He was also helped by the fact that many of the protagonists in his story had set out to write down fragments of their own lives sometimes thinly disguised in fictional form. This was the case with S.P.B. Mais, of Priscilla herself, who produced numerous drafts of stories and memoirs, and finally Gillian, who seems at the end of her life to have turned against her friend and decided to discover for herself the truth of what had really happened to her. (Perhaps she discovered or suspected that she had been betrayed over Vertès. Perhaps she was angry to realise that while many of the people she had known in London were risking their lives to liberate France, Priscilla was living a very different kind of life.)  

Shakespeare, who also does a lot of digging in archives, is pretty sure that Gillian's unpublished account did not get all the details right but her manuscripts, upon which he stumbled quite by chance while researching another book, were of inestimable value in his quest. Along the way he uncovers bits of the history of occupied France that are hardly known even to expert historians. While reading this book, I found myself in conversation with the leading French historian of this period (and indeed the historical consultant to that successful TV soap opera) and he had never even heard of the internment camp for British women in Besançon — just as Shakespeare visiting Besançon could find no one who knew about it. 

Nowhere in his absorbing book does Shakespeare judge the behaviour of his aunt. He tells us her story and lets us draw our conclusions though he suggests she is buffeted by events rather like Modiano's Lucien Lacombe. Indeed since he is writing as historian not novelist — even if at times he allows himself to imagine his protagonists' thoughts and emotions —by the end we are left with Priscilla as rather an enigma, a passive figure never really in control of her destiny, a victim of sorts. We have no sense of how she herself viewed her past or judged it, or what she thought of the epic historical backdrop to her own personal dramas. Secretly she tried to write about her life in fictional form but accumulated only publishers' rejection slips (Shakespeare says that she was just not a very good writer). 

Her second marriage was possibly a way of burying her past; her attempts to write possibly a way of trying to exorcise or come to terms with it. She had converted to Catholicism to marry her vicomte, and although her second husband would not allow her to practise her faith, she seems to have been tormented by guilt about her divorce — and perhaps other matters too? Graham Greene even makes an appearance in the book. As a friend of Gillian he is asked to recommend a priest to help her troubled friend. Priscilla takes to drink and one's final impressions on reading this book are of an inexpressible but also mysterious unhappiness. Did she ever ask herself Clouzot's question, "Where is the light and where is the shadow, where is the line between them?" We simply do not know.