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’.
Increased acquaintance with Yolande only served to make her more unpleasant. Georges’s glacial and exalted wife did not alter one jot her opinion of Robert’s long-legged and shy English fiancée. ‘Elle ne dit jamais un mot!’ her voice rising in a determined effort to maintain her top-dog position. She bent her playing card and waited for it to snap back. Her complaints were various: Priscilla never played belote, never joined in the conversation, never offered an opinion about Art or Music, never . . .
But Yolande’s conversations were about people whom Priscilla did not know, about politics, which she did not understand. Just looking at Yolande made Priscilla cough.
Their battles formalised over what Priscilla called ‘the bath question’. There were only two baths at Boisgrimot, zinc tubs with swan’s neck taps, installed by Robert’s father. Adelaide, the reigning queen, had access to one of them; Yolande to the other. Everyone else was supposed to wash out of buckets. Priscilla’s gentle insistence on using Yolande’s bathroom – reached by walking through her bedroom – ratcheted up the hostilities.
Strangely for one so timid, Priscil
la was not at all in awe of Yolande’s husband Georges. When, on the second evening, Georges had another of his grand explosions, Priscilla was comforted by a sense of déjà-vu. Instead of shrinking with everyone else behind the uncomfortable Louis Quatorze settees, she took strength from one of SPB’s bedtime stories, about his grandfather in Georgeham, a man of extraordinary irascibility who once whipped the village blacksmith and left a scar on his back. Priscilla’s father had been the one family member not afraid of him.
On the other hand, Priscilla got on famously with Robert’s traditional Catholic mother, Adelaide. Priscilla wrote: ‘She was very agile for her age. She walked up and down stairs several times a day and she still had quite good eyesight and could hear everything one said in spite of her 85 years.’ A portrait in the drawing room showed the young Adelaide to have been attractive – ‘more so than any of her daughters’. But she had exhausted herself giving birth to eleven children and now looked forward to joining her husband in the family crypt. Her single outstanding desire – having given up on Guy – was to see her youngest son Robert married. She had heard glowing reports of Priscilla from Guy and Georgette.
Priscilla became very fond of the old lady. It helped that Adelaide had a tricky relationship with Yolande, who, to Adelaide’s impotent fury, had taken control of the kitchen and housekeeping. Adelaide viewed Priscilla as an ally who was likely to be more amenable. ‘She could not have been nicer to me.’
Adelaide leaned on her arm in walks around the garden. They sat on a bench side by side. Once, they were chatting with Robert when he was called away to see Monsieur Bezard. Priscilla looked out over the tennis court, the cooing pigeons, someone riding through the trees, the sweet-smelling bonfire, the gap in the hedge where the late Vicomte liked to blast away at hares from his wheelchair. She would come to recognise that rarely a day went by without Robert thinking of Boisgrimot.
Bells were ringing across the field. In the declining light, Priscilla led the old woman, the ferrule of her stick crunching on the gravel, slowly down the avenue to Vespers. Talk was of Robert. He had told his mother. ‘She was overjoyed at the idea of his settling down at last.’ He had not yet asked Priscilla, but in the morning he was taking her into Caen to propose formally. The city – forty-five miles away – had an excellent jeweller’s.
Adelaide, getting ahead of herself, held her hand and patted her while giving Priscilla advice on her future life. Where she would live, what she would do, and about children. Priscilla would have children, not so many as Adelaide perhaps – but lots of them.
Priscilla’s blushing face studied the dovecote. Dimples appeared with reluctance in her cheeks as she pretended to have no idea what Adelaide was talking about. But her heart pounded.
13.
LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN MAN
At twenty-two, Priscilla’s vulnerability was part of her appeal. Most men flatter themselves that certain women want looking after. She brought that sense out in a lot of them. She had the careless allure of Grace Kelly which Alfred Hitchock sought (but failed) to put on screen in Marnie. Interviewed by the Daily Express in Bodega Bay, the director remarked that people had the wrong idea about Grace. ‘They think she is a cold fish. Remote, like Alcatraz out there. But she has sex appeal, believe me. She has the subtle sex appeal of the English woman and this is the finest in the world. It is ice that will burn in your hands.’
This was Priscilla’s impact on a young French aristocrat in Caen only a few days after her visit to Boisgrimot. She had not exchanged a word with him. It was one of plenty of instances of men being electrically attracted to her across a bar, a room, a street.
On the night of Sunday 2 October 1938, feeling lovestruck, the Marquis de T. walked back along the deserted Boulevard des Alliés to the restaurant where he had spied Priscilla earlier in the week, and handed a letter to the patron, asking him to give it to that lovely girl, which he did. Air raids were feared and de T., recently mobilised, had spent the previous days painting the streetlamps. But his mind was not seething over the political crisis. In the dim blue light, there would have been something ghost-like about him.
‘Mademoiselle,
‘I am the officer whom you saw at the Brasserie Chandivert. I don’t know what you think of me or if you think of me, or even if you noticed me. Myself, I think about you constantly. I have managed to find out your name and address, and this morning I commit the folly of writing to you.
‘I hope that my letter moves you and that you won’t be annoyed at my audacity. As for me, I fear nothing except that you will be angry with me or that someone intercepts my letter.
‘That night, when you went out to the kiosk on Boulevard des Alliés to buy a newspaper, I desperately wanted to talk to you, but I did not have time because you walked back into the restaurant. I don’t know if you will be returning. Meanwhile, I can’t imagine life without you. The last time I saw you, as you entered the restaurant, it seemed to me that you looked at me and I can’t forget that look.
‘Since I saw you, I have not stopped thinking about you. I can’t go into the Chandivert without looking at the place where you were sitting. I can’t walk past the hotel in the Place Royale without imagining you in the reading room, your back to the window, your legs stretched out on a chair, your head turned to a book of which I regret not being able to read the title. Time and again, I have asked myself what could explain your presence in Caen. I rather presumed that the gentleman who tracked you like a shadow had to be your brother or that a marriage proposal must have been the reason for your visit. I am very unhappy because I refuse to believe that a young woman as beautiful as you isn’t engaged, or at least loved by some young man. At any rate, I try to convince myself that you don’t love him back.
‘You will consider me completely mad for writing these things to a young woman whom I have hardly glimpsed. You mustn’t, because I mean everything I have just written. I hesitated before doing so, then I realised that this is my only chance of seeing you again, which is why I have decided to risk everything. I know nothing about you and yet I have to see you again, whoever you are, wherever you are.
‘I wait anxiously for your reply.
‘Lieutenant de T., Pax-Hôtel, Rue Vanquelm, Caen, Calvados.’
She had kept the letter, but then most would. You would sense at once the character of the person who wrote it, a romantic who has given everything, exposed himself totally. But Priscilla never saw him again, not as far as I know.
And she had a further reason for saving his letter. The Marquis de T. was a reminder, the last before she committed herself irrecoverably, of the life she might have led. Only a day or two before, another upper-class Frenchman, ‘the gentleman who tracked you like a shadow’, had asked her to marry him.
In the Hôtel Place Royale, in the room where she had been reading, Robert reached out for her hand. Priscilla was not an obvious catch, as can readily be seen by a bleak inventory of her life to this climactic moment. Her childhood was a fragile amalgam of the betrayals, deceits and self-deceptions of those people she depended on to offer her protection and example. If you are rejected by both parents, you would go into another world. You would build a shell, first possibly with books and then by seeking love through men. She was beautiful and so she attracted them, but not one of them was willing to commit himself, at least not convincingly, not until Robert. When finally he proposed in the febrile last days of September 1938, at a time of unprecedented public apprehension – when, as her father wrote in his diary, ‘we couldn’t believe that there could be no war’ – she accepted.
The date was set for 15 December 1938, the wedding to take place in Paris, at Saint-Honoré d’Eylau, the Doynel parish church in Place Victor Hugo – once Priscilla had completed her instruction.
Religion was not the impediment that Robert had feared. Vivien said: ‘Pris had positively wanted to become a Roman Catholic like him.’ Priscilla informed the priest in Paris that her grandfather was a Derbyshire vicar, and her fath
er a lifelong and devout member of the Church of England, who prayed daily and had ‘a good working relationship’ with God: ‘Nous sommes Catholiques-Anglais,’ SPB would inform a French priest in the late 1940s.
Immediately on his proposal being accepted, Robert travelled to England, not to request SPB’s permission for Priscilla’s hand, but rather to ask Doris in Cornwall. The pair hit it off, Robert later joking that if he had met Doris before meeting her daughter ‘he would have made love to her’. But in a letter to Priscilla at the time, Robert vented his exasperation at the English, their grating pace. The train down to Exeter was ‘a real wheelbarrow’; in the restaurant car, an Englishman with round blue eyes had described as ‘slow’ the waiter who ended up not serving Robert’s meal; on the train from Dieppe, another Englishman offered to teach Robert to speak English ‘very slowly’. He exempted his little cork: ‘I love everything that surrounds you, everything that you can see with your eyes, everything that you love. Je te quitte, mon petit bouchon.’
So began Priscilla’s three-month engagement, a sundial that marked only the bright hours.
They broke the news to Gillian over tea at the Café du Rond Point. On 22 October, Gillian wrote to her mother in New York: ‘She is marrying Robert in December and is busy getting her “trousseau” together. She’s going to London on Wednesday till the wedding. After, she will live in Paris.’ Gillian suspended her reservations. ‘I’m so glad she is getting married and has found someone to look after her as she never had a very happy time up to now.’
On her arrival in London, Priscilla was surprised to see the guards no longer wearing bearskins but tin hats. There were anti-aircraft batteries along Horse Guards Parade and the traffic lights were protected by black metal shields with crusader crosses cut out. Four weeks after the signing of the Munich Agreement on 30 September, the euphoria that SPB had recorded was less evident. Then, he had written in his diary: ‘The scene of joy is so great that I can’t even bawl a prayer of thanksgiving to God. It seems quite impossible to believe. Yet the Daily Express says Peace. I dare not write it in capital letters lest it should be false news.’
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