Daisy Waugh - Bordeaux Housewives

Zuberzonic Zebedee

Maths Genius, Life Enhancer and Very Good on Penguins

This one’s for you XXX

Cover Page

Title Page Bordeaux Housewives Daisy Waugh

Dedication Zuberzonic Zebedee Maths Genius, Life Enhancer and Very Good on Penguins This one’s for you XXX

BUSINESS AS USUAL

HOW IT ALL BEGAN

FINDING THE WILL

FINDING THE WAY

CATCHING JELLYFISH

EATING MOULES

FROM DAWN TO DAFFY

DAFFY’S LITTLE PROJECT

FEELING THE FEAR AND DOING IT ANYWAY

VERTICALLY CHALLENGED ERITREANS

BABYSITTERS

HORATIO, LADY EMMA AND THE ALMOST-KISS

LOBSTER WITH MAYONNAISE

COFFEE AND PETITS FOURS

A LAST BREAKFAST

TWO STRAY CATS

HOW MANY BEANS MAKE FIVE?

DAY FOUR

FINAL DAY

PERMISSION TO SHOOT

ENTENTE CORDIALE

DAFFY’S LIST

ELECTRICITY

EMMA RANKIN’S RECOMMENDATION

VERY OLD FRIENDS

SMUTTIE FORMS A PLAN

SKID START

MURRAY, LEN AND THE SONY PD150

TEAMWORK

SCREEN-TEST

MAKING A PITCH

FRENCH LESSONS

GRAND OPENING

COURT SUMMONS

RURAL BLISS

MONEY, SEX AND MORE BABIES

INVESTMENT MONITORING

TREATS

OLD MAID

KITCHEN FURNITURE

DIFFERENT KINDS OF FRIENDSHIP

TOWN SHOES

PENELOPE WHATNOT

FIFTEEN MINUTES

PARTY PLANNING

GETTING DRUNK

SKIDDING AROUND

STRAWBERRY TARTLETS AND OTHER PLEASURES

TIMING

HOLD UPS

TRAVELLING ALONE

MORNING HAS BROKEN

MAX FACTOR

A LITTLE LIST

UNDER THE YEW TREE

LONG DRIVE HOME

NAKED TORSOS

WHEN THE KISSING HAD TO STOP

KEEPING A TAB

BONNE NUIT

SUNDAY MORNING

SKID STIRRING

TEAMWORK

MONEY TO BE MADE

MESSAGE BREAKDOWN

KIDS ALONE IN KITCHENS AND ALL THAT

MAKING PANCAKES

WAITING

UPSTAIRS

DOWNSTAIRS

BUTTERFLY WOOD

KEEPING DATES (1)

KEEPING DATES (2)

ONE YEAR PASSES

TAX BILLS AGAIN

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Daisy Waugh

Copyright

About the Publisher

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 1/ 2each, 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.