positively ill.” Abruptly she changes subject. Elie had arrived to fetch Liliane and the children. Having just stayed at the palace of Laeken with the King of the Belgians, he had entertaining stories to tell about that royally dysfunctional family. Poppy also boasts on my behalf that I spoke German not too badly and was a remarkable skier who had gone on a cross-country “Ausflug,” or expedition, with Hubert Ragg. Finally a passage about Alan shows how well aware she was of what was coming: “He is rather agitated at this moment about our future etc. and as for me my one idea is to simplify his life so that he has less work and fewer worries.”
The Eton schedule of lessons and games left very little time for anything else. Several days passed, whereupon I received a letter from Alan to say that Poppy was hurt not to have heard from me, and I was to write to her at once. It was not his style to be brusque and to issue peremptory commands. Rather shocked, I did manage to fill up four sheets of paper which survived in the bundle of correspondence carefully kept with a rubber band on Poppy’s bedside table.
Oliver Van Oss, my housemaster, was imposing in every way, in knowledge, taste, and not least physical bulk. He also had a natural humour. In the course of the morning he came to find me to say that Poppy had just died. I was to go to Paris as soon as possible, and he would drive me to Heathrow. On the way in his car he made a point of advising me that grief ought to be expressed and there’s nothing wrong or unmanly about crying. Kenneth Rae was already at Heathrow with tickets for us both. In old days before the war he had been a friend of Poppy and Alan in Vienna. The family albums have photographs of him dressed like Alan at the time in lederhosen and white knee stockings, and depending on the season in ski clothes or a bathing costume. At the firm of Cobden-Sanderson, he had been Alan’s first publisher and now he was devoting himself and his private fortune to founding what in due course became the National Theatre. From Castle Hill Farm we used to walk through the woods in about a quarter of an hour to his house, Knowles Bank. To me, he was Uncle Kenneth. He wept openly.
Elie shared the Avenue Marigny house with his elder brother Alain. You entered a courtyard where the concierge was in a lodge to the right. The main door to the house was on the left, and you seemed to step into a cavern, somewhere not intended for human habitation. Glass roofing at the top of the vast staircase threw a ghostly light. In reception rooms that nobody went into were pictures by the greatest artists, magnificent Boulle furniture, museum pieces of every sort. Good manners inhibited talking in a normal voice in this forbidding setting. At the end of a dark corridor was a smallish rather dingy room with a bed jammed in one corner against the wall. I had never seen a dead person.
More than a cemetery, Père Lachaise is a city of the dead. The Fould family possesses a gloomily ornate mausoleum there with plenty of space. Two days after her death, Poppy’s coffin was placed alongside unknown ancestors. Hebrew prayers were said. Alan wanted to have Poppy reburied in the local parish churchyard in Kent. Dr Chavasse, then the Bishop of Rochester, refused to grant permission because Poppy had been Jewish. Her final grave is in the Catholic cemetery of Viarmes, the slightly ramshackle village a mile or two from Royaumont.
Alan took me back to Eton. The approach to my house was through an archway, past a row of cottages, rather picturesque. Standing there was someone wearing an old mackintosh and a shabby felt hat. John Betjeman, the poet in his disguise. He had been shuffling about in the doorway for hours. Years later he told me, “I knew the Captain would be sad so I wanted to meet him on his return.” In keeping with his view of the human comedy, Betjeman had mythologised Alan’s one-time military rank, elaborating it to Captain Bog, a mistyping for Big Nose. There had been an evening when he addressed the school’s literary society, caught sight of me in the audience, and called out, “Oooh Baby Bog!” – his face alive with delight in the private joke. Years later too, I wanted my daughters Jessica and Candida to have a memory of someone who had had more influence on Alan than any other contemporary. By then Betjeman was in a wheelchair. “The Captain is like an onion,” he said to the three of us. “You peel off the skin and always there’s another skin. Those who don’t love him think that after the last skin there’ll be nothing. We who love him know there is something but what it is we shall never find out.”
Back at Eton I was straightaway caught up in a compulsory game of football on one of the far pitches known to the school as Dutchman’s. In the middle of the game I stopped, I stood still, struck by the realization that I was being compelled to behave as though nothing in my life had changed.
TWO
Le Palais Abbatial
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
