Lace Page 26

  Maxine sat up. It was a brilliant idea! Why hadn’t she thought of it? It was very much like what she was doing already, in a small way; Charles’s sisters already used the place as a rest home. And perhaps she might open a branch of the antique shop in the stables.

  “I could help to arrange for publicity at the American end,” volunteered Judy. “What you need is a steady flow of people from the States who want to enjoy the chateau experience. Perhaps you should start by asking some well-known Americans to stay free.”

  “But I thought the idea was to make money,” Maxine objected.

  “Yes, but if you invite a couple of Hollywood stars—they often visit Paris—you’ll get terrific coverage in the American papers and then you’ll be talked about. Word of mouth! Honestly, Maxine, I know this business. You mustn’t think that PR is free; you mustn’t make the same mistake as the rest of your goddamned compatriots. You pay for it, just as you do in advertising, only in a different way.”

  Judy rolled her eyes in mock Gallic exasperation. “It’s riskier, because you can’t control what publicity you’re going to get, but if you’ve got a good, newsworthy product and the PR is handled efficiently, you get good coverage.”

  “I’ll speak to Papa this weekend,” said Maxine thoughtfully, “before he speaks to Charles about the vineyards.”

  Charles was appalled by Judy’s idea and made it clear that he wanted no part of it. He found it painfully distasteful to think of strangers in his family home. He realised that something had to be done to stop the chateau from falling down, but he was working as hard as he could to make the estate pay and to modernise it and he simply didn’t have time for any other ventures. Eventually, however, he was worn down by Judy’s enthusiastic insistence and Maxine’s quiet determination. Vulnerable because of his exhaustion and anxiety, knowing that something had to be done, he agreed to let Maxine go ahead, provided she committed none of his meagre capital to the project—because there was simply none to spare.

  Maxine was tremendously excited. She found it difficult to keep her mind on the practical aspects of the project because charming little side ideas kept popping unbidden into her mind. She was sure they could set up a little arcade of shops in that great useless stable block; she could franchise some of them the way Paris hotels did, and they could have a little shop to sell champagne by the bottle or by the crate.

  When consulted, Maxine’s father cautiously said that while he thought the idea had possibilities, he couldn’t possibly finance such a venture himself. However, they might be able to get bank financing.

  As soon as they started to draw up estimates, they realised that the restoration of the chateau would need far more money than they could gross by running it as a hotel. Maxine had heard that one or two English stately homes had been turned into historical entertainment areas for family outings, with museums and amusement arcades. She thought this sounded like a good possibility, but dared not mention it to Charles until she had researched her scheme; she could imagine his rage at the idea of turning the home of his ancestors into an amusement park.

  After Judy had flown home, Maxine also left for a two-week trip, during which time she visited those chateaus of the Loire Valley that had been opened to the public. The interiors were almost empty and devoid of interest, except to the scholarly. She went to England and visited Longleat, an exquisite example of Elizabethan architecture, owned by the Marquess of Bath; she went to the beautiful and highly successful Woburn Abbey; then she trudged up to Derbyshire to see the Duke of Devonshire’s Chatsworth in all its chilly splendour. She returned to Epernay with very decided ideas: in her own castle she did not want merely to present a tour of an old family home—she wanted to try to evoke history, using stage production techniques.

  Maxine, her father and the estate accountant drew up a new set of figures for her ambitious project. Both men were dubious, but Maxine was determined that her scheme would be accurately assessed for financial viability. Then, filled with despair by the total figure, Maxine telephoned Judy. “We’re going to need around $177,000. I don’t think it’s going to be possible.”

  “It’s possible until it’s proved impossible, so just look quietly confident and project assurance.”

  Maxine had learned a lot since drawing up her first financial forecast to extend her antique shop. Now, with the help of her father and the estate accountant she set out her business proposition, and together the four of them—for Charles had reluctantly agreed to participate in the presentation—drove to Paris to discuss it with a merchant bank. They needed to borrow 33 million francs, and if they got it, they would need to achieve a turnover of 39 million francs a year to cover running costs and show a profit. With any luck, it would take them fifteen years to get out of debt. But if they didn’t have any luck they would be homeless and out of work, for the entire estate was now pledged as collateral against loans, not to speak of a further guarantee from Maxine’s father.

  Understandably, Charles fought against this. “I said that I would agree in principle, provided that none of my capital was needed!”

  “This isn’t capital. It’s a matter of using all your unmortgaged assets as collateral for the loan.”

  “But if it doesn’t succeed we’ll be bankrupt.”

  “And if it does succeed you won’t have to leave your family home. Your sons can grow up here as you did.”

  Maxine won.

  From the day the bank loan was taken up and the interest began to mount, there was not a moment to be wasted. Maxine hired a secretary, a neat competent girl with a tight mouth, and from that moment it was difficult to tell whether Mademoiselle Janine was running Maxine or Maxine was running Mademoiselle Janine.

  Charles shuddered when he thought of what could go wrong. Maxine thought only of the work to be done; she woke up remembering what she had forgotten the day before, her life revolved around a series of lists and lists of lists, but she was exuberantly excited. Judy had already designed her letterhead; in traditional script it read simply:

  Le Château de Chazalle • Epernay • France

  During the months that followed, Maxine couldn’t spend as much time with her babies as she would have wished, but no matter how busy she was, she always spent the afternoons with them. After they had gone to bed, Maxine worked far into the night—every night—as she took over the responsibility of the chateau as a business proposition and continued with the work that she had abandoned when she first became pregnant.

  Apart from the relatively small area in which the family lived, many of the rooms and passages were still in a depressing chaos. Forgotten treasures stood next to worthless watercolour daubs by Charles’s greataunts; everything seemed to be dirty, covered with cobwebs and fly-droppings or nibbled by mice. The attic in the west turret was filled with oil paintings—horses and dogs, sheep and prize bulls, as well as other animals treasured by Charles’s ancestors; unfortunately, they had been badly stored, and many of the paintings were torn and in need of repair. It was a daunting project.

  Paradis designed and superintended the rebuilding and decoration work. Maxine picked a young Parisian designer to work with her on the exhibition and together they produced a plan. Maxine didn’t want crowds shuffling in and out of beautiful rooms while a bored guide chanted at them. She wanted the tour to be an exciting, theatrical event. “I want our guests to feel amazement and delight,” she told the designer, who had never before dealt with such an odd demand.

  Their first job was to get an accurate plan of the second floor, and once that had been surveyed, their next step was to plan the tour. For a week they pored over the plans together, scribbling over them on tracing paper and chalking out different ideas for the tour route. Then the whole family moved to a rented house in Epernay and everything in the chateau was cleared out to go into storage for six months while the building restoration took place. Before it went through the door and into the furniture vans, each item was catalogued and photographed. Aware of the inexorab
le change in popular taste—and also that the throw-outs of one generation are the antiques of the next—Maxine had resolved to sell almost nothing. “We have plenty of space,” she reasoned, “so we will invest in storage. This sort of nineteenth-century picture and furniture is already selling well in America, so we will only get rid of the really big pieces, like all those armoires, which I can sell to cabinetmakers who will make fake period bookcases from them.”

  Maxine examined every piece of furniture herself. Her greatest discovery was when she spotted the gracefully curved legs and fine bronze mounts of a slender pair of Boulle commodes; the handles, set in rosettes of five acorns, were the same as the Mazarine commodes in the Louvre, which had been made in 1709 for Louis XIV. Only one item was sold—a cylinder-topped desk with inlaid floral marquetry by Oeben, dated 1765. Maxine hated it on sight. She sold it to the Metropolitan Museum for five million francs, to the astonishment and admiration of her husband, and it paid for the plumbing.

  Then the building contractors moved into the chateau and Charles found it difficult to decide whether they were rebuilding it or tearing it down.

  “I cannot stand much more of this chaos!” he roared at Maxine one morning, waving his arms in the middle of the gutted main salon, where doors and windows were being unblocked and partitions were being destroyed in a welter of banging rubble and dust. Maxine was used to the chaos caused by such work and she did not see the apparent muddle but only what would shortly be the exquisitely restored salon. Linking her arm in his, she led him away to the next wing, where much of the reconstruction work had been completed. But here the noise and bustle was even worse as the whole wing was being scrubbed from top to bottom by professional cleaners with huge scrubbing machines for the floor, complicated, automated ladders and arm extenders for getting into places that were otherwise impossible to reach.

  Charles bolted out of the nearest door and headed for the stable block where the dogs were kenneled, but his traditional house of peace had been invaded by yet another army of workmen. The interior of the stable block was being rebuilt as an arcade of charming, old-fashioned little shops, and would also contain a coffee bar, a restaurant and a free wine-tasting cellar.

  Charles threw up his arms in Gallic despair as Maxine caught up with him and tugged his sleeve. “Darling Charles, you’ve been so patient . . . only a few more weeks, love . . . let me show you the part that’s finished—Ancestor Alley—it was completed yesterday!”

  Ancestor Alley was their joke name for the History Walk on the first floor. The entire tour was electronically operated by a push-button system, with the human element introduced as extra, because Maxine wasn’t sure how much human element she’d be able to rely on. Pencil-beam spotlights marked the darkened, crimson-roped route. Some of the small rooms had been completely blacked out and furnished with museum showcases of clear glass, cunningly lit by narrow beams of light, so that it looked as if the family treasures were floating in space.

  One eight-foot-wide corridor was painted Chinese yellow and used as a gallery for the portraits of Charles’s ancestors. Charles calmed down as he walked past the beautifully exhibited rows of de Chazalles who stretched back into history—seven-year-old Christian with a blue sash over his silk shirt was leading a donkey across the park in 1643; in 1679 Amélie de Chazalle smiled in a pale gray, low-cut moiré dress, with a parrot perched on her shoulder; in 1776 a group of seven little children (with two sets of twins) sat solemnly around the dining table eating grapes and walnuts, while their beringed and ringleted little mother fed almonds to her pet monkey.

  “Poor things, they were all beheaded in the Revolution except for the youngest boy,” Charles suddenly heard his own recorded voice saying. “He escaped to Geneva, disguised as a runaway lady’s maid, somehow managed to marry an heiress, and their daughter married Henri Nestlé of the chocolate family.”

  Charles’s voice also welcomed the visitors in the entrance hall and, as they moved through the house, he recited his entire family history from the twelfth century to the present; translations in twelve languages were available. Other rooms had background music—Strauss waltzes, harpsichord music, the voice of a young boy soprano floating to the arched roof of the family chapel, and the faint, animated chatter of children, which could be heard in the old nursery.

  Maxine had hoped to open the chateau to the public on the first of July, but as always there were problems with workmen, so they were unable to open until mid-August. On the opening day they all waited, tense with anticipation. Supposing nobody turned up? Expectantly, they all waited at their battle stations at nine o’clock in the morning. But nothing happened.

  In the cobbled courtyard, between the stable block and the house, a charming, nineteenth-century carousel had been erected, with carved and gilded horses, dolphins, swans and mermaids for children to ride. Children could also be taken for rides on ponies or on a trip in the old yellow-lacquered, eighteenth-century state coach, which once again would lumber up and down the drive. There were going to be as many free shows as Maxine could devise, from carousel rides to champagne-tasting—anything that was necessary to make a success of the first day, not only to boost the morale of the staff, but also because the press might be there.

  Nothing happened until ten-thirty in the morning. Then as the first three coaches approached the chateau (Charles immediately thought, We’ll have to reinforce that drive), a small cheer broke out from the excited group that was waiting for them on the front steps. In an unprecedented gesture, Aunt Hortense snatched off her scarlet pillbox hat and threw it in the air. She had been more worried than any of them. Only she knew that it had been her last-minute, behind-the-scenes arguments that had convinced Maxine’s father to take the plunge.

  If it failed, he would never forgive her.

  19

  FROM THE BEGINNING Judy had had no trouble in getting publicity for the chateau, and nearly all the first paying guests were booked in from the United States. Maxine had also invited a handful of French celebrity friends, including Guy Saint Simon, now a well-known fashion designer, in order that the Americans would feel that they were getting their money’s worth.

  “They’re obviously all enjoying themselves tremendously,” Guy commented after his first visit.

  “Oh, yes, one or two have already booked up for a further visit,” said Maxine happily. To her surprise, she found that she loved entertaining these strangers—she found something interesting about most of them, and their enjoyment was infectious.

  Painfully, Maxine rebuilt the crumbling fabric of Charles’s family home and brought it to life again. Of course, it was not possible to please everybody. Charles’s sisters were icily critical, but then they always found something to complain about. They thought it vulgar that a de Chazalle should have to work and that their home should be opened to strangers. “Serves him right for marrying a bourgeoise,” said his elder sister. “God knows what she’ll think of next: strip shows in the drawing room or a zoo in the park.”

  Both sisters refused to face the fact that without Maxine’s work there would no longer be any chateau, and that without her encouragement and support, Charles would be in no position to establish the estate as one of the principal minor tourist attractions of the Champagne. Most of all the sisters deplored Maxine’s vulgar American associate, the one who had flown over from New York for the opening, that young woman, Judy, who talked loudly and discussed money and business at meals.

  Just before Judy flew back to America, Guy drove out to the chateau from Paris. It was the chef’s evening off, and a cold meal had been left in the library. As she took a slice of ham, Judy felt an odd, school-girlish, conspiratorial atmosphere of suspense and smothered giggles, as if a secret was about to be revealed. Maybe they were going to give her a present? After all, opening the chateau had been her idea. . . . She took her plate and sat on the footstool in front of the log fire at Aunt Hortense’s bony feet, the metatarsals bulging after a lifetime spent in too-high heels.
It wasn’t really cold enough for a fire but Maxine always kept one burning in the little library.

  “Something’s going on. What’s up? What are you hiding from me?” Judy said suspiciously.

  Aunt Hortense gave a smothered laugh and almost dropped her plate. Guy looked at Charles, who gave an odd grin—Charles now enjoyed Guy’s company, although at first he had resented this dressmaker who had been in the nursery with Maxine and who consequently knew what she was thinking far better than her husband.

  Now Guy nodded his head at Charles and turned to Judy. His face was serious. “We want to discuss a business proposition with you, Judy. We want to suggest that you open your own office and handle our publicity in the States.”

  Judy was astonished. “That’s very . . . that’s wonderfully flattering and very generous of you.”

  “Not at all, it would be in our interest,” said Guy. “I need my own PR in the States, and I’ve worked with you for years in Paris. You know my business.”

  “And we are obviously going to rely on American visitors to the chateau,” added Maxine. “So we need someone we can trust to handle us in America.”

  “Don’t think that the idea hasn’t crossed my mind! But I’m far too young and I haven’t any capital. Maxine, you know I need every cent I can save for mother’s medical bills. I’ve no money.”

  “We’re paying other firms to do this work now,” Charles said. “We might as well pay you. To be frank, I also thought you might be too young, but we all started young. You’re nearly twenty-three, Judy. A woman of that age is not too young to be responsible for little children, so why not for a little business? You don’t have to start immediately. We could plan for six months’ time.”