HOLD UPS
KIDS ALONE IN KITCHENS AND ALL THAT
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 (381/2 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.
