Mr. Murphy visits us at the Chateau De Brissac
It was nothing earthshaking. No one got hurt and we escaped with no financial loss. But all through that evening, everything that could go wrong kept going wrong. One after the other. Now we laugh at the peculiar set of small misfortunes that befell us, but we weren’t laughing as it happened.
Our family of four, my wife Param and my daughters Sim and Nim aged 22 and 20 respectively had embarked on bucket list item - a leisurely three thousand kilometre driving trip across Switzerland and France in October of the year 2024.
The trip had been going swimmingly well until then. Hertz had, in all their munificence, upgraded the five-seater car that I had chosen for the trip to a more powerful and roomier seven-seater. The Airbnb properties we had rented had far exceeded expectations – none more so than the first one at Lauterbrunnen, nestled as it was in a valley with two almost vertical cliffs about half a kilometre in front and behind the house with over seventy waterfalls cascading down both sides to shower music on our souls, and much taller snow-clad peaks staring down at us from the left and right. The weather, even on the days when there had been dire predictions of thunderstorms and lightning, had been nothing but sterling. Our drive across Switzerland to the snowclad mountains of Schilthorn, Schynige Platte and Zermatt, to the picturesque, seemingly un-lived-in villages of Iseltwald and Murren and to the lakes around Interlaken has been breathtaking, better than in our wildest imagination. Our fears of our family of four imploding because of excessive forced closeness had seemed unfounded and we were, mostly, happy and enjoying each other’s company.
In short, our cup was overflowing, and we were full of joie de vivre as we left Switzerland and entered France. Having had our fill of the astounding natural beauty of that country, we were ready now for the architectural marvels created by mortals. Consuming four-fromage pizzas by the hectare, we wound our way across eastern France and through the picturesque Loire Valley, eager for the next big attraction of the trip - a one-night stay at the Chateau de Brissac. We had managed to see a few Chateaus along the way, so we had an idea of what to expect. But Brissac exceeded our expectations.
We reached at about 4 PM, gazing with wonder at the marvel of old-world architecture more beautiful and ethereal than any we had seen so far. Where the other Chateaus had been two, at most three, storey structures, Brissac seemed to reach for the sky. The grounds around it, all manicured lawns, seem to extend as far as the eye could see.
As we started unloading, a tall and lanky figure came striding across the lawn and started helping us with our bags. After we were done, I thanked him and asked him what he did at the Chateau. He said he managed the property and, almost as an afterthought, added that owned the place. I gaped, not having realised that the Duke of Brissac had just unloaded and carried into the castle the heaviest among our bags. Our first brush with French royalty, and we were utterly charmed by his presence, humility and good nature.
After setting down our luggage in the beautifully appointed double rooms, we were told that we were the only outsiders in the castle that day, so we had the entire building much to ourselves. As we completed a round of the castle, we ended up in the basement where I saw that there was a small shop selling produce of the Chateau’s substantial estate. Among the offerings were bottles of white wine. Having neglected to get myself of some alcoholic succour after the long drive there, I picked up bottle and made my way back to our rooms.
That purchase triggered a sequence of events that kept us on tenterhooks for the next few hours.
When we reached our third storey room, the girls got busy taking Instagram photos of themselves. I realised that the wine bottle had a cork stopper, searched around for the wine opener but could not find one. I asked Param to come along with me for a walk as I went down to the car to get the Swiss Army knife that I had bought in Zermatt as a keepsake, so I could open the bottle.
Param is the kind of person for whom a phone at 90% juice is almost fully discharged so she had just set her phone for charging. I had just bought a new phone, and Sim and Nim were using that to take photos. My old phone was lying unused, but I had moved the SIM card from that phone to the new one. We were only going down for a few minutes, so I took that phone with me to use as a torch as it was getting dark outside. Therefore, as we went down the stairs, we had one phone between us, and it was without an active cellular connection.
As we reached the entrance to Castle, we marvelled at how large and thick the door was. There was an automatic door lock mechanism, but I was sure that I had let the manual bolt out enough that the auto-lock mechanism would not engage. Or so I thought.
When we returned to the entrance door after retrieving the knife from the car, we saw to our very mild consternation that the door was now firmly locked. Param had taken a photo of the door code, but when I asked her to take it out, we remembered that her phone was upstairs in the room. We tried all combinations of the code that we could recall, but the lock stayed stubbornly locked. After several failed attempts, we tried to press the button that was meant to connect us to someone inside, but it stayed silent, too. Beating the thick doors seems to produce no sound at all, not even to us. I walked around the castle, hoping for another way in, but everything had been securely shut down for the night.
There was a light on in two rooms on what seemed to be our floor. The area around the door had a lot of loose gravel, so I sprayed some of it on what we thought were the windows to our room, to no avail. We learnt later that those room had not been ours at all!
We sat on a bench for a while, thinking of options. Thankfully, it was it was just a little nip in the air, so it was unlikely that we would freeze to death. All we could hope was for our daughters to realise that we hadn’t returned in a while, so they could let us in. After about 20 minutes of waiting, we started to feel a bit cold, and I wanted to end it and get back to the warmth of our room and my bottle of wine.
I remembered seeing free Wi-Fi available at the Burger King that we had been to earlier that day, and it was about a ten-minute drive away. We agreed that the quickest way to get us back in was to use that Wi-Fi to call our daughters to the door of the castle. Leaving my wife to tell them of our predicament if they came out while I was away, I decided to drive to the Burger King.
Before I started driving, I tried to get the GPS in the car to give me the directions, but it could not find any Burger King in the vicinity (we learnt later that the Burger King had started operations just a couple of days ago so hadn’t been updated in the car’s GPS.Assuming I could easily find the restaurant again, I set off. Just as I got out of the castle gates, I saw a pub full of drunken revellers and thought it might be a good idea to stop and try my luck at finding free Wi-Fi there, even at the cost of a beer, but I didn’t see any open parking spot. I did find one a bit ahead but thought that the Burger King was a more viable option and did not stop.
About a kilometre away from the Burger King, there was large roundabout with about six roads leading out of it. It was quite dark by now and the town of Brissac does not seem to find it prudent to invest in streetlights, and I ended up taking a wrong turn on to what seemed like a highway leading out of Brissac. Only that morning, I had missed a turn on a highway and had to drive back for an hour to get back on track, so I was upset for putting myself in that predicament once more. Fortunately, I saw that this highway had some small roads branching out of it as I whizzed past one. I resolved to turn into at the next one and saw that there was one close by on the car GPS. I was able veer into it and immediately stopped to turn the car around. As I reversed, I ended up with an earful of a honk from a passing tanker and realised I was too close the highway, so I decided to go a bit further along that road before I reversed. When I was sufficiently far from the highway, I stopped to turn, only to realise that this road was too narrow for me to turn my large car around. Not thinking much of it, I slowly eased my front two tires a bit off the road, thinking that the embankments will take their weight.
I was wrong on that count. As both front wheels sank slowly off the road, and my heart sank with them.
Despite sensing already that it was an exercise in futility, I tried a few times to reverse on to the road, but the wheels found no purchase. My car was stuck, straddled fully across the road as I sat there for a few minutes, thinking of my predicament. Strange place, no lights for kilometres, far from my current abode, no phone and that car, stuck.
As I got off the car to inspect my handiwork, I realised that I had not put on my shoes on for this sojourn, just my bathroom slippers. A cursory look with the torch in my phone revealed what I had suspected all along – a difference in the level of the road and the soil on its side was big enough for the tyres to spin free as the car rested on its chassis. I turned off the car, locked it and decided to hoof it to the Burger King. The night was pitch black by now, the only light coming from my phone’s torch and the occasional distant glow of headlights. The quiet was broken by the roar of trucks hurtling past, shaking the ground beneath my slippers. I thought of the beautiful sunset and the rainbow I had seen only a couple of hours ago, when I had come to the Burger King that evening. That seemed years ago now.
I imagined that I would have to bring to bear all the navigational knowledge gained by humankind in the millennia before the phone GPS was invented to get there, but that, thankfully, was not needed. As I reached the main road, I could see the bright neon lights of the restaurant in the distance, so I started walking towards it. I soon realised, however, that it was not going to be an easy task. The good folks managing the municipality of Brissac also did not see it fit to invest in making roadside paths for fearless nightwalkers like me. The lack of any roadside lights left only the feeble light from my phone to guide me.
As I walked, leviathan trucks whizzed past me, too close for comfort. It would just take a glancing blow from a protruding rear-view mirror to knock me out. To save myself from that fate, I resolved to get off the road whenever a truck came near, but that presented another problem – there was deep grass on the roadside, covering almost all of my calves. I cursed myself having researched only about the crime levels in rural France (fortunately non-existent) but reading nothing about the wildlife, especially of the slithery kind. My skin crawled as I stepped, almost barefoot, into the grass every couple of minutes, so I skipped back on to the road with a nimbleness belying my advanced years and substantial bulk. Thus, prancing inelegantly on and off the road, I walked slowly back towards the town for what seemed like ages.
As I walked, I wondered at the weird set of coincidences that had forced me to me walk for more than an hour in slippers. Only a week before I started on this trip, suffering from lower back ache issues and anticipating long treks, I had invested an obscene sum of money in what the manufacturers had called “the most comfortable shoes in the world”. Fat lot of good those shoes were doing to me today!
As I got closer, I realised that the Burger King which, though quite near as the crow flies, would take me a much longer walk if I wanted to keep to the roads. On the other hand, I could take a short-cut. Separating the road on which I was and the road on which Burger King was located, was a large plot of land with visible puddles of water, and even deeper grass than I had encountered so far. However, emboldened by the fact that I hadn’t been eaten or bitten thus far, and being hungry, tired and cold with a backache that was acting up, I decided to wade through that grass and soon reached my destination.
As soon as I had regained my breath and my composure, I logged on to the Wi-Fi and called my daughter. Sim picked up the phone and with great relief told me that she knew everything, and that Param was inside the rooms, and that all was well and that I should come back right away. They had gone down to the castle entrance about five minutes after I had left, and had let her in. My news to them, though, was not as heartening. I told them about the car and its accident and that cast a pall on the family’s relief at the imminent closure of today chapter of our journey.
My immediate problem was to get back to the Chateau. My first thought was Uber, but after the app spun on its tracks for over 5 minutes to find a driver for me, it gave up. My next port of call was local taxis, but I realised that I cannot make local calls over Wi-fi but needed a SIM card for that. I tried to talk to the oldest of the youths manning the Burger King counters, but when I finally got to them with my very limited French and a liberal use of the Google Translate app, I was told that the restaurant had been newly set up and did not have a land line phone that I could use. My third option was to ask for a lift to the castle, I did not have much hope of a successful outcome on that front. Would I trust a dishevelled foreigner with muddy feet in bathroom slippers, asking for a lift late at night, especially if I was the resident of a small village? The three strangers who I approached made their choice clear – they didn’t, too. No lift.
I was not looking forward to another thirty-minute walk in the dark, now decidedly cold night. But when all else failed, I only had my bathroom slipper clad feet to fall back on to get me back. I girded the old loins, called the family to announce the start of my trek back home, and began walking. This time, thankfully, since I was back in the village limits, I could walk on the pavements. The lack of streetlights did not bother me this time, since my phone still had enough charge for me to see especially since it was now augmented by intermittent lights from people’s houses.
When I finally reached home, I was relieved to see Param and the kids running towards me through the offending castle door. As we hugged, we agreed that things weren’t too bad since everyone were safe and together. As I cleaned up and had my dinner, I told them the story of my evening after I left home. Param, in turn, told me that as she sat outside in the darkness, her thoughts drifted to ghost stories about old castles. Pacing to calm herself, she felt a wave of relief when the motion-sensing lights flickered back on, as if the castle itself was keeping her company
The children had come down soon after. They were cross with us though, for not trusting them enough to realise that we had been missing, and come down to rescue us as they had eventually done.
We tried to call Hertz Switzerland and France to report the incident, but only heard recorded messages promising to call us back in the morning. As I had my dinner, Nim then brought up an important point that I had not considered so far. I had left the car in a dangerous position and had neglected to turn on the parking lights, fearing they would drain the battery if they ran all night. If someone drove along the way on that narrow road and failed to see the car in the dark, there could be an accident. At the very least, someone could be prevented from getting home. We all agreed that we were duty-bound to call the local police to warn them about the car.
A call to 112, the French phone number for emergencies, resulted in us talking to an operator who spoke in halting English. I gave him a short version of the accident and the registration number, model and an approximate location of the car since I did not have the name of the road where it had stalled. He promised to get the local police to get it towed to safety and, when I told him I was doubtful of the exact location, told me laconically that they would have the intelligence to look at adjacent roads if they did not find it on the road where I thought it was. He could not take our phone number, since he said that he had no way of calling international phones, so he said that the police officials will find me at the Chateau. We felt strange that he did not even note down my name, contact details and even my car details. When I asked for his name, all I got was that he was a fire-fighter. But we decided to put our trust in fate and the French police.
We were certain now that our schedule for the next day would be in shambles. We had planned to depart for Paris the next day at about 10 AM, a drive of about three and a half hours. We had bought non-refundable tickets to see the Palace of Versailles which closed its doors at 4 PM. Once we dealt with the police and got back our car, we were certain that we would not be able get there in time to see the Palace. Prepared for a difficult day ahead, we decided to call it a night and worry about tomorrow, tomorrow.
Everyone else seemed to quickly fall asleep, but sleep eluded me when I finally lay down on my bed, well past the witching hour. I kept thinking about the evening, of everything that went wrong, of everything that could have gone wrong and of what could go wrong the next day.
The events of the evening had already robbed us of a memorable evening of exploring, late into the night, a thousand-year-old castle. Instead, we had endured an evening of needless anxiety.
I thought of everything that I could have done differently. If only I had taken my phone along. Or asked Param to take hers. If only I had wedged the castle door open. Or waited some time more for my daughters to realise that we were late and come down. If only I had decided to stop at the bar just outside the castle and used their Wi Fi. Or not taken the wrong turn at the roundabout. I told myself that I could have taken a photo of the car GPS, which would have given me the exact location of the car. If only.
What is more, it was not over yet. Given all that I had heard of police bureaucracy, I was certain of a tough day ahead. I had not yet confronted an even bigger fear – what if the car got stolen? I had bought insurance against theft from Hertz, but this could delay us further, putting paid to our finely laid plans for the next few days. Who knew what Mr. Murphy had planned for us tomorrow?
As I lay there thinking of the car getting stolen, I remembered that we had left some of our bags in the car, and one of them might have one of our Apple AirTags, those fancy thingamajigs that are meant to locate lost or stolen items by transmitting their locations at regular intervals. Picking up my phone, I opened that app that shows the location of the AirTags. To my delight, I could see the exact location of the car in the app. Heartened by the fact that I would at least know where the car was the next day if the police picked it up or even if it was stolen, I drifted off to sleep.
When we woke up in the morning, first thing I did was tell the family of my discovery of the AirTag, and we all hastened to check the location of the car again. I was glad to see that it had not moved overnight, so I assumed that the police had not been able to tow it anywhere. I decided to get ready quickly, ask the duke’s help in finding a tow truck and get to the car before the police did. However, as when we checked the location again as soon as I was ready to leave, the car had moved. It was now showing at a location about 20 kilometres away. The police had acted.
Further sleuthing by my personal ace investigative team placed the car in the yard of a towing company. With a quick call, I learnt was that all I had to do was to come to their yard, pay up the hefty towing costs and take it, and there was no need to contact the police. Just like that!
Things were looking up, we all agreed. I called a local taxi company, who promised to send a car in 15 minutes. As I ran down to the dining rooms to get snatch up a quick breakfast, I met the duke and told him the story of last night. He was appalled at our bad experience, and kept apologising, until I saw that my taxi had arrived and promised to tell him of the final outcome upon returning.
As I travelled to the towing yard, I heard later that Param had also met with the duke when she came down for breakfast. She also told him the entire story from start to finish but was not interrupted once during the entire retelling! At the end of the tale, the duke was again very apologetic for the fact that we had to go through that experience and kept wondering how both of us could keep laughing through the whole retelling of the story. He kept saying that we should have woken him up after my return. With all his connections and friendships in the village, he would have easily been able to rouse someone with a tow truck and get back our car in the night. He offered us the use of the castle rooms for week, at no extra cost. If not for a week, he said, stay for a day. We kept thanking him for his offer to help and his generous offer of the use of his house, and kept saying that it was not his fault, but he would have none of that. Eventually, when we turned up at the reception to settle our bills, we saw that he had given us a huge discount.
I was able to get to the tow truck company, pay the sizeable towing charges and retrieve my car without incident. I called Hertz to report that I now had the car, and they promised to reimburse the towing charge. After the chaos of the previous night, it felt almost surreal to see the car safely in the yard.
We were able to depart an hour later than planned and reached the Palace of Versailles on time to marvel at its immense beauty.
It was as if the world was suddenly back to normal. Everything was back to being better than we expected. The palace of Versailles astounded us by its opulent architecture and Paris was more beautiful than in the movies we see of it in all our lives. Our drive back to Zurich through the heart of the Burgundy wine region and Dijon of the mustard fame was enchanting and we returned to Sydney without further ado.
However, that evening of madness will forever stay in my memory, of the kind of evening that I have never faced until then, of the evening when everything that could go wrong, did. Despite everything, though, each incident had been inconsequential in itself and each one occurring individually would have not caused us to bat an eyelid. Combined, they turned a leisurely evening into unforgettable night, one that we will recall forever to friends and family over drinks.
As the castle disappeared in the rearview mirror, I offered a silent toast to Mr. Murphy, hoping he wouldn’t join us for the rest of our journey.
End Note:
I sent this story to Duke Charles-André de Brissac after I published it here, thus forcing him to go through it for the third time, no less! This was his very classy reply, which I reproduce here with his permission:
Comments
The narrative, delightfully reminiscent of PG Wodehouse, was an absolute page-turner, albeit a short one. Honestly, had Mr. Murphy (or his mischievous muse) not paid a visit, Sukhjeet’s time at Brissac might have been just another postcard-perfect memory. Now, it’s a tale worthy of dinner-table storytelling for years to come!
Thank you, Sukhjeet, for sharing this gem! Here’s hoping for sequels—preferably with less Murphy and more hilarity. Can’t wait for the next episode!