A Chateau of One's Own Page 10

  ‘Well, not quite. Even though they’re closing the thing down, they want me to stay.’

  ‘What?’ Panic in her voice.

  ‘They asked me and Keith to stay. Can you believe it? The only time I want a show to get cancelled and they tell me to stay. Unbelievable.’

  ‘We’re going. Tell him no.’

  And that was that. Bud was ready. I was too, but leaving that money on the table was hard. I had worked my whole life to find a gig where the pay was reasonably good and the work easy. With some misgivings, I ambled back into my boss’s office.

  ‘So, what’s it going to be?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, first of all, I want to say I’ve enjoyed working with you. You’ve been a great boss. Thanks for all the support.’ This sounded a little unctuous and servile, but what I said was true. My boss was great and laid-back and smart. It was his bosses that I despised, their fear and bad decisions. ‘But I’m going to France with my wife and kid. Thank you for the offer. It is flattering. But one of the reasons I bought the place in France is so morons like your boss would not determine my fate.’

  ‘Fine, understood. It’s been great working with you too. I wish you the best of luck. Maybe I’ll come visit. Some day.’

  ‘We would love to have you.’ I felt empowered and in control of my own destiny. It’s a rare thing when you can move on and leave something substantial on the table and say, I simply don’t need you, I don’t need this job. Like that old silly country and western song from the seventies, ‘Take This Job and Shove it’.

  I returned home early that evening. We would pack and leave. Why delay?

  Over the next two months, we packed and packed some more and made arrangements to leave. There were myriad minor and major details to take care of. Final rent; cancellation of gas and electric and phone; booking a moving company. Most of this went smoothly. Some nights we would sit up and talk of our new adventure. The next day, to add a little extra spice to our chaotic lives, Bud found out she was pregnant. We were overjoyed. All the little niggling things took a backseat to this new life growing now in Bud’s belly.

  Then a call came from a good friend in Cape Cod. Bud had spent summers during university cleaning houses in this beautiful part of the country. This was how she had paid for her studies, and she had made friends along the way. One of her former clients, Cynthia, knew we were heading out soon.

  ‘Bud, I have an acquaintance – our gardener, actually. He is French. I told him we had friends moving to France and he is interested in talking to you about employment. Do you think you’ll need a gardener or handyman?’ she said on the phone one afternoon.

  ‘We hadn’t thought about it. But the property is quite large and we could use some help in the beginning.’

  ‘I should tell you, he’s very capable and experienced. But he does like the drink a bit.’ Alas, a recurring theme in our lives.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Bud was sceptical. ‘Well, it’s nothing bad, just that he is French and he likes to have some wine at lunch. He’s fond of whisky too.’

  ‘I suppose it can’t hurt to meet him. Where is he now?’

  ‘He’s here in Cape Cod. I will set everything up. You can come stay with us and meet him at our house.’

  It’s odd how people come into our lives. Here was a friend from Bud’s former days as a maid, inserting herself into our plans with the best of intentions and changing how things would unfold.

  We hired a car, packed up Blue and started off for Cape Cod. We both thought a handyman might be good, just to help get us on our feet. Plus, vainly, we liked the idea of employing a caretaker on our new estate. We envisioned a life in the country full of workmen and servants who could tend to the estate and help us maintain a life that we were not accustomed to, but one that we hoped for. We were already planning to assume our place as lord and lady of the manor. Self-deception is a very powerful tool.

  We arrived in Wood’s Hole, Massachusetts, a sleepy, cosy, beautiful little enclave at the western end of Cape Cod. The town was tiny, home to a major oceanographic institute filled with scientists, local workers and some summer holidayers. It was rumoured that the town was composed of 600 couples in summer and twice that number in winter. Bed-hopping appeared to be the local sport during the slow season.

  We pulled up to Cynthia’s house, an early-1900s shingled dwelling surrounded by trees and a pond. Lovely.

  ‘It’s so nice to see you,’ Cynthia said. Bud hugged her old boss and we settled in on the porch for a cocktail. Cynthia was a serious, pragmatic woman who knew what she wanted, with shoulder-length grey hair, thick glasses and long, elegant fingers. Her movements were abrupt and clipped as though she was displeased with something and wanted to get on with things. But she could not have been any more kind or generous. Bud had formed a genuine friendship with her despite their age and social background differences.

  ‘Hercule, the gardener, will come by any minute now,’ she said.

  ‘Great. We’re looking forward to meeting him.’

  Cynthia offered us drinks and we moved out to a vast wooden porch overlooking a smooth, oval pond. We chatted about local gossip and life in the big city. Bud and she reminisced about summers long slipped past. Cynthia laughed quiet, persistent laughs, muffled with her hand. It was good to see Bud enjoying memories that I was not a part of. Sometimes it seemed we had been together forever. This reminded me that we had both, at one time, maintained separate lives.

  Ten minutes later, a 1960s pickup truck pulled into the yard. From the porch, we could see a medium-sized, fit, handsome guy get out of the truck. Hercule looked to be about forty, deeply tanned with a thick head of hair and a weathered Gallic face. He wore a tweed sports jacket and tan trousers with loafers.

  ‘Hercule, this is Sam and Bud. They’re the ones I told you about.’

  ‘Very nice to meet you.’ He had the slightest French accent but spoke perfect English. This was a good start. He could translate for us in tight spots and help us get things done.

  We chatted idly about the property, about his work experience. Bud breastfed Blue as she squirmed in her arms. Hercule’s eyes widened like saucers. But he was kind and gentle and seemed to have loads of experience. He told us of former clients – an estate in Palm Beach, a massive property here in Wood’s Hole – and his life as a gardener. His former bosses were way out of our league but we pushed ahead. After about half an hour, Bud pressed him.

  ‘So, if you were to come work for us, what kind of salary would you be looking for?’

  ‘I think about 2,500 euros per month. I think that’s fair and I spoke to my brother in France and he says that’s what the going rate is.’

  We both stifled an almost uncontrollable gasp. This was far, far beyond our means.

  ‘That’s too much, I will tell you right now.’ Bud didn’t miss a beat.

  ‘We can talk about it. I realise you would be giving me a place to live. I am open. The important thing for me is to get back to France. It’s been almost twenty years.’

  We arranged to call Hercule in the coming week with our answer. He could certainly help us and having him around might even increase our chances of getting the B&B up and running sooner. Or so we rationalised.

  Bud called Hercule later that week and we offered him the job. At 24,000 euros a year (£16,500) or 2,000 a month. For some reason, this sounded better than 30,000 a year. It was just as bad and far beyond our resources. But we were insecure and needed help. Our first mistake. We found out later that the average salary for a good, professional handyman in France was far less than this; around 16,000 (£11,000) a year. And Hercule was simply a gardener. But, coming from New York, where everything is triple the price, we thought the salary seemed reasonable at the time. Hercule accepted the offer but requested that we pay for the transport of his beloved pickup truck. He said it would be used for work around the property. This would be another $1,000 (£540) on top of our own moving expenses. At the time, we thought we had enough money, so
we agreed. We have never been accused of being canny entrepreneurs.

  The movers arrived and placed everything we owned into a large metal container, ready for shipping across the pond. Hercule would follow several weeks later.

  In early April, almost a year after we had moved the cats and bought the chateau, we arrived at our new home. Kate and Leo had been working for the same period of time. Angus, the youngest, had left early, tired of the work and feeling underappreciated.

  They had made great progress. Walls had been stripped; false partitions torn down; the gallery, Guard’s House, dining room and several bedrooms painted. The day before we arrived, Leo and Kate also left the chateau, exhausted and discouraged. It seemed that no matter how much work they did, there was always a greater amount to be done. The stress of the work, the crushing size of the project, weighed heavily on them. We gathered that things were not well for them in paradise. There were the language problems, the loneliness of country life in the winter, the isolation of being in a culture not your own. The unhappy couple packed their things, drove to the train station and left our beaten-up van in the car park.

  We found the van at the train station and made our way to the house. Our first days back at the property left us wandering around, once again, in a daze. We made to-do lists and explored the rooms again. Jehan-Claude was now living just up the road in a former farm building that had once belonged to the estate. It was a year after we had bought the place, but he still had the keys to our outbuildings.

  This was something we would have to sort out, but for the time being it was OK as JC had been most helpful to the worker bees.

  Spring had begun in the Loire Valley. A nice metaphor for the true start of our venture. The trees were sprouting new leaves, flowers poked up after a long, dormant winter. The birds sang us awake every morning as we gathered our thoughts and prepared for the new day. In our first weeks at the chateau, we felt the days warming and lengthening. We absorbed the smell of possibility around us. This set us on an optimistic path and helped us to put aside the true scale of work that lay ahead.

  Each day we left the chateau early and visited the local boulangerie. The divinity of French bread and pastry is well established. But to experience the gifts of the local baker day in, day out was to realise why exactly we had moved in the first place. Every trip brought a sweet assortment of crusty bread with a chewy centre, fresh tarts and the odd eclair. Like our French neighbours, we made this trip at least once and sometimes twice a day, giving our day a sense of order and regularity. The trip to the bakery made us focus on the importance of every day’s meal, the rhythms of everyday life.

  We had found in the big city that eating was simply an errand, a tiresome means to an end, to be taken care of quickly and with as little fuss as possible. Here in France, the eating seemed, at least for us, to be the means and the end. You would get at least two hours for lunch each and every day while fitting in the errands and other mundane necessities around these essential acts.

  Our daily rituals were punctuated from time to time by a trip to the weekly market in our small town. It is true that in parts of America, including New York City, and throughout England and Ireland, the farmers’ market does in fact exist. In many cases, these markets were resurrected after long neglect and urban and suburban flight. With a new generation of families with disposable incomes, smart people came up with the idea to recreate the weekly market. These are authentic in the sense that they tend to cultivate local produce and rely on small landholders and family farms to supply the weekly goods.

  The small-town market in France never went away. This isn’t to say that French city-dwellers don’t live modern, harried lives like the rest of us. The late-night supermarchés and the Wal-Mart- or Tesco-type monstrosities do exist in France. All arranged to cater to the needs of frantic modern lives. But alongside this clearly new arrangement is a vital, thriving network of tens of thousands of small country markets where most French families get at least some of their weekly produce. This is one of the myriad reasons we moved to France, to Europe, in the first place. We were looking to get back to basics. And we took full advantage of its goodness.

  Our own market was a simple affair. Each week, it was filled with seasonal fruits and vegetables, tasty-looking but highly imperfect as all home-grown things tend to be. You would not often find the perfect, unblemished tomato, plump and red. It might be oblong or fat with tiny scars. But the taste was true tomato-ness, tangy-sweet and luscious. There was always a van full of meat, freshly slaughtered calves, half and whole pigs, mouth-watering sausages and boudin, a blood sausage that I had also found in my native Louisiana. We often frequented the cheese man, or fromager. He was a local farmer who specialised in goats’ cheeses and a thick-rind, creamy, mouldy concoction that reminded us of the divine Gorgonzola of Italy mixed with peppers.

  You could also buy a mattress or a pair of shoes or a polyester jumper, roller skates and a pair of cheap sunglasses. I presumed these were all made in China. So much for authenticity. The live fowl always fascinated me too. Every week, several farmers would set up with a selection of savoury birds including geese, turkeys, ducks, chickens, pigeons and pheasant. You certainly wouldn’t enter a Marks and Spencer and negotiate with the butcher the ins and outs of butchering your own fowl followed by an in-depth discussion of preparation.

  One day we ventured toward the turkey stall with friends who loved animals. Tom, a tall, rangy man with light hair and steely blue eyes, approached the farmer and asked him the price of the turkey, the one with the broken wing.

  ‘Twenty euros,’ the farmer replied.

  ‘Sounds good. We’ll take her,’ Tom responded happily. ‘We want to take her home and help mend her wing and make her a pet.’

  The farmer stopped in the middle of placing the turkey in a hessian sack. He looked at Tom.

  ‘What?’ he barked.

  Tom said, ‘Yes, we want to help this bird. We keep turkeys as pets.’

  The farmer yanked the bird out of the sack and placed him back in the cage.

  ‘What are you doing?’ a baffled Tom asked.

  ‘You cannot buy my turkeys for pets. They are for eating.’

  ‘What do you care what we do with the animal? It is the same money for you.’

  ‘No turkey for you. They are for eating. No pets.’

  Tom persisted but with the same result each time. Pets were not on the menu. With tradition comes certain ways of doing and being that cannot be questioned. We all shuffled off only slightly disillusioned with our quaint, French country market.

  Within a few weeks of our permanent arrival, I sent out an e-mail note to friends and family alerting them to our official move. Most wished us well and promised, or threatened, a visit in the near future. One e-mail came back from our old sources of inspiration, Frank and Rosemarie of Roundwood House, which prompted us to think about our needs for the coming summer of work. We had met their son Richard on our visits to Roundwood. After a few correspondences back and forth, we arranged for Richard and his friend Andrew to stay with us for the summer. They would receive room and board, a small stipend, and a chance to experience France while working on the property and helping us get started. We mentioned this arrangement to other old friends in Ireland and soon we had four strapping Irish lads aged 15 to 18 lined up for the summer. We all made last-minute plans. The boys would arrive in two weeks and stay for three months. It seemed like a great plan. All parties were duly excited and looked forward to a fruitful summer. On our tight budget, especially in light of the imminent arrival of Hercule, the extra help seemed a logical, economical and productive way to proceed. Unfortunately, no one warned us that teenage boys eat their equivalent weight in food each day.

  Meanwhile, Hercule arrived, ready to work and eager to sort out the incessant problems of the chateau. His room sat on the third floor of the north wing of the chateau. This afforded our new employee privacy and quiet. We agreed Hercule would use the kitchen with us. Hi
s movements were discreet and the first month went off without a hitch.

  At nine in the morning exactly one month after our arrival, a large truck laden with a huge metal container parked at the front of the chateau. Apparently, the contents had caused some sort of stir at port in Normandy. Customs had held up the delivery for about ten days. When the container arrived, the seal was broken, which seemed to indicate tampering or entry into the container. The truck driver told us this was because les douanes, or customs, had investigated the load.

  Simply happy to have received our shipment, we did not question the driver’s word. Hercule, Jehan-Claude and I started unloading.

  ‘It looks like all of these boxes have been punctured, opened. Do you see all these tears?’ I asked.

  ‘I think it is the customs, as the driver said,’ Hercule replied.

  ‘But why would they open all the boxes? Wouldn’t they do a spot check?’

  ‘I don’t know. I will ask.’

  Hercule walked over to the driver and they discussed calmly. The driver assured Hercule that this was standard, although he seemed a bit nervous, a little too eager to help unload the boxes. It was almost as though he wanted to help out so he could tidy up, reposition and close up the randomly scattered boxes in the container.

  After a few hours, the container was empty. We had carefully placed some 150 boxes throughout the chateau. Packing peanuts and paper and stuffing were left strewn in the container, not so much from our messiness but from a recent ransacking on the docks of Normandy. It appeared for the moment that all was here. I signed the documents saying we had received delivery and everything was in good order.

  Over the next week, we slowly unpacked and placed our humble possessions throughout the massive chateau. Quite honestly, we had very little of value save a computer here, a bit of cutlery and silverware there, books, kitchen utensils and the like. One day I opened our box of videotapes and video equipment. The box was virtually empty except for a few cords, connectors and a couple of black tapes in their original packing. I searched in a few nearby ‘office’ boxes looking for our personal videotapes. These included the videos of Blue’s magnificent birth. She was born two years earlier in a birthing centre, in a tub. The event was the highlight of our lives so far. The tapes were missing.