A Chateau of One's Own

by Sam Juneau

  Our stay in paradise was nearing its end and my flight was set to leave from New York on Friday. On Wednesday, I got nervous as the hard-driving, never tiring Diane kept turning up old contacts and new voices for our pieces. Late that evening, I timidly told Diane my situation – I had to go back to France for a few days, it was a life-or-death situation. As a mother and grandmother (hard to believe), she was understanding and insisted we start back at the earliest possible time. We called our travel people and booked the earliest flight for Friday morning. If we hopped on that, I could just make my evening flight to Paris. Five hours from LA to New York, two hours at the airport and then seven hours overnight to France. It had to be done.

  Midday Saturday, I arrived at the train station in Angers from Paris. Bud was there in our heaving, partly rusted 17-year-old Mercedes with two beaming faces sitting in the back peering out the window. I jumped into the car and burst into tears. I hugged and kissed my dear little family as if it had been years since I’d seen them. Such is the life of the emigrant coming back to the homestead after scraping together a living in a foreign land.

  Later that night, we all nestled into bed, our one large bed, cranked up the ailing heating system and drifted off to sleep, four little birds in the nest. Just after sweet sleep’s comforting touch, I heard a yelp.

  ‘Ouchhh! Dammit!’

  I leaned over as quickly as I could in my post-flight stupor and flipped on the light.

  Just then, I saw the back end of something hairy and a long, spindly pink tail slip into the bathroom.

  ‘What happened?’ I yelled.

  ‘That rat just bit me,’ Bud replied calmly.

  I was home at last.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Clouds Gathering

  After weeks relying on the kindness of friends and strangers, sleeping on sofas, crashing at country estates and living in four-star luxury on the road, I had found my way home for Christmas. The time had passed so quickly I had trouble getting my bearings back at the chateau. The mood in the house was not particularly festive but we were all grateful to be together after our time apart.

  In the quagmire of my Michael Jackson duties, I had managed to field a couple of dozen requests for wedding visits. One, made by a young French count, was particularly urgent as he and his fiancée intended to marry in two months’ time on Valentine’s Day. On my first day back at the house, I groggily greeted the young hopefuls who had visited to look around the place for their wedding venue. The count was average height with dark hair, dark eyes and a barely hidden snarl. I didn’t quite know why he was so displeased but his countenance did not match his easy-going speech. His beloved was tall and willowy with black hair and long elegant fingers.

  We seated ourselves in the large, warm wood-panelled library. I made coffee and sat with the two babes (they couldn’t have been more than early twenties) and we chatted of little things concerning Anjou – the weather, the upcoming festivals, the happenings in Angers. I gave them a tour of the house and some of the grounds. They seemed excited and decided to book. The rate was a modest 1,200 euros (£830) for use of the chateau for the day. I told them they could stay free of charge on their wedding night, as the honoured couple, and the other rooms would range from 74 to 94 euros, breakfast included. They didn’t want to commit to the rooms so we signed an informal agreement and parted ways.

  I wasn’t entirely happy with the price. I had recently seen Gosford Park on DVD. I looked up the house on the Internet, featured so stunningly in the film. Wrotham Park, a mid eighteenth century Palladian villa with a vast park, offered wedding receptions for eight hours only at a cool £4,000. I must be honest, Bonchamps did not have the perfection and quality of this English masterpiece. But my resentment grew as I pondered the market for weddings in France. I had done my research and I knew the prices – the prices people were willing to pay. For our first year, we decided on 1,200 euros. The upper end for a stately chateau in the central west of France was 1,800 euros (£1,200), still one-third the tariff of an equivalent English country house. But we made our decision and wanted to build up business and get referrals later on down the road. I mused, why couldn’t we live in a country where people made real money and weren’t afraid to spend it? The answer, sadly, was we never could have afforded such grandeur if the market were more competitive, more aggressive. Such was our lot. Still, a thousand or so in February, plus rooms, wasn’t a bad start.

  I met with about half a dozen other couples over the holidays. I could only wait for their responses as I trudged back to New York after only a week at home. Bud would have to take care of the arrangements for February’s wedding. At the end of January, I received a call.

  ‘Sam, we have a major problem. You know that gigantic Lebanese cedar right next to the house? With the huge branches? The one where the kids always play?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It fell down in a storm yesterday. It’s blocking part of the road and is splayed out all over the parking area, the field where you want the guests to park for the wedding.’

  ‘Any other good news?’

  ‘Oh, the gas bill came. Nineteen hundred euros.’

  I quickly got on the Web and looked up as many arborists as I could find in our little region. Call after call, the verdict was the same – at least 1,000 euros, sometimes up to 3,000… oh, and we can’t do it until late April. The cost would swallow any profit we hoped to gain from the wedding. Bud called in a few friends from the town and nobody could even contemplate taking the monster on. Months, they all said. I left it at that, hoping for some minor miracle.

  But not all was lost. Since Christmas, we had pulled five more weddings and bookings were up nicely since our first summer. We even had a full house for Easter for several days. So, our season was starting in early April now, not late June like last year. The Guard’s House, the dutiful money-maker, was filling up nicely too.

  Another spot of good news came from Bud’s sister Mary. Over the months of my long American sentence, Mary was able to make repeated and dutiful trips to help care for the children and provide Bud with company. Somehow, she had arranged with her job to take a leave of absence. She was the eldest of Bud’s nine siblings and had fallen madly in love with Blue and Grim. She seemed to have an endless capacity to care for and play with the tireless, sometimes relentless babies. Her visits and selfless generosity helped keep Bud sane during that long dark winter.

  Five days before the wedding, I landed myself back at the chateau, ready to take care of business. As Bud drove us up the long dirt road to the house, there, lo and behold, were no fewer than 13 neat and perfectly straight stacks of wood, cut and sorted, good to bad, ready for carting off and burning.

  ‘Bud! What happened? Who did that?’

  ‘Who do you think? Jehan-Claude. He’s been here since the tree fell. Day and night, when he’s not working, cutting the thing up.’ Bud smiled. She’d been keeping this from me as a surprise.

  Dear, dear Jehan-Claude. Shortly before we bought the chateau, he and his wife had made the short move to the end of our long road where they took up residence in a small stone farmhouse. We had called on the man several times over the past year and a half to fix drains, repair the old, beaten-up washing machine, sort out minor electrical problems and rake leaves. JC was our saviour.

  Relieved and profoundly thankful, I began raking and mowing and sweeping, vigorously and vainly trying to get the grounds into some semblance of order. Bud took over the cleaning and laundering of the linens with Patricia, a local woman who had worked for the association for Down’s syndrome adults back in the 1990s. She was smart and efficient with strong, thick arms and the work ethic of a tireless plough horse.

  Over the next 72 hours, tables, chairs, flowers and decorations arrived, always accompanied by the sweet, happy smiling faces of the bride and groom. The caterers piled into the kitchen in the late morning of the day of the wedding and began their intricate work. My nerves were taut as I feared for the success
of the big day… would there be enough parking, would the guests like the house, would the happy couple be pleased?

  The wedding began in earnest around six in the evening. The caterers were on their marks, music was floating gently on a mild sunny day and the wine and cocktails began to flow. Bud and I and the babies retired to our ‘appartements’ just above the kitchen, watched videos and peered, all of us, out the window as a pageant of guests arrived with grins and looks of awe in their gleeful eyes. The only bit of news to dampen an otherwise stellar debut was the fact that not one of the 150 guests took a room for the night. I had set a generous price, the price of a crack house in the East End of London, 74 euros, with breakfast, and not a soul booked a room.

  Around three in the morning, things started to settle down and the music finally stopped playing. Luckily, Blue and Grim slept right through and I made the final rounds to make sure all was in order. The caterers had cleaned up, nothing appeared to be broken, drunken couples staggered out the door and people took long, lingering sips of champagne as the party was finally at an end.

  The next morning, I was up at seven with Patricia to do a final clean up and serve breakfast to our newly wedded guests, our only guests, Monsieur et Madame le Comte. They rose and appeared at around noon. I poured coffee for them. They were quiet and utterly depleted after the night’s revelry. They seemed pleased as they worked on croissants and fresh apple juice.

  ‘Ça va?’ I ventured.

  ‘Oui, it was a wonderful day. Génial. Étonnant.’

  ‘And the guests, were they happy?’

  ‘Everyone loved the house,’ the bride said. ‘Just one thing, though. You really have to lower your room prices, because you won’t have any guests if the rooms are so expensive.’

  I thought my head would explode. Seventy-four euros per room (94 for a suite that slept five) and you’re telling me I have to lower my prices? Do you realise the cost of maintaining the property, the cost of heat just for one day for your wedding? On the verge of losing it, I smiled.

  ‘Thank you so much for the advice. I will keep that in mind. I’m delighted you had a lovely day.’

  I couldn’t bear to think Fontaines was right. It killed me. How could you make a living in the service industry when the local people, your neighbours and new-found countrymen, would not spare a sou to spend a night, one godforsaken night, in a chateau after a splendid wedding?

  My night-time bedside friend Balzac wrote, ‘Finance, like time, devours its own children.’ This niggling reality, the truth about our prospects, had begun its feast.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  L’Espoir

  Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. With this nugget of wisdom tucked firmly in our hatbands, we ploughed ahead. I struggled back at the chateau for a month and a half after that first wedding and then continued my vagrant and transitory existence in New York, made a few more trips out to California and made enough money to keep the ship afloat until the summer season began. I had been in the big, bad city for five months total with time off back at the castle for good behaviour. It felt good to bring in some dough, but fundamentally the situation was untenable. This summer was make or break.

  By late May, we had nine weddings lined up for the year with more requests for the next year. I got smart after that first experience and made renting of the chateau contingent on booking all the rooms. This helped a little and most people conceded. This brought income from half of our wedding receptions to about 2,000 euros with the others languishing in the 1,200 euro mark. Our bookings for bed and breakfast in the chateau were up to about 180 nights with 14 weeks in the Guard’s House, plus the weddings. Not terrible, but not yet sufficient.

  We busied ourselves with all the duties of spring cleaning. The chateau looked good, the trees and flowers were blooming, the bees were active. So we joined in and quickly made another baby shortly after my return, a lonely sailor back from the high seas looking to reclaim his wife and his life.

  In the late afternoon one warm, sunny day, Bud called me over to the house as I mowed our unruly lawn. This minor chore consumed no fewer than fifteen hours a week and became alternately a time of solace and annoyance.

  ‘I was cleaning up the Oak Suite and I saw a couple of dozen bees climbing the walls. Maybe you should take a look.’

  We went up to the second floor together to see what our new friends were doing. I leaned down and opened up a retractable metal chimney cover that sat just inside the fireplace. This was a simple covering to prevent draughts from coming down the chimney. We heard an enormous roar, the buzz of thousands of little bodies moving and shaking and doing their springtime thing. I peered carefully up the chimney and spotted a grotesquely large hive wedged into the brick walls of this long disused shaft.

  I called Jehan-Claude on the phone and he suggested I call the pompiers, or fire brigade. I quickly set up an appointment. I tried to insist in my pidgin French that they needed to come that day or early the day after as we had guests the next night.

  Bright and early the next day, the pompiers showed up, including some of the same lads who had investigated the infamous hornet sting incident. They arrived with a massive crane and set to work scurrying on the roof and down the chimney with ropes and ladders and various contraptions. The visit caused all sorts of excitement for the children. Blue ran around the red beast of a fire engine while Grim crawled behind, the two of them like intoxicated banshees, screaming and climbing on steps, pulling on cords and hoses, delighted.

  An hour later the job was done. I thanked the men and considered it well worth the 40 euros, the standard fee for beekeeping duties. Later that afternoon, an elderly couple arrived in a red convertible sports car. They had booked two nights in the Oak Suite, a mini-honeymoon, the two of them on second and third marriages (so the affable man had told me down the telephone from Wales). I greeted them and gave the quick tour of the library and dining room while enquiring as to whether or not they desired dinner that night in our little village. As we arrived at the door to their suite, it struck me that I hadn’t reinvestigated the room since the firemen had exterminated the bees. I flung open the door hastily, stepped in first and searched the room frantically. Clean. No sign of bees. Relieved, I bid them good day and let them get down to urgent business.

  Patricia and I served them breakfast the next morning and they disappeared. They seemed pleased and full of energy. Late that night as Bud and I watched the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice for what seemed like the fortieth time, I heard a knock on the door.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry to bother you, but we have a little problem in our room. Can you come take a look?’

  ‘Of course.’

  I followed the spry gentleman up to the room. His mood was good – which I assumed was due either to the euphoric success of his mini-honeymoon or to the fact that the problem was not particularly major. As he led me into the room, I heard a slight chuckle. His new, freshly bathed wife sat on a small sofa reading a book. He walked over in front of the fireplace and just stood there.

  There, on the floor, sat a slow-moving golden stream with a pleasant, familiar scent.

  ‘We were sitting here reading.’ Sure, you were reading, I thought. ‘And all of a sudden we heard an enormous crash. I looked around for the source of the noise and as I poked around the fireplace, this river of honey came seeping out.’

  I was mortified. ‘I am so sorry. I thought we had taken care of this. What an alarming thing to happen. I can move you, immediately,’ I stammered, and tried to be as solicitous as I could muster. They insisted on staying and assured me they were delighted with the accommodation.

  They seemed embarrassed by my attentions. They frowned at one another and looked me over. A long moment passed and nothing was said.

  Finally, ‘We’ve had a perfect stay and you’ve been so hospitable. But we have one favour to ask.’

  ‘Anything.’

  ‘Can we stay in this room anot
her night? I know we didn’t book it for this evening, but we would love to grab an extra day.’

  ‘Of course. It would be our pleasure.’

  ‘And please don’t charge us for the room service we’ve had here tonight.’

  We all laughed heartily and I left them to their business. So it had been with most of our guests. In general, so far, they had been a good, unique group of open and adventurous people who thought a few days or a week in the French countryside with good books and lovely trees and pleasant walks might be a good way to unwind and ‘escape into authentic French country living’. Or so our publicity said. And as people came and went, it proved true.

  In the thick of the summer, our friends Dennis and Marion came – that Marion, who was the mother of the famous Irish brawlers of Angers, the boys who had come two summers ago to work the property. Dennis and Marion came as friends and worked like dogs, helping us hold up the fragile venture. Their only need was bed and food, their only desire seemingly to work in the sun. One night they were sitting out the back of the chateau, drinking wine late into the evening. Bud and I had gone to bed. At around 11 o’clock I heard a tap at my door.

  ‘Sam, it’s Marion. There’s a guest down here who needs something. He’s pretty angry. Can you come?’

  I peeked out the window and saw the stout Englishman who had arrived that afternoon with his wife and two grown children, standing belligerently on the driveway with folded arms. I put on my clothes and went downstairs to face whatever music our revered guest was playing.

  ‘Good evening. What can I do? Is everything all right?’

  ‘No. Everything is not all right. We are in the Poplar Room and there is a group of Americans above us making all sorts of noise. We cannot sleep. I just travelled overnight on the ferry, arrived in this morning and drove five hours to get here. Where, by great misfortune, I was seated next to this same family at dinner at your local restaurant and was forced to watch while they acted like complete animals.’