Chapter 4
France, July 1999
‘ THIS? THIS LUMP OF … RUBBLE? Philippa, you can’t be serious? When you said you’d bought a chateau, Peter and I thought you at least meant somewhere with windows, or a roof! This is lunacy!’
Maggie, her mother and Aunt Phil were standing in front of a ruined chateau. Well, to Veronica it looked like a ruin. To Maggie, it looked magical. It had walls but most of its windows were missing and there was a gap like a toothless mouth instead of a front door. Ivy twisted through the gaps, winding around the faded blue shutters, and, standing in front of the missing door, calmly eating clumps of bramble, were two donkeys.
‘It’s got a roof, look,’ Phil told Veronica, and all three craned their heads upwards where there was undeniably a roof, although vines poked through various holes there, too. ‘Don’t you think it’s perfect?’
‘For demolition?’
‘No, Vee. For my hotel,’ said Phil, before sweeping an arm in front of her. ‘The best hotel in Provence.’
‘What’s a cha … that thing Mum said?’
‘Chateau? It means castle in French,’ Phil answered.
Maggie’s eyes widened. ‘This is a castle?’
‘Not exactly. Sometimes it just means big house. Come on, I’ll give you a tour.’
‘In there?’ Veronica shrieked. ‘You must be joking. It’s a building site, it’s not safe to go in there.’
‘’Course it’s safe, and I don’t know where you’re going to sleep if you won’t come inside.’
‘In there? Sleep in it? Philippa, you’ve gone too far. This is madness, it’s absurd. How on earth are you going to turn this shack into a hotel? Think of the cost! Think of the work! It’s just not feasible. Maggie! Maggie, stay here, please.’
But Phil had already taken her niece’s small hand to lead her through the stone arch without a door.
‘Hiya, Lars, how’s it going?’ she said to a tanned, bearded man crouching in front of a socket in the hallway. ‘Mags, this is Lars, he’s a very brilliant photographer who also happens to know a bit about electrics.’
Maggie waved shyly at Lars. She was nine and it was the first time she’d ever been abroad because her parents preferred to take holidays to Cornwall and Scotland. Once a year, they went to Portugal where Peter Meriwether played golf, but always during term time when it was cheaper so Maggie was despatched to stay with Mrs Whiteman down the road. France seemed like another planet. Even the air was different, hot on Maggie’s nostrils when she breathed in.
This trip, Peter had stayed at home claiming he needed to work (while, in reality, trying to avoid a week away with his wife), so Maggie and Veronica had flown out together that morning and been met at Nice airport by Phil in a very dusty, very old car. As they’d driven higher and higher during the last half-hour of the journey, Maggie had looked through one window, then scrabbled to the other side of the back seat to see the view from there. At every bend, she’d thought they must be at the top of the mountain, then her aunt would swing the car around and there’d be another stretch of road before them.
From the front seat, Veronica had complained incessantly about car sickness.
Eventually, Aunt Phil had pulled off the road and parked at the bottom of a track. It was too overgrown to drive to the house, she’d explained, so they’d walked the last few hundred metres while Veronica had shrieked about snakes.
‘Look up, Mags,’ Aunt Phil had urged, as they’d stood in the entrance hall.
Maggie had tipped her head backwards to look up at the stone ceiling four floors above them. The stairs in the house wound around the walls, up and up like a helter-skelter. It was the most magical house she’d ever seen.
A flash of movement on a wall caught her eye. ‘There’s a lizard!’ she said delightedly, as its tail vanished through a window.
‘Gecko. A bit like lizards, just smaller. Lots of those here. And birds and butterflies.’
‘And donkeys,’ Maggie said happily. France was already paradise. Her mum wouldn’t let them get a cat at home because she said it would moult on the furniture.
‘Let’s go up,’ instructed Phil, leading her up the stairs. ‘I’ll put the kettle on in a sec, Lars.’
‘ Danke ,’ growled the photographer.
Behind them, Veronica was picking her way across the hall’s uneven rubble floor. ‘Maggie, you mustn’t go up there. Maggie! Philippa, do not go upstairs! Philippa!’
‘Come on, Vee. The views from the top are worth it.’
‘This place is a death trap, Philippa. Oh, good god, there’s a lizard.’
‘It’s a gecko, Mum,’ corrected Maggie, following her aunt.
When they reached the fourth floor, Phil pointed through a wide hole where a window should be. ‘The sea’s behind those hills.’
The trees looked small, Maggie thought, standing on tiptoes to peer down. The wind was whistling through the window frame, making her hair whirl around her face and the shutters bang against the wall. She wasn’t sure she’d ever been so high.
‘Are we in Heaven?’ she asked, because Heaven was the highest place she could think of.
Her aunt laughed. ‘Kind of.’
‘Get away from the window, please, Margaret,’ Veronica snapped, arriving on the top step panting. ‘You might fall.’
‘I won’t.’ Maggie hated her mother babying her. ‘Look how high it is,’ she added deliberately.
‘Yes, much too high, come away please.’
‘Do you want to know why it’s this high?’ Phil asked her niece.
Maggie nodded and Phil crouched down beside her so they were both looking through the window.
‘It was built a long time ago.’
‘How long?’
‘Over a hundred years ago.’
‘By who?’
‘That’s what I’m trying to tell you, little Miss Chatterbox. It was built over a hundred years ago by a rich naval hero who came from Marseille.’
‘Why was he so rich?’
‘Margaret, please can you get away from that windowsill.’
Maggie and Phil ignored Veronica.
‘He was rich because he’d been very successful at war, leading the French navy, and given a title and land and lots of money by Napoleon as a thank you.’
‘What was he called?’
‘The Duc de Miradoux, and he lived near Marseille, but then he fell in love with a very beautiful woman, wh—’
‘What was she called?’ checked Maggie.
‘No idea, but what happened was he fell in love with this beautiful woman, very very in love. So in love that he built this big house for her, on the highest hill he could find because it was cooler here in the summer, especially if there was a mistral blowing, which is like a strong wind.’
‘Mistral,’ echoed Maggie, shaping her small lips around the foreign word.
‘But Narnesse was close enough to Marseille that it would only take them a day to travel here,’ continued Phil. ‘Remember, they didn’t have cars then, only horses.’
‘They had trains,’ said Maggie, who’d been learning about the Victorians at school.
‘And some trains,’ agreed Phil, ‘but not here. So he built this big house, for him and his younger wife and all the children they plan to have. But then she died …’
Behind them, Maggie heard her mother tut. ‘I’m not sure you-know-who needs this story, does she?’
‘Mum, I can understand you. I’m not five .’
Phil continued. ‘So the Duc de Miradoux’s wife dies and he’s so broken-hearted that he becomes a recluse and lives up here for the rest of his life, in this big old house with all these rooms and nobody to fill them.’
Maggie’s mouth fell open. ‘Why did she die?’
‘Who knows. People were always dying back then.’
‘Philippa, I really —’
‘And he lived here all by himself?’
Phil nodded. ‘And probably with some staff, rich people usually had staff. But no family, no children, and he never married again.’
‘But that’s so sad. Poor …’ Maggie couldn’t remember his name.
‘The Duc de Miradoux.’ Phil shifted her head closer to Maggie’s and dropped her voice. ’Some locals even believe he haunts this place.’
‘Philippa …’
Maggie’s eyes widened. ‘Like his ghost?’
‘Like his ghost, at night. You can hear him crying, they say. That’s why I could afford it, because it’s supposedly haunted. Cursed, some people sa—’
‘Philippa, I really don’t think this is appropriate.’
‘So that’s why I’m going to fill this place with people and bring it to life.’ Aunt Phil ignored her sister, then stood and dusted off her fingers on her long skirt. ‘Because he never could.’
Veronica reached for Maggie’s hand. ‘If you’ve quite finished telling my daughter horror stories, can we go back downstairs before someone falls through the window and there’s a new tragedy?’
Veronica complained every day that holiday: she complained about the dust, about the heat and the danger as Maggie helped Phil clear out the bedrooms. She complained about the mosquitoes and the flies and the lack of electricity and water. When Phil turned on the generator she complained about the noise. She complained every night as the three of them bedded down on old mattresses in what would later become the hotel’s dining room, and she complained about almost every meal. It was too rich, or too garlicky, or too oily, or too hot.
Maggie loved it. She loved the geckos, she loved sleeping under a sheet every night. She loved feeding Paul and Ringo (Phil’s donkeys) the apricots from the tree behind the chateau, and walking into the village every morning to collect their croissants before filling up their plastic bottles with water from the village fountain. ‘Magic water,’ Aunt Phil called it, explaining that it came from the mountains. Transfixed by the idea of a broken-hearted duke whose ghost roamed the chateau, she listened out at night for him and thought, once or twice, that she might have heard him before realizing it was the donkeys outside.
She loved the various friends her aunt had enlisted to come and help her renovate the place: not just Lars, but Edo and Celine, musicians from Paris who were in charge of replastering the walls; Emilio, a Peruvian graffiti artist who was removing each shutter and repainting them their original lavender-blue colour; plus two muscled Italian models, Gabriele and Tommaso, who were clearing the gardens and pruning the olive trees.
Maggie joined in, some days: one afternoon, she crouched over a shutter and repainted it. Or at least she repainted a small patch of it that Emilio later went over. She helped the Italians on another day, carefully removing and rescuing the worms from the clods of earth they threw behind them as they dug what would become the vegetable patch. Lars didn’t let her near the electrics.
She loved helping Aunt Phil clear the bedroom wardrobes of old keys, balls of string, empty jars and dusty clothes, long forgotten, which Phil put in a pile to wash in the village laundrette. She loved the adventure of it and the freedom of having a giant garden to explore. In Fulham they only had a small patio. For a nine year old, it was paradise.
But most of all she loved standing beside Aunt Phil every night watching her cook on a camping stove, inhaling the smells of onion, garlic or herbs, or of the sea one evening, when Phil cooked mussels they’d bought from the fish man at the market. When she grew up, she wanted to be just like Phil, cooking and living in this magical place called France, and not like her mother, who that week constantly ordered Maggie to rinse her hands, or put on more sun cream, put on shoes, or wear a stupid sun hat.
On their last night, Maggie sat on the grass outside, watching Paul and Ringo chew another bramble bush, wondering if the thorns hurt their tongues. She didn’t want to go back to London the next day, but Aunt Phil said she could come to France whenever she liked. So that was something.
She heard her mother’s voice from the kitchen and turned her head to hear better. Maggie knew she shouldn’t eavesdrop but it was almost impossible not to in a place without windows and doors.
‘You can’t possibly pull this off, Philippa. Come back and live with us. You can’t stay here, it’s completely mad.’
‘Vee, you always say that and I always manage.’
‘Not every time, no. Need I remind you of wh—’
‘No! You don’t have to remind me. I know. I’m aware of it every day. But I can manage this . I’ve got some money saved, not much, but friends are going to come and help. It’ll be a commune for a while but I’ll get there. You have to trust me, Vee, please.’
Maggie heard her mother snort.
‘Just because my life looks different to yours, it doesn’t make it the wrong life,’ her aunt persisted. ‘I know it’s strange to you, but I really want to do this. This place is home; I can feel it.’
Veronica snorted again. ‘You say that now but it’ll be somewhere else next month, or next year. Whenever you decide that you’re bored of it.’
Maggie heard the clicking noise of her aunt lighting the camping stove.
‘Don’t think I’m not grateful, Vee, for everything you’ve done, and Peter. But you’re wrong about this. I want to put down roots.’
‘This is a fantasy, Philippa, and you’re drinking too much again.’
Maggie jumped at the sound of a loud crash, and Paul and Ringo looked up, their furry jaws momentarily frozen.
‘Vee, let me be. Stop lecturing! Stop interfering! Stop trying to run my life …’
‘Someone’s got to.’
‘Stop! Just stop. Please stop. Please don’t ruin the past week. Let’s get through tonight and then you can take Maggie home and never come out here again.’
‘Fine, I need to start packing.’
Maggie listened to her mother’s footsteps recede to the dining room while watching an ant weave between blades of grass, stopping occasionally and reversing to find another route. It looked like he was trying to find his way home and, just for a second, she wished she could swap places with him. She could be the ant and stay in France, and he could go back to London.
‘Want to come pick thyme with me, Mags?’ asked Phil, appearing from the kitchen.
She jumped up and pretended she hadn’t heard anything.