The Chateau of Happily-Ever-Afters

‘There are a lot of expats around these parts. Land is cheap, the commute back home isn’t too bad, and everything’s just that bit nicer over here. Well, you must know that already if you’re moving in.’ She nods towards the château, her long earrings jangling with the movement.

‘I haven’t moved in,’ I say, trying not to choke on the baguette I’m making short work of. So much for being civilised. ‘I’m just here on holiday for a few weeks. After that, it’s back to the grindstone in the UK.’

‘Where are you…’ She stops mid-sentence with her mouth hanging open. I follow her line of sight towards the château. Julian has chosen that moment to appear from the gardens and is walking up the steps to the open door.

‘Oh. My. God,’ Kat says, doing an unintentional impression of Janice from Friends. ‘Look at that fine specimen of manhood. That is a god carved out of pure marble, that is.’ She grabs my wrist. ‘Is he yours?’

‘No!’ I say in horror. ‘Ick!’

At the top of the steps, Julian turns and gives us a wave.

Kat is practically swooning on the spot as he disappears into the depths of the château. Her grip on my wrist tightens. ‘Why on earth is he not yours? He’s gorgeous.’

‘Ew! I would never…’ I stutter, struggling to find the words for just how hideous a thought that is.

She looks at me and then back at the house. ‘There’s something wrong with you. As they would say around here, that is un homme magnifique.’

She may as well be drooling.

‘Yeah, from a distance. Once you meet him, his attractiveness drops so far below zero that we need a bigger numeric table.’

‘I don’t believe that for a second.’ She finally lets go of my wrist, but if she was a cartoon character, there would be hearts in her eyes.

‘He’s a Scottish knobkettle who thinks he’s far better looking than he actually is.’

‘Ooh, he’s Scottish too?’ She fans a hand in front of her face. ‘Don’t make it worse! Scottish men are so sexy. Does he have a kilt?’

‘I sincerely hope never to find out.’

The look she gives me would be less incredulous if I’d told her there was a flock of pterodactyls swooping overhead. ‘Why is he shirtless?’

‘Because he’s an idiot.’

‘I didn’t know idiocy caused men to spontaneously remove their shirts. If that was true, there’d be a lot more shirtless men in my life.’

I smile as I look over at her. She’s got friendly blue eyes that are accentuated by her short haircut, and her bright green top is colour-coordinated to perfectly match the green bits of her hair, her eyeshadow, and the bracelets around her wrists. Everything about her screams of someone who’s supremely comfortable in their own skin.

‘I could introduce you, if you want,’ I say against my better judgement. She seems like a nice person. She deserves better than Julian.

‘Nah. I’ll trust your judgement. Besides, I’ve got my eye on someone. He hasn’t got the body of that glorious creature, but he’s got a smile that makes me go weak at the knees every time I see it. Of course, he’s only in town twice a week for the market and he doesn’t speak a word of English, but I think we have some kind of lost-in-translation connection.’

‘In all fairness, most men don’t understand English. Communicating with them is hard enough in the same language, so maybe non-verbal relationships are the way to go.’

She laughs. ‘I hear you on that one, lovely. I also sometimes think pushing them out of a window might be the way to go.’

‘If you want to test the window theory, please come in and try it from the fifth floor…’

It makes her laugh again and nod towards the château. ‘So what about him? Is he a workman or something?’

‘No, unfortunately. If he was, he’d be leaving soon.’ I sigh, unsure of how to explain sharing this place with Julian in a way that makes sense. ‘We’ve inherited half the château each. We’ve both turned up at the same time and there’s nothing either of us can do about it.’

‘Oooh, forced to share a house with him. I wouldn’t complain about having to look at that body! It’s a shame it’s such a big house really. You’ll probably never even see him.’

‘I live in hope.’ I go to tell her about my plan to drive him out, but I stop myself. It seems just as childish as everything else I’ve done since I’ve been here, and I get the feeling she’d tell me I’m being unreasonable, and I don’t want to have to admit that I am being a teensy bit unreasonable. Like, the teensiest, tiniest bit.

‘Well, I must be getting on, lovely, but I’ll come back tomorrow. If you could arrange for that gorgeous Scottish thing to be shirtless again, I’ll feed you for free.’

‘What if I could arrange for him to be upside down in the moat? Would that work?’

‘Aww, I’m sure he’s not that bad. Do you want anything else before I go?’ She pulls back the cover of her cart to reveal a selection of goodies I hadn’t even seen until now. ‘I’ve got croissants, pains aux raisins, cinnamon twists, brioche, and white crusty loaves that’ll still be fresh by lunchtime.’

Everything’s set out on her cart in individual clear plastic boxes and, even with the lids shut, the smell is divine. The bakery at work never smells like this. It always smells of the chemical preservatives the company pumps into their dough to keep it looking fresher than it is.

This is proper baking, proper fresh, proper food. The noise I let out sounds positively orgasmic. ‘Oh God, one of everything, please. Two of that iced twisty thing.’

‘And for your gorgeous housemate?’

‘Ha. He can feed his bloody self. After all that taunting last night, I wouldn’t get food for him if you paid me in fresh baguettes and gold bars.’

She gives me a curious look, obviously having no idea what happened last night, and I blush. ‘I’ll just run in and get my purse.’

When I get back, Kat’s still standing in the courtyard, looking around at the surrounding land, and I’m feeling sheepish.

She’s bagged everything up into brown paper bags, and I tip my empty purse upside down as I walk towards her. ‘What do I owe you? Because I’m fairly sure it’s more than the three euros I’ve got left.’

‘Six euros.’

I hand her my last three coins. ‘I used the last of my cash to pay the taxi driver yesterday. Can I cancel—’

‘You know what, don’t worry about it,’ she says with a smile.

‘No, I can’t do—’

‘Seriously. Coming here and seeing the, ahem, sights has really perked up my morning. It’s the least I can do for a fellow Brit.’

‘I can owe it to you. If you’re coming back tomorrow, I’ll have it by then.’

‘There’s no need,’ she says with a shrug.

‘Speaking of, where is this village you mentioned earlier? Is there a shop there? Because I need to get cash out and I really need to get some food in, and some teabags. I haven’t had a cup of tea in over twenty-four hours. I’m failing as a Brit.’

She starts laughing. ‘If you think you’re going to get a cup of tea around here, you’re sorely mistaken.’

‘What?’ My stomach plunges in unease. ‘No PG Tips?’

‘Not a chance. The French don’t do tea. Not in the way you mean, anyway. In cafés, you might find teapots full of some pseudo tea liquid too weak to drown a gnat, but you won’t find proper tea here. You’ll be hard pushed to find a kettle in the shops.’

‘We’ve probably got a kettle,’ I say, glancing back at the château. I still haven’t had a chance to look around properly and haven’t found the kitchen yet. Even as I say it, realisation sets in that anything here has been unused for twenty-odd years. If there is a kettle, I can’t imagine it still working. ‘They must sell teabags somewhere.’

‘Yep. Back in Britain. Next time you come out, stock up and fetch them with you. The French are wine and coffee people.’

‘Great,’ I mutter. While wine and coffee have their place in the world, the day just got infinitely worse. This is why people have comfort zones. Never mind poisonous snakes and plants with homicidal tendencies – it’s because there’s never a shortage of PG Tips in London.

‘I’m going there now if you want to tag along.’

‘Hmm?’

‘To the village,’ Kat says. ‘It’s about a forty-minute walk, but I’ve got to make some stops on the way, obviously. You’re welcome to come with me, if you want. It’s best to get there early. It gets busy at lunchtime.’

‘Oh yeah, that would be great,’ I say, even though it makes me nervous too. I’m not good at new places, and I’d be guaranteed to get lost trying to find this village on my own, but I’m equally not good at new people, and I envision forty minutes of awkward silence as Kat and I run out of things to say to each other before we’ve got to the end of the driveway.

I gather up my baked goods, leaving a croissant to eat on the way, and run back inside. I dump them on a table near the door, make sure to slip my key into my pocket, just in case Julian gets any ideas about locking me out, and run back out to the courtyard.

‘It’s so beautiful here,’ Kat says as we walk along the little lane outside the château grounds. There are no pavements and it’s barely wide enough for a car. If one comes by, we could be in trouble. ‘You’re so lucky to own such an amazing house.’

I haven’t felt very lucky so far. I still miss Eulalie like I’m walking around with a hole in my stomach, and no château can change that. In fact, everything about the château makes the need to talk to her claw even deeper. I want to tell her that I’m here, that I’m seeing the things she saw, that all her stuff is still here, and I’ll look after it somehow.

And then there’s Julian. I want to tell Eulalie that she had a nephew and he’s here too. I want to ask her if she’d want him here or if I should protect her beloved château from him somehow, even though annoying him to the point of making him leave seems like an even more stupid plan the further I get from the house. We’re adults. What am I going to do to him? Clingfilm the toilet seat?

Kat’s first stop is a farmhouse twenty minutes down the road from us.

‘This is Wendy,’ she says to the old man who comes out to greet us. ‘She’s moved into Le Château de Châtaignier.’

The man suddenly looks excited. ‘Oh, avec Julian!’ he shouts, before spouting off a mouthful of French. The only word I can understand is Julian’s name. He makes the motion of turning a key in a lock.

‘I only understand basic French,’ Kat says to me. ‘Something about someone locking someone out?’ She shrugs like she hasn’t got a clue what he’s going on about.

Oh great. This must be Julian’s new friend, the one who gave him the key.

‘Un homme bon,’ he cries, shaking his fist at me. ‘Charmant!’

I look at Kat helplessly.

‘A good man,’ she translates. ‘Charming.’

I roll my eyes. ‘Said by someone who must’ve spent all of twenty seconds with him. Any longer than that and I’m sure his opinion will change.’

The man starts babbling in French, looking annoyed with me.

‘He’s saying he loved your great-aunt,’ Kat says. ‘Something about her being proud of Julian having the chestnuts.’

‘She wasn’t my great-aunt, she’s was Julian’s, which just proves that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. And I don’t know about chestnuts but there’s definitely something nuts about Julian.’

‘What’s he done to you?’ Kat says as we walk away. ‘Old Mr Adelais seemed very fond of him.’

‘Old Mr Adelais doesn’t have to live with him,’ I mutter. ‘It’s complicated. The château was supposed to be mine, but he’s muscled in with this bloody loophole and he thinks he owns the place. Which he kind of half does.’

‘I don’t know why you’re letting it bother you. Surely there’s enough space in that huge house for both of you? Personally, I’d be very happy to share a house with him for nothing but the view alone.’

Maybe she’s right. Forty rooms and fifteen acres. You could easily lose someone in all that space. I won’t even know he’s there. It’ll be fine. Even if I don’t manage to drive him out, he’s not going to spoil my time here. The place is so big you could have a family of sixteen in it and still need smoke signals to find each other.

The walk is slow because we constantly stop off at Kat’s morning regulars, always being met at the gate by eager villagers, waving money at Kat in exchange for the goodies on her cart. I watch her have stilted conversations with people in French, which mainly involve miming and some species of sign language. She introduces me each time, but I haven’t the foggiest idea what’s being said to me, so I just nod and smile, and say ‘oui’ a lot, even though I have no idea what they’re asking me, and Kat loses the conversations when they start speaking too fast. I could have told everyone that I enjoy grating cheese and wearing an alien cow on my head for all I know.

‘So, do you really make a living doing this?’ I ask, even though I can easily see her cart is nearly empty and there’s no sign we’re anywhere near the village yet.

‘Yep,’ she says. ‘There are a lot of old people around here who find the walk into town challenging or who only go in on market days. The bloke who owns the boulangerie in the village is a bit of a bugger, to be honest. He refuses to open early even though people want their bread in the mornings, but I can’t complain because he’s left a clear niche for me.’

‘I’m kind of a baker too. I mean, not professionally or anything, I just knock cakes together in my spare time, but I love it. I used to bake a lot with Eulalie, the woman who left us the château.’

‘What do you do for work?’

I’m embarrassed to mention my job to her. It doesn’t even seem like a proper job. ‘I’m a sampler in a supermarket. I hand out samples and try to make people buy whatever the store wants pushed on any particular day.’

‘Oh, I hate those people.’ She suddenly realises what she’s said. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean that.’

It makes me laugh. ‘It’s fine. I hate it too. It’s not what I intended to be doing with my life, but it’s a paying job, so why rock the boat?’

‘You’re talking to someone who relocated to France on a whim. I’m a big believer in boat rocking.’

‘Things go wrong when you start rocking boats.’

She waves an arm around her. ‘At least you sink in a beautiful place.’

She’s definitely right about that.

‘It must be amazing to cook in your château,’ Kat says. ‘I’ve stood at the gate loads of times and tried to imagine what the kitchen would be like. Is it huge?’

‘I don’t know, I haven’t found it yet.’

‘I bet it’s huge. You’ll have to give me a guided tour sometime. And bake me something in it. It’s such a beautiful old house. It probably infuses everything that’s made in there with decadent glamour.’

‘Well, Eulalie certainly seemed to think it was infused with something.’

By the time we reach the village, I understand why elderly folks around here aren’t keen to do it often. Even this early in the morning, the sun is hot enough that sweat is beading on my forehead and I’m desperate for a bottle of water. It’s not a hard trek, but it’s uphill towards the end, and the narrow lanes don’t get any wider or safer, although we don’t see any traffic other than a man on a horse.

There’s a little wooden sign up on a wall surrounding a house that reads ‘Bienvenue à Toussion’. It looks like it’s been burnt into the wood by someone with a magnifying glass in the sunlight. It’s the kind of sign you’d miss if you weren’t looking for it, and as I look at the village spread out in front of me, the same could be said about that. The pavementless tarmac gives way to cobbled streets lined with half-timbered houses, painted in a rainbow of pastel colours around their wooden beams. If the Easter Bunny existed, he would live here.

It’s a beautiful place, and I feel Kat watching me as I take it all in. ‘It grows on you,’ she says. ‘I worked in the middle of a shopping centre back home, every shop in one place. If you ever needed anything it was right there. I laughed at the idea of trying to live here, but you adapt.’

I can’t imagine ever adapting. You could fit the whole of this village into one boarded-up shop on my local high street.

The most noticeable thing is the silence. There’s no traffic, no beeping horns, no yelling. The only sound is a bee buzzing around a red flower in someone’s windowbox.

An old lady totters down her flower-edged garden path with a sprightly ‘bonjour!’ As she chooses one of Kat’s baguettes, I look around and see an old man watering flowers in his window. He waves and shouts a greeting.

If I had a book in my arms, I’d be walking around like Belle in the opening scene of Beauty and the Beast. There’s a calmness here, an atmosphere of the village that time forgot. And stepping back in time is exactly what it feels like. The pretty, wooden-framed houses are nothing like the dull, drab bricks in England. Each window has a windowbox underneath it, full of tumbling, colourful flowers, and although I can’t understand the names on the few shops I can see, it’s easy to tell they’re houses-turned-shops and their owners probably live above them.

‘The épicerie,’ Kat points out as we wander. ‘That’s the grocery shop. There’s a little cash machine in there but it’s often out of funds. You can pay for anything with your cards though. Did you tell your bank you were coming here?’

‘No. I didn’t think they’d be interested in my holiday plans.’

‘Well, they’ll probably block your card because they suspect it’s been stolen. You’ll have to phone them and prove you’re you. And that’s the pharmacie, I don’t need to translate that one.’ She points across the road. ‘That’s the boulangerie, the bakery, and not to toot my own horn, but my stuff is much better than his. Further on is the library but you’ll be lucky to find it open. It’s run by a forgetful old bloke who forgets he runs it most days.’

I look around in disbelief. ‘That’s it? A chemist, a baker, a grocery shop, and a library?’

‘What else do you need?’

‘I…’

‘This village only really comes to life on market days. The streets are lined with stalls and that covered triangular area in the middle is full of sellers.’

I look at the odd-shaped area between the bakery and the library, hanging baskets full of flowers swinging from each concrete pillar supporting the roof. ‘When’s market day?’

‘Tuesday and Saturday mornings,’ she says. ‘I’d love to get a stall but I’d have to get here so early that I’d let my regular customers down. Then again, when you meet Theo, the butter seller, you’ll see why it might be worth it. He’s gorgeous.’

When Kat leaves me, with a promise of coming round with breakfast tomorrow morning, and me actually having the cash to pay her this time, I watch her green-tipped hair walking away and wonder what I’ve let myself in for coming here. I don’t understand a word of the language, and even though Kat’s taught me to ask ‘parlez-vous anglais?’ in shops, she’s also told me not to count on any locals speaking English. The next few weeks might not be quite the relaxing holiday I was hoping for.

In the épicerie, the shopkeeper greets me with a bright ‘bonjour’ and comes out from behind the counter babbling in French. After a series of hand gestures and me butchering the pronunciation of the three words I know, he goes back behind the counter and watches me like he’s not sure if I’m a foreigner or a really weird shoplifter.

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