The House with Blue Shutters by Lisa Hilton Page A

description. ‘She said
     to say she phoned, but there was only the answer machine and she needs to know.’
    Charlotte set the blistering rack down slowly on the wall of the old pigsty. What did Aisling think she was doing, she thought
     self-righteously, it was Monday morning! Lolling around in a negligée painting her nails? She was working, and so was Malcolm,
     who took odd jobs in the season on English gîtes and had got up at six-thirty to drive fifty kilometres to see about the filter
     in some hysterical woman’s pool. TheGlovers did not have a pool. Then she felt mean and asked Richard if he would like a glass of Orangina.
    ‘Is your mum going out then?’ she couldn’t help asking, wondering where it was she and Malcolm hadn’t been asked.
    ‘Yeah, it’s sick. We were meant to be going to see
Star Wars
, but now she’s going to drinks at the chateau,’ he pursed up his mouth to inject pretension into the last syllable, ‘and
     we have to stay at home with Caroline.’
    ‘Caroline?’
    ‘Caroline Froggett. She sucks. She’s a PG and she’s got a sister, but the sister’s grown up and her parents are going too.
     It’s crap, actually,’ he said, daring the semi-risk of the word.
    ‘Oh dear, that is disappointing. I didn’t know Aisling and Jonathan knew the chateau people.’
    ‘They don’t, but my mum can’t wait to have a nose. You know what she’s like. And the dogs at the chateau tried to kill Mr
     Froggett, that’s Caroline’s dad, so they’re all going to have a meeting about it and drink loads of wine, probably.’
    ‘Well, tell your mum it’s fine, but a bit short notice. I think Malcolm’s got some videos of Monty Python, we could watch
     that instead.’
    ‘Yeah, all right. Thanks for the drink.’
    On the way home, Richard jerked his bike into a skid around the wall of the bridge, like Valentino Rossi. He and Oliver consoled
     themselves for the general crapness of living in France with the thought that next year he would be old enough for a moto.
     That’s if dad let him have one, because they couldn’t even have a Playstation, even though you could get the converter plug
     in Landi. Also, you could buy spliff in the barin Castroux, which was cool, though he hadn’t actually had any spliff yet. Claudia had caught him filching a cigarette and
     had been pretty cool actually, saying that if he was going to smoke he might as well do it properly, and she showed him how
     to inhale in the barn. He pretended not to know how, although he’d been smoking since he was like, twelve, a year ago. Richard
     definitely fancied Claudia, although her tits weren’t that big, but she was really pretty and smelt of perfume and her clothes
     were all droopy and a bit see-through. He wondered if she sexed with Alex a lot.
    It was a bit sad, but he actually missed school. He and Oliver boarded in England, which was fine, because he didn’t want
     to go to the
lycée
in Landi with all those rubes, no way. School was a universe away. School was internet and skiing trip and sneaking into
     town on the bus and it wasn’t weird to live in France because lots of people’s parents did, even though to hear his mum you’d
     think they were the only English boys to speak French at all. His parents’ French made Richard cringe. He hated, detested,
     loathed and despised the way they always carried on speaking unnecessarily, chatting to everyone in the shops instead of just
     saying thank you and going like they would in England. The way they smiled too much and made mistakes, and those awful pantomime
     actions to make up for it. French was not another world, it was just what you spoke when you played football in Castroux or
     hung around the café sharing a cigarette with Jean-Luc or Kevin, who both had motos and were not at all impressed that Richard
     and Oliver spent half the time somewhere else. Mum kept asking about his friends in the village, asked him to invite them
     for supper, but Richard