Guy, four years older, bustled in with his long-standing girlfriend, Georgette Graeff. She was a dressmaker, originally from Alsace, in her mid-thirties. Her hair was dyed blonde and she had kind, large brown eyes. Georgette and Guy had been together fifteen years, despite his family’s disapproval. Priscilla learned that Robert’s widowed mother was opposed to the idea of their marrying, but Guy refused to give Georgette up: instead, he had taken the dramatic move of rejecting his birthright in favour of his middle brother Georges, the only son with children. Georges had assumed the position as head of the family and inherited the family’s main chateau in Sainteny.
The old woman announced dinner. They went into a dining room full of heavy marble-topped furniture. Over a reasonably good meal, Priscilla’s confidence grew and her voice relaxed. Guy had been at the races with Georgette – who groaned that he spent as much time gambling on the horses as Robert spent at the Bourse. Priscilla liked her. She did not like Guy. He was cross and rude to Georgette, and fussed over Robert as if he was his mother.
Coffee was taken in Guy’s room, which was furnished identically to Robert’s, except that the carpet and curtains were green. Georgette questioned Priscilla about England. Was the food in England so appalling? Priscilla defended dishes like porridge, suet pudding and mint sauce. Robert grimaced. Mint sauce was the limit.
The brothers’ talk was about war. There was an atmosphere of unease in Paris that March; in England, it had been less noticeable. Robert had volunteered in 1916, when he was seventeen. He feared another European conflagration, in which France and England were certain to be beaten. Priscilla could tell that his experience in the trenches had marked him.
To change the topic, she asked Robert if he travelled much. That set him off on his favourite subject: every summer he and his other brother Georges visited Hungary where they had friends who owned estates teeming with pheasants and wild boar. His greatest pleasure was hunting, he said.
At the end of the evening, Robert took Priscilla back to her hotel in a taxi. She found him soothing and different from the juvenile South African she had left behind in London. He promised to telephone the next day. He left without trying to kiss her.
Robert invited Priscilla to see the Bluebell Girls at the Folies Bergère. The dance troupe comprised twenty girls who looked just like Priscilla, all blonde, British and over five foot nine. They were choreographed by an Irish woman, Margaret Kelly, whose title on the programme – ‘Maîtresse de Ballet’ – brought back memories of Madame Nesterovsky.
Another evening, they sat in a boîte in Rue Marbeuf and listened to a violinist play a Hungarian romance.
A fortnight passed.
Robert took her dancing. He was an indifferent dancer. He had no idea that Priscilla was following the orders of an abortionist.
It was obvious to Gillian, joining the couple under the Coupole, that Robert was falling for Priscilla. Also, that Priscilla was no longer concerned about their age difference. ‘I have never met anyone so gentle and sweet.’
One night at Jimmy’s, among the couples dancing was a tall, wafer-thin woman. She wore a beaded, Chinese style copper-coloured dress and a matching skull-cap on her cropped hair. Priscilla asked the waiter who she was. The Georgian princess Roussy Mdivani. The sight of her on the dance floor, bare feet in flat gold sandals, provoked Priscilla to jump up and lead Robert, who did not seem to mind how foolish he looked as his pigeon feet struggled to follow the tango. The scene was unbearable to Gillian: her young friend who had wanted to be a dancer, who had wanted a baby, dancing away her child. ‘Pris danced non-stop hoping to bring a miscarriage. We left the nightclub at five in the morning feeling exhausted.’
Priscilla’s employer wrote from Mincing Lane. Owing to her prolonged absence, she was sacked. She had still not told Robert that she was pregnant.
On her way to Professor Laurens’ drawing class one hot morning, Gillian called at Priscilla’s hotel. She was informed that a doctor had taken Priscilla away. Priscilla had left an address for Gillian, not to be given to anyone else.
The address was a woman’s prison near Montparnasse cemetery. Frantic, Gillian headed to La Santé. She walked fast along the warm tarmac, the length of the prison’s huge wall, until she reached a small building.
‘On the door was a copper plate with the words Maison de Santé. I rang. A fat woman half-opened the door. I told her I wanted to see Mademoiselle Mais. She let me in without a word and disappeared. Beyond the entrance was a rectangular room on each side of which were a number of curtained-off cubicles, about six each side. I heard groans and howls and sniffed the odd smell of disinfectant, sweat and tobacco. A man appeared in a blood-stained apron, the sort butchers wear. He looked worried. He led me into one of the cubicles where Pris lay looking very flushed and ill. “You must remove her at once,” the man said. “She has a very high temperature. I don’t want any trouble. Je ne veux pas d’histoires. And not a word about this place or she will be in trouble too.” I asked if I could telephone for a taxi. “Not from here,” the man said. “There’s a telephone in the café opposite the prison.” Off I went to the café, where I made two calls, one for a taxi and the other to Robert to say I would be arriving shortly at Rue Nollet with Pris. I could not say more as the telephone was near the zinc counter and people were listening.’
Bit by painful bit, Gillian extracted from Priscilla what had happened. The dancing had triggered heavy bleeding. In agony, she had telephoned the abortionist who decided to take her to La Santé and operate.
Priscilla was bundled into a dirty room where a radio played at full volume. There was a table covered with a cotton sheet, flooded with a brutal light from a low hanging bulb. On a stove, chrome instruments were being boiled. Handkerchief in hand, she lay back on the couch.
A knock on the door and he entered. She recognised his owlish features. He wore rubber gloves and held a syringe. ‘I’m going to give you an injection.’
Naked, she touched her stomach to see if the injection was taking effect. Nothing yet. And remembered Tom lying on her. His blond moustache against her cheek and his puffy face without much expression.
If she could have retraced her steps a year. She never forgot the next moments.
The man opened the window to let out a fly. She saw his profile in the glass and felt a narrow instrument penetrating the deepest part of her body. After the third dilation, the pain in her uterus was horrible.
‘This is atrocious, stop it, I can’t go on, I can’t.’
A hand covered her mouth.
Handkerchief between teeth, she shook her head from side to side.
‘I beg you,’ the abortionist murmured, ‘don’t move.’
The radio played ‘Le Petit Coeur de Ninon’, punctuating the metallic click of an instrument that made the same noise as the inspector in the Métro when he punched her ticket.
‘For heaven’s sake, keep still.’
Another raucous cry through the handkerchief. Once again, the nurse’s hand clamped her mouth. Her nails gripped into the arm of the woman, who flinched. ‘You’re scratching me.’
‘Courage. Almost there,’ said the abortionist.
She felt a warm liquid inside her, the sensation of a death.
Covered in blood, she cried out.
The nurse ordered her in a harsh voice to shut up. In the corridor someone was going to the toilets. Minutes later she dragged her wounded body to the cubicle where a shape appeared in the room and developed into Gillian.
‘She was already out of bed and looked pretty feeble to me,’ Gillian wrote. ‘However, she put on some clothes and we crept out of the place like a couple of thieves. Many women died from botched abortions. Priscilla had a narrow escape.’
To the end of her life, Priscilla suspected that dirty instruments had been used. The days afterwards were not very coherent. What did its face look like, what would its features have become, its smile? She had never seen its face.
‘I remember Pris bein
g butchered and going septic and nearly dying in Paris.’ In Robert’s apartment in Rue Nollet, Gillian sat through the night beside her.
Robert had been unfazed by the appearance of two distressed young Englishwomen on his doorstep. Next morning, to Gillian’s relief, he took charge. Priscilla was to move into a cleaner hotel nearby as soon as she was well enough, and look for a job; she could eat her meals with him.
Priscilla had run through her £5. Confused, feeble and without funds to pay the motherly hotel owner in Boulevard Raspail, she was packing her suitcase when a young man stumbled into her room, tall, well-built, platinum blond hair and a moustache: Tom Ewage-Brown, begging her to marry him. ‘Men are mad,’ she reflected to Gillian of the man who had probably been her only previous lover. ‘He said that he hadn’t realised how much he loved me and that he couldn’t live without me.’ She told him to go to hell.
She settled into the hotel which Robert had found for her in Montmartre, and through a contact of Doris’s accepted a job as a secretary in a translating bureau, run by an erratic Irishman who was a member of the anarchist movement.
It was a beautiful spring. Robert swept her under his wing. They sat out of doors, Gillian bringing a sheet of paper, a paintbrush and bottle of ink, in case there was anyone to draw. A Swedish magazine had commissioned her to take notes ‘on what the tout-Paris women were wearing’.
Priscilla’s memories of this time are full of gaps, but her itinerary is possible to follow because Gillian made lists of the cafés and what they ordered. A tournedos at the Café de Paris, a chocolate cake at Rumpelmayer, dinner at Drouant in Place Gaillon. And who they saw. The artist Christian Bérard waddling out of the Café de la Paix, beard, hair, clothes spattered with paint. And one afternoon outside the Café Flore, Picasso, sprawled in the back seat of a chauffeur-driven Hispano Suiza with a pile of canvases, and dressed in a black bowler hat and striped crimson sweater. His car was trapped behind a lorry. ‘So we had leisure to stare.’ And in the evenings a play at L’Atelier or a film at the Apollo in Rue de Clichy.
Cinemas, cracking cacahuètes, fumes of High Life, which Priscilla had taken up smoking in packets of ten. From Gillian, too, she learned the trick of putting her odds and ends into a handkerchief which she dropped the whole time, so that Robert was finally moved to whisper to Gillian: ‘Don’t you think she could do with a handbag?’ Off the two of them went to Hermès where Robert chose for Priscilla a beautiful leather bag, her first.
For a dernier coup, Robert took them for drinks to the Panier Fleuri, a small brothel behind Boulevard Sébastopol, where a madam sat beside a pile of fresh towels, in front of a board of lights indicating which room was free. Gillian recalled: ‘None of us went upstairs. We just sipped a cognac or an anisette. The girls wore open cotton gowns, knee length, and between clients touted for easy money. Robert would place a coin on the corner of the table and the woman would suck it up with her pussy.’ Another girl smoked Guy’s cigar through her vagina. On these evenings, Gillian said, ‘It was as natural for Robert and his brother to go to the Panier Fleuri as to stroll down the Champs Elysées and have a drink at the Café du Rond Point.’ Priscilla speculated with Gillian about what went on in the rooms overhead.
The abortionist had warned that it would be many months before Priscilla could resume a normal sex life, but after what she had been through Priscilla did not mind. She told Gillian: ‘I am finished with the physical side of life for ever.’ It was almost a relief to discover that Robert did not seem to mind either. When she went away with Gillian to Sainte-Maxime, he wrote notes to Priscilla in a neat minuscule hand, addressing her as ‘mon tout petit bouchon’ and ending each note with the sentence ‘Je t’aime et je t’embrasse comme je t’aime.’ And still not even a kiss.
‘No one had ever been kind to me before, and he filled a sort of need in me. It was almost as if he were father, brother and sweetheart all in one. He never made love to me, but he was gentle and sweet and quite good company.’ Something sad in Robert’s character touched Priscilla. ‘I felt very sorry for him because he was an unhappy person – neurotic, I suppose. He had been brought up in luxury with his ten brothers and sisters and now they had very little money and had lost all their splendour.’ If she had wanted to put his character in a nutshell, she would have said that it was a curious mixture of frivolity and hauntedness.
‘Passer à la casserole’ was Gillian’s phrase for ending up in bed with someone. Back from a family summer holiday on the Côte des Basques, she rekindled her affair with the married Hungarian artist. Afraid of bumping into anyone who knew his wife, he took Gillian to obscure cafés and they made love in semi-brothels. Priscilla, not having met him, believed that Gillian was wasting her time: Marcel Vertès would never leave Mrs Vertès.
Gillian flashed back: ‘What about you? Has Robert proposed yet?’ He was taking his time.
Even though handsome and charming, Robert struck Gillian as ‘a very limp, boneless character’. By mid-autumn, Gillian decided that he was the caricature of the idle aristocrat and too old for Priscilla. He had a good brain, why didn’t he get a job? Robert and Guy were a pair of vampires. ‘They feed on your youth.’
It was not lost on Gillian that Robert kept Priscilla away from the family chateau in Normandy. Had Robert invited Priscilla to Boisgrimot to meet his mother? Gillian had the impression of a crowd of stuffy and elderly relations presided over by a widowed matriarch who would find plenty of reasons to disapprove of Priscilla, as she had of Georgette. The Doynels were keen for Robert to marry, so Gillian understood from his brother Guy, but they were overly conscious of their lineage. A penniless English girl from a broken family, who had aborted her illegitimate child – this was not what fourteen generations of in-breeding, and not one divorce, had taught them to look forward to.
Priscilla defended Robert to Gillian. ‘He is worried about his mother. She won’t approve of a foreigner as a daughter-in-law. Besides there is the question of religion.’ The Doynels were strong Catholics. Priscilla believed that ‘his family would be very upset because I was a foreigner and I was not a Catholic.’
‘After a year in Paris, I decided that it was time to take a decision of some sort.’ Still uncertain of Robert’s intentions, Priscilla resigned from the translation bureau and travelled to England to ‘see if that would shake him’. She left her return date open.
In London, she had tea with her father at Bendicks, where he had previously taken her with Alec Waugh. A year had passed since their dreadful last meeting. SPB found Priscilla highly strung, generous-hearted, sensitive. ‘I’m so terribly afraid that she may run into trouble, by marrying without thinking,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘She’s tremendously attractive. It’s odd having a daughter almost marriageable. And it’s hard for me to talk to her.’ Doris had for too long indoctrinated Priscilla with bitterness towards him.
In April 1938, SPB was writing and broadcasting at full tilt to pay off ‘the ruinous costs’ of his wife’s unsuccessful divorce case. Radio was his mainstay, but in order to earn the £700 that he owed his lawyers, he had begun working for the BBC’s fledgling television service. When he met Priscilla, he was finishing a television play, and in the middle of presenting a television series on Craftsmen. With the idea of securing Priscilla a job in this exciting new medium, he introduced her to a producer, Andrew Miller-Jones, writing to him afterwards: ‘It was awfully nice of you to see Priscilla, who fell heavily for you!’
Miller-Jones, who later co-founded Panorama, responded: ‘In meeting your daughter the pleasure was mine, I only hope we shall be able to do something’ – which suggests that Priscilla was open to the possibility, although there was no further mention of a job.
Priscilla had not lost her ability to bewitch. In May, a tall, good-looking captain in the Irish Guards wrote to her from Gloucester Gardens: ‘You are the loveliest thing that ever happened and I adore you with every fibre of my being. Please be kind to me and forgive me. We were meant for each other –
no matter how long we have to wait – our end will be together. Even if you marry Robert, eventually you will come to me and I to you. I know that is so, I can see nothing else.’
But would Robert marry her?
At his chateau in Lower Normandy, Robert could not decide.
He knew that Priscilla wanted a child. Was his health up to it? He had been fragile and frail since boyhood. No one could work out what was wrong with him; whether it was an accident, as with his brother René, who had tumbled to his death from a horse; or illness, like another brother, who had died of meningitis; or the fact that he was the product of so many cousins intermarrying; or that his mother was forty-three when he was born.
And memories of the First World War continued to wake him.
Some of Robert’s behaviour was a consequence of his months in the trenches. He had been wounded in the German counter-attack in 1918. Not physically, like one his friends, also nineteen, who had his jaw blasted away and whose screams he heard his whole life long, but in his core. Nothing else had affected his character so much, not even his Catholicism. Anything that reminded Robert of the mud and the lice had the power to make him retch.
On 25 January 1938 Robert had witnessed an exceptional aurora borealis which many locals in Sainteny seized upon as an augury that predicted another conflict. Towards 6 p.m. the clouds dispersed and in the north sky Robert saw a brilliant display of emerald and rose-hued lights, ‘taking on the aspect of a flag agitated by the wind’. One old lady declared that this was not a good sign – she remembered the same pulsing red and green lights in her childhood, immediately before the German invasion of 1870. Many looked on it as a premonition. Zizi Carer, the daughter of Robert’s ‘intendant’ or steward, was nine at the time. ‘We thought it meant the end of the world,’ she said.
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