Bordeaux Housewives. Daisy Waugh
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Название: Bordeaux Housewives
Автор: Daisy Waugh
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
isbn: 9780007347469
isbn:
‘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.
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.