Читать книгу Fault Lines - David Pryce-Jones - Страница 9

ROYAUMONT! The accumulation of vowels following that throaty initial r is a test of correct pronunciation. Poppy would make me repeat the word, and also practise saying the equally tricky noun grenouille, a frog, until she was satisfied that my English accent was ironed out and I could pass for being French and imagine myself a Special Operations agent deceiving German sentries at a check-point. Royaumont! The name alone has an almost enchanted power to bring back the past as though everything was still as it once had been. My grandparents Eugène Fould from Paris and Mitzi Springer from Vienna had acquired the house in 1923. He wanted to make the kind of splash in high society that the French are famous for, but he did not have the means for it. One of the richest women in Europe, she paid.

In those days you drove from Paris for about an hour on the narrow roads of what was then the department of Seine-et-Oise. Through Viarmes, past the garage of Monsieur Fauvarque with its hand-operated petrol pump, and next to it the iron gate leading to the cemetery, you would come down the hill and over a crossing known as the Croix Verte, to enter what seemed like the kingdom of our family, a beautiful and romantic place. An immense stone wall closes off the field to your right. On the far side of it are huge trees, and over their tops pokes up a mysterious piece of masonry, something like the point of a gigantic pencil. In the 1789 revolution teams of oxen had been harnessed to pull down the great thirteenth-century abbey church that had stood here, one of the largest in the country. This huge Gothic spike is a monument to lost scale.

The trees are felled to provide a sudden vista of water and the house, known to us as the château, but more correctly the palais abbatial. The abbot of the day had built himself a classic Palladian house that the revolution almost immediately prevented him from enjoying. Standing back a little from the road is a perfect symmetrical cube with terraced steps on three sides that seem to anchor it into the setting. Further round the enclosing wall is another vista, this time of a canal at the end of which is the first full view of the front façade. The stonework is so pale a yellow that it is almost white. Opposite the house on the left of the road is a wide lake and a path screened by poplars leading to a second lake with a pair of swans, and beyond that a third lake where the wild duck flight. And there stands the Gros Chêne, an oak many hundreds of years old, its majestic branches so extended and heavy that iron props and bands and cables have to support them. This tree is the unspoken symbol of continuity, and to walk to it is a pilgrimage of sorts.

Along the edge of the first lake runs a lane, at the head of which is Franto’s cottage. Originally a Slovak, Franto was invited by Mitzi to some celebration here and nobody remembered to send him home. A gap-tooth smile in his round weather-beaten face and his rolling gait were definitely foreign, and his French came out as unrecognizable grunts. A keeper, he had a way with animals; his home had the raw smell of a zoo. It was said that he used to beat his wife. In the war the Germans never troubled him. At the end of that lane is the Faisanderie, in old days several separate cottages, all of them now done up in perfect taste for Liliane and Elie de Rothschild, and a long row of cages for rearing pheasants. In the war, Rimbert the head keeper lived there. To summon him, his wife would blow a trumpet and once said to Max, Mitzi and Eugène’s son and heir, “Monsieur le Baron veut-il que je trempe mon mari,” an untranslatable pun as the verb for blowing the trumpet differs only in its initial vowel from the verb for deceiving. Max’s story is that he gave the Faisanderie as a wedding present when Liliane married Elie de Rothschild. Elie’s story is that he had to buy the house.

The wrought-iron gates in front of the château are kept shut. Whoever is driving will hoot and someone, probably Madame Marius the gardener’s wife, hurries from the lodge to open. Ahead is an ornamental avenue of trees planted with geometric spacing between them, and you can glimpse to your left the long low building of Les Pères, so-called presumably because monks or novices were housed here – the two-storey eighteenth-century building has long since been converted into stables. In the park is also the house of Marcel Vernois and his wife Renée, he the bailiff of the estate with its farm and its forests, she the housekeeper, and both of them jolly gnomes of unstoppable energy. Like a French infantryman in the First War, Marcel wears breeches and leather gaiters. We’d walk up partridges or in the evening have a shot at the wild duck on the furthest lake. At the right season he’s after eels or crayfish, and fills buckets with white-shelled snails, a feast for everyone from the château and the farm that Renée serves at a trestle table set up in the open. He taught me how to drive. In the middle of the level crossing at Beaumont-sur-Oise, I was at the wheel when the bell began to warn that a train was about to arrive. As the barrier was coming down, I stalled and panicked. Marcel pushed me out of the seat and drove off the rails just in time.

You go from the château through a wire gate, always unlocked, past the column bases that are all that remains of the abbey church, and so to the Laiterie. This is Max’s dower house. The entrance is glassed in, and in the middle is a rectangular basin with running water. Max has placed a ceramic eel in it, and small children invariably think it is alive. The Laiterie gives on to the wide cobbled farmyard. You need strength to open and close the huge wooden gate in the high enclosing wall at the far end. The immense storage barn is centuries old. Hens scratch about under fruit trees. Marcel puts on a uniform to take honey from the beehives, and he is also responsible for distilling the cassis served every day after meals. Janine lives in a corner house, she’s Polish, a housemaid, and so gentle that she becomes almost invisible.

In front of the château is an expanse of sandy gravel that Albert has the job of raking every morning. A huge man wearing a peaked cap for extra authority, he seems to be keeping an eye out for all comings and goings. The flight of steps up the terrace to the front door has columns framing the entrance and statues set into the wall. Sometimes I still dream of the test I used to impose on myself as a boy, to jump off those steps each time higher, to land sideways on to the patch of grass below. I never dared jump down from the balustrade at the very top.

As the front door opens you would at once be aware of scale and proportion and light. If such a thing is possible, here is intimate grandeur. The hall rises high to a barrel ceiling. At its centre stands a table attributed to the eighteenth-century master Thomire, with a pink granite top over gilded bronze resting on winged sphinxes. Furniture like that conveys a lot of information about the owners and their freedom to indulge their taste. To the right is the drawing room, imposingly circular, with huge windows and a door out to a side terrace. Here the pillars round the wall are purely decorative. Beyond is the fumoir, the room no longer used just for smoking, but also where we would gather informally before or after a meal. To the left is the dining room, a matching circle except that it has ornamental painted panels of flowers and birds. The huge round table seats twenty-four. At the far end of the hall the spiral staircase repeats the motif of a circle. The steps are so shallow that you feel like racing up, past the half-landing with Max’s bedroom and the schoolroom where we had lessons and played with the electrified set of toy Märklin trains belonging to my cousin Philip and which he had laid out in a mock-Swiss landscape.

Max, the second and last Baron Fould-Springer, is nominally the head of the family. Dark on account of its low ceiling, his room halfway up the stairs is an accumulation of family portraits, an Empire bed, cashmere shawls, piles of newspapers and letters, mementos, and a vast collection of his lucky charm, owls of every size in stones, materials, and styles of every sort. He throws nothing away, not even worn envelopes. He is absorbed in the pages of newspapers that print puzzles and spends lots of time writing notes to himself in a pocket-book in a handwriting of tiny hieroglyphics that nobody but him could make sense of. After David Copperfield, he has a long-standing joke with me that he is Murdstone, and he leers, “Boy, I’m going to cane you.”

From the moment he was born in 1906, Jessie took charge of him until she died in 1959. She used to subscribe to the Sunday Express, and would cut out Ripley’s “Believe it or Not,” its regular feature illustrating far-fetched facts, and paste these rectangles like wallpaper in the corridor leading to his bathroom.

Every morning, she ran his bath for him and carried a breakfast tray into his room. He had been sent away to a Jesuit boarding school in the north of France and eventually to Magdalen College, Oxford, remaining uncertain which of these establishments was the most unsatisfactory. He must have been the only undergraduate at Oxford accompanied by his nanny.

Handsome, he had cut quite a dash in the 1930s, entertaining at Royaumont and the host of shooting parties at Kapuvár, an estate inherited in Hungary. His game book records a red-letter day there in August 1935 when he and his guests, the Duc d’Ayen, Comte de Beaumont, Comte de Maillé, Comte de Montsaulnier, Prince Achille Murat, and Jean de Vaugelas, shot an astonishing 6,009 partridges. Once past middle age the thin off-colour face, and especially the questioning look in his eyes, conveyed that he no longer found life easy. His usual comment to the news on television was “On n’a encore rien vu,” we haven’t seen anything yet.

His father’s son, he wore a small Star of David on a gold chain around his neck. Also like Eugène, he had a repertoire of stories and jokes, some of them Jewish. Mocking his education, he’d stress the wrong syllables in names such as Aristophanes and Euripides. One of his favourite quotations was “Quod licet Jovi non licet bovi” (What is permitted to Jupiter is not permitted to the ox), and another, uttered in a stagey falsetto, was: “Ach aber ach, das Mädchen kam, und nicht in Acht das Veilchen nahm” (Oh dear, the maiden came and paid no attention to the violet). Yet another derived from an elderly aunt who had tried to attract rabbits in the park in Vienna by holding out her hand as though offering food and saying, “Komm, Kaninchen, komm” (Come here, little rabbit, come here).

Playing the invalid, he chewed every mouthful of his food twenty or thirty times, finishing the meal long after everyone else. Liliane quipped, “Il a une très mauvaise santé defer,” (He has really good ill health.) Actually he was athletic, diving off the high cliffs at Eden Roc in the south of France, flying gliders, riding his horse and most remarkably crossing the ornamental canal in front of the château forwards and backwards on a tightrope. His interests were architecture and art, about which he wrote occasional pieces for the magazine Paris Match under the pseudonym Max Viar, short for Viarmes. When the car fetched him for a day of office routine as chairman of Maisons-Alfort, the family-owned factory that carried us all, he looked resigned to the boredom of it. One woman in his life was Paulette Helleu, daughter of the artist, and another was Cécile de Rothschild, Elie’s sister. Asked what sort of a lover Max had been, she replied, “pas plus mal qu’un autre” (no worse than anyone else). Solitary after his nanny’s death, he married Georgette Aftalion. Already middle-aged, she passed the time of day in an armchair, her bony face and staring eyes evidence of psychic disturbances too deep to fathom. To Mitzi, Max was “my adored Sonny,” yet on page after page in her diaries she pulls him to pieces with no apparent understanding that her domination and his dependency might explain the beaten-dog look in his eyes. His homosexual adventures in Paris were an open secret. In his Paris house in the rue Saint-Didier, he holed himself up in the care of Louise Chavanel, more like another elderly nanny than a housekeeper. Every morning there, Dr Vacher, a well-known psychotherapist, came to take breakfast and give professional advice.

White-haired and imperturbable, Jessie and Marion Stainer, the other nanny, were referred to as the duchesses. Throwbacks to the England of Queen Victoria, they were never in a hurry and rarely raised their voices. An unspoken agreement divided responsibility for the children: Max and Poppy (and so ultimately me) going to Jessie, Bubbles and Lily to Nanny Stainer. Rivals as much as colleagues, these two tended to oppose one another, only to unite in the face of criticism or interference. Nanny Stainer came from a large family in Godalming. One of the seven children of a carpenter, Jessie was born in 1872 in Horspath, a village near Oxford. When she was still small, they all moved into Rose Lane, Oxford, a street whose cottages have long since been demolished to make way for university buildings. She and her brothers and sisters had three pairs of shoes to share between them, and only those whose feet happened to be the same size as the available shoes could go to school. A boy had been sent home because he was dirty, and Jessie put on an Oxfordshire accent to relate how the mother had come to rebuke the teacher, “My boy ain’t no rose, you larn him not smell him.” Poverty and lack of opportunity were part of the natural order of things. A lifetime of hard work had deformed Jessie’s feet and ankles so that she had to have specially made orthopædic shoes that she called “beetle-crushers.” In her private vocabulary, an umbrella was an umbershoot, manipulative behavior was inkle-weaving, and those she took against were arsehole-creepers. Playing with nicknames, she wrote to Poppy as Kate, and might sign her own letters as Martha. Her philosophy was summed up by an incident at a tennis tournament to which she liked to refer. Jean Borotra had been losing badly until someone in the crowd shouted, “Courage, Pépé!” and he went on to win.

Making their lives in France, she and Nanny Stainer spoke a phonetic anglicised French: rubdisham for dressing-gown, culleryfere for radiator, saldiban for bathroom. Nanny Stainer in fact read Les Liaisons dangereuses round and round. Jessie had memorized whole chunks of Shakespeare, as well as a variety of poems and songs, some serious and some comic. She had an excuse for the neuroses and tantrums in the house: you can’t expect thoroughbreds to be cart-horses.

You could race up the great stone staircase, three or four steps at a time, to finish at the top in an open space like a gallery, with a shiny floor of black and white marble flagstones. Busts of Roman emperors were set in sockets at the top of columns. In front of the window at the far end of this open space was a statue in black plaster by the nineteenth-century sculptor Bosio. I always thought this eye-catching figure balanced on one foot was Hermes, but the experts say it is a representation of love, a Cupid.

And on that floor is the bedroom I shared with my cousin Elly, daughter of Bubbles, my eldest aunt. In it hangs a life-size portrait of Poppy aged about eleven in a costume copied for a children’s fancy-dress party from the Velázquez portrait of the Infanta, a study in reds and orange. Philip, four years older than his sister Elly, has a room to one side and the nannies are on the other side. Before the war Alan and Poppy had a bedroom and dressing-room on this floor. When I was two, I put my hands into the butter on their breakfast tray and then onto the silk bed-head. The fingerprints were permanent.

We children – Philip and Elly and myself – were left to our own devices. On the lower ground floor was the library, built round a single vast weight-bearing pillar. We had this room to ourselves. The windows let in little light and the air was musty. Eugène had collected the books, and they reflected his knowledge and taste in art, literature and politics. Among the several languages he knew was Russian, taught at his mother’s knee, and after his marriage he had learnt Hungarian in order to keep up with the management of the properties. In October 1906, for instance, he visited Szabolcz, near Budapest, and could judge in conversation that the bailiff was very professional whereas the bailiff’s wife was a Hungarian peasant. Two volumes of Petőfi’s poems annotated in pencil in his hand have survived (and so has his complete edition of Heine.) On the shelves of books concerning Jews was Édouard Drumont’s La France juive, an anti-Semitic diatribe so popular that this copy is from the 200th edition. Drumont’s poisonous caricature of the Jew who becomes a Baron “and presents himself boldly in society” was aimed at the handful like Eugène whose every encounter was a test of their social standing.

The books had been catalogued with a card index, many of them had been rebound uniformly, and all of them had a bookplate with an engraving of the house. The table for Russian billiards was one distraction in the library and the gramophone another. The playing needle of this antique had to be changed frequently and the records were 78s of singers like Lotte Lehmann and Richard Tauber. “Mein Herr Marquis” from Die Fledermaus and “Di quell’amor” from La Traviata were never stale. Over a sofa covered with brown velvet was a stuffed and mounted bird, a bustard with a huge wingspan shot by Max on the Hungarian puszta. Alone most mornings at the desk in that atmospheric room, I began to teach myself to write. Starting with book-length imitations of Agatha Christie, I moved on to sentimental pastiches of Hans Christian Andersen and Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes, a novel that cast a spell almost as embracing as Royaumont.

Beautiful Mitzi can never have been, gawky as a girl, dumpy as a married woman. Her expressive brown eyes had black rings round them, zwetschenknödel or plum dumplings as her eldest daughter Bubbles called them. Up on the top floor, Mitzi reserved for herself a corner room, smaller than others and out of the way. Everyone was expected to start the day by paying respects. You approached on tiptoe, you exchanged whispers with her maid Paulette to find out how well Mitzi had slept in the night. The emotional atmosphere in the house, family relationships, interpretation of the news, were in Mitzi’s gift. Still in bed with a breakfast tray, the mail and the newspapers, she might wave a hand or give you a possessive kiss, receiving you with the formal informality of a reigning monarch. The quivering of her thin lips indicated what you were in for, what you had to expect in the afternoon session with her. Notes hand-delivered by one of the servants were storm signals. One that survives reads, “May you daily have more of the Essential, realizing that no man or woman can give it you.” Another missive in the archive is just as typical: “Your injustice and ingratitude towards me have wounded and embittered me. Your words are not those of a happy or sad, good or bad child but those of a cruel woman. Your impressions are evidently almost always false but you remain amused and proud of them.”

On the same landing as her bedroom was her boudoir, a low and dark den because the immense wing of the abbey loomed close enough to shutter out daylight. Here were enacted scenes of Grand Inquisition. The future of everyone in the house depended on keeping in her good books.Where she came from, Kuss die Hand, a hand kiss, made plain who was giving, and who was receiving, favours. She never used the stairs. The lift had a cabin of some scented wood. When Mitzi stepped out of it into the hall to take possession of her realm, it was as well to be there, ready for whatever it might be. Everything seemed ordered, everything seemed protected and privileged, but all the time under the surface and unacknowledged, the fault lines that Mitzi had put in place were in operation: Not quite Jewish and not quite Christian, not quite Austrian and not quite French or English, not quite heterosexual and not quite homosexual, socially conventional but not quite secure, here were people not quite sure what their inheritance required of them.