by Daisy Waugh
Maude opens it out and even in the moonlight recognises it at once. It’s a photocopy of an Eritrean passport they were working on a few weeks back; at about the time, in fact, of the ill-fated fête. ‘…Why are you showing me this?’ she asks. ‘We sent his papers off a month ago, Heck. What are you doing with it?’
‘You were absolutely right…It was just too much of a coincidence, wasn’t it?’ he says. ‘I mean, honestly, I wouldn’t expect Emma to have even heard of Eritrea, let alone to drop it randomly into a conversation. And just to happen to mention Eritrean passports…’ He shakes his head. ‘So, anyway, I went for a nose around upstairs – on my own,’ he adds. ‘I found it on her dressing table. It was tucked into the back of her diary…’
Maude glances at him, suspicions still far from allayed. ‘But how did she get hold of it, Heck? That’s what I’m wondering. How did she get hold of it?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘Oh, really?’
‘I’ve no idea how she got hold of it, Maudie. No idea at all.’
A LAST BREAKFAST
The following morning, Timothy informs Daffy he will drop her at the Marronnier on his way back to the airport. She nods quietly. She is very quiet all through breakfast, unable to eat the tiny, warm croissants presented to her; barely able to swallow her coffee. Looking at her across the linen tablecloth, at the lines of fear and misery etched deep on her morning skin, Timothy feels a flicker of something not dissimilar to guilt. Daffy’s never fended for herself – ever. She’s barely able to make herself a cup of tea. He bought the place out, lock and stock – requiring the previous owners to leave everything but their most personal belongings behind. Nevertheless, he wonders briefly how she’s going to cope on her own.
It is 6.30 a.m. A normal time for Timothy and his wife to be at breakfast. He lifts the crisp pink cuff of his immaculate City shirt, and glances impatiently at his Rolex. His plane leaves in a couple of hours and Daffy insists on sitting opposite him like a dead person, thin fingers resting listlessly on the handle of her coffee cup, sleep-starved eyes staring into space. He’s beginning to find it irritating.
‘Are you actually intending to drink that?’ he asks, signalling the full cup of coffee. ‘If not, I suggest we get on the road. I’d like to be at the airport sooner rather than later, if you don’t mind. Have you packed?’
‘…Hm? Oh. No, thanks. I mean yes. Yes, I packed. Yes of course…I put my stuff in a sort of laundry bag…One of their laundry bags…’
‘Fine.’ He allows his raspberry lips to curl a little, into a very small smile. ‘Well, then – we’d better get you started, Daphne. Hadn’t we? It’s a big day for you today…Are you excited?’
With a great effort, Daffy nods her head. ‘Very,’ she says.
‘Excellent.’ But even Timothy daren’t quite pretend to be convinced. ‘…Chin up, dearest,’ he says.
The last time he called her ‘Dearest’ was the morning she first presented him with his son. She remembers that – how could she forget? – and teeters on tears for just a moment. But she smiles. ‘The chin’s very up,’ she says. ‘I’m – Of course. It’s all going to be wonderful.’
‘Brave girl.’ He pats her shoulder. ‘…I’ve got a small surprise awaiting you at the village, Daphne,’ he says. ‘You’re going to be quite pleased.’
So they drive the twenty minutes back to Montmaur, during which he delivers to his wife a short monologue including advice and general observations about her newly adopted country. She seems, he thinks, by and large to take it in.
The Place Marronnier is deserted as he parks up. He stops the car in front of Daffy’s new home: the picturesque – the upliftingly picturesque – Hotel Marronnier. But on this occasion Daffy’s heart does not sing at the sight of it. Quite the opposite. She glimpses the building through half-closed eyes, hardly daring to look. Sees a blur of stone wall, of lime trees, and shutters all shut tight. She feels a lurch of utter desolation and realises she’s going to be sick.
Timothy doesn’t cope with it well. He doesn’t cope with it at all. In fact he pretends not to notice and leaves her, coughing up last night’s saffron mayonnaise onto the chestnut trees in the middle of the place, and wanders off to inspect the arrangements for Daffy’s surprise. Which is shiny and blue and brand-spanking new, and parked, just as Timothy had ordered, in the single space beside the Marronnier’s large public terrace. Gingerly, he delves behind the driver’s-seat tyre and pulls out an envelope with the key.
‘Voilà!’ he says, turning back to his wife, now straightened up and leaning weakly against one of the tree trunks. ‘A little French car for my little French wife!’ he calls. ‘What do you say?’
‘Oh…Gosh, Timothy. You needn’t have. I could have…It’s lovely…Thank you.’
‘Want to have a drive?’
‘No. I mean no, thank you. Not just yet. I thought you might like to –’
‘Right then. Well.’ He rubs his hands together, unable to camouflage his relish, the sense of intense relief he feels, having so nearly got everything over and done with. ‘Well, Daphne. Dearest. I’d better leave you to it! I’ve got a lot to do before I get on the flight, and I shan’t be able to do it while I’m driving.’
Daffy stares at him. ‘But wouldn’t you – Can’t I just show you round? Ever so quickly? Wouldn’t you like to just – have a teeny tiny look?’
‘I’d love to, but I fear, sadly, that I can’t.’
‘…Really?…Not even a glimpse? Wouldn’t you like to –’
‘Daphne, I shall see it next time. After you’ve done a little work. All right? There’s no point in seeing it now when you’re about to change it all. Is there?’
‘But –’
‘And when I come back you can show me all the stuff you’ve done!’
She looks ready to object again. In fact her fear of this moment – the moment when Timothy drives away and leaves her alone in this strange place – is stronger, even, than her fear of Timothy himself. And Timothy senses it. He senses a marital rebellion brewing at this, the final hurdle. So he moves fast. He pecks her on the cheek, gives her a tight, antiseptic squeeze of the shoulders, with face already turned away, and hurriedly, without turning back, clambers into his hire car, slams the door and drives.
As he accelerates through the village square, and she stands there, hopeless, watching him go, he honks his horn once, twice, three times – a blithe little farewell. She waves at the disappearing back windscreen, and then he’s gone. And Daffy is quite alone.
TWO STRAY CATS
She looks around her. At her feet lies the stuffed laundry bag, filched from the luxurious Relais des Champs hotel. In her hands are details of her new bank account, keys to her new car and her new home. It’s still only seven o’clock. Daffy stands there, uncertain what to do next. The boulangerie opposite is just opening. The whole square is scented with the warm, fresh smell of baking bread, but even that fails to bring her comfort. Rather, she notices the boulangère eyeing her curiously, straining to observe her from above the high glass counter. Daffy turns away.
Slowly she picks up her bags and takes them to her new front door. She’s dreamed of this moment every night, every day, for two long months. Now she tries to remember how she imagined she would be feeling. It all seems like a lifetime away. She can’t even, as she fumbles with the lock, remember what the place looks like inside. She can remember the smell – of French tobacco – and she can remember a black and white poster above the bar, of two handsome Frenchmen in polo necks, smoking cigarettes. But beyond that, she realises, all is darkness. A blank canvas for her new life.
And now the key doesn’t work. Or she can’t work out which key is for which lock. Her eyes are beginning to tear up, anyway, so she can’t see what she’s doing. Normally, at this stage in a difficult situation, Daffy would already be sobbing. But on this occasion, something – some small, quiet voice of wisdom, some basic survival instinct – impels her to be calm, to keep try
ing. She is on her own, now. Nobody can help her. She must unlock the door by herself, or remain outside for ever.
She unlocks the door.
A smell of stale air, stale smoke, and, beneath it, polish, alcohol, and a distant hint of fresh baking bread from the boulangerie opposite. She pauses. There are slim shafts of morning sun from the windows, where the shutters are fastened tight. Daffy chooses not to switch on the lights but stands there a moment, allowing her eyes to adjust. She sees the outline of the long bar, and above it, glinting slightly, a long row of glasses. There are chairs upside down on top of the tables – four or five small tables scattered about, and a stack of plastic tables piled by the door she came in through, ready for the terrace outside.
A good bar needs drinking glasses, she tells herself, trying to be practical. And tables, of course. And a nice smell…The room seems smaller than she remembered. Cosier. There is lino at her feet. Reddish-brown, she remembers suddenly, worn through in lots of patches. Slowly she runs her hand along the length of the bar. Plastic. That’s right. The plastic that’s supposed to look like wood. When she visited the only other time, the plastic bar top had reminded her of home; reminded her, oddly, of an occasion when her mother had been sick, and she and her father had eaten baked beans together at the wood-effect kitchen table. She’d had an unhappy childhood. The baked-bean tea with her father, who’d died when she was just eleven years old, had for some reason always been one of her happiest memories. The bar’s reminder of it had helped her to fall in love with the place.
Behind the bar there’s a small, dark archway, which leads, she remembers, to a back lobby, and on to the building’s only set of stairs. Wooden stairs. No carpet. The layout of the hotel means guests have to walk behind the bar to reach their bedrooms – something Lady Emma Rankin had made a tremendous fuss about when they’d been round together. Daffy had been quite embarrassed. And at the far end of the bar is the patron’s kitchen, the only private room on the ground floor. Daffy remembers the kitchen only vaguely; full of light from a couple of double windows, both looking out onto the boulangerie and the Norman church behind it. And with a ceiling lower than the rest of the house, and yellow cooking stains on the walls around the oven…
Finally, she’s ready to see the place in its full glory. She steps over the junk mail to the nearest window. There are four windows in all; three on the wall opposite the long bar, looking out onto the Place Marronnier and the terrace, and a fourth at the side, looking, like the kitchen, onto the church and the boulangerie. Daffy slowly opens each window, pushes back each squeaking shutter and invites the cool, clear morning light to flood in.
When the bar is full of light and air and there are no more windows to open, Daffy turns herself to face the room.
Her Bar. Yes. It is smaller than she remembered, and shabbier. The walls look rough, in need of – smoothing – she thinks. And she’ll paint over the horrible brown flowery wallpaper. She’ll paint the room white, she thinks. Or yellow. Or pink! Timothy never allowed her to paint anything pink.
She feels a first flutter of excitement. Perhaps, she thinks. Perhaps…But her hopeful reveries are interrupted by a thump, a soft footstep directly above her head. Daffy whimpers in instant panic…If the robber comes down the stairs he’ll come out through the back room. He’ll see her. Worse than that, he’ll see her bag lying there beside the door. He’ll snatch the bag, and, even if she survives his attack, Daffy will have lost her passport, her car keys, her new bank details, her mascara, her tweezers…
Behind her there is a window, wide open. She could save herself – escape through the open window right now and forget the bag…Or risk everything, take those two steps required to pick it up…Another soft thud, from the stairs this time…She scrambles onto the sill, ready to leap – when she sees a flash of something moving. Something small and scraggy and light brown. It leaps through the archway and up onto the bar, looks at her, and delivers a horrible croaky, broken mew. A stray cat then, with some kind of vocal affliction.
‘Ohh!’ cries Daffy, pulling her legs back in through the window. ‘Ohh, thank goodness. Thank goodness! You poor little thing!’ As she clambers back inside the room her knees feel weak with relief. ‘You poor little stray thing,’ she murmurs, never so comforted by the sight of a fellow living being; never so happy to see anything in her life. ‘You poor angel little stray thing.’
It stares at her, the way cats do. ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ Daffy murmurs, approaching softly, ‘pardon, pussycat…I can’t speak a word of French…Ne parly any français. Have you been locked in here all this time?’ Carefully she reaches towards it. ‘You’re a skinny little thing,’ she mutters, running a gentle hand along its scrawny back. ‘You and me both!…Oh!’ Daffy’s fingers discover the cat has a collar, and a nametag, too. She peers at it. But there’s no name on the collar. Only the words HOTEL MARRONNIER.
‘Hotel…’ Daffy gasps. ‘I don’t believe it! They’ve abandoned you! How evil can you get? Oh you –’ She lifts the cat from the bar and holds it to her, her heart almost bursting with love for it already. ‘I’m going to look after you,’ Daffy mutters. ‘Don’t you worry. I’m going to look after you, and you’re going to look after me, and we’re going to look after each other! And first of all, little pussycat, we’re going to go out there, you and me, and I’m going to buy you some milk!’
Daffy keeps the cat in her arms and heads out, hooking up her handbag with one arm as she passes the door, leaving everything else as it is; ground floor windows all wide open, the key in the lock, and the upstairs still unexplored. She heads out across the Place Marronnier in search of a grocery shop.
HOW MANY BEANS MAKE FIVE?
Rosie Mottram has her arms, head and gargantuan breasts sticking full out of the passenger-seat window as their car draws up in front of La Grande Forge. She is whooping with excitement; waving large sunglasses in her hand and literally yodelling with the triumph of her arrival.
‘Oh God,’ moans Maude to Horatio, hearing the noise from way up in the COOP, at the furthest end of the house. ‘Here we go, Heck.’
‘…Five days, Maudie…’ Horatio says gloomily, as they slip out through the COOP door, carefully sliding Jean Baptiste’s bookshelf into position behind them. ‘…Five bloody days of it.’
‘I know.’
‘It’s going to be hell.’
‘It’ll be fine. They’ve got a car. We can pack them off on jaunts to places. They can go to the sea. They can have a look around Bordeaux. They can go to Saintes to see the amphitheatre…’
‘They can go to Saintes and look at the car park, for all I care. As long as they get out of the house.’
Tiffany and Superman, splashing about in the swimming pool, hear the car and the whooping and immediately hurl themselves out of the pool and across the garden to greet their new guests.
The children have plenty of friends in the village; many more than their parents, who, thanks to good-natured exhaustion – and, let’s face it, creeping middle age – grow less inclined to be sociable with anyone, French or English, with every year that passes. Their children, on the other hand, can happily while away hours bicycling around the village square with their French school friends, and they do. They have extraordinary freedom – far more than they could have done back in London. (It’s one of the many reasons Maude and Horatio continue to rejoice in their rustic French lifestyle.) But they have never before had people to stay. And though neither can remember much about the Mottram parents or their children, Superman and Tiffany have been counting the days, the hours, the minutes until they arrived.
So the Haunts, with happy smiles (some more genuine than others), emerge from their various corners. They stand together, in front of the long, white, blue-shuttered house: Mummy Haunt, Daddy Haunt, healthy, sun-kissed girl and boy Haunt, with the southern sun beaming down on them – the perfect advertisement for nuclear families and a law-abiding life.
‘Blimey,’ mutters Rosie, while she and hus
band unclick their safety-belts. ‘What do they think? We’re casting for a Colgate commercial?’
But husband Simon’s mobile has started to ring. ‘Bit jealous?’ he says, glancing at his telephone.
‘Of course I’m not! I’m only joking. I’m just saying –’
‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘Gotta take this –’ He turns away from her. Switches off the engine. And slowly, one by one…
‘…Jesus Christ!’ mutters Horatio to Maude, through clenched jaw and fixed grin. ‘How many of the buggers are there?’
…the Mottram clan clambers out from the heavily packed Volvo.
First the girl, Grace, the one the same age as Tiffany. They had been expecting her.
And then the boy, Daniel, the same age as Superman. Fine.
And then Rosie and her giant knockers, whooping away.
And then Simon, the husband. On the telephone…And then another child, aged about two, smeared in melted chocolate and wearing nothing but one short, filthy T-shirt.
…And then another child, possibly a twin, similarly presented, but the opposite sex.
…And then a baby, about nine months, with a smear of dry green snot on its upper lip, sweating beneath all the straps on its car seat.
…And finally, holding the car seat, a profoundly miserable-looking teenager; skinny, white, incredibly tall, with pierced nose and lower lip and hair dyed a dull purplish yellow. The au pair.
The youngest three children are screaming.
‘Rosie,’ Horatio says, stepping bravely forward. ‘Welcome. Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome. Welcome.’ He disentangles himself from her damp embrace, gazes at the gaggle of entirely white-haired children – and all other words escape him. Five more days, he thinks. ‘Welcome,’ he says again.
‘Yes. Welcome!’ Maude says, under similar pressure only slightly worse, since their current predicament is all her fault. It hadn’t occurred to her to ask Rosie if she still had the same number of children. And nobody mentioned anything about au pairs. Now there were eight people to cater for. Eight. Plus four Haunts. For five days. ‘Welcome,’ she says.