Chateau Beauchere

Excerpt from Chateau Beauchere, a novel (2018) by Elizabeth McKague

In the South of France, where the colors are all gold, blue and swamp green, there is a place called Château Beauchere. Built in 1170 A.D. by one Lord Arthur de Giffrinnet, the castle’s name, meaning ‘beautiful oak,’ is markedly derived from the offspring of an ancient oak that, like Odysseus’ bed, breaks through the floor of a courtyard, where, sitting in the shade beneath its hissing branches, you have a rather dreamy view to the east of the dazzling white peaks of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire. The structure of the Chateau is crudely medieval, its roseate stony face exudes a rather sinister magnetism and its tall, leaning, rectangular frame, built into a hillside, is a far cry from the princely renaissance castles of the Loire. It is also apparent that Lord Arthur built the place for the sole purpose of residency, as there is not a wall or moat or ruin that can be traced back to any construction for defense, and its location, upon a plateau of stones with wildflowers screaming through their cracks, half way up a forested slope where the lone oak in the courtyard is isolated from a population of chestnut, olive, sycamore and weeping willow tress, would have been almost inaccessible back in the 12th century. Lord Arthur’s horse alone knew the way home. A winding dirt driveway, created upon the invention of the carriage is still in existence today and perhaps decades later, a landing was made where currently the Peugeots, Fiats, electric cars, bicycles and scooters of present tenants are parked in half-hazard vogue.

These tenants of the 21st century rent their quarters from one Nathaniel Lock. He is not French. He is American. How he came to own the chateau is where our story begins. What he made of the chateau is the plot of our story’s middle, and what happens to the chateau in the end… well, the author does not yet know, or perhaps thinks it wise not at this interlude to tell you.

When Nathaniel first met his second wife she had asked, “But your name, American, of English origin, must surely have at one time been Locksmith, like Blacksmith or Tinsmith or Coppersmith… no?”

“Maybe,” he answered, “Yet by my father’s generation is was just plain ‘Lock’. Perhaps I have a great-great uncle somewhere whose surname is simply ‘Smith.’”

This made Ephébie, his wife laugh. He had loved the way she laughed. Sometimes in the still heat of a late afternoon, when silence is so abundant that even making the effort to say the word ‘silence’ creates noise, and time is so transparent that the strokes of Addison’s brush upon a canvas in the next room could be heard, Ephébie’s laughter would softly shake on a breeze through the open windows and then fade and fade until a more familiar sound, the whimpers of pain before death, entered his heart through her memory. Then the spell was broken and Nathaniel would hear another brush stroke, the buzzing of bees, the oak tree’s papery leaves, the sorrowful gut of Fino’s cello floating through the floorboards from the studio below and outside in the yard, Jérôme’s chisel, methodically biting bit by bit into a block of marble. Nathaniel would sigh and go back to his writing.

He had never aspired to be a writer. He was a surfer from Santa Cruz, California. The idea occurred to him three yeas ago, two years after the end of Ephébie’s battle with ovarian cancer, to devote his free time to the pen. They were married ten years, ten calm, decent, adorable years. He met her at the Festival d’Aix-en Provence in the summer of 2003. He was at that time finalizing a divorce from his first wife, named Giselle, and had simply got into his car one day after another quarrel, drove out of the parking garage of the building on the Boulevard Poissonnière where they had lived for the past eight years and left Paris without stopping off at his new dwelling to gather but a few things, and drove south all day without caring where he was going or where he would stay. At one point, after driving for four hours, he stopped at a café in a small village to relieve him self and take coffee and a sandwich. He noticed a sloppily pasted poster in the window advertising the opera Pelléas et Mélisande by Debussy at eight o’clock that same night at the Theatre de Jeu de Paume in Aix. As we shall soon find out, Nathaniel Lock was a true opera aficionado and the piece mentioned was rarely performed, even in Paris. It was late July and he knew of the festival and realized that it was in fact that time of year, as he’d gone to it once or twice before with Giselle. So, his direction on instinct had been correct, he was excited, Aix was but another two hours away and he remembered the name of the hotel where they had previously stayed. He used the café phone to call and reserve a room and by luck, the Hotel De Gantes just had a cancellation, for during the festival most places are booked far in advance.

He made it to the hotel with a few minutes to freshen up and walked directly to the Theatre de Jeu Paume. Ephébie was in line ahead of him, reading a summary of the opera’s plot from a pamphlet to her girlfriend.

“Prince Golaud finds mysterious Mélisande lost in a forest, falls in love and marries her and brings her back to the castle of his grandfather where Mélisande falls in love with Golaud’s younger half-brother Pelléas. Golaud gets more and more jealous and spies on the young lovers until Pelléas is forced to leave the castle but arranges to meet Mélisande one last time. Alas, jealous Golaud rushes out and kills Pelléas. Then Mélisande gives birth to a daughter and dies.”

“I wonder why she’s mysterious?” The girlfriend asked.

Ephébie shrugged, “Maybe because she’s lost.”

“Whose baby is it? Her husband’s or her lover’s?”

“Surely it’s the brother’s.”

“How do you know?”

Ephébie laughed, “C’mon, who is Mélisande sleeping with through the whole opera anyway? Not her husband.”

“Right.” Nathaniel grunted behind them. Giselle had cheated on him.

The girlfriend turned around, “Have you seen it before?”

He cleared his throat and put on a casual air. “I’ve read it, the libretto and the music, but no, I’m excited to see it now.”

“I’m Anouk,” the girl said, “and this is my friend Ephébie.”

He introduced him self. “Do you girls live in town?”

Anouk giggled, “I do, but Phebes here lives outside of it-- or is going to very soon, you see…”

‘Phebes’ nudged her friend then interrupted, “I plan to move to a place about 30 kilometers south, in the country.”

Nathaniel nodded. “The air is good down here.”

“You’re visiting from America?” Anouk asked. His accent was slight but obvious.

“I’ve been living in Paris for eight… almost nine years.”

The line started to move along and he followed them into the theatre where, before they parted to find their seats, Nathaniel waved to them with a friendly, “Enjoy the show!”

The production was fine, not fantastic, but moving and professional. Like the girls, although he didn’t yet know it, his first instinct after the theatre let out was to have a drink at any one of the outdoor tables near by on the Cours Mirabeau. Every place was crowded and people lingered in the square. He walked on and soon noticed Anouk sitting alone at a table in front of the Brasserie Les Deux Garçons. She waved to him to come over and he did so.

“Where’s your friend?” he asked.

“WC. Sit down, please join us.”

“Thank you.” He found an empty wicker chair a few tables away and dragged it over. “So, what did you think?”

“I cried. We both cried.”

“Yes, that is usually the way it is with opera.”

Phebes returned and it seemed to Nathaniel that she gave him a rather chilly glare but then smiled as she took her seat and bubbled, “I’m so thirsty! It’s so hot!”

The July air was warm; the night was fresh but very warm.

They ordered a bottle of Chenin Blanc and of course, he insisted on paying.

He was beyond tired after such a long day but found their company delightful. They were both pretty and younger than he, Anouk by perhaps ten years and her friend by maybe only five or four. They spoke no more of the opera and entertained themselves with yay or nays to the upcoming events in the festival and musings about the customers around them, mostly tourists who had come to the town only for that reason. Ephébie seemed to know quite a bit about music and Anouk appeared to have perfected the art of people watching. Nathaniel was happy to order one more bottle yet when that was finished, the imminent heavy wave of exhaustion sped over him and he could barely keep his eyes open long enough to walk around the corner to his hotel. He slept until noon and took coffee and lunch in the De Gantes courtyard, then walked to the Parc Jourdan where he hoped to sit quietly beneath an elm, yet a stage had been set up in the middle of the park and a concert, that would be followed by another and another all day long, was going on. Nevertheless, he loved Chopin, so found his tree, lay back his head, and listened.

In half an hour he heard a voice say, “I love Chopin.”

He leaned his head of curly blond locks to the left and opened his eyes. There, in an Olympian ray of sunlight, sat Ephébie, her long legs stretched out of a pale green summer dress, sloping down the hillside and ankles crossed, worn, beige leather sandals tossed on the grass next to an equally worn festival program, with her bare shoulders pointed upwards and long brown hair flowing down her back.

“Me too, although I must admit that I’m partial to Liszt.” He smiled and straightened his posture and looked her in the eyes, she had deep, brown eyes. “How long have you been sitting there?”

“Not long.”

“Where’s your friend?”

“Anouk?” she shrugged, “Who knows? Anouk will be Anouk…”

“So, you’re on your own today?”

The Nocturne, Opus 9, #1 ended, and her answer was drowned out by a park full of applause.

It was intermission and people began to get up from their picnics and head for the toilets or stretch and walk and mill about in the sunshine.

“So what’s next?” Nathaniel asked.

She picked up her program then laughed, reading, “Liszt!”

“Ah, very good.” He became shy, so did she. They looked at the disseminating audience. Then, as the musicians for the next set began to move out onto the stage he had an idea and without thinking twice blurted, “Perhaps after this set we could… I don’t know, walk in the village and maybe have dinner somewhere?”

“Okay.”

She answered in such a casual tone that he felt a bit embarrassed for it was as if she had said, ‘Sure, why not, guys ask me out to dinner almost every day’.

The opera that night was Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte, which neither of them had any interest in, so they relished a leisurely dinner, flowing fine wine and an expanding conversation that became more and more intimate as the warm Mediterranean night eddied along. He walked her to her car, as she was staying ‘in the country’, and although he had learned much about her life, that she’d been traveling Europe, spent a year in Italy, several months in Prague, and had just arrived back in France from Tangiers, whether she was going home that night to a husband or boyfriend or alone, not a clue was dropped. He took a chance and kissed her before the fountain, and they decided to meet at that very spot the following day at one o’clock. She never showed up. He waited an hour, then stepped into a bar across the street for a drink, then went back and waited another hour, but she never showed up. His hotel suite was expensive but the opera that night was Tristan und Isolde. How could he miss his beloved Wagner? Well, that’s what he told himself yet knew his heart leapt and at the thought of possibly seeing her-- or Anouk for that matter-- to get more information, alas, the objective ended all in vain.

He returned to Paris, settled the divorce with Giselle and completely rent her from his existence, which, with determination, he continued on, and as we may have guessed, the mysterious Ephébie, whose surname he did not know, had taken root in his narcissistic soul.

Yes, there is no denying that Nathaniel Lock was a handsome man. At the age of 37, he still had a full head of longish, sandy blond curls, reflective though searching light brown eyes that instantly warranted trust, a thoughtful brow, a proud nose like an Etruscan soldier, a masculine Hollywood hero type jaw that always appeared to have a three day stubble and a soft mouth that produced a dimple in his left cheek each time he smiled. His physique was of Hollywood stock as well; at six foot two, he had broad shoulders, a thin waist, legs with rock hard thighs and it must be said that half his subterranean narcissism stemmed from the fact that, coming from German and Swedish ancestry, his nether region was very well endowed indeed.

He had never been a playboy. Before Giselle he had had two relationships in which he invested his entire being only to be utterly trounced by the break up, each after less than a year. The first was in high school and the second in college, the anguish suffered by the former was worse for it charged through his blood and body but the mental torture he put him self through as a result of the latter had him walking around campus for months feeling as if he were upside down like the Tarot card of the Hanged Man. How he got into Stanford University is an odd story and a bit Dickensian.

As a child he was always called Nate. He grew up in a tidy but dilapidating beach house-shack, painted pink with white trim making it look like a cupcake. The ocean was a block away. Since the age of three, Nate lived alone with his elderly mother, a hard working woman of Swedish descent. His father, a second generation German, of whom his memories were dim, was a lazy, stupid fellow who smoked a lot of weed and eventually decided that he could find a better way of life outside of the cupcake (although to all that knew him this was more than doubtful), and disappeared. Neither Nate nor his mom ever heard of the creep again. He had two older half brothers that were already in their early twenties when Nate was born and both of them had been discovering greater shores beyond Santa Cruz for some years. Adam and Leo, only an awkward or special occasion could drag them for a visit back home and although he rarely saw them, they were kind to him and he liked them, especially Leo who called him ‘little brother’. Their father, a decent man Nate never met, died the day Astrid, his mother, gave birth to her third son, quite miraculously as she was by then 45 years old.

Astrid loved music and there was an old, dusty white baby grand Steinway in the cupcake that perhaps, Nate guessed, she used to play. He started taking lessons at the age of five and didn’t mind it, actually liked it and was soon excited about it for his piano teacher, a 30 year old good looking young man with a funny beard, was extremely nice to the child and as naturally as a father might be, showed Nate a human trait that his child’s life had yet to be the recipient of-- basic human compassion that came, this of course was something the boy was still too young to understand, out of sheer pity for the kid’s living situation. Nate loved Astrid and she wanted the best for him but she was tired, the birth had made her tired.

As a toddler she took him to the beach. He loved the beach. In elementary school, if he practiced piano everyday after school, he was aloud to go to the beach on weekends and in middle school, if he practiced piano two hours a day after school he could go to the beach directly, and on Saturdays, after four hours of practice, and on Sundays-- he would go for the whole day! It was during this period, at around twelve years old that he began to watch the surfers, really watch, and watch and watch, unaware that he was witnessing surfing history and that his binoculars were following the ups and downs of sportsmen soon to be great such as Joey Thomas, Robert Waldemar and Kevin Reed. In a few more years, at the age of fourteen, when he could play Chopin, Beethoven, Shubert and Gluck immaculately and with passion, Robert ‘Wally’ Waldemar took the lonely boy under his wing and gave him a surfboard that he kept in a neighbor’s garage so as not to worry his tired, hard working, aging mother.

He practiced surfing as industriously as he did piano and the waves were to him like music, sometimes gentle, sometimes violent, but continuously beautiful. He became strong and fit and muscular. Astrid, still unaware of his adventures, attributed this surfacing Adonis physique to the heredity of a natural growth spurt. He was talented in the water and made friends, true friends for the first time in his life. Girls became infatuated with him and he became proud. Then, he became dangerous and would go out in tumultuous conditions and try tricks far beyond the scope of his skill. One day, a few months after the dissolution of his relationship with his high school sweetheart named Jill, his body and blood trying to cool the inward rage, he wanted to show off and paddled out far from the shore to a spot where the waves, because of a mysterious undercurrent, rose to nearly 50 feet high. It was a Sunday and his friends on the beach crowded together in fear as they watched him out there alone, wondering whether it was a joke or what was he trying to prove? He got out back easy enough and popped up onto the crest of a huge wave and took the drop down, carving the face and began charging but had to bail and got caught inside a washing machine. His board popped up. Two veteran surfers who had foreseen the ill omen were on their way out to him, and the one who got there first dove for him, found him, flopped the body on his board and rode back in. He was given mouth to mouth, he threw up, he couldn’t walk or talk, he was in dire pain. An ambulance came.

Astrid went to the hospital. He was in intensive care. He had hit some rocks (revealing the mystery of the undercurrent), and fractured two ribs on his right side, ruptured his hip, tore tendons throughout his right knee, broke his right arm and had a concussion, but the gods love Adonis, there was not a scratch on his handsome face and the doctors were positive he would live.

When he was sent home, he was at first bed ridden but gradually recovered, slowly and painfully. He couldn’t play the piano and he could barely make it to the bathroom on crutches. He was heavily medicated and had nothing to do but listen to the radio. Sure, the folk songs of the sixties and seventies were cool, but he did not feel connected to them, and the rock bands that he admired inconsolably reminded him of former glory days with his friends on the beach. He would turn the dial in frustration switching stations and in the evenings, settle on a classical station that played opera each night from 7 to 9 p.m. It was a world, a world he could enter, a place to forget and surrender.

During the first few months of recovery he had many visitors, in the beginning almost every day and Jill came by once but it was a malicious interview. Other girls came, and girls who he never even met before, because in Santa Cruz, California, in 1981, Nick Lock was a hero.

He was always a good student as he applied the discipline he’d acquired as a musician to his studies and when he was back to normal, he passed all of his exams with flying colors and graduated high school. He wanted to continue to study music with a secret passion for opera. He dared not go far from Astrid, fearing it might literally kill her, so he applied to Stanford, was accepted, bought a car and continued to live in the cupcake for the first two years of college. Then, when he fell in love with Tracy, he moved closer to the campus but not a weekend went by when he didn’t drive the easy 43 miles to visit his mother at home.

He saw her weakening. Perhaps she had waited for his college graduation for soon afterward Astrid had a brain hemorrhage and died. Adam and Leo came and spent a few days with Nate sorting out her things. She left the house to her youngest son, which his two brothers had predicted and they were not at all troubled by an act of such palpable grace.

“What are you going to do now, little brother?” Leo asked sincerely.

“I don’t know,” Nate told him, “But I really need to get out of this hippie town.”

Leo laughed and suggested Nate sell the house and follow him back to New York City. Nate accepted the idea. The cupcake sold for a great deal more than he estimated and with a thirst for culture, especially after his quality education, he bought a ticket for Paris instead, where he met Giselle immediately, married her and at the age of 28, secured a job teaching music at The American Conservatory of Paris.

The months succeeding his foray in Aix-en-Provence were spent in a rather mediocre torpor. He taught his classes, saw a few friends and made a half indolent effort to spruce up his new little studio on the Rue Monsieur le Prince. The money he received from the cupcake was eaten up in his first year of marriage, traveling Europe with Giselle, whose income as a real-estate agent sustained the couple’s comfortable bourgeoisie lifestyle throughout their following years together. His own salary from the Conservatory was modest in comparison and his recent extravagance in Aix nearly depleted his savings. Life in Paris is not easy, especially for an American no matter how long you live there. He had no family or true friends, well, except for a fellow named Marcel, as the people he met often seemed to have a way of disappearing when the friendship would become ‘inconvenient’. He felt more alone than ever yet it was a familiar, almost soothing sort of loneliness, reminiscent of his childhood before he started surfing, an activity, alas, he had not considered resuming since the accident. But now, on warm nights as he sat at a table before the tall, open windows of his narrow balcony where a cracked pot of white geraniums gave him guilt for the brown edges of their petals, he found himself imagining the waves, imagining himself riding over them and vise versa. He still played the piano and sometimes endeavored to compose but he did not consider himself an artist and preferred to unleash his creative urges into the intricacies of everyday life.

Marcel was the only one who called him Nate; it appeared to amuse him.

“Mais bien sur, Nate,” Marcel cut into his steak, “the sea is filled with fish.”

Nathaniel finished his glass of Bordeaux. “Should we get another bottle?” He raised his arm for the waiter, “The same?”

Marcel nodded, chewing. He was a big guy, not heavy but tall and stocky and usually jolly with an occasional descent into deep and dark depression. He had a Hemingway-esque appetite and seemed to drink (if one were counting) to excess although in the nine years they’d been friends, Nathaniel had not once seen him ‘wasted’.

“I’m not ready.” Nate ate a forkful of his l’oeuf mayo. They were having lunch at Les Caves du Polidor. It was a sunny, crisp September Sunday. The streets were busy. Pretty women were everywhere. So were charming men, and every one seemed to be in a couple. “I was thinking of getting a cat.” He added.

“Poor cat!” Marcel laughed, “I want to walk in the Luxembourg gardens after and maybe go that bookshop on the Rue Bonaparte and see what they’ll give me for my first edition of Marguerite de Valois.”

The waiter brought the second bottle and Nathaniel lifted his glass, “Ah! You’re broke too?”

“Me? Never, I just don’t like to have so much Dumas on the shelves, it makes me feel dull.” He laughed, finished his steak then sat back and squinted at his friend, “Do you need money?”

“No, no. I’m fine… it’s just… it was a joke.”

“I have money, you know.”

“So does Giselle. Really, I’m good.”

“Do you see her?”

“Sometimes. We can talk now, like human beings.”

“How did you speak before?”

Nate made a scary face, “Like monsters!”

Marcel said no more. He was also divorced and in opposition to his friend, had become quite the playboy, especially when he was in ‘Hemingway’ mode.

They took a leisurely walk in the park and Marcel sold his book for a pretty penny, (or centime), and merrily took Nate out for a drink, then another, then a late dinner and they finally parted ways at Saint Sulpice past midnight.

Monsieur Lock was offered an extra class at the Conservatory, which he accepted with much gratitude. He had a plan and began to save money. As winter approached he found it increasingly difficult to disavow the loneliness and got a cat, a gray tabby that he named Wally. It helped to a degree but what really got him through the freezing, isolating hours of winter was his grand plan. Thoughts of Ephébie had not ceased and his dreams were constantly flavored by the rose tinted moving picture of that day and night they spent together, as well as fabrications of reasons as to why she did not meet him at the fountain. By May he had saved enough money for his trip, called the Hotel Des Gantes and reserved a single room on the second floor, far more affordable than the suite they put him in last time, and had the festival program sent to him. This he studied acutely, trying to place the events in order according to those that Ephébie was most likely to attend. After weeks of deliberation he finally decided upon an agenda for the first three nights: Madame Butterfly instead of Carmen, Orfeo and Eurdice (most definitely!) over Eugene Onegin, Der Ring des Nibelungen rather than the Marriage of Figaro, a break on the next two nights and the sixth night, well, nothing could compare to La Bohème. He bought a map of Aix-en-Provence and learned the streets by heart, he bought a tour guide to the best restaurants and chose a different one for each night that in his mind seemed to compliment the theme of each opera. He devised picnic menus for days lounging in the park, listening to Liszt and he bought new clothes, new shoes and a very cool pair of sunglasses. He was fully aware that he was being rather ridiculous and more often than not he’d step back and laugh at his self, but he wanted her, and of course he knew as well that he didn’t really know her, that the object of his desire was a phantom he created in her image out of his own longing, but he wanted her the way, that fateful day, he wanted that 50 foot wave.

It was not that he had been celibate since his divorce, far from it. He had maintained a casual, intermittent affair with Amelia, the clarinet teacher at school and had no problem feeding his manly pride by procuring a one night shag here and there, especially on those bi-monthly nights when he and Marcel went carousing about town, yet outside of sexual satisfaction, such flings left him starving.