Have you remembered to add toilet roll to your shop this week?
Bog roll. That’s as exciting as my life gets. I nod at my phone and slip it back into my bag, trying to pretend it was an important business email and not a weekly reminder from my online shop. I want the two men in the room with me to think I’m such a sophisticated person that I can’t even go for one meeting without someone needing me for something vital.
I’m sitting in a solicitor’s office in central London, two places I try to avoid at all costs, and all I’ve seen on my way here are sophisticated, together-looking people, unlike me who couldn’t find a shirt smart enough so used a striped work shirt and put a cardigan over it so no one would notice the supermarket logo. It’s August and twenty-eight degrees outside. It’s way too hot for a cardi, this solicitor has clearly never heard of air conditioning, and the sweat prickling my forehead has started melting my make-up.
Globules of foundation dripping off my eyebrows is doing nothing to make these men think I’m sophisticated, or that I understand a word that’s been said since I entered this room. Nothing makes sense and I can’t grasp everything the solicitor is trying to tell me. I risk a glance at the bloke next to me, who meets my eyes and gives me a gleaming smile. I huff and look away, folding my arms as the solicitor talks, and he goes back to nodding along calmly like being told you’ve inherited a French castle is an everyday occurrence.
‘As I was saying,’ the solicitor says, pushing back thinning grey hair that he looks much too young to have. ‘My client, Mrs Beauchene, left a will. It was written, signed, and witnessed within the last year of her life, and she was of sound mind. In it, she bequeaths Le Château de Châtaignier to you, Miss Clayton. However, we have encountered a snag.’
I look at the bloke to my left again. I don’t know what’s going on but it seems like he is the admittedly very handsome snag.
None of this can be true. Eulalie didn’t have a château. She was ninety-six years old and lived on the seventh floor of a crappy block of flats in outer London that should’ve been demolished years ago. In the winter, her minuscule pension often left her with a choice between buying food and putting the heating on. The only thing she had to bequeath to anybody would’ve been a sticky boiled sweet from the bottom of her handbag.
‘As Mrs Beauchene held dual citizenship, French law applies to her will, and as such she foregoes the right to disinherit any direct descendant. Therefore Mr McBeath…’ He gestures towards the gorgeous bloke on my left. ‘…Is entitled to an equal share of the estate.’
Why don’t solicitors speak English? Is that what they teach them at solicitor school? To completely lose the ability to communicate with other humans? I take a deep breath and smooth my trousers across my legs. This is surely a mistake or some kind of scam. I expect his next line will be something about a Nigerian prince wanting to give me a million pounds, and all I have to do is give him my bank details and pin number. ‘This is a mistake. Eulalie wasn’t a French citizen. I mean, I know she married a French bloke but he died years ago. She’s lived here for as long as I’ve known her.’
‘She still held French citizenship. She owned property in France and paid her French taxes. She may not have lived there, but French law still applies to French citizens. I have all the documentation right here.’
I sneak another look at this Mr McBeath bloke. He’s still nodding along like he understands all this perfectly, and I wonder how he can be so calm. Isn’t he even half as bewildered as I am?
‘But she didn’t have a château in France, and she definitely didn’t have a nephew. She didn’t have any family. She’d lived alone for twenty-odd years since her husband died.’
‘Great-nephew,’ he says in a Scottish accent.
Annoyance flares in me at his flippant response. This is a big deal and he’s acting like someone’s told him it might rain tomorrow. ‘No nephew. This whole thing is a joke. You’re—’
‘If you don’t mind…’ the solicitor interrupts. ‘There is no question of legitimacy here. You, Miss Clayton, and you, Mr McBeath, are now the proud owners of Le Château de Châtaignier, a nineteenth-century castle in a little corner of lower Normandy, France. Once owned by Lord Beauchene, the Duke of Toussion, passed to his wife upon his death, which she now leaves to you, and—’
‘The Château of Happily Ever Afters.’ I let out a breath. Normandy, the duke, a château. Eulalie always spoke about it. She’d told me so many stories of France in the 1950s, of a young girl falling in love with a handsome duke and living in a castle, but I never thought it was real. She loved to read romance novels and I always thought her tales were nothing more than the fantasies of a lonely old lady, stories spun like those in the books she read. Her hands were arthritic and she couldn’t write them down so she told them to me instead.
Both men are looking at me like I’m a few bananas short of a bunch. ‘Eulalie talked about it. She called it “The Château of Happily Ever Afters”. She used to tell me stories about a duke and a huge château with so many rooms they didn’t know what to use them all for.’ I can’t help smiling at the memory. I miss her so much, the easy evenings with a glass of French wine each while we sat in front of her window, looking at the street down below. The smell of the Indian takeaway three doors down, grown men fighting each other in the road, drunken people vomiting on the pavements. ‘How can you be so drunk that you feel the need to vomit in the street at eight p.m.?’ she’d say. ‘People have no sense of refinement these days. In my day, projectile vomiting was saved for strictly two a.m. onwards.’
Eulalie told stories of a different life, of romance and adventure with a handsome duke in France, stories of love and laughter, a million miles away from the grotty streets and mildewed block of flats where we lived. But they were just stories to escape from reality. None of it was real. Was it?
‘Forty rooms,’ the solicitor says, running a finger down a sheet of paper on his desk. ‘Fifteen acres of land. It’s been unoccupied for twenty years. It’s yours to do what you want with now. You can use it as a holiday home, move there, sell it on and keep the money…’
‘I’ll buy her out,’ the fake-nephew says, like I’m not even in the room, and I splutter at his nerve. Who does he think he is?
‘The property has been valued at just under a million euros,’ the solicitor says.
I choke on air. A million euros?
Fake-nephew goes red in the face and starts fidgeting with his cufflinks. ‘Well, maybe not buy her out as such…’
Ha. Serves him right for being so blasé.
‘It’s a very large property, in a good area, with a good amount of land. Châteaux are still popular with expat buyers and always fetch a decent price.’
Decent? I think about Eulalie. How could someone own such an expensive château in France, and live out their days in a leaky London flat approximately the size of a cramped shoebox?
‘Mrs Beauchene also left a letter for you, Miss Clayton.’ He hands me an envelope. ‘Wendy’ is written across the front in Eulalie’s neat handwriting and the sight of it makes me blink back tears. I cannot cry in front of these men. I’m hyperaware of McNephew’s intense eyes on me as I lean forward and snatch the letter off the solicitor much harder than I’d meant to.
‘Mrs Beauchene also left, er, somewhat of a riddle in her will. She requested