In his view the moustache was a work of art, far more interesting than Salvador Dalí’s famous version. It had taken him three whole years to perfect it. Dark brown in colour, it unfurled in perfect symmetry over his top lip, ending in a dramatic curl at either end like the strong man in a Victorian circus.

Guillaume and the moustache had just finished an hour’s lively French lesson with the expat members of the Bratenac Ladies’ Luncheon Club. He made a little money from these sessions, but did it more for the entente cordiale and the belief that if all these Anglais were going to come and live in his country, the least they could do was to learn the language. It also helped that the English ladies liked a drink and spent enough to keep the owner, who happened to be Guillaume’s partner, very happy.

Among the club members present was Jackie Brown, well over seventy but still bursting with energy under her mahogany permatan. Jackie considered herself the doyenne of Bratenac’s expats. She had left Essex and settled here long before a lot of the other arrivals and, unlike many of them, spoke good French, albeit with a truly terrible accent.

In her view, Jackie was the opposite of retired, and that was the way she liked it. Like most expats looking for ways to make ends meet in their French paradise, she had a variety of jobs, from managing empty properties to doing the changeovers for Airbnb rentals, making sure villa swimming pools hadn’t gone green and unusable, and organizing her toyboy husband of sixty-two, Steve, who happened to be Bratenac’s most popular builder. Perhaps toyboy was an exaggeration, looking at Steve. He was big and muscular, but had a large paunch and an arse that hung over his trousers when he bent down, in a classic case of builder’s bum. Jackie was forever nagging him about this unsightly appendage. After all, she didn’t want him popping his clogs before her, even though he was thirteen years younger, did she?

The other regulars in Jackie’s coterie were Janine, who did dog walking and dogsitting, often moving into people’s houses for the whole time they’d gone back to the UK; Mandy, who made money catering for the expat parties; Shirley, who was a happy housewife; and Suzi, who saw herself as the group’s femme fatale, since she had a weakness for other people’s husbands. Jackie knew that this came from insecurity and a fear of ageing; but even so, having lost her own first husband to another woman, she knew Suzi definitely needed watching. Fortunately, Steve wouldn’t have noticed if Suzi had posed naked across a plate of chips – or rather, he’d have noticed the chips. He’d lost interest in sex long ago, which was a pity because Jackie certainly hadn’t.