Beauchamp Hall

by Danielle Steel

  “Well, there are four more seasons for you to watch, including the one playing in England now. And they’re filming the seventh season as we speak, or they will be, starting next week. You can order the others that have already been shown on the Internet. I’m exactly like you. I binge-watch it when I get it. And Pete is just as bad. We love it.”

  “The castle is incredible. Is it really like that in real life?”

  “Haversham Castle. Apparently it is. It’s owned by a British marquess, and he lives there with his sister, a lady, but he owns it because of the laws in England, which give the land and the title to the oldest son, and traditionally no one else inherits anything. They looked pretty cool in the article I read, they’re about our age or a little older. The show saved them from losing the castle apparently, they were out of money, and they make a fortune from renting it for the show. The whole town gets involved and watches them film it.”

  “The man who writes the show must be brilliant,” Winnie said with open admiration.

  “It’s his first big success. It’s a huge hit over there. I knew you’d love it, Win. I’m so glad you watched it.”

  “It’s the best Christmas gift I got. I’ve never been addicted to a TV show before.”

  “Neither was I, until Beauchamp.” Barb sounded thrilled that Winnie loved it.

  “I’m going to order the other seasons tonight.” She went straight to her computer after she hung up, and ordered them all. The sixth season wasn’t available yet, since it was still playing in England, but she put in an advance order, which she’d have in four weeks. She had three more seasons to look forward to for now, as soon as they arrived. She could hardly wait.

  She had just pressed the send button with her order when Rob called her.

  “Hi, I just got back. What are you up to? I missed you.” It was nice to hear that and surprising coming from him, he rarely admitted it.

  “I’ve been in bed watching DVDs for the last two days. The ones I won in the elephant game at work. It’s a fantastic show.”

  “I’ve got a pretty fantastic show for you too. Can I come over?” He usually didn’t ask, he just showed up.

  “Sure. I don’t have anything to eat in the fridge, I haven’t been to the grocery store in days. I couldn’t tear myself away from the TV.”

  “I’ll pick up something on the way,” he said, and walked in half an hour later with a pizza box. He bounded up the stairs after he left it in the kitchen, walked across the room to her bed, and kissed her hard. She’d been watching an episode from season one again, and enjoyed it just as much the second time. “What’s that?” He noticed it on the screen, and looked unimpressed by the costumes and the main drawing room of the castle.

  “The show I told you about.” She smiled.

  “Never mind that.” He ejected it and tossed it on the dresser, took a DVD case out of his pocket, put a disc in, and hit Play. And within seconds she could see what it was, the porn film his cousin had given him, and it was one of the roughest ones he’d brought over yet. She looked at it, uncomfortable at how extreme it was, and it was a shocking switch from the genteel show she’d been watching for three days. Before she could comment, he tore off his clothes and grabbed her, and started re-enacting what they were doing on the screen, trying to force his fist inside her, until she pulled away and made him stop.

  “What’s wrong?” He looked annoyed and was violently aroused.

  “That’s kind of a rough hello, isn’t it?” She was unhappy about how brutal he wanted to be. There was nothing loving about it, it was the rawest kind of sex.

  “Since when did you get so prissy? Come on, babe, I missed you. I’ve been thinking about this for three days.”

  “I missed you too. How about we just make love, that works pretty well for us. We don’t need to play porn games. Those guys are pros.” She wasn’t prudish, but there was something disgusting about it, and she didn’t want to participate. But he wanted more than just making love. He looked angry as he grabbed her again, and made love to her more roughly than he usually did. It frightened her a little, and wasn’t fun for her. But he came like a rocket, and within minutes wanted to make love again. He had come home starving to the point of being crazed. And after the second time, she wanted him to stop for a while.

  “What’s wrong with you? Most women would beg for a guy who can make love to them like that. I’ve got the cock of a twenty-year-old.” But a heart of stone, she wanted to say.

  “I like it better when you’re more tender and sensual.”

  “I like it better this way,” he said angrily. “I’m not gay.” He looked furious.

  “You don’t have to be gay to be gentle, Rob,” she said quietly. She didn’t like his homecoming style at all. And out of the blue, she suddenly wanted to ask him a question. “Are you in love with me, Rob?” It broadsided him completely and he didn’t answer for a minute.

  “What the hell have you been watching on TV while I was gone? Desperate Housewives? What kind of question is that?”

  “An honest one. You never say it. Do you love me?”

  “What do you expect, for me to throw flowers at you or burst into song? Sure I love you. Do you think I could make love to you like that, if I didn’t? That’s how men express love.”

  “No, that’s how men express lust. That’s different.”

  “I love your body,” he said, ignoring what she said. “I like being with you. We’ve been together for eleven years. That must mean something.” It could also mean habit, fear of loneliness and of being alone. They had great sex, but all of a sudden she wondered what else they had, and what he felt for her. And even what she felt for him. The love interests on Beauchamp Hall were so intelligently expressed, the characters really cared about each other, and despite their upper-crust manners, they fell in love and found elegant ways to demonstrate it, nothing like the porn film he wanted her to re-enact. She felt violated by everything he had done that night.

  “Eleven years together means a lot. I just wonder what we’re doing sometimes.”

  “We’re having great sex. Unless you want to go all virginal on me now.”

  “I don’t just want to be made love to, I want to be loved and respected too.”

  “Oh, for chrissake,” he said, leaping out of bed, and pulling on his clothes. “I don’t know what you’ve been watching since I’ve been gone. Little House on the Prairie or The Sound of Music. I’m not a kid, Win. I’m a man. And this is how I am. If you don’t like it, then maybe we need to think about this. I’m going home. Call me when you’re normal and ready to act like an adult again.”

  “I don’t need to act like a whore to be an adult, Rob. I’m a woman and a human being. I’m not some hooker in a Tijuana bar.”

  “And I’m not some namby-pamby guy who wants to beg you to have sex like a fifteen-year-old. You know what I like, and how I like it.”

  “I don’t like watching porn with you,” she said bluntly, “or how it makes you act.”

  “And here I just told my cousin you’re a great woman and will do anything I want.”

  “Actually, I won’t,” she said firmly. “Is that what you like about me?” She looked shocked.

  “I don’t like how you’re acting now. I can tell you that.” And with that, he stormed out of the room, thundered down the stairs, and slammed the front door behind him. She could hear his truck start a minute later, and then drive away.

  Shaking at everything that had been said, she rescued the DVD of Beauchamp Hall where he had tossed it, took his out, and put the Beauchamp disc back in, pressed Play, and climbed back into bed. Within a few minutes, she felt calm again, and as though she had entered a world of noble gentlemen and ladies, people who knew how to behave and how to treat those they loved. She watched three episodes in a row, and felt as if all was right with the world again. And she had th
e answer to her question. Rob was not in love with her. It hit her like lightning. And she was not in love with him.

  Chapter Three

  Rob didn’t call her for three days after the night he came home from Detroit. She didn’t call him either. She didn’t like the way he had treated her, and her realization that he didn’t love her and her own doubts about loving him had shaken her. They were great sexual partners, but not much else. They had no common interests, no shared friends, except for a few of the men in his bowling league. They went to work, came home, slept in the same bed on most nights, and made love when he felt like it. She realized suddenly that he hardly talked to her, and it had taken her eleven years to notice. For years, she had told herself that all men behaved like that. But what if they didn’t? The men on Beauchamp Hall didn’t, but it was a TV show, and set nearly a century earlier. And Erik respected her sister, although she knew their marriage wasn’t exciting, and she knew that her sister had had an affair he probably didn’t know about a few years back, but she’d stayed with Erik.

  What did she have with Rob, other than predictably efficient sex? She wanted more, she wanted real conversation, someone to take walks with, to share good times, and to learn things from each other. She wanted what the players at Beauchamp Hall had, but that was a fantasy and she knew it. Now she was dissatisfied with her life and a man who wanted to re-enact a porn video with her, who said he loved her body, but not much else. She wondered if he even knew her, or asked himself if he did, or cared. She would have talked to Barb or Marje about it, but she knew she’d sound crazy if she told them she wanted her life to resemble a TV show. Marje especially would have gone nuts over that and accused her of being even worse than a dreamer.

  Rob called her the morning of New Year’s Eve. She’d been watching season one of Beauchamp Hall again, and assumed she’d be watching it that night if Rob didn’t call or take her out, and that was beginning to look like a serious possibility. She wondered if it was over between them and didn’t want to ask.

  “So, are we going out tonight?” He sounded awkward.

  “Do you want to?” she asked cautiously.

  “Yeah, I do. I don’t know what got into you the other night, but let’s forget about it, and have a nice time at Murphy’s like we always do.” She had just watched the Christmas special from the first season with everyone in white tie and tails on New Year’s Eve, as they danced around the ballroom. The reality of her own life was laughable compared to that, but it was also almost a hundred years later, and even in British aristocratic circles the world had changed dramatically since then. She would be spending New Year’s Eve watching her boyfriend play pool at his favorite bar, drinking beer instead of champagne. And she’d been spending New Year’s Eve with him that way for eleven years. “I’ll come pick you up at seven. I have some things to do before that.”

  “That would be nice,” she said, sounding subdued. Despite her epiphany, she wasn’t ready to end it with him yet, and not on New Year’s Eve. That was more drama than she wanted with him. She wanted to be sure of what she felt for him, or didn’t, before she reacted to it.

  She was wearing jeans when he picked her up. There was no point wearing anything else. No one at the bar would be dressed up. A few of the younger girls might be wearing halter tops, but she felt stupid wearing one in the dead of winter, and freezing in the drafty bar all night. Instead, she wore the yellow sweater he’d given her for Christmas, and he looked pleased when he saw it.

  “You wearing the thong I gave you too?” he whispered in her ear when he kissed her, and she laughed.

  “No, I’m not.”

  “You can put it on for me later, to start the year off right.” She didn’t comment, and they drove to the bar in his truck. He started playing pool with his friends as soon as they arrived, and they had burgers at the bar around ten o’clock. He started another pool game half an hour later. At midnight, he was winning, and she walked over to him, tapped him on the shoulder and kissed him at the stroke of twelve, while his friends hooted and whistled. Then she went back to sit at the bar, and he went back to the game. She found herself wishing that she were at home watching Beauchamp Hall. She was living vicariously through the actors and the show. Their dialogue was so perfect. They said everything she would have wanted them to say. Even their hair looked impeccable in the style of the period, their jewelry, their clothes, their manners, the way they moved and behaved and reacted to each other. The restraint they used when dealing with difficult situations. She watched it at every opportunity, it had Winnie in its thrall. It had become her guilty pleasure. She was already depressed that in two days she had to go back to work, and wouldn’t have much time to watch it anymore. It had been perfect in the past few days, because Rob was working and she wasn’t, so she sat at home in her pajamas all day and watched it. But in two days that had to end.

  Rob drank too much beer that night, while playing pool, and Winnie had two beers early in the evening, and had eaten since. She was totally sober at 2:00 A.M. when they went home, so she drove his truck, and she had to help him into the house.

  “Come on, baby…put the G-string on for me….” He was staggering and slurring. He leaned on her heavily and she could barely get him up the stairs, and the minute he hit the bed with all his clothes on, he passed out.

  He woke up at eleven o’clock on New Year’s Day with a pounding headache, and went downstairs to find her. She was sitting in the kitchen, watching an episode of Beauchamp Hall on her computer, when he walked into the kitchen and sat down.

  “Not that crap again. Why are you watching that? I can’t even understand what they’re saying.” She turned it off so it wouldn’t bother him, and poured him a cup of coffee. “I won a lot of money last night,” he said, looking pleased. “I had a great time.” She nodded. She hadn’t, but didn’t want to complain. It was no different from all the other New Year’s Eves they’d spent there since they met, and she’d put up with it before. She knew he wouldn’t understand why something had changed. She wasn’t sure she understood it either.

  He went back to his place after she cooked him breakfast. He said he was going to meet up with some of the guys, and would be back that night.

  Barb called. Pete had some work to do in the office, and she came over to watch two episodes of Beauchamp Hall with Winnie. They had just finished the last episode they’d been planning to watch when Rob came home early and saw Barb in leggings and a tight exercise top that showed off her figure. He looked her over with a practiced eye, as though Winnie weren’t there. Winnie pretended not to notice, and Barb said she’d see her at work tomorrow and left.

  “She’s hot,” Rob commented when the door closed behind her. She had a good figure, but always complained about her big breasts and what an encumbrance they were.

  “She’s getting married next summer,” Winnie said, putting the DVD away.

  “To the dentist?” Winnie nodded. “He’s a wimp. She deserves better than that.”

  “He’s good to her,” Winnie said and walked to the kitchen to cook dinner, and Rob followed her.

  “Are you okay?” he asked and she nodded. “You’re acting weird these days.”

  “I’m trying to figure some things out.” She didn’t look at him as she said it.

  “About us?” He could sense that something was different, but he didn’t know what or why, and neither did she.

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe what you need to figure out is why you watch that stupid show all the time. I think it’s making you a little crazy.” She wondered if it were true. Suddenly she wanted to be with the people on the show, and live among them, as though they were real and not actors speaking lines someone had written for them. She was starting to believe it was real. Maybe Rob was right. She felt as if she might be losing her grip on reality. And her own life seemed off-kilter. Rob was part of it. The relationship they�
��d had for eleven years didn’t seem like enough compared to what she was seeing on the show, but the universe of Beauchamp Hall didn’t exist. Yet her life seemed so inadequate compared to it. Even the servants seemed more eloquent and more polished than Rob, who acted like a boor most of the time.

  She didn’t say anything to him about it. They ate dinner without talking, went to bed afterwards, made love without his putting any exotic demands on her, and he fell asleep five minutes later. When she woke up in the morning, he had left for work. She managed to shovel the driveway after the night’s fresh snow and get to work on time. Winnie looked serious when she sat down at her desk. Barb didn’t say anything for the first half hour and then looked at her intensely.

  “Are you okay? Something wrong?”

  “I don’t know. All of a sudden, my life doesn’t fit, like it shrank in the wash or something.”

  “Uh oh, sounds like Beauchamp-itis to me.” Winnie smiled at what she said. It felt that way to her too. “You know they’re just actors, right? They’re not real people. They don’t live at the castle. And they’re not waiting for you to show up.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Winnie said sadly. “But everything used to be so great back then. So elegant, so polite, so right. It puts a whole new perspective on my life.”

  “It’s a fantasy,” Barb reminded her. “We’d all like to live like that, but even those people don’t anymore. They all lost their money, and they look like you and me. There are not many grand lords and ladies around these days. How are things going with Rob?”

  “Not so good,” Winnie said. “We had a couple of bad fights last week. He gets a little crazy sometimes. I don’t think he loves me, Barb. I’m some kind of sex object to him. And what’s worse, I’m not sure I love him either. We just stay together out of habit, and because we have nothing else to do. I asked him if he loved me a few days ago, and he told me he loves my body. I think all he wants is sex most of the time. I don’t think he even knows who I am, or cares.” Barb looked surprised to hear it.