’s the size of a serving plate, with the contents of its stomach quite visible through its transparent skin, and around it a very distinct aura of death. Horatio gives the jellyfish a nudge with his trainer. Nothing. No movement at all.
‘It’s dead,’ Horatio announces.
Superman whimpers first, then he fills his lungs and lets out an almighty wail. ‘You killed it!’ he cries. ‘You killed it! How could you do that? HOW COULD YOU DO THAT TO HIM?’
EATING MOULES (#ulink_8ee45daf-7756-5e57-a4d7-975e96b90efa)
Superman says he can’t eat moules today because it will remind him of all the lonely and dead jellyfish he has learned to love on the beach at St Palais. He and Tiffany insist on a full portion of frites each to make up for the disappointment, and after that, once their orders are placed and they’re all feeling a little more settled, and they’re at their favourite table overlooking the beach and the sea breeze is drifting through the restaurant’s large, open windows, and the children have their Orangina and the adults their carafe of deliciously cool, pink wine, Tiffany mentions, quite casually, that when she and Superman dropped off Jean Baptiste’s papers this morning, he was accompanied by a strange man. With a clipboard.
‘He was?’ says Maude airily, still very much in Paradise zone. ‘Seriously, because poor Jean Baptiste. He’s so often alone. I’m just happy he’s got people calling…Ooh. Hot gossip everyone,’ she adds, suddenly perking up. There is a hint of pride in her voice, ‘hot gossip’ being one of the things the Haunt adults tend to miss out on in their new French life. The nature of their work – and their natural preference for a quiet and private life – means the Haunt parents don’t socialise much, not with the local English nor even the French. What little gossip that does reach them usually comes, somewhat garbled, via the children, whose merry, independent social lives (pedal-powered, mostly) are unrelenting, and a marked contrast to that of their parents. ‘Madame Martinet in the boulangerie told me an English woman put in a bid for the Hotel Marronnier. At last! And she’s quite glamorous, apparently. Maybe Jean Baptiste could tear himself away from Mr Clipboard and fall in love with her…Be nice, though, wouldn’t it? Little bit of interracial love-making, to help the European Project along…’
The rundown Hotel Marronnier in Montmaur is the only hotel or bar in the Haunts’ local village. It is picturesque – absurdly so – with a little stone terrace shaded by lime trees at the front, and a view looking out over the square and the tiny Norman church opposite. The place has been up for sale since long before the Haunts arrived in the area. Because, though numerous buyers have sniffed around it (most, if not all of them, English), the initial elation at its storybook prettiness fades immediately, after even the most feeble of rosy-coloured investigations into its books. It needs money spending on it, and it’s been running at a loss for years.
‘…Don’t you think, Heck?’ Maude asks him. ‘Or perhaps it’s still too soon for Jean Baptiste to find someone new…’
But Horatio isn’t listening. He’s more concerned about the man with the clipboard. ‘Tiffany,’ he says slightly irritably, ‘why didn’t you mention it before?’
‘Don’t worry, Dad. It was only the stupid old pétard,’ Superman says carelessly. ‘I told Tiffie not to worry but she can be quite silly sometimes. Also, Tiffie, I’m pretty sure he did another stinker while we were talking to him. Did you notice?’
‘No, he didn’t,’ Tiffie says.
‘Did he know who you both were?’ asks Horatio, keen to stick to the point.
‘Superman told him, but I think he knew already. In fact Superman was brilliant.’
‘I WAS NOT!’
She ignores him. ‘Superman distracted him while I handed over the papers. So he probably didn’t even notice.’
Maude wrenches her mind from enjoyable images of Jean Baptiste helping along the European Project. She too, finally, has sniffed danger. She and Horatio glance at each other nervously. ‘…What did he look like, Tiffie?’ Maude asks.
‘Very, very handsome,’ replies Superman, randomly.
‘Well – he wasn’t exactly handsome,’ Tiffany disagrees. ‘If you don’t mind me saying, Superman. He was sort of fat. He had a sort of wobbly fat face and a lot of sweat in the crinkles under his chin. And he had greasy hair sort of stuck over his head and he also had these weird teeny-tiny feet.’ She chortles. ‘I thought he probably spent all the time falling over.’
‘Age?’ asks Horatio.
‘Old. Kind of like Granny.’
Maude and Horatio consider these new details carefully. ‘Hm,’ Horatio says. ‘And you say he looked like he was there on business? But you think he didn’t notice you handing over the papers?’
‘Of course not,’ Superman and Tiffany say at once.
The family fall silent while the waiter delivers their moules frites, putting the third bowl – since Superman had insisted he wanted frites and frites alone – directly in front of Tiffany.
‘That’s really unfair,’ Superman moans, eyeing her bowl. ‘Actually, can I have a pizza?’
‘Et un pizza, s’il vous plaît,’ Maude says briskly, before Horatio has time to make a fuss.
‘Honestly Maude,’ Horatio frowns. ‘Would you give him a line of cocaine if he happened to ask for it?’
Maude doesn’t bother to reply. She watches while the waiter leaves, takes the usual care not to speak until he’s out of earshot. ‘What do you mean, Superman, the pétard?‘
‘The farter.’
‘I know what it means. I mean why do you call him “the pétard”? Have you seen him before?’
‘Of course we have! You remember! In the shop.’
‘Ah!’ says Horatio, light dawning, wiping cream sauce from his chin. ‘I know who he’s talking about. The farter! In the shop! Monsieur – Monsieur – What’s his name? Superman’s quite right. We bumped into him in the Co-op. And the children couldn’t stop laughing…You must remember, Maude!…Monsieur Bertinard!’ he says triumphantly. ‘Voilà! Olivier Bertinard.’
‘Ohhhh!’ Light dawns for Maude, too. ‘Him!’ She grimaces. ‘Gosh, he’s an awful man. But he’s not répression. Thank God. He lives in that wonderful house opposite Hotel Marronnier. We wanted to buy it, do you remember? Except it wasn’t for sale.’
‘That’s the one,’ Horatio nods. ‘He’s just retired so he’s got nothing to keep him from poking his nose where it doesn’t belong. And no, he’s not from répression,’ Horatio adds, slurping another moule into his mouth, ‘but he is about to take over from François Bourse next week. When the village elects its new mayor…’
‘I do wish François could be persuaded to stay,’ Maude sighs, and Horatio shoots her a look.
‘I’m sure you do.’
‘For God’s sake, Heck. He’s at least fifteen years older than I am.’
‘…So I’m assuming’, Horatio continues evenly, ‘that Monsieur Bertinard was out canvassing.’ He glances at Tiffany. ‘Sucking up to people,’ he explains. ‘To make sure they vote for him on Tuesday, or whenever the election is.’
‘Well he wasn’t sucking up to us,’ Tiffany says. ‘He hated us.’
‘That’s probably because you can’t vote, my angel. Any more than we can…’ It is one of many small costs of living life as an outlaw and an outsider; one of the few that might annoy him and Maude if they allowed it to. He scowls suddenly. ‘What d’you think, Tiff?’ he asks her abruptly. ‘Do you think he was suspicious?’
Under the table Maude delivers a not-very-gentle kick.
‘Ouch! Bloody hell, Maudie –’
‘Suspicious of what, Heck? Nobody’s done anything wrong!’
‘Oh, no. No, of course not,’ Horatio says. ‘Of course not. Absolutely right. So…’ A short silence falls, and a moment of gloom in Paradise, possibly even of a little fear for Maude and Horatio. There is so much at stake – not just for the people they help but for themselves and their children. There’s barely a day that passes when they don’t re-evaluate what they do. Barely a day. Sometimes they both decide they’ll give it all up, open a bed and breakfast for real, like the other expats, or start that organic vegetable stall they’ve been talking about for so long. Sometimes it seems so straightforward; so incredibly tempting. But then along comes another e-mail from Fawzia, another tale of misery, torture, terror, of someone’s existence hanging by a thread…and Maude and Horatio find that they simply cannot turn away…
‘You know the new English girl?’ Superman demands suddenly, breaking through the silence, surprising everyone, once again, by how much he takes in: ‘I mean the one who’s buying the hotel?’
‘Who might be buying the Marronnier?’ asks Maude.
‘That one,’ he agrees. ‘Elle a les cheveux d’une sirène.’
Maude smiles, ruffles his small head. She loves the way her children are so at home in the French world around them; the way they flip from one language to the other. It makes her proud. She wishes she could do it so effortlessly. ‘Hair like a mermaid, Superman? How lovely!’
Superman nods. ‘Like this,’ he says, indicating a cropped bob. ‘Lovely and yellow. Anyway, that’s what my girlfriend said.’
It’s while they’re driving back to the cottage after lunch, the children asleep on the back seat and Maude wriggling inside her white linen skirt, trying to make room for all the children’s profiteroles she ate, that she suddenly remembers another piece of news, one which she’d unconsciously put to the back of her mind for almost a week now. Horatio is not going to be happy about it, and she doesn’t really blame him. She’s not happy either.
‘Oh Heck, I forgot to mention,’ she begins, as if it were quite trivial. ‘Not brilliant news, I’m afraid. But the children will be pleased…Which, you know – before you go mad, just, please, bear in mind…And I mean, at some point we were going to have to make the house properly visitor-proof. With the children’s friends getting older. Plus there are so many people who, really, I don’t think we can put off having to stay any longer. So –’
‘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.’
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Daisy Waugh
Introducing the perfect Summer read for 2006. Bordeaux Housewives is a romantic comedy combining a heady mix of sunshine, sex, Sancerre and secrets.When an ordinary English family swap dreary suburbia and the rat race for the glorious countryside of France they have no idea just how much their lives are going to change.For in addition to the culture shock, they have been selected to appear in a reality TV show about their Good Life lifestyle. But they also have a secret life which they need to hide from the cameras…Meanwhile, at the local bar, another expat is finding that local attractions amount to more than wine, cheese and sunflowers…
Bordeaux Housewives
Daisy Waugh
Zuberzonic Zebedee
Maths Genius, Life Enhancer and Very Good on Penguins
This one’s for you XXX
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#u0adcaef4-38e9-5106-8c3a-03732cdd4ebd)
Title Page (#ua8e501ee-6e69-5870-8bd9-99dc80da10f8)
Dedication (#u35951eb8-ca77-5913-ade4-abc2607302f6)
BUSINESS AS USUAL (#u37417de9-2dbb-5645-a753-b489ece6c8ed)
HOW IT ALL BEGAN (#u5f283a22-eab1-57a9-ba92-94197fe1725e)
FINDING THE WILL (#u08666177-306b-5bbb-9877-46d6cd0a65a2)
FINDING THE WAY (#u98742459-923f-5b23-abfe-1452e357a081)
CATCHING JELLYFISH (#uf5fc6244-e056-52fb-9eee-91974de9572a)
EATING MOULES (#u21326b45-2ba6-5119-96fd-79ddff3deb3b)
FROM DAWN TO DAFFY (#u9d002090-ef60-53b9-b8f8-9e42d8a30b48)
DAFFY’S LITTLE PROJECT (#u0feaec1e-f90b-58f7-aaac-1df9e376684b)
FEELING THE FEAR AND DOING IT ANYWAY (#u40ebe484-065f-552e-a63d-ff26200ad7a6)
VERTICALLY CHALLENGED ERITREANS (#u46cc969c-800e-5f53-88ca-345c01aa13ff)
BABYSITTERS (#u56be823b-117d-5783-83b9-d3d867abd1ac)
HORATIO, LADY EMMA AND THE ALMOST-KISS (#u7502feab-baf7-5fd6-b4ee-7f4af0c1bc0b)
LOBSTER WITH MAYONNAISE (#ua920303f-09a3-53f6-b95b-85e670db2178)
COFFEE AND PETITS FOURS (#uc2beefb3-a398-5ed2-b57f-dd63fe61b211)
A LAST BREAKFAST (#u283d3bbb-61d2-54fe-9c95-9aaaa2532ca7)
TWO STRAY CATS (#u38d31ca2-ad24-535f-b3e2-8c1e0f798224)
HOW MANY BEANS MAKE FIVE? (#u61dd72bd-2f7c-5c7e-9fd5-82007837abb0)
DAY FOUR (#u696adac3-0af7-5aaa-b8ea-f882f9842494)
FINAL DAY (#u0d9acf98-03a4-5eb6-bee8-fe479205707a)
PERMISSION TO SHOOT (#uf9b656e9-a19f-5aa5-bc44-9ab3cd9a1a33)
ENTENTE CORDIALE (#ub67fc599-2e9e-5131-9a6a-7b619aa161f2)
DAFFY’S LIST (#u673a2db5-8b24-5a71-9860-275abdd38bb5)
ELECTRICITY (#u136aeeac-487a-568d-8422-f1a7edb5b824)
EMMA RANKIN’S RECOMMENDATION (#u2a377de2-6e21-5d61-964b-29001683fea4)
VERY OLD FRIENDS (#u5700ce85-ab35-51a1-8c31-b7647655a583)
SMUTTIE FORMS A PLAN (#ua26ff93e-5360-5a51-b97f-98078b6c2a14)
SKID START (#u59940279-1396-558a-a99d-54716f029a9b)
MURRAY, LEN AND THE SONY PD150 (#u8daff901-a5c3-5f93-b84d-623a90398dbc)
TEAMWORK (#u15d37b03-e157-5108-8aaa-9680e0bc0201)
SCREEN-TEST (#u1d810958-0034-5919-9779-110484db3a2a)
MAKING A PITCH (#uad32bd59-b18e-5e5f-b35b-5525dd5ea5b5)
FRENCH LESSONS (#u5811fc3c-9d15-5b92-967f-b2db081e635d)
GRAND OPENING (#u4f34e82f-966a-5ae1-b84b-45bf3b4b58bd)
COURT SUMMONS (#u5d3a5c44-6a7d-580e-828e-be2ce5c22340)
RURAL BLISS (#u0b1d21f9-1f2a-5bd2-92f8-2c3ea6876d79)
MONEY, SEX AND MORE BABIES (#uf9167c9f-ffb4-530f-9c83-bd92e9b05847)
INVESTMENT MONITORING (#ua52257bf-cec0-595c-9062-4fbf9d7af979)
TREATS (#u1a41e5b5-bafa-575d-8018-cff7d074774e)
OLD MAID (#u8ca4f998-6d21-5f33-8752-ca75d0300ac7)
KITCHEN FURNITURE (#u16092ce8-0a26-5b8a-9375-ec0531fdb630)
DIFFERENT KINDS OF FRIENDSHIP (#u1bf4ff3f-dbb1-561d-abbd-a7b2841a973a)
TOWN SHOES (#uf7c4f38c-a766-5776-ac8f-5739e3b2360a)
PENELOPE WHATNOT (#uf272d356-4d27-5a45-8498-593a8ffb7aea)
FIFTEEN MINUTES (#u7eeaa8f6-c176-55d3-84fb-cd84f85aa758)
PARTY PLANNING (#udb373d11-3422-5d78-96d5-f9820250889c)
GETTING DRUNK (#udc4c6376-3a2d-5a28-abe8-770fd4f24436)
SKIDDING AROUND (#u6b94ad9d-c48e-5bb0-b5de-98a85b5b7a06)
STRAWBERRY TARTLETS AND OTHER PLEASURES (#u51406168-6c21-5239-a05c-f34c48d92bcf)
TIMING (#ufc7003f1-286c-5e21-87fa-bb7db14a4499)
HOLD UPS (#ub79fef32-d8d9-5166-8ed8-93306ef8a742)
TRAVELLING ALONE (#u36490efa-7411-510a-af99-53cccac0fc3f)
MORNING HAS BROKEN (#u0ac683f2-8115-5e6e-9811-68091e298626)
MAX FACTOR (#ub426c57b-fda1-51bf-9e54-e3c1327d2899)
A LITTLE LIST (#u2d6c369d-b20f-59ed-a93b-4950dd5f7ea3)
UNDER THE YEW TREE (#u9f287f8c-12f2-587a-a32e-2f648324e560)
LONG DRIVE HOME (#u619a9003-a367-5d4b-8782-3db9364eeafe)
NAKED TORSOS (#u6ddb3bf0-0ed3-5f0e-b212-3e5e537b7ce2)
WHEN THE KISSING HAD TO STOP (#uda927aeb-257f-52d5-adfe-acff0c2e22e6)
KEEPING A TAB (#u405ebdd2-64aa-53b8-9d63-97deda1b9eb5)
BONNE NUIT (#u8fc29797-2988-5b5a-b1a1-45d7c04b1c41)
SUNDAY MORNING (#u6767543f-8437-561f-9e30-e513085d02cb)
SKID STIRRING (#u79c250d3-8ecb-59ad-8cc3-610823c1303f)
TEAMWORK (#u2aa06b41-e2f8-507b-8fcc-38599a0b5d98)
MONEY TO BE MADE (#u30613394-3819-5b14-8c75-515681129508)
MESSAGE BREAKDOWN (#uef4e6b77-03ba-59d0-bb69-be777d8d865d)
KIDS ALONE IN KITCHENS AND ALL THAT (#u73dcf94a-f5e9-5dac-932a-f3bf0a6a1f65)
MAKING PANCAKES (#uee52b95c-9b91-5e45-bf27-6efd3ae8213d)
WAITING (#ue417ffd9-a5a7-5f0c-b3d9-353612e074f3)
UPSTAIRS (#u55a5cfe9-7329-5a2d-aa98-799279dc22ec)
DOWNSTAIRS (#u04512789-d7ae-56c7-83e3-1309436789b7)
BUTTERFLY WOOD (#u96b8802c-440b-5313-8d9c-3c908c6ddfd7)
KEEPING DATES (1) (#uc396eb2f-2353-5d3e-b1a8-c283cbac9b2e)
KEEPING DATES (2) (#u2f40ef54-54f9-5be9-be69-3ba6fd9c6748)
ONE YEAR PASSES (#ucce8d8a4-8245-52a6-8902-e03a6922a21d)
TAX BILLS AGAIN (#uc4400226-fab3-5080-8e8c-87ab64cb5fee)
Acknowledgements (#ue3921aea-2680-5455-8dbd-782da799b9d2)
About the Author (#u3c89289a-1d8a-5529-9c3f-cd87a0b49950)
Also by Daisy Waugh (#u3833b44c-de42-5b31-a69b-192b3ab9d296)
Copyright (#uc446b99c-c6ba-5d95-91f3-d48eac8651f1)
About the Publisher (#u2a8cb5c8-d73a-59c6-b1a8-47254afc40ba)
BUSINESS AS USUAL (#ulink_691155a3-eb7b-576b-8f15-df22f80207ca)
The family Haunt moved to France for the same reason as most English people. Three years ago they lived in a tiny terraced house in Brixton, South London. Now they live surrounded by sunflowers, in a long, white cottage with pale blue shutters, and they eat fresh oysters every Sunday for lunch. The cottage, aptly named La Grande Forge, is barely half a mile from the small village of Montmaur, where the Haunt children attend school, and a little more than an hour from the beautiful cosmopolitan city of Bordeaux. It stands alone in the wide, flat landscape, pretty as a fairy tale, twinkling with innocence and promise. It has its own vine-covered terrace, its own small orchard of plum trees, even its own small swimming pool.
La Grande Forge was lavishly converted from several ruined barns into one comfortable modern dwelling by the previous owners, who also happened to be English, and whose dream of living the French idyll turned sour at some point, as so many do, for reasons the Haunts assume to have been financial. The region is chock-a-block with courageous, naive English people going slowly broke. Happily the Haunts are not among them. They’re not rich by any means but they can afford to continue, for the moment at least. What with everything else, money is one thing they don’t much tend to worry about.
Today it is Wednesday. An ordinary, sunny Wednesday in late June at La Grande Forge, southwest France, and Tiffany Haunt and her brother Superman – or Superrrman, as the French insist on calling him – are meant to be at school in Montmaur completing their projects on Napoleon. Mr Horatio Haunt (Père) is meant to be in the garden digging up organic new potatoes for Montmaur’s twice-weekly market, where he sometimes tells friends he has an organic fruit-and-vegetable stall, and Mrs Maude Haunt (Maman) is meant to be doing something delightful with the kitchen Roman blinds, which she’s been constructing from flat-pack entirely without help for the last two and a half years.
But with the Haunt family there is always a Plan B. As there has to be. Organic vegetables, even when combined with the income from a yet-to-be-realised family gîte, are never going to keep shoes on anyone’s feet, least of all the French taxman’s, whose appetite for shoes, and anything else for that matter, is notoriously insatiable. So Plan B has the Haunt family in a low-key, business-as-usual kind of panic. They have things to do, people to see, and they are lagging behind again.
They also have another Plan for later today, once business is completed, to drive to the coast on a quest for pet jellyfish and a good lunch. Maude and Horatio (38
/
each, and both meandering inexorably toward their own personal mid-life crises) believe their strangely clever children know more than enough about Napoleon as it is, and since Tiffany (8) and Superman (5) are already bilingual, better at maths, geography, history and poetry than anyone in either of their classes, it seems to the Haunt parents that they would benefit more from catching jellyfish in the sun, followed by a healthy lunch of moules à la crème and profiteroles.
But first Mr and Mrs Haunt have some documents to see to. It’s going to take them at least a couple of hours to perfect them and, as always, it is essential no mistakes are made. The documents need to be FedExed to a Rwandan water engineer hiding out in Nuneaton, England, and they have to reach him by noon tomorrow or he and his wife may have to be sent home to Rwanda, where they will possibly be killed, probably be tortured, and where they most certainly do not want to go.
Important work, then, in a small, small, secret way. Not only that, their neighbour and good friend, former Parisian chef Jean Baptiste Mersaud, now Montmaur’s favourite builder (and, coincidentally, a strapping man; breathtakingly attractive with that torso, and that dark hair curling at the nape of his neck and those green eyes, and that outrageous accent français), has, in desperation, also appealed to them for some small, small, secret help.
The Haunts had never intended to help him, having long ago made it a strict policy to keep the nature of their real work hidden from all neighbours and friends. Apart from which, Maude and Horatio suspect it may be wrong to offer what is, after all, an illegal service to anyone unless they feel them to be in the utmost, deepest and direst need.
But a week ago, last Wednesday evening, when Jean Baptiste came by to fix the kitchen French window he himself had built and installed three years previously, and after he had refused to take payment for it – as he often did – they asked him – as they often did – to stay for supper. Jean Baptiste said yes. He has always liked the Haunts, the air of functional, unsentimental family life which permeates their household. It makes him feel a little less empty, at least for a while. Four years ago, soon after they had moved from Paris back to Montmaur, Jean Baptiste’s girlfriend and their two-year-old child were knocked over and killed by a speeding police car. For a short while the three of them – Jean Baptiste, beautiful Julie, and the curly-haired child – had been a familiar sight in the village square; an outrageously loving threesome; a sight for sore eyes. And now they were gone. He still doesn’t talk about them much. He goes about his business as usual, smiling, even laughing, but their absence seems to drip from him. Nobody can look at Jean Baptiste without seeing the suffering.
In any case, it wasn’t until after Superman and Tiffany had gone to bed, and the bottle of pineau (a local blend of wine and cognac, lethal but popular) was brought forward, that Jean Baptiste, in his usual mixture of broken, effortful English and very eloquent French, mentioned his other, more worldly, troubles. And he only mentioned them because they were on his mind, and it filled the silence which would otherwise have been filled with his own sadness, which – he was acutely aware – always seemed to bring everyone down. It didn’t occur to him that his good friends, the mysteriously unproductive jardiniers anglais, might actually be able to help. But, one way or another, and entirely inadvertently, by the end of the evening he had persuaded Horatio and Maude to think the unthinkable…to do the undoable…to jeopardise their entire international operation for the sake of a few French business receipts.
Jean Baptiste is many things – a talented chef and a fine builder, and a keen student of English – but he is disorganised. He works hard, six days a week, long hours a day, and yet barely, in an expensive country and with all the tithes and charges made on him by a bloated government, manages to make enough money to survive. It’s a dilemma so common as to be almost tradition among self-employed small French commerçants. Like the English migrants who come out to try their luck, they are constantly broke or on the brink of bankruptcy.
Late last Wednesday evening, as the three of them were nearing the end of their bottle of thick and very strong pineau, it became clear that Jean Baptiste was on the brink not only of bankruptcy but of jail. The men from répression de fraude, a.k.a. the tax inspectors, were on to him. They were coming on the following Wednesday to inspect his paperwork, the same Wednesday that this story begins.
‘Mais le problème est,’ he said, shrugging his broad builder’s shoulders, staring philosophically at the empty pineau glass in his brown builder’s hands. They were perched, the three of them, around the large kitchen table; the mended French doors to the terrace pushed wide open, and the soft breeze and the sound of crickets filling the warm evening air. ‘My big problem,’ he continued, ‘it is…que je n’en ai pas.’
‘Tu n’en as pas?’ repeated Maude incredulously. ‘No paperwork at all?’ She frowned at him. He looked green, she thought, beneath the golden brown skin. He looked exhausted. Terrible. ‘Mais dis donc, Jean Baptiste. Qu’est-ce que tu vas faire?’
‘Je ne sais pas,’ he said simply. He shrugged again. He was out of ideas. Out of even trying to have any.
A silence stretched before them. Maude and Horatio glanced at one other, already nervous at what the other might be thinking. They scowled at each other. Shook their heads. Then Horatio stretched across the large kitchen table and carefully refilled Jean Baptiste’s glass.
Jean Baptiste looked at it, slugged it back in one, stood up, bumping his head on the kitchen extractor fan behind him as he did so. ‘En tous cas – I am too boring for tonight,’ he said, rubbing his head. ‘Je m’en vais. C’est la vie, eh?’ He smiled at them both, but it was clear the smile was a strain.
He was on his way out, at the front door and casting a casual, professional eye over a small splinter in the door frame when Maude and Horatio broke. Simultaneously.
‘Jean Baptiste. Wait!’ they cried. Jean Baptiste turned. ‘When did you say he was coming, this répression bastard?’ demanded Horatio. ‘How long have you got?’
‘…Because the thing is,’ said Maude, ‘…C’est possible qu’on peut t’aider, Jean Baptiste…I think we may be able to help.’
Over the weekend, and greatly against their better judgement (if not their better nature), Maude and Horatio knocked up a cargo-load of receipts for Jean Baptiste, and also, while they were at it, various other forms that were missing from his répression-pleasing portfolio. Combined, the Haunts’ illegal paperwork would place Jean Baptiste Mersaud squarely back on the right side of the law. Which place, considering how hard he works and how much the Monsieur from répression gets anyway, is exactly where the Haunts – and Jean Baptiste – believe he belongs.
So. Now the job is almost done. Their work only waits to be delivered. Jean Baptiste has of course been sworn to secrecy; Maude and Horatio have of course refused to accept any payment for their work. And since they are both intelligent, educated people, who believe a moral code is something to be worked out by an individual, not by an avaricious government, or by any government, their major dilemma this morning, as ever in a modern family, is not one of ethics but of time. Tiffany and Superman, the Haunts’ beautiful, matching children – round-eyed, round-faced both, with untidy mops of light brown hair and noses freckled by the sun – are impatient to leave for the beach. They want to have a go at catching the jellyfish before lunch.
However:
it is already ten o’clock.
the best beach for jellyfish is a forty-five-minute drive from the house.
the Rwandans hiding out in Nuneaton need their papers dispatched from the FedEx desk in St Clara, eighteen kilometres away, by noon.
Jean Baptiste Mersaud, who also needs his papers this morning, lives a kilometre or so in the opposite direction.
It seems obvious to most people concerned that, rather than hanging about in their parents’ workplace whining about the delay, Tiffany and Superman should try to help out.
‘Have you finished the stuff for Jean Baptiste?’ Tiffany inquires. ‘Is it all ready for him?’
Mr and Mrs Haunt don’t reply immediately. In fact, though she’s standing directly behind them, and in a very small room with a very low ceiling, they don’t even notice she has spoken. So intense is their concentration they may not even have noticed she’s in the room. They’re upstairs, working side by side at one of IKEA’s cheapest kitchen tables, in the room they call the COOP (Centre of Operations), which was meant to have been the new baby’s bedroom, except Mr and Mrs Haunt haven’t got around to having the new baby. They’re beavering away on their desktops like the pair of computer whizzos they are, utterly deaf to the world.
‘MUUUMMMMMM!’ yells Superman, so loud it gusts the papers off their table. They don’t respond. Absently, they hold the papers down, and continue working. ‘MUUUMMMMMM! TIFFIE ASKED YOU –’
‘Forget it, Superman,’ Tiffany says calmly. ‘This is Jean Baptiste’s stuff, I’m sure of it.’ From the corner of the messy little room, between light box and the new laminating machine, she picks up a wedge of papers with a yellow Post-It on top, labelled ‘J. B. MERSAUD’S STUFF’. She holds it in front of her father so it rubs slightly against the end of his nose.
‘Dad? Is this it?’
‘Yup,’ Horatio says, swatting it away. ‘Thanks, baby. Can you and Superman drop it off? You know where he lives?’
‘Sort of,’ Tiffany says.
‘I know,’ Superman says. ‘But first I need somebody to help with my puncture. Tiffie, will you help me?’
‘He’s on the road to Saujon,’ Horatio explains, blowing a molecule of dust off his 36-bit flat scanner, reaching for an eyeglass, which he thinks has slipped somewhere behind the machine. ‘Head south. It’s a bungalow. Not quite finished. More like a building site. You can’t miss it…Anyway, you’ll know it when you see it, I’m sure.’
At this exchange Maude is lulled from her highly focused work-trance. ‘Heck,’ she exclaims. (Maude always calls Horatio ‘Heck’. No one remembers why.) ‘Heck, for heaven’s sake, we’ve talked about this. I don’t think it’s right or fair or appropriate that our beautiful, innocent children…’ She tails off, unwilling to elucidate for fear of Tiffie understanding more than she ought. She shoots a meaningful scowl at her husband, who isn’t looking. ‘C’mon,’ she says. ‘We’ve talked about this. It’s out of the question. The children cannot be dragged into all this…any more than they are already. It’s wrong.’
‘What’s wrong?’ Horatio asks, all innocence.
‘You know perfectly well.’
‘Nothing’s wrong,’ he says brightly. ‘Anything wrong, Tiff?’
‘Huh? I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ says Tiff, perhaps just a little too quickly. Tiff may be only eight years old, but she’s sharp. She doesn’t miss a thing.
‘Really?’ Maude turns to her. ‘You honestly don’t know why I should object to you delivering this stuff to Jean Baptiste?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Do you have any idea what you’re delivering?’
‘Eh?’ says Tiffie. Maude looks at her carefully. Tiffie shrugs. ‘Stuff he wants, I expect.’ She smiles, as if she’s been struck by a new idea. ‘Maybe it’s stuff he left behind?…Anyway, who cares? Only you said he wanted it before lunch and Superman and me –’
‘Superman and I,’ Maude corrects her automatically.
‘Superman and I want to go to the sea.’
It is a source of constant surprise to Maude that her daughter, so intelligent in so many other ways, should continue to be so trenchantly, wantonly ignorant – and incurious – about the true nature of her parents’ work. What does she think her parents do all day, stuck up here in this tiny room with all this state-of-the-art machinery? Maude smiles at her, half relieved by it, half irritated. ‘Well. But even so. Even if you don’t know –’
‘Tiff and her brother have very kindly offered to deliver some stuff to our friend Jean Baptiste. Which he urgently needs, by the way…’ Gingerly, Horatio lifts a small PVC sheet from beside the laminator and carries it to the light box in the corner of the room. He has his back to his family. ‘I mean, before noon…’ he adds vaguely, lifting the retrieved eyeglass, squinting into it. He clicks his tongue. ‘…S’no bloody good, is it?’ he mutters, more to himself than anyone else. ‘Bugger! Maude? Come and take a look at this. Dyesub’s damn well playing up again. It’s not bonding.’
‘Honestly, Mum,’ says Tiff, watching her mother crossing the room to Horatio, bend over the light box, noticing with familiarity the instantaneous switch in her concentration. ‘…I don’t see what you’re fussing about,’ Tiff continues soothingly. ‘We’re just giving Jean Baptiste some bills or something, aren’t we? Because we want to get some jellyfish. I don’t even know what…I’ve no idea…Mum?…Mum?’
‘Christ!’ mutters Maude. ‘That’s no good, Heck. It’s no good to anyone. Wouldn’t get past the people at bloody Blockbusters. Forget the dye-sub. Don’t you think? Go with the Teslin sealer. Teslin should be fine. Hurry up, though,’ she adds edgily. ‘How much time have we got?’
Horatio turns around while his wife is still tutting over the failed document, signals for Superman and Tiffany to take the package and run. Tiffie winks at him, covers her mouth to stop herself bursting with the excitement of it all. She and Superman carefully, quietly tiptoe over to the open skylight and onto the small, flat, hidden roof beyond.
‘Use the door!’ Maude calls pointlessly after them as they scamper quickly over the roof pretending not to hear her, scramble down the vine at the far end of the building and leap to the garden below. She clicks her tongue. ‘Why can’t they ever use the bloody door?’
It takes the children twenty minutes to mend Superman’s puncture. Tiffany accidentally catches Superman’s little finger between the wheel and the tyre, and Superman thumps her, and then they roll around in the grass for ages, punching and kicking, until one or other remembers the endgame. The jellyfish. They stand up. Dust each other down and get back to work.
Tiffany slides the ‘J. B. MERSAUD’ package into a plastic shopping bag and then slides the shopping bag into the purple rucksack which is meant to be her school satchel. And they set off, pedalling merrily through the lanes, discussing names for pet jellyfish. Wondering if there is a word for jellyfish in Russian. Discussing, in a roundabout way, the etymology of ‘jelly’, and then ‘fish’, wondering if they’ll have to share a plate of frites with their moules today, or if their parents will be generous for once and let them each have a plate of their own.
‘Because it’s not like we actually wouldn’t finish them,’ complains Superman. ‘Sometimes I really hate Mum and Dad. Do you, Tiffie?’
A screech of brakes. (They need oil, Tiffie remembers.) ‘Superman,’ she whispers, ‘Shhh!’
They have turned a bend in the sunny lane. The field of maize that has been obstructing their view has turned now into a stretch of vineyard, and at last the half-built wreck (work stopped the day his family was wiped out by a police car) that is Jean Baptiste Mersaud’s bungalow is upon them. As is the fact that he has a visitor. Jean Baptiste drives a white van and, when he’s not working, a moped. Everyone in the neighbourhood knows that. But this morning, parked neatly between the moped and the white van, is a smart, metallic green Renault. A saloon car.
‘I’ve seen that Renault before,’ whispers Superman. He is crouching close to his bicycle handlebars to evade detection. ‘…It’s that man from our shop. Who hated us. Remember, Tiffie? When he did a stinky old fart and then he just knew we smelt it. That’s why he hated us.’
But Tiffie doesn’t remember. At least she remembers the incident, of course. It had been killingly funny. But she doesn’t remember noticing what car he climbed into after the event. And the problem with being called Superman and only five years old is that people are sometimes not inclined to take your observations seriously. ‘I think you’re wrong, Superman,’ Tiffie whispers back.
‘No I’m not,’ Superman says. ‘It’s definitely him.’
‘Anyway, what are we going to do now? You think we can just go up there and deliver the stuff? Even though he’s got visitors?’
‘Of course we can.’
Tiffie shakes her head. ‘I don’t think so. What if it’s the man from répression?’ In the mid-morning heat, the purple plastic rucksack is beginning to stick to her back. She yanks it off, the better to think, and drops it onto the ground between them. ‘We need some kind of reason to be there.’
Superman sighs, slightly bored suddenly. He looks up at the clear blue sky, notices a falcon hovering above, circling them. ‘Look, Tiffie,’ he laughs. ‘I think he thinks I’m a mouse.’
‘No he doesn’t. Be quiet, Superman. I’ve got to think…What if we say…’ She frowns. ‘What if we say we heard he wanted to learn English so we’ve come to give him some English books?’
‘Very stupid,’ Superman says succinctly. ‘Anyway, I’ll do it.’ And before Tiffany can stop him, he’s picked up the rucksack and is pedalling wildly, past the white van, past the smart Renault saloon, all the way up to the bungalow’s front door. Tiffany screams at him to wait.
It’s just as they’re both reaching for the doorbell, and Tiffany is still screaming and yelling, that Jean Baptiste (strong naked brown torso glistening in the hot summer light: he’s clearly been chopping wood or something equally fortuitous) meanders around from the back of the bungalow to find out the source of all the racket.
‘Ahhh!’ he says, smiling very warmly. ‘C’est Superrrman! Et ta soeur! Bonjour, Tiffany!’ He ruffles their heads affectionately. ‘Alors les enfants…’ He bends down to be level with them, throws a nervous glance over his shoulder, ‘Vous avez quelque chose pour moi?’ He holds his hand out. ‘Allez. Vite! Vite! Sinon, le monsieur –’
Just then the Monsieur, the very same stinky old farter Superman had been identifying moments earlier, appears from the far side of the bungalow. He’s in his early fifties, fat, very small, with rimless half-moon glasses and iron-grey hair, oiled into an astonishingly neat parting. His beaky nose is quivering, or so it appears, with curiosity. He is carrying a clipboard.
A silence falls. The man with oiled hair considers the three of them – guilty faces, all of them, he thinks – rocks on his small, well-shod feet, and scowls. He recognises the children. Les petits Anglais. With the manners of cochons. Bien sûr. Comme tous les petits Anglais.
‘Bonjour Monsieur,’ Superman says, passing the rucksack to his sister and stepping sedately around his own bicycle to shake the stranger’s hand. Behind him, he assumes his sister is handing over the papers. He understands instinctively that he must keep the man occupied for just a couple of seconds, until the transaction is complete. ‘Je ne sais pas si vous vous souvenez, Monsieur, mais je vous ai déjà rencontré il y a quelques jours. Au village. Dans le Co-Op…’ He can’t help grinning, remembering the time they last met. ‘…Je m’appelle Superrrman.’
‘Hmmm,’ says the man, folding his arms over his clipboard. It’s clear that young Superrrman speaks excellent French, and the man feels vaguely patronised by that. He chooses to answer him in English. ‘Unfortunately,’ he replies, noticing Tiffany out of the corner of his eye, wondering what it is about that bundle of papers which makes Jean Baptiste Mersaud grasp for it with such alacrity. ‘I have no memory of this occasion at all. However, I find myself wondering why a young man like yourself isn’t in the classroom this morning?’
‘He’s feeling poorly,’ interrupts Tiffany briskly, before Superman has a chance to respond, or to say anything unhelpful regarding jellyfish. ‘We both are. Very infectious.’ She zips up the empty rucksack with a businesslike flourish. ‘Anyway, we’d better get off. Come on, Superman. I think we should go back to bed before we start spreading our germs to other people. Au revoir, Monsieur. Au revoir,’ she says, nodding to Jean Baptiste.
Jean Baptiste winks at her, and quickly, before the other man can say anything more, she and her little brother are bicycling full pelt back up the lane again.
HOW IT ALL BEGAN (#ulink_74a2c476-9da6-575c-bcb0-cb6fcb503e60)
It all began, this life of crime, while Maude and Horatio were still living in South London. Superman must have been only five or six months old. Mrs Haunt had just returned to work at the vast graphic-design company where she and her husband happened to rediscover each other, and they were celebrating said return – or marking it, anyway – by providing dinner for a bunch of their friends. It was not a good dinner. The Haunts were – still are – strangely disinterested cooks, in spite of all the magnificent French ingredients now surrounding them. Neither of them is particularly bothered about food.
So dinner was finished without much regret, and the Haunt parents and four or five others, most of them new parents themselves, were flopping about at the cramped kitchen table, glugging back wine and discussing the things new parents in South London tend to discuss: local schools, and so on; Tesco’s delivery service. It was all OK, all quite pleasant, because the Haunts, being nice people, had (with a few exceptions) nice friends. But it wasn’t an evening anyone would be likely to remember. Or it wouldn’t have been. Until boisterous, big-breasted Rosie Mottram put her oar in. Rosie had been in the same antenatal class as Maude when Maude was pregnant with Superman, and had somehow inveigled her way into the Haunts’ lives ever since. She lived only three streets away and seemed permanently to be sitting at Maude’s kitchen table. Here she was again. Since giving up joint partnership with her husband, Simon, in their TV production company, to become what she insisted on calling a ‘full-time mum’, Rosie had also proclaimed herself member of some trendy subdivision of a Born Again Christian group. In any case, that evening Rosie decided to perk things up a bit by starting another argument about the Haunt parents’ choice of name for their baby son.
Maude and Horatio were already tired of having to justify it to people. Maude’s mother had actually sobbed when they first told her, and though Horatio’s parents, who were very English, never voiced their objections, they had so far noticeably failed to call their only grandson anything more specific than ‘the baby’.
Rosie squeezed her boisterous bosoms together (always on show, regardless of the weather), making the body glitter shimmer around her canyon cleavage, and she said, because she was a bit drunk, fuelled with low-level dinner-party boredom and a lot of Dutch courage, ‘No but come on,’ (an annoying way to begin) ‘you’re not actually going to christen the poor sod “Superman”, are you? For Christ’s sake! Apart from anything else, no church would allow it.’
‘The church doesn’t need to worry about it,’ muttered Maude. ‘Heck, could you pass me some more wine?’
‘No but seriously, Maude,’ persisted Rosie, like a dog with a bone. ‘I know I’m not his godmother or anything. A-hem. You might say it’s none of my business. But you haven’t gone and put that idiotic name on the birth certificate. Have you? I mean you can’t. It’s just too bloody cruel.’
‘Of course we have,’ snapped Maude. ‘It’s his name, isn’t it?’
Horatio glanced at her, slightly shocked. Actually ‘HUCKLEBERRY’ was the name on Superman’s birth certificate: ‘Huckleberry Dorian Philip Haunt’. But then a few weeks after registering him, Maude and Horatio had agreed HUCKLEBERRY sounded too effete and they had over-compensated, most people agreed, by calling him Superman instead. At any rate he was listed for a place at Tiffany’s nursery school under the name of Superman. Superman Huckleberry Dorian Philip Haunt – and that, to Maude, seemed more than official enough.
‘It’s probably illegal, anyway,’ Rosie said. ‘I bet you’re not allowed to register someone under a silly name like Superman.’
‘Of course you are.’
‘Show me!’ she exclaimed. ‘Go on, show me his birth certificate. You must have it around here somewhere.’
‘Show you?’ repeated Maude. ‘Certainly not.’
‘Why not?…Otherwise, how can I believe you?’
‘Well – you can believe me or not –’ By this stage Maude was beginning to feel quite uncomfortable. She had lied without thinking, just to avoid a drawn-out conversation. It clearly hadn’t worked.
Rosie chortled. ‘I bet he’s actually called Vernon or something…Vernon,’ she said again, very pleased with herself. ‘I bet he’s bloody well registered as Vernon.’
Horatio followed this to and fro with some interest. He noticed his wife’s earlobes were turning red, and also the edges of her nostrils – as they did, he’d come to notice, whenever she felt cornered, or was about to lose her temper. Maude was – is – notorious for her temper.
‘Of course he’s not called Vernon,’ Maude snapped. ‘You’re being incredibly boring, Rosie. I told you. He’s called Superman.’
‘Liar, liar,’ Rosie sing-songed, giggling drunkenly. ‘Pants on fire! You must have his birth certificate in the house somewhere. So show me. Come on! I’m interested. I want to see an official document with the words “SUPERMAN HAUNT” printed on it. It’ll be funny. And I want to see it.’ She banged the table, trying to be amusing but only succeeding in spilling coffee and making everyone jump. ‘I insist on seeing it right now!’
At which point Horatio decided to step in. ‘Wait there,’ he said suddenly, ‘I’ll go and find it.’ He stood up. ‘Maude –’ he turned to his wife. She was staring at him, aghast, and he had to clear his throat to stop himself from laughing. ‘Darling. Can you remember where it is?’
‘N-N-NO! Heck, of course I bloody well can’t.’
‘I’m pretty certain I saw it up in the office. Somewhere. In your desk, or mine. Come and help me find it.’
‘W-well…’
‘Come on,’ he said, smiling that nice, lazy smile. He turned affably to his wife’s friend, keeping his eyes averted from her cleavage, so vast that just looking made him want to gasp for air. ‘Anything to shut you up, Rosie.’
And that’s how it all began. That’s how the seed of an idea was first planted. Because a Born Again Christian called Rosie from the Brixton Antenatal Natural Birth class chose to taunt them one night about their decision to call their son Superman.
Maude and Horatio disappeared from the kitchen for almost half an hour. Giggling like teenagers, they dug out Huckleberry Dorian’s genuine paperwork and copied it, using their joint skills in desktop graphic design, changed the name and printed out a replica – or something similar enough for the drunken party downstairs, none of whom had made a particular study of birth certificates and would have been satisfied with just about anything, so long as the ink was dry.
So. And that was it. Nothing much. They kept the phony birth certificate because it reminded them of a funny time – and also, in truth, because it was surprisingly good and they thought it might come in handy if the conversation regarding Superman’s name were ever repeated. It taught them they were natural counterfeiters, even when drunk. It also taught them what they had both suspected all along:
That these things are possible.
That almost anything is possible, with a little nerve and a little will.
The thing the Haunts lacked, at that stage, was the will.
FINDING THE WILL (#ulink_5a007a73-1478-5e33-b68f-f378210d342a)
In fact, Mr and Mrs Haunt had always had fire inside them. Only the London parking regulations and the birth of their two young children had temporarily dampened the flames. They met, the first time round, sometime in the early 1990s, when they were both aged twenty-one. They met at a Somali refugee camp on the Kenyan-Somali border, where they both briefly happened to be working as volunteers; volunteers whose youthful idealism was already beginning to curdle with experience. They spent a week together near a hot, dry place called Wajir, drinking Tusker beers around desert campfires, smoking Sportsman cigarettes and mulling over the world’s evil ways – and they liked each other very much. Actually, they already loved each other. But Maude had a journalist boyfriend she’d left in Mogadishu, Somalia and, at the time, Horatio was more or less meant to be living with a US Peace Corps girl based in Nanyuki, Kenya. It wasn’t, they agreed, meant to be. Or not then.
But time passed. They returned home, both of them to London, to noisy bars and mortgages and numerous beige-coloured offices with mini dividing walls. They forgot about each other. They forgot about the desert nights and the starry desert sky and all the magic of Africa – until one day, at one of their beige-coloured offices, they bumped into each other again. They were in the same lift. They were on their way to the same seventh floor, and the same afternoon course, called Successful Interfacing with Clients. Seven years had gone by. Long years. They almost cried with happiness.
Marriage quickly followed, and then Tiffany and then Superman and that strangely dreary dinner party with bigbosomed Rosie, the Born Again. Mr and Mrs Haunt continued with their not-very-exciting lives, full of love for each other and their children, but overshadowed by something intangible: boredom, guilt, disappointment, exhaustion. They lived like this, going to work and going back again; rejoicing in Superman’s first tooth, in Tiffany’s never-ending stream of bons mots; occasionally going out and meeting new people but mostly putting the children to bed and falling asleep in front of the telly.
And then the thing happened. Maude Haunt’s thirty-fourth birthday, and Horatio was taking her out to dinner. The minicab driver who came to pick them up bore all the fine-boned features of a man from the Horn of Africa, and because the Haunts already had a bottle of champagne inside them, and the sight of anything or anyone from that part of the world tended to make them nostalgic, they struck up a conversation with him.
At first he wasn’t enthusiastic. He was cagey. But when they told him they’d met each other working at the Somali refugee camp near Wajir in Kenya, he seemed more interested. They told him Maude had been working on a health project in Mogadishu and he seemed more interested still. That was when he turned around to take a better look at his passengers without even stopping the car.
War-torn, lawless Mogadishu was his own hometown, he told them. They learnt that he’d been a doctor there and that he too had worked for a while at the refugee camps. His wife had been a midwife at Mogadishu’s only maternity unit, delivering babies while gun battles raged outside. Until the day the hospital itself was attacked. She was raped, battered, left for dead. When she didn’t die she and her husband decided, finally, to follow the exodus, and so they took their surviving three children and fled, arriving in Britain without papers, unable to prove who they were or what they did. Asylum was refused. Appeal refused on a technicality. The doctor, his wife and three children had been in hiding, without identity, ever since.
A horrible story. Another horrible story. Awful. Terrible. Unimaginable. Sometimes we forget how lucky we are. We do. But anyway. It’s second on the left. After the traffic lights…Except on this occasion Maude happened to know the hospital. She knew the midwife.
A small world. That’s what changed everything.
It cast a pall over the birthday celebrations. Horatio had booked a table at a restaurant in Soho with a Michelin star. It was cripplingly expensive, and neither he nor Maude would have fully appreciated it even at the best of times, but he loved her. He wanted her to feel spoilt. They sat facing each other over the crisp white linen tablecloth, and chewed on their food without tasting it. The minicab driver and his wife had reminded the Haunts of a world they had allowed themselves to forget. It reminded them of their past, of how they used to be, how much they used to care about these things. Anyway, they didn’t bother with pudding.
And then, back at home, when they both assumed the other was in the bathroom brushing teeth, or downstairs locking robbers out, they bumped into each other in the loft; both, so it happened, in search of the same thing. By the time Horatio appeared Maude already had it in her hands.
CERTIFICATE OF BIRTH
‘Ahhh,’ said Horatio contentedly. ‘Great minds…’
‘Exactly,’ Maude replied. ‘Don’t you think we can help?’
‘If they’ll allow us.’
‘They’ve got nothing to lose.’
‘No. Not really. But he seemed like a nice guy. I mean, honest. Didn’t he? He might feel bad. Wrong, I mean. Getting involved in fraud.’
‘We could give them new identities,’ she said. ‘A chance for a fresh start.’
He took the certificate from her, held it up to the light.
‘…Just a couple of pieces of paper,’ he muttered. ‘It’s not much, is it?’
‘You kept their telephone number, didn’t you?’
He smiled. ‘Of course I did.’
FINDING THE WAY (#ulink_9526a419-1b1b-5a1b-9326-b09c951d6adc)
It was surprisingly easy. Maude and Horatio searched the Internet.
They found books for sale on Amazon with titles like DIY Documents and How to Make a Passport on your Home Computer. They even found a training course: ‘WANT A NEW IDENTITY? CLICK HERE!’ After that, they upgraded their computers and their printers, exchanged their sheet-fed scanner for a flatbed, downloaded the necessary computer programmes, mostly illegally, and set to work. Every evening for about a month, after putting the children to bed, they climbed up to the office in the loft and honed their skills.
The copies they made, after numerous false starts, were good. Five British passports; five birth certificates; two new National Insurance cards. The minicab driver, Doctor Ahmed Hussein Mohammed Islam, and his wife Fawzia might never quite work as medical professionals inside Europe – the documents couldn’t help them do that. But at least they could work. At least they could be allowed to exist again.
In fact they did more than exist. The doctor started his own driving school, which has grown steadily ever since. His instructors’ cars, with their distinctive logos (incidentally designed by the Haunts), are hard to miss around London nowadays, and he’s considering opening another school in Manchester. Meanwhile his wife volunteered as an unpaid ‘Listener’ for a large private charity, offering tea, soup, ping pong and advice to asylum seekers from all over the world.
A happy ending. Or beginning. These days, of course, the Haunt counterfeiting rescue system is much more streamlined. They act less on conversations with random minicab drivers, more on specific, well-planned and highly secretive commissions from Fawzia, the wife. Fawzia, as a Listener, hears hundreds of immigrants’ tales every day; many of them truly tragic, some less so, some very obviously made-up. She only refers the most desperate, hopeless, unjust cases to Maude and Horatio. And even then, occasionally – very occasionally – Maude and Horatio will hear a person’s story and decline to help. It’s a small, compassionate and, on the whole, an efficient operation. Even Fawzia’s bosses at the charity have no idea what goes on.
Maude and Horatio, it’s important to realise, are not political people. They simply understand that whatever bureaucratic system for immigration is in place – be it too harsh or not harsh enough, or corrupt or simply incompetent – there will always be individuals in genuine, desperate need of help. Help which, for the time being at least, Maude and Horatio are willing and able to provide.
The Haunts refused to accept payment for that first good deed – and they still do, for similar assignments. But often, when the people they’ve helped are back on their feet, they send them money anyway. Sometimes quite a lot of it. Fawzia’s husband sent them £100,000 two years ago. They opened a numbered bank account in the Cayman Islands where they now have a back-up Family Fund, which grows in ungainly fits and starts, and which has recently topped £130,000. Much less than the value of a terraced house in Brixton, or a long, white cottage with a swimming pool in southwest France, but enough, at least, to start again, should the need arise. The Haunt parents understand the nature of their work means that one day they and their children will probably have to disappear themselves. Drop everything and go. But they have the money saved. They have alternative IDs ready and waiting. Actually, they have several of them.
CATCHING JELLYFISH (#ulink_eae3961d-7a72-5e2d-8f01-6cadf51d4ae1)
Late last summer on the beach at St Palais-sur-Mer, Superman and Tiffany were tipping plastic buckets of seawater into a rubber dingy, when Tiffany suddenly let rip with a horrible scream. Swirling around inside the dingy was a live jellyfish: they must have scooped it up by mistake.
‘Do you think we should warn people?’ Tiffany said, staring at it. ‘There must be hundreds of jellyfish out there. People are going to get stung.’
‘How do you know?’ asked Superman, taking his plastic spade and giving the jellyfish a whack.
‘Stop it!’ Tiffany yelled at him. ‘You’ll hurt her.’
He did it again.
At which point a monumental fight ensued, ending when both children somehow got sand in their eyes and Maude, fed up with all the noise, scooped the jellyfish into a bucket and released it back out to sea.
The children have never forgiven her for it. They had, they said, grown to love that jellyfish, and nothing, except possibly another one, would ever fill the void. Hence the outing today. It has taken the Haunt parents almost nine months to get around to it.
The beach at St Palais-sur-Mer is more or less empty, in spite of it being such a lovely day. But the task they have set themselves turns out to be more difficult than they had all imagined. Live jellyfish don’t often float into children’s plastic buckets, it turns out. They don’t even seem to float nearby.
‘You should never have let that one go, Mum,’ says Superman, scowling at her. He’s said it about once a minute ever since the outing began. After an hour of fruitless searching the Haunts are beginning to feel hot and hungry, and though Tiffany is being surprisingly stoical, Superman is close to tears. ‘You should never have let that one go, Mum,’ he says once again. ‘How could you do it?’
‘I’m sorry, darling,’ Maude says automatically. ‘Right, then. Who feels like some lunch?’
‘That poor jellyfish probably really wanted to come home with us,’ moans Superman. ‘And now he’s out there, floating about. He’s probably still looking for us.’ At the thought of that – of his jellyfish, lost and lonely, floating about – Superman’s eyes once again begin to fill with tears.
‘Look out, Dad!’ screams Tiffany suddenly, pointing at something just in front of Horatio’s foot.
There on the sand lies the largest jellyfish any Haunt has ever before set eyes on. It’s the size of a serving plate, with the contents of its stomach quite visible through its transparent skin, and around it a very distinct aura of death. Horatio gives the jellyfish a nudge with his trainer. Nothing. No movement at all.
‘It’s dead,’ Horatio announces.
Superman whimpers first, then he fills his lungs and lets out an almighty wail. ‘You killed it!’ he cries. ‘You killed it! How could you do that? HOW COULD YOU DO THAT TO HIM?’
EATING MOULES (#ulink_8ee45daf-7756-5e57-a4d7-975e96b90efa)
Superman says he can’t eat moules today because it will remind him of all the lonely and dead jellyfish he has learned to love on the beach at St Palais. He and Tiffany insist on a full portion of frites each to make up for the disappointment, and after that, once their orders are placed and they’re all feeling a little more settled, and they’re at their favourite table overlooking the beach and the sea breeze is drifting through the restaurant’s large, open windows, and the children have their Orangina and the adults their carafe of deliciously cool, pink wine, Tiffany mentions, quite casually, that when she and Superman dropped off Jean Baptiste’s papers this morning, he was accompanied by a strange man. With a clipboard.
‘He was?’ says Maude airily, still very much in Paradise zone. ‘Seriously, because poor Jean Baptiste. He’s so often alone. I’m just happy he’s got people calling…Ooh. Hot gossip everyone,’ she adds, suddenly perking up. There is a hint of pride in her voice, ‘hot gossip’ being one of the things the Haunt adults tend to miss out on in their new French life. The nature of their work – and their natural preference for a quiet and private life – means the Haunt parents don’t socialise much, not with the local English nor even the French. What little gossip that does reach them usually comes, somewhat garbled, via the children, whose merry, independent social lives (pedal-powered, mostly) are unrelenting, and a marked contrast to that of their parents. ‘Madame Martinet in the boulangerie told me an English woman put in a bid for the Hotel Marronnier. At last! And she’s quite glamorous, apparently. Maybe Jean Baptiste could tear himself away from Mr Clipboard and fall in love with her…Be nice, though, wouldn’t it? Little bit of interracial love-making, to help the European Project along…’
The rundown Hotel Marronnier in Montmaur is the only hotel or bar in the Haunts’ local village. It is picturesque – absurdly so – with a little stone terrace shaded by lime trees at the front, and a view looking out over the square and the tiny Norman church opposite. The place has been up for sale since long before the Haunts arrived in the area. Because, though numerous buyers have sniffed around it (most, if not all of them, English), the initial elation at its storybook prettiness fades immediately, after even the most feeble of rosy-coloured investigations into its books. It needs money spending on it, and it’s been running at a loss for years.
‘…Don’t you think, Heck?’ Maude asks him. ‘Or perhaps it’s still too soon for Jean Baptiste to find someone new…’
But Horatio isn’t listening. He’s more concerned about the man with the clipboard. ‘Tiffany,’ he says slightly irritably, ‘why didn’t you mention it before?’
‘Don’t worry, Dad. It was only the stupid old pétard,’ Superman says carelessly. ‘I told Tiffie not to worry but she can be quite silly sometimes. Also, Tiffie, I’m pretty sure he did another stinker while we were talking to him. Did you notice?’
‘No, he didn’t,’ Tiffie says.
‘Did he know who you both were?’ asks Horatio, keen to stick to the point.
‘Superman told him, but I think he knew already. In fact Superman was brilliant.’
‘I WAS NOT!’
She ignores him. ‘Superman distracted him while I handed over the papers. So he probably didn’t even notice.’
Maude wrenches her mind from enjoyable images of Jean Baptiste helping along the European Project. She too, finally, has sniffed danger. She and Horatio glance at each other nervously. ‘…What did he look like, Tiffie?’ Maude asks.
‘Very, very handsome,’ replies Superman, randomly.
‘Well – he wasn’t exactly handsome,’ Tiffany disagrees. ‘If you don’t mind me saying, Superman. He was sort of fat. He had a sort of wobbly fat face and a lot of sweat in the crinkles under his chin. And he had greasy hair sort of stuck over his head and he also had these weird teeny-tiny feet.’ She chortles. ‘I thought he probably spent all the time falling over.’
‘Age?’ asks Horatio.
‘Old. Kind of like Granny.’
Maude and Horatio consider these new details carefully. ‘Hm,’ Horatio says. ‘And you say he looked like he was there on business? But you think he didn’t notice you handing over the papers?’
‘Of course not,’ Superman and Tiffany say at once.
The family fall silent while the waiter delivers their moules frites, putting the third bowl – since Superman had insisted he wanted frites and frites alone – directly in front of Tiffany.
‘That’s really unfair,’ Superman moans, eyeing her bowl. ‘Actually, can I have a pizza?’
‘Et un pizza, s’il vous plaît,’ Maude says briskly, before Horatio has time to make a fuss.
‘Honestly Maude,’ Horatio frowns. ‘Would you give him a line of cocaine if he happened to ask for it?’
Maude doesn’t bother to reply. She watches while the waiter leaves, takes the usual care not to speak until he’s out of earshot. ‘What do you mean, Superman, the pétard?‘
‘The farter.’
‘I know what it means. I mean why do you call him “the pétard”? Have you seen him before?’
‘Of course we have! You remember! In the shop.’
‘Ah!’ says Horatio, light dawning, wiping cream sauce from his chin. ‘I know who he’s talking about. The farter! In the shop! Monsieur – Monsieur – What’s his name? Superman’s quite right. We bumped into him in the Co-op. And the children couldn’t stop laughing…You must remember, Maude!…Monsieur Bertinard!’ he says triumphantly. ‘Voilà! Olivier Bertinard.’
‘Ohhhh!’ Light dawns for Maude, too. ‘Him!’ She grimaces. ‘Gosh, he’s an awful man. But he’s not répression. Thank God. He lives in that wonderful house opposite Hotel Marronnier. We wanted to buy it, do you remember? Except it wasn’t for sale.’
‘That’s the one,’ Horatio nods. ‘He’s just retired so he’s got nothing to keep him from poking his nose where it doesn’t belong. And no, he’s not from répression,’ Horatio adds, slurping another moule into his mouth, ‘but he is about to take over from François Bourse next week. When the village elects its new mayor…’
‘I do wish François could be persuaded to stay,’ Maude sighs, and Horatio shoots her a look.
‘I’m sure you do.’
‘For God’s sake, Heck. He’s at least fifteen years older than I am.’
‘…So I’m assuming’, Horatio continues evenly, ‘that Monsieur Bertinard was out canvassing.’ He glances at Tiffany. ‘Sucking up to people,’ he explains. ‘To make sure they vote for him on Tuesday, or whenever the election is.’
‘Well he wasn’t sucking up to us,’ Tiffany says. ‘He hated us.’
‘That’s probably because you can’t vote, my angel. Any more than we can…’ It is one of many small costs of living life as an outlaw and an outsider; one of the few that might annoy him and Maude if they allowed it to. He scowls suddenly. ‘What d’you think, Tiff?’ he asks her abruptly. ‘Do you think he was suspicious?’
Under the table Maude delivers a not-very-gentle kick.
‘Ouch! Bloody hell, Maudie –’
‘Suspicious of what, Heck? Nobody’s done anything wrong!’
‘Oh, no. No, of course not,’ Horatio says. ‘Of course not. Absolutely right. So…’ A short silence falls, and a moment of gloom in Paradise, possibly even of a little fear for Maude and Horatio. There is so much at stake – not just for the people they help but for themselves and their children. There’s barely a day that passes when they don’t re-evaluate what they do. Barely a day. Sometimes they both decide they’ll give it all up, open a bed and breakfast for real, like the other expats, or start that organic vegetable stall they’ve been talking about for so long. Sometimes it seems so straightforward; so incredibly tempting. But then along comes another e-mail from Fawzia, another tale of misery, torture, terror, of someone’s existence hanging by a thread…and Maude and Horatio find that they simply cannot turn away…
‘You know the new English girl?’ Superman demands suddenly, breaking through the silence, surprising everyone, once again, by how much he takes in: ‘I mean the one who’s buying the hotel?’
‘Who might be buying the Marronnier?’ asks Maude.
‘That one,’ he agrees. ‘Elle a les cheveux d’une sirène.’
Maude smiles, ruffles his small head. She loves the way her children are so at home in the French world around them; the way they flip from one language to the other. It makes her proud. She wishes she could do it so effortlessly. ‘Hair like a mermaid, Superman? How lovely!’
Superman nods. ‘Like this,’ he says, indicating a cropped bob. ‘Lovely and yellow. Anyway, that’s what my girlfriend said.’
It’s while they’re driving back to the cottage after lunch, the children asleep on the back seat and Maude wriggling inside her white linen skirt, trying to make room for all the children’s profiteroles she ate, that she suddenly remembers another piece of news, one which she’d unconsciously put to the back of her mind for almost a week now. Horatio is not going to be happy about it, and she doesn’t really blame him. She’s not happy either.
‘Oh Heck, I forgot to mention,’ she begins, as if it were quite trivial. ‘Not brilliant news, I’m afraid. But the children will be pleased…Which, you know – before you go mad, just, please, bear in mind…And I mean, at some point we were going to have to make the house properly visitor-proof. With the children’s friends getting older. Plus there are so many people who, really, I don’t think we can put off having to stay any longer. So –’
‘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.’
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Daisy Waugh
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Introducing the perfect Summer read for 2006. Bordeaux Housewives is a romantic comedy combining a heady mix of sunshine, sex, Sancerre and secrets.When an ordinary English family swap dreary suburbia and the rat race for the glorious countryside of France they have no idea just how much their lives are going to change.For in addition to the culture shock, they have been selected to appear in a reality TV show about their Good Life lifestyle. But they also have a secret life which they need to hide from the cameras…Meanwhile, at the local bar, another expat is finding that local attractions amount to more than wine, cheese and sunflowers…