Mrs P's Journey

by Sarah Hartley

  And each time she returned it would get a little bit worse.

  Sometimes though, when the skin around Bella’s eyes was waterlogged from crying and she could not button her coat without her hands faltering, instead of stumbling back into Alfred’s life, she sought shelter with Phyllis.

  She did this after one stormy interlude with Alfred in 1925. Bella was grateful for her daughter’s invitation to Paris. As she shut the front door on the house in Mulberry Walk, the sadness that tugged at her was left behind. It would linger and coil itself instead around Alfred, slowly pulling his spirits down, as Bella caught a ferry with Phyllis to France.

  ‘A slum of a room,’ was how Phyllis described the cramped quarters in La Glacière, as she unlocked the door. She knew her mother would recoil at its greyness, but at first Bella seemed grateful just to be beyond Alfred’s clutches. Her gratitude would last only a few hours, however. That first night, when the overhead Metro screeched into the station and went on doing so through the early hours, Bella howled in her bed, according to Phyllis, and tore at her hair: ‘This hellish din will drive me mad!’

  A letter early the next morning from her doctor, Mr Denison, gave her just the excuse she needed to leave:

  Twice I’ve had to pull your husband out of the gas oven . . . He can’t believe you’ve thrown him over. He says he’ll never drink again if only you’ll come back. He talks and thinks of nothing else but you. Without you I don’t think he can stand on his own feet. But can you stand up to such a task? Or will he pull you down with him? Only you, Mrs Orr, can decide.

  Within the hour, Bella was transformed into a nervous, giggling girl and Phyllis escorted her to the Gare du Nord.

  ‘My darling husband wants me after all,’ Bella gushed. ‘Be pleased for me.’

  Back at Bec de Mortagne, the exposure of her dear friend Jacqueline and her gentle family to the disturbing conduct of her mother, left Phyllis unsettled. For the rest of her stay in Mortagne, the nights would not pass with sleep. Her solitary progress had been set back, thanks to the one person who ought to have cherished her daughter’s talents in the presence of other parents. Phyllis had imagined her mother telling witty anecdotes about English life, her eyes and hands fluttering to the amazement of M. Bannier. Phyllis wanted them to fall in love with her mother and in turn, perhaps, they would fall in love with her too.

  Phyllis returned alone to her college. Even before the start of the new term, everyone there, she concluded, would be told by Jacqueline about how unsuitable she was as a friend. Yet the familiar smell of hot laundry and madeleines, as well as the long lessons spent instructing Léonie, led her mind away from the chaos that had dragged her mother back to England. Perhaps on hearing of Bella’s visit, Tony would write to Phyllis and suggest a quiet week together of gentle pursuits, for although they were not as close as they might be, brother and sister supported each other’s perseverance with their parents.

  We roamed all over the countryside drawing and fishing, Tony wrote in his memoirs, I drawing, Phyllis fishing. We first caught crayfish in the river and brought them back to our pension. Mother came out again for a little while, but to our relief was soon bored and went back to London. It was then that my mother suddenly announced that she could no longer afford to keep me at the Slade and that I should go to Paris to the Académie Julian where a friend of Alfred’s was a student. So I went to Paris.

  Until then, Tony had somehow managed to evade the wrath and confusion of his mother. Since school, he had encouraged a remoteness between himself and his parents partly because, like Phyllis, he dreaded the excruciating embarrassment of their dramatic entrances and bizarre clothes, which stirred whispers in public and annoyance in private.

  However, it was in Paris in December 1921, that fifteen-year-old Phyllis became embroiled in such a mess (not of her own making) that she was finally asked to leave the College.

  Snow had been falling for a week before the telegram arrived. It was the day before Christmas Eve and the end of term. The paths had been swept to the church and lanterns lit the way to the carol services which had gone ahead as usual. Duck, pickled cabbage and hot mulled wine kept the pupils from getting the chills. At night, the common room turned into a curious gift factory of girls and teachers knitting woollen socks for brothers and fathers, sticking pressed flowers into bookmarks, while some baked gingerbread men and bottled jars of honey in the kitchen with Simone.

  FAMILY REUNION. CHRISTMAS IN PARIS. TAKE TRAIN.

  The telegram that Phyllis waved at Madame came as some relief. Her smile was infectious. For the second year running, no one had invited the little English girl home for Christmas and Madame Brettain could hardly have left her alone again in the school as it remained unheated until Epiphany.

  ‘Make sure you are back in time for the new term,’ the headmistress warned her.

  In retrospect, even the notion of a family reunion was laughable. Presents were for children, and who wants to eat turkey when you can have the best foie gras and caviar in the world? A carnival – that was how Phyllis described that particular Christmas. From the intimate innocence of the boarding school, she was submerged into the raucous, gaudy, adult world of Paris, from which neither Bella nor Tony did anything to protect her.

  Of all the trains that Phyllis might have caught on Christmas Eve, the one that carried her from Fécamp to Gare St Lazare crashed. In the deep white of the countryside, windows split and shattered as carriages twisted off the rails into waves of snow. The temperature inside dropped to minus ten and for five hours the passengers, all uninjured, slapped each others’ backs, opened brandy bottles wrapped as presents and forced their mouths to chatter through carols. Phyllis remembered a woman slapping her face, with a flap of her leather gloves.

  ‘Do not fall asleep, ma petite, or you may never wake up again.’

  When the train finally limped into the station, Phyllis was greeted by Tony and his friend Dick, both muffled up in heavy coats, scarves and berets.

  ‘You’ve buggered up the whole afternoon,’ Tony stormed. ‘Why the bloody hell have I got to bother with a stupid kid like you!’

  Words related to her terrifying train ordeal began to spill out of Phyllis’s mouth, but her brother refused to listen.

  ‘Shut UP!’ He had heard enough tall stories already.

  They must be already here, Phyllis deduced from his furious demeanour, that had nothing to do with her late arrival.

  The threesome headed to the Boulevard Raspail where they were supposed to have gathered at noon. There in a grand suite, propped up in a flounced green brocade double bed, were Bella and Alfred. Crowding round them on the carpet were Tony’s artist friends, including Balthus, who later became famous and who Phyllis recalled as a dirty-looking man. Long, unkempt hair hung down on to the shoulders of his paint- and grime-stained clothes, and like a character out of La Bohème, a cigarette butt hung from his loose lower lip.

  All including host and hostess were Pernod-tipsy and the guests, while greedily gobbling their free eats, discussed their fervent creeds on art, philistines and social injustice.

  If Phyllis had anticipated what we would now call quality time with her mother, she was very much mistaken. Bella was enjoying the show. For the next five days, a merry band of freeloading artists and authors latched on to the money-mad couple, whose amazing fox-fur coats and loud voices allowed them entry into places as diverse as the Opéra and the Jockey Club on Montparnasse.

  Despite her festive glow, Bella humiliated her daughter by noticing (aloud) just how much time Dick, the tall, dark Irish artist, had spent staring at Phyllis. At sixteen years her senior, Phyllis thought he looked old enough to marry her mother.

  ‘How do you like being the centre of attention, dear?’ Bella smirked through a squint of smoke, half out of jealousy and half in the glorious knowledge that her daughter would never have half as many men try to seduce her as she had done.

  But Phyllis wasn’t the centre of attention. As the younges
t in such a disparate family, no matter how warmly she smiled up at whoever was talking and tried to chip in with conversation, she was always an afterthought. Tony, it seems, had forgotten to book his sister a hotel room, but neither he nor Bella seemed anxious about where Phyllis would spend Christmas Eve. Thankfully Dick, mortified at the treatment of the schoolgirl, who looked ludicrous sitting among the intoxicated artists, left their company to telephone a family friend.

  Phyllis later believed he bribed them to put her up for a couple of days. His discretion, among all the showy characters, was yet another gentle kindness that Phyllis would not forget.

  Then the arguments began. Christmas Eve was all about Midnight Mass at Notre Dame, Bella declared. No, it wasn’t. It was all about having a good time at the Ritz Bar, Alfred retaliated.

  ‘Why can’t you do just this one thing – for me?’ Bella threw herself out of bed and stomped into the bathroom, quite forgetting that out of the pair of pyjamas she was sharing with Alfred, she was wearing the top . . . No one seemed to notice but Dick.

  Alfred relented.

  At the spectacle of Midnight Mass, where the smell of incense mixed with the icy breath of the Pernod drinkers, Alfred’s genuflecting was decidedly out of practice and he tripped.

  ‘Shhhhhhhh.’ Bella, her eyes closed throughout much of the service, elbowed her husband in the ribs. She squeezed Phyllis’s hand. Hark.

  Phyllis listened to the choir voices reverberating like sharpened crystal around the giant candlelit tomb. Her temperature started to rise and as she pinpointed a favourite shade of red in the Virgin Mary in the West Rose window, her world went black.

  Her slight body came round shaking and coughing in the arms of Dick, who had lifted the slumped girl from Bella’s feet – the older woman was trying to listen to the end of the Adeste Fidelis – and carried her outside into the Place du Parvis. From her swooned position, her head lolled back to see the Galerie des Chimères (gargoyles) ready to pounce on her. She let out a weak scream.

  ‘I won’t let them eat you,’ Dick said, and kissed her on the forehead.

  When Bella and Alfred and Tony shuffled out with the congregation, their concern was limited. Bella pulled on her daughter’s arm. ‘Stop coughing! It irritates Alfred. Never let your ill-health be a nuisance to others.’

  As a gesture designed more to boost his alcoholic quota before Christmas Day than to comfort his stepdaughter, Alfred placed his hand on Phyllis’s head and prescribed hot grogs. Immediately.

  From café to café they swayed. From the Rotonde to the Dome and then down to Boulevard St Germain for a drink or three at the Deux Magots. The hot brandy set fire to Phyllis’s head and her eyes burnt into the two models whom the artists had waved over. They perched on the knees of Tony and Dick. They dipped their fingers into tumblers of whisky and giggled. ‘We are wearing no knickers.’

  Phyllis did not want to hear any more of their pretend whispers, so she leant on the bulky arms of Alfred, who was discussing which was the most dangerous venereal disease with a beautiful sculptress.

  ‘I should take Phyllis home.’ The low voice of Dick was drowned out by Bella’s drunken tone. ‘Keep her here. All this is good for my daughter’s education!’

  Alfred cried for absinthe. When the walls began to shimmy, the happy gang staggered into the cold. Their slow, arm-in-arm progress took them over the Pont de la Concorde and up the Rue Royale.

  ‘Find me absinthe and oysters to tickle our juices,’ Alfred cried.

  Was there a Christmas Day that year? If there was, Phyllis could not remember one detail. The next few days skipped into one haze of light. The parties that alcohol and Alfred required to make their magic appear left Phyllis on the brink of collapse. No one heard her cough now above the noise of laughter, and her red cheeks they took for a sign of pleasure, not a raging temperature.

  It was Dick, whose calm Irish voice had soothed her outside the church, who delivered her to the train station.

  ‘You will be better off at school,’ he said. ‘Go back and rest. I’ll be thinking of you.’

  It was in fact, the worst thing Phyllis could have done.

  The moment she set eyes on her limp walk and fevered temples, Madame screamed at Phyllis: ‘You dare to return to work ill! This is too much. You have a holiday and you return like this? How could any self-respecting mother . . .’

  Phyllis remembers Madame shoving her into the scullery and demanding that she iron a stack of damp linen for the girls’ beds. She remembers the steam and the swimming sound of water, but not much after that. The doctor was summoned. He diagnosed pneumonia. Madame was told to inform Mr and Mrs Orr that their child’s life was in danger. Petrified that Phyllis might die in her school, in her sickbay, the headmistress sent a telegram to Bella straight away.

  Nothing.

  As Madame nursed the burning child, her anger at Phyllis subsided. ‘Mon petit. Mon pauvre petit,’ she would whisper as she patted a flannel on her brow.

  A week later a parcel arrived.

  To help my recovery Mama sent me a pale blue diaphanous Worth evening gown: ‘Worn by Lady Brecknock for her portrait; and then discarded. You’ll be able to alter it to fit. I’ve written to your father to tell him your ill news but I have not heard from him. Have you?’

  How stupid Madame had been, to believe she would receive some thanks, some recognition from the rich Englishwoman, for bringing her daughter back from death.

  Tant pis.

  Pity was too good for Phyllis now and Madame literally sent her packing, as soon as the girl was strong enough to stand.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Il n’y a que le provisoire qui dure (Only the temporary lasts)

  The fast jazz noise of Paris had fixed itself in Phyllis’s overheated imagination and bombarded her with a cacophony of notes even as she boarded the ferry back to Southampton. This time, her feet could reach to tap the floor as she sat on the wooden bench seats in the bow, facing out into the English Channel. Farewells to her first real friends at Fécamp had been rushed, too brief for tears, and anyway, no one would have been able to say anything sentimental above the howls of Marcus, who on sensing a departure had taken it upon himself to cover the departee in as much dog hair and slobber as possible.

  Any passenger who glanced upwards from Phyllis’s boots to her black lamb’s-wool coat (a hand-me-down from Jacqueline), and the long dark plait that snaked down from her felt cloche, would have thought her a poised young woman, older than her sixteen years.

  In her memoirs, Phyllis did not take this journey. After Fécamp, she headed straight for the Sorbonne, to enrol as an undergraduate in Philosophy, courtesy of a Get Well Soon cheque from her father who, despite a solid Swiss bank account, had chosen to settle in a measly one-bedroom apartment in Chicago.

  Two years on, Sandor still felt utterly humiliated by his bankruptcy and had, once again, tossed aside his fickle past which no longer served a purpose. Of course, he could have sucked dry his savings in a Zürich bank, but oddly enough he quite enjoyed the pain and self-sacrifice of fanning the ashes of his past success into a bigger, roaring flame.

  Instead of seeking out the European aristocracy in New York, he moved west to mix with clusters of Hungarian exiles and Eastern European immigrants, who taunted what they believed was his English accent, who questioned why a man with such dainty manners and bespoke suits would not confide in them, wondered why he refused their offers of beer in this time of Prohibition (he brewed his own) and why he picked up prostitutes.

  On his second attempt to haul himself up from a ‘pauper’ to a noted businessman, it was anger that fuelled his ambition. ‘That I, Sandor Gross, should have come to this,’ he muttered to himself as he picked his way through bums begging on the street or dined in backroom bars where gangsters flipped coins and played poker for a living. Happy memories did not dare intrude. The twice-weekly dinner and lunch at the Savoy, the soothing chauffeur-driven Bentley, champagne before The Magic Flute at Covent G
arden, his handsome mahogany desk. Lost. He had lost them all – his wife, his family, his reputation and his home. Only pride, Sandor later told Phyllis, had stopped him accepting a knighthood. ‘I could not bear to see your mother flaunt herself as Lady Gross.’

  Only pride, too, stopped him from ever telling his ex-wife he loved her. In a strange, destructive way Sandor had loved Bella. The times when she obeyed and did not stray from her pretty role as wife and mother. When she clung to him (but not too hard) for warmth, when she travelled on business with him and promised not to speak up in company. That is when he loved her.

  With time and distance, the cruelty which had spat from him when they were married, the resentment and jealousy he felt at her popularity, swilled around and disappeared. He could not accept that Bella no longer adored him and even deceived himself that given enough encouragement, she would return to him.

  As for his children, out of guilt he mailed the occasional cheque to them, but he could no longer be expected to remember their birthdays. He was pushing himself hard through every possible working hour. Up at dawn. Dead at midnight. Even during the Depression, Sandor considered the hundreds of men waiting around the block for the soup kitchen to open to be lazy good-for-nothings.

  At Staten Island, where he had first queued among the filthy masses, shuffling forward into the Land of the Brave, he recognised himself, twenty years earlier, in those with the trembling lips as he watched face after desperate face stutter to officials with a few words of English.