I pulled the duvet up around me, half willing Daniel to reappear at the door though I knew that that night he wouldn’t, and tried to beckon sleep as I lay with the ghosts of the former couple and the ghosts of the hysterics and the image of our guest stretched out on the sofa, the flat becoming more populated with every passing hour.
Twelve
Given the fog in which he moved, I was surprised when Pierre announced that his last day in Paris was some kind of Journée du patrimoine, similar to our National Heritage Day, and suggested we go and see something old and stately. To this day I don’t know how he came to choose Challement, a hamlet in Burgundy with a little-known chateau, whether he’d been given a pamphlet or was told by a friend.
We set out at ten and bought three tickets to Clamecy, the station nearest the chateau. Daniel surprised me by coming to sit by my side while Pierre took the seat opposite us. He pulled out a newspaper in German, opened it to the middle and frowned as he began reading something in the upper right-hand corner. Once the train left Paris we rushed through the suburbs and before long were hurtling past wall after wall, or rather one continuous wall, of pine trees, thousands of green needles made one by velocity as they filled our windows. Daniel nodded off, his head resting on a shoulder, but I was eager to stay awake to the scenery. Every now and then Pierre would reach into his jacket pocket and extract a liquorice coin and slip it into his mouth, making loud smacking noises from behind his newspaper.
After a while the trees fell away, revealing a second landscape hanging parallel to the first: that of the granite sky, which seemed suspended by a few rusted threads that could at any moment snap, leaving this heavy lid to collapse on to the fields and vineyards blanched by winter.
Daniel had arranged for a guide. At Clamecy station a man was waiting for us, a tall figure in jeans and a parka slouched against his Renault. He was fluent in English and as he drove us down the country road, rolling up his window as the sky fought for expression, he explained he’d worked in Dover for two years.
Off the main road we turned into a smaller one, then past a copse of trees, up a tiny hill, and towards a large piece of land enclosed by a low crumbling wall. The car came to a halt. We got out, Pierre last, and were led through a gate hanging off its hinges and into a thickly overgrown garden. Its paths were no longer distinct, the original layout blurred by a profusion of dandelions, thistles, nettles and other weeds. There was a brackish pond hemmed in by reeds and flagstone. Grass half a metre high. Overturned bottles and black rubbish bags with dirty rainwater in their dents. The open jaws of a pair of corroded garden scissors. A few metres in the distance, an old car with missing tyres.
From the outside the chateau looked dark and unhappy; rather than a proud survivor, it seemed to resent the fact it had survived.
The air closed in around us as we stepped from the garden into its bare, chilly shambles. During and after the Revolution, our guide explained, most of the building’s past had been effaced by both men and erosion, and now little more than its skeleton remained. Yet that skeleton, I saw, was full of character. Over the foot of a stairwell hung a mutilated coat of arms, as if its metal face had received multiple batterings. Between the eighth and eighteenth centuries a string of families — Cizelly, Pioche, du Vierne, La Ferté-Meung and Motte-Dreuzy — had reigned over the seigneury. But with each consecutive owner, our guide added, Challement had fallen into ever more dramatic disrepair and now so little was left, it required a real feat of the imagination to envision the place inhabited by anyone, the rooms so draughty even the ghosts would be blown about.
We climbed a claustrophobic flight of stairs, a segment of the balustrade dangling like a broken arm, and wandered through a set of abandoned rooms. Everywhere I looked, I saw signs of deterioration and decay, of wondrously indifferent dilapidation. Doorways without doors, window frames without panes, deep splintery gashes in the floorboards, gloomy yawning fireplaces, a smashed metal crib. Here and there, the walls and ceiling looked singed and the air smelled faintly of smoke. I pressed my hand against one of the cold walls, the only parts that seemed impervious to time, yet there too I noticed pockmarks in the stone and bits missing from the mortar. Long strands of cobwebs swayed in the corners of the rooms, the absence of windowpanes drawing in currents of cold air from outside. Our guide said it was as if time had stood still in the chateau, but no, on the contrary, everywhere I looked I saw signs of its passage.
At one point I heard the click of a door in another room but there were no doors. At another point, I thought I heard a window slam shut but there were no windows. It must have been the wind.
Back on the ground floor we explored more rooms. Up in the corners I noticed a multitude of nests and wondered whether they belonged to bats or birds who had come to winter inside, though the difference in temperature between indoors and outdoors was minimal. I pulled my coat tightly around me and stuck my hands in the pockets. Daniel had removed his gloves and was writing in his notebook. Pierre stood quietly beside him.
Towards the end of our tour, as we stood in an immense room with high ceilings, once a grand banqueting hall, our guide said, I caught sight of a sooty figure emerging from the fireplace and scurry out of the room. The thing seemed to detach itself from the stone like a shadow fleeing its owner. I cried out. Daniel quickly turned. After a second’s delay, Pierre turned too.
The guide asked whether something was the matter. I told him I’d just seen a creature, man or giant rat, I wasn’t sure, come out of the chimney.
‘Oh, that’s our chatelain,’ he answered calmly.
‘Your chatelain?’
‘The owner of the chateau. Half the fee you paid goes to him.’
We wanted to hear more. He hesitated. We clamoured. He hesitated. Daniel said we were soon leaving France, had come all this way, and wanted to depart with something more than what we’d just seen. His words seemed to work.
So, as we stood with our arms huddled into our chests there in the banqueting hall that seemed to grow ever more gusty, we were told the tragic story of Marc Cointe, the chatelain of Challement.
Marc Cointe, the man you have just seen, began our guide, was born into the wrong family and the wrong fate. He would have been better suited for just about any other life than the one he was handed. He detested all the trappings on which his family name was embossed yet it was as if the very lines of his life were in the silver before he was even born. As an only child he rode his wooden horse in the meadows and played with the fish and newts in the pond, but by the time he turned fifteen and searched in vain for friends beyond this little kingdom — he had private tutors, no formal schooling — his feelings towards his privileged background began to evolve in complicated ways.
Sadly, nothing was to change. Cointe spent his entire life on the grounds of the chateau, with only two visits to Paris and one to Provence. Yet he was extremely cultivated, the villagers said, and well read.
But a nihilist.
At his father’s funeral he kept his distance, watching from under a tree as the coffin was lowered into the earth by four men, and then drank himself into a stupor in the library. When his mother died a year later, he watched her funeral from a castle window. Both parents were buried in a grove thirty strides from the house but no one ever saw him visit the site.
Cointe had informed opinions on everything — he could hold his own in any debate — but he never wrote anything down. It was enough to share the fruits of his thought with a drunken audience of three: the local farmer, the local welder, and the master of keys of the canal lock.