The Chateau of Happily-Ever-Afters. Jaimie Admans
to get on a train and go in search of them. Love doesn’t exist and adventure is for Indiana Jones. There aren’t really French dukes who whisk you away to fairy-tale castles and throw lavish balls for the nobility of France. It’s just a lovely fantasy to lose yourself in for a while.
That’s what I tell myself, anyway, as I lie there staring at a water stain on the ceiling, listening to a drunken man puking up his onion bhaji on the street outside, thinking about how early I’ve got to get up for work in the morning. But then that little fizz of excitement returns.
I bet you don’t get people vomiting outside The Château of Happily Ever Afters. I bet it’s peaceful there. Sunny. Glamorous. About as far away from here as you can get.
When I wake up in the morning, I know I’m going. After lying awake most of the night, trying to convince myself I’m stupid for even considering it, I’d assumed I’d wake up this morning with my sensible head back on, but my mind is filled with the château. Eulalie talked about it so much that getting a mental image is easy and, as I look around my grotty flat, all I can think is one thing. Why would I not go there?
It’s now or never. If I don’t do this now, I’ll talk myself out of it. I’m owed holidays from work, and although I haven’t reserved them in advance, I could book my time off now and phone in sick this week. I could lie to my boss. I could find my passport and go to the place Eulalie loved more than anywhere in the world.
I have two choices. I can go to work as normal. Put on my uniform and get the bus in like any mention of a French château has been nothing but a dream. I can stand with my table in the supermarket aisles, getting in the way of every customer, hawking whatever product the store wants hawked today. I can learn my lines perfectly, deliver them to customers with such chirpiness that the exclamation point is audible, and try to push whatever food the shop has been paid to push. I’m a sampler in a supermarket bakery, a job that goes against the very core of what you think you know about human nature: it makes people turn down cake.
It’s the kind of job you do solely because you get paid. I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed a day at work, or felt valued, or like my skills as a baker were being taken into consideration. A dog could do my job if it wouldn’t eat all the cake samples.
Or I can take a risk. Eulalie was like a mum to me. My own mum died a few years ago, and Eulalie was there for me through every moment, and she became the closest thing I had to family. Losing her has left a huge hole in my world, even though it wasn’t sudden, and we both knew the end was coming by the time she died. Doing what she wants me to do, and visiting the place she loved so much… it suddenly seems more important than anything else.
Until today, the biggest step I’ve ever taken outside of my comfort zone is doing the weekly shop in Sainsbury’s instead of Tesco. As I sit in the back of a taxi with a driver who chatters at me in French, oblivious of the fact I can’t understand a word, I realise that my comfort zone has been well and truly left behind.
I’ve never been to France before and, on reflection, it was a mistake to tell the chauffeur de taxi this, as he’s spent the past hour giving me a complete history of the country and the delights of the Normandy region. At least, I assume that’s what he’s doing. He’s been rattling on for ages and the only word I’ve understood so far is the ‘bonjour’ when I first got in.
The countryside here is beautiful, green hills that stretch out for miles, dotted with handsome black and white cows. The roads close up as we get closer to the château, lined with overhanging trees and hedgerows bustling with birds. I have no idea where we’re going. The château is so remote that even Google Maps didn’t cover it, and as we trundle down an overgrown lane that looks only suitable for tractors, I’m sure he’s taking me to the wrong place. There is a château in the distance, popping into view occasionally through the trees, but it’s massive, and it only gets bigger as we get nearer.
This can’t be it. It’s huge. And completely alone. There’s nothing else around for miles, just fields and trees and more cows.
When the driver turns in, I’m convinced he’s gone to the wrong place, because this is insane. I cannot own a place like this. Well, half own. It’s the kind of place you’d expect the queen to live. If Buckingham Palace was in the middle of the French countryside, this would be it. There’s a moat. After we’ve turned into the property and driven down a driveway so long that if the airports ever get overcrowded, planes could easily come in to land on it, there’s an actual moat and an actual bridge that the taxi drives across. I’ve never seen a moat in real life before. It’s impossible that I now own a house that has one.
There has got to be a mistake.
‘Are you sure this is the right place?’
‘Oui,’ the driver says.
Even I can translate that.
Across the bridge is a large square courtyard and gravel crunches under the car tyres as we come to a stop.
It’s been a long drive and it’s cost me more than I’d budgeted for, but trying to understand French trains and buses and however many connections it would’ve taken to get this deep into the Normandy countryside wasn’t something I could cope with today.
The driver is getting my suitcase out of the boot before I’ve even had a chance to process it. After giving him almost every one of the euros I hastily drew out of a cash machine in a French train station this morning, following a panicked realisation that I was in France and completely unprepared, with only my British bank card and a British twenty-quid note in my purse, he leaves me standing in the courtyard, wondering how I’m going to call him back, because he’s obviously brought me to the wrong place.
This can’t be it. I mean, I know the solicitor threw around figures like a million euros, but I wasn’t expecting it to be this big. The building itself is so huge it seems ridiculous that anyone could live in it. Row after row of double windows stare down at me, five floors of them, a tall pointed roof, and towers at each corner, their spires stretching up into the blue sky. I’m not sure if it looks like a castle from a fairy tale or the kind of place you’d need Scooby Doo regularly on hand.
I feel small as I stand in the shadow of the house and look around the courtyard, nothing but land for miles. Trees and grass. Weeds taller than me. The odd ramshackle outbuilding. I suppose it must all be my land now. Well, mine and Mr Loophole’s. I have no idea how much fifteen acres actually is, but it sounds like a lot.
Something in the moat makes a splash. I jump because it’s the loudest noise I’ve heard since the taxi left. There’s no road and no neighbours or other noise-making things nearby, and it makes me nervous. At home, the neighbours are literally on top of you and you need earplugs to get through a day. Privacy and solitude might not be a thing, but at least there’s someone to hear you scream if you get attacked. I step a bit nearer to the moat, but the water is murky and I think better of it. Whatever made the splash was probably a snake. A poisonous one. That would be just my luck.
I shiver and wrap my arms around myself even though the sun is hot and bright. I’m alone in the middle of these huge grounds, with this huge house, in a country I’ve never been to before, with a language I don’t understand. What am I doing here? There’s stepping out of your comfort zone and then there’s bungee-jumping out of it with a broken rope and no parachute. That’s what I’ve done. I should just go home.
Even as I think it, I know I can’t. I didn’t leave the flat before the crack of daylight, lie to my boss about being ill, take two trains and a painfully expensive taxi, and spend half the day travelling only to go home before nightfall.
This is just a holiday. People take holidays all the time. People go to visit French châteaux all the time. All right, so they don’t usually own them and probably pay a pretty penny for the privilege, and that’s the point, isn’t it? You can’t be given a château and not visit it. That would be silly. This is like