Priscilla (14 page)

‘I was very small, but I saw Madame Robert. It was a big attraction to see people of the chateau. Because I was from another world than them.'

The chateau was the scene of some of the fiercest fighting in Normandy. By the time the shelling stopped, Boisgrimot, Saint-Pierre church and the Doynel tombs had been obliterated, and hardly a house in Sainteny remained standing.

Sainteny's mayor told me: ‘The community was literally destroyed.'

The destruction included the archives, said Jean-Paul Pitou, who was the local historian. He had spent two decades researching into Sainteny's past. Such was the resistance to talking about this period at all, not to mention the mistrust in the neighbourhood towards those who might have collaborated with the Germans, that even when documents did turn up, they were destroyed. And in a morose voice from which he could not keep his regret, Pitou recalled the secretary of the association that looked after war victims, a woman whose responsibility was to assess the refugees, and who removed their papers and photographs from their houses for safekeeping. ‘When she died in the 1960s, her children made a bonfire and burned all the files, for two days and two nights.'

A photograph in Comte Paul Doynel de la Sausserie's privately printed
Genealogical History of the House of Chivré
was one of the few images to survive of the chateau of Boisgrimot as it looked in 1944. The windows blown out, the shutters gone, the brickwork torched as if a bush fire had swept through. The trunk of a solitary oak twists up over the damaged roof, charred and spindly.

The black and white ruin bore no resemblance to the magnolia-painted building that I approached on a mild September afternoon. I walked over a narrow moat filled with water, over a lawn planted with pampas grass and pressed my face to a window. ‘Now it's a bourgeois house, excuse me,' the local historian had cautioned.

Destroyed by bombs in July 1944, and sold with panic-stricken haste by Robert's brother Georges, Boisgrimot had endured a sterile renovation, and was now available for rent. Visible through a windowpane was the sole link to the former proprietors, a stone fireplace engraved with three mallards – the Doynel crest.

There was no one around – the present owner lived in Cherbourg – and I made a circuit of the buildings, poking into the conical dovecote. In a corner of the stables, covered with hay, was a dilapidated wood carriage, streaked with blue paint.

The only image of Boisgrimot as it was in Priscilla's time was a tinted postcard of the chateau, owned by Jacqueline Hodey. Pitou told me that it
took eighteen months to persuade her to show it to him. When I explained to Jacqueline that I was here to find out what had happened to my aunt, she said: ‘On fera sortir les fantômes' – It'll bring out the ghosts.

On this, her first visit, it was a warm day without sun; not a good hunting day, what the French call a jour des dames. The steward, Monsieur Carer, collected Robert and Priscilla from Carentan station in the blue pony trap. The French government had issued Priscilla with a gas mask, a grey oblong box which hung at her side.

The stout horse lumbered them though a flat landscape bordered by thick hedges into Sainteny and down a gravel drive overarched by oaks. These ancient trees were the joy of Robert's father, who had forbidden his children to saw off a single branch. His dying words: ‘Leave my trees alone.' Robert felt a peace whenever he saw them.

The chateau that emerged from beneath this natural arch was a long two-storied manor house, painted oatmeal and rather plain on the outside. The building dated back to the tenth century, but more recently someone had added on a pigeonnier – a sign of aristocracy.

Stables in sight, the horse quickened pace, throwing them together on the buggy seat.

Small dogs pressed their noses into her skirt as Priscilla stepped down. Robert's mother Adelaide stood on the steps, a small, very old, alert-faced woman dressed in a black jacket edged with embroidery. She kissed Priscilla with some affection and led the way, through a hall that smelled of gun oil and expensive leather tackle, into a large square drawing room, with windows on both sides.

About twenty Doynels stood waiting – Adelaide's seven surviving children and their families. Priscilla's overriding impression was how ancient they were. Two of Robert's four sisters seemed old enough to be her grandmother. An unmarried woman, Priscilla shyly kissed their hands.

Forty-three-year-old Guy, Priscilla already knew. She was now introduced to the brother who had somersaulted over Guy to become head of the family.
Georges, who was forty-one, was the wealthiest and cleverest of Adelaide's three sons. He had married a rich woman and made money dealing in antiques and paintings. In looks and in temperament he was quite unlike Robert: astute and energetic, but with a dreadful temper, generally sparked by the most trivial incident. The family tip-toed around him.

His twenty-nine-year-old wife, Yolande de la Sayette, was a crashing snob who believed in living ‘selon son rang' – according to one's rank – and mingling with exclusive people only. But an eccentric dress code sabotaged her bids to appear stylish. ‘She had no taste in clothes and when she was well dressed it was generally a fluke,' wrote Priscilla. Their character was conveyed by an advertisement placed recently in
The Times
. ‘Young French Married Couple, best society, would take well-educated young people desiring to learn French in their comfortable villa near Dinard, July–September.'

Yolande greeted Priscilla, and smiled as far as her narrow mouth would let her. She sported a strange bird's feather in her hat. ‘She took an immediate dislike to me,' Priscilla wrote, ‘when I told her in answer to a question that I had not been presented at Court.'

English girls were rare at Boisgrimot. Yolande was automatically suspicious of the young woman whom Robert had invited to stay. Priscilla's white complexion challenged Yolande – those lazy blue eyes that could suddenly become very concentrated, those rounded arms and shoulders, those firm breasts, that tall and slender figure, that hair, and smoothing a dress so obviously purchased for her. Yolande saw une arriviste, a provincial interloper from the old enemy. In this part of France, she would warn Priscilla, they did not much care for the English – they knew the history. But she could not deny that Priscilla held herself well. She had radiance, she had presence. And Robert loved her.

Robert had told his family about Priscilla; how splendid she looked, standing on deck in a warm wind. Her provenance, Sherborne, the town of Roger of Caen; her ancestry, one of aristocrats and eminent authors.

Catholic? No. But that was being seen to.

What did her father do? A famous writer. On the wireless. The Prince of Wales had introduced one of his programmes. The Queen listened to him.
He had met President Roosevelt. They nodded.

He did not tell them about the situation of her parents. Divorce for the Doynels was an insupportable disgrace.

And no word of Priscilla's circumstances when he met her.

The room subsided back into its dark sensible proportions. A niece ran forward to give Priscilla a flower she had picked, and showed her upstairs to change. Robert led her down to dinner.

A woman from the village served the meal. Priscilla's gaze faltered over the main course, a slim slice of goose breast like the sole of a ballet shoe. The gloomy panelled room made Yolande's powdered face look whiter as she watched for Priscilla to do the wrong thing.

Priscilla glanced down the long table. There were no napkins. And the manners of the family surprised her. ‘They all wiped up their sauce with a bit of bread between finger and thumb. When eating eggs or drinking tea or coffee they always dipped bread into the mixture. Also, they ate several different courses with the same knife and fork and never changed the plates.'

Dinner over, everyone retired to the drawing room. They sat in scrolled couches overlooked by cracked ancestral portraits of men decorated with the Order of the Holy Ghost. On the black and white wallpaper, a still life of a dead deer on a wooden table, a couple of antique hunting horns (‘Mes fils adorent la chasse'); and a bookcase containing the works of Claude-Joseph Durat bound in red leather. During a visit lasting several days, Priscilla did not remember anyone opening a book. Some knitted, some played cards, some talked. Conversation hovered over the situation in Czechoslovakia and moved on, but every eye in the room was paying attention to Priscilla.

Princes and magic. Was this what Priscilla had envisaged as a child? Did she creep into Robert's room? Bounce on the bed, draw the heavy curtains, fearing to whisper in case she woke his old mother in the next room. Or disturb Georges, gassed in the First War. Or Guy, who had done such sterling work to uphold the façade that Priscilla was from the English nobility. Guy understood perfectly – he had had to endure Yolande's smug censure of
Georgette. Yolande, her prejudice fixed like the pigeonnier at the corner of the chateau, had declared Georgette ‘socially unacceptable'.

The chateau slept. From her window, Priscilla could see fields and a hard tennis court overrun by weeds. She looked down the sacrosanct avenue of oaks. Out there was fear and the sound of boots, the sense of six hundred years and a way of living – feudal, religious and embodied in the small black shape of Robert's mother – about to totter to an end. The house was so imposing and grand, at the same time it looked ready to crumble into the tennis court.

My mother told me that when, after the war, Priscilla discovered Giuseppe di Lampedusa's novel
The Leopard
, the portrait of an ancient family in full disintegration, it became her favourite book.

The shadow of Robert's father Georges continued to fall over Boisgrimot like the branches of his precious oaks. His funeral in January 1935 had attracted one of the largest gatherings of the regional nobility in the Doynels' history. The archpriest of Chivré had headed the cortège which carried the body from the chateau to the cemetery in Sainteny. Robert and his two brothers were chief mourners. During a sung mass attended by the district's priests, the eighty-four-year old Vicomte was lowered into the family sepulchre beside his two dead sons.

Invitations to his funeral listed the Vicomte's five addresses. He owned a further ninety-four properties, and by leading a careful life had contrived to leave his children ten each – plus, according to Priscilla, ‘enough money to allow them to live at leisure, without working'. Robert had never done a stroke of work in his life, she told Gillian.

The archpriest in his oration described Robert's father as a ‘fervent traditionalist' who had embraced his civic duties with passionate seriousness. He had twice served as mayor of Sainteny and had founded a free school for the local children. An equally fervent Catholic, he paid for the schoolchildren's education so long as the boys became priests and the girls nuns.

Not one of the Vicomte's own children had grown up to take Holy Orders. In a worn anecdote which summarised for Priscilla their profligacy, the
Vicomte invited his three sons to a restaurant. He chose a sardine and a veal cutlet and passed the menu to Georges, who found it depressing to scan a menu without selecting the priciest item. ‘I think I will have oysters.' Guy then ordered caviar, and Robert lobster. After stroking his beard for a long moment, their father threw up his hands: ‘Why not? I will have oysters, caviar and lobster too.'

The Vicomte had greater luck in passing down his love of hunting. The archpriest alluded to it in his prayers, how the forests echoed with the old man's horn. ‘The great distraction of the late lamented was la chasse; in every part of the region he had a reputation as an excellent shot. He continued to shoot from his wheelchair, even when an unfortunate accident rendered him immobile.'

In the morning, Priscilla went riding with Robert along a sun-speckled bridle track. It was a hotter day and she had wanted to put on shorts, but he asked her not to: it might shock the villagers.

Hooves clopped furiously on being led on to earth. The breath of honeysuckle sweetened the air; pigeons circled overhead.

Robert showed her over the estates, pointing out the milking cows, the buckwheat fields, and introduced her to the farm workers. Monsieur Bezard descended from his tractor, followed by his dog. He discussed the changes Robert would like to make. Priscilla had difficulty in understanding the Breton dialect. On poles on top of the haystacks, someone had tied live crows to scare off the birds.

They rode back through the village, between cottages built of pressed earth and clay. Priscilla found them primitive compared with houses in Sussex or Devon – and recalled her father nearly cancelling a tour through Normandy after his first day in France, he had never slept in such a filthy hotel. In SPB's opinion, the roads were straight and monotonous, the countryside dull, the villages smelly. ‘The country people, all dressed in black, looked as unhappy as the houses they lived in.' Sainteny was like this, a feudal backwater where nobility and clergy dominated unchallenged.

Robert's late father had appeared in frock coat and hat, gloves in hand, for 6 p.m. prayers in the drawing room. This pious tradition continued under Georges, the new head of the family. ‘One always had to be at Mass and Communion at least once a week, not to mention Vespers.'

To demonstrate her religious credentials, Priscilla joined Robert and his family in their processions to the village church. ‘They were very drab – they looked like crows all in black – one could hardly distinguish them from the peasants, which was odd as both parents had great distinction.' Robert seemed to be the only one who had inherited this distinction. The rest of his family were decrepit, expiring. Priscilla, surveying these gruesome Doynel aunts and uncles ‘always going and coming from church', wondered ‘what sins they could have committed to go to confession so often'.