‘Nevertheless you went to bed with him,’ chastised the Parisian judge.
‘Well, what else could I do?’
Carré’s answer to her own question: ‘What must be done; survive, of course.’
The best thing to do was eat the bacon. Only those who were there at the time undertood this. Priscilla understood. Her friend Zoë understood. And so did Gitta Sereny. ‘I was never hungry,’ Sereny told me. ‘I went to Maxim’s time and again. It was Maxim’s or Flore. You didn’t eat in Flore; in Maxim’s you ate.’
‘Well, here it is – your beloved open fireplace.’ Otto Graebener’s snug drawing room at 3 Avenue Bosquet was a tempting sanctuary when Priscilla compared it with her unheated, airless Gestapo cell in Rue des Saussaies. Hardened by her losses in love, she took a pragmatic attitude to this educated German who played cricket and fives, and spoke fluent English; who had galloped to her rescue.
Perhaps later there was a bitter aftertaste mingled with shame, but at the time she hid her face in his mane. She accepted Graebener’s gifts; his ‘exquisite cigarettes’ and couture dresses. She invited Zoë to join them for canapés in his apartment. She stayed with Graebener in between his business trips to Spain and Germany, on the understanding that he shielded her from the Gestapo. But her heart was not scratched. This was about to change.
To recap. In the winter of 1943, her possessive lover Emile Cornet was in Fresnes prison, and Priscilla was under the Gestapo’s instructions not to communicate with him. Robert remained based in Boisgrimot, impotent and neurotic and refusing to divorce. Daniel Vernier continued to take her to the races at weekends, seeing Priscilla on his own at 11 Place Saint-Augustin when he was meant to be at a ‘poker evening’, or inviting her to a family dinner like the one on that cold December evening.
In the years ahead, she would once or twice find herself going back to this moment when something in her chest slid sideways.
30.
PIERRE
A wind was blowing and there was no one in the street as Priscilla bicycled to the Verniers for dinner. She was tugging off her ski-gloves when a man entered the room, quiet, watchful, blue intelligent eyes, a mocking smile. He wore an English suit and a shirt monogrammed with the initials PD.
Simone introduced her eldest brother Pierre.
He had arrived from Annemasse on the Swiss border. In October 1940, following their ejection from their home in Tourcoing, the family had bought a factory manufacturing nylon stockings under the brand name ‘Callipyge’. Soon after his meeting with Priscilla the emblem for these stockings became a blonde in a tight-fitting dress, and parading the unofficial motto, ‘La déesse aux belles cuisses’: the goddess with beautiful thighs. The image was painted on mirrors and showed the young woman’s long hair piled high, just as Priscilla wore it at this period because of electricity cuts.
Pierre was thirty-two, married with three small children, a practising Catholic, Anglophile, upper class. His father was a Viscount to the Holy See and the Vatican’s ambassador to Monaco, a title that Pierre inherited after the war. But on that December evening in 1943, all consideration of family, class, religion suspended itself. Simone explained how Priscilla was an English friend living precariously in Paris. With the stillness that anticipates a light going out, Pierre stood there helpless, Priscilla too, in her divided skirt. ‘That meeting of you was a so marvellous thing,’ he wrote to her in English.
A song half-buried came back, the sound of her abusive ‘stepfather’ Boo humming ‘I never seemed to know what love meant, dear, till I met you/I never thought that two hearts as one could beat so true.’ She had been mistaken before, but not this time. For the next eight months, Priscilla came to feel emotions different from any that she had experienced hitherto. In Pierre’s presence, she felt her full height, as if the tips of two searchlights had met.
A property of his stockings was that you could rip them off without tearing them. With Pierre, Priscilla hoped to have the daughter that both of them craved. But from the outset they had to proceed with care, less out of concern for Otto Graebener than for Pierre’s envious brother-in-law, whose desire for Priscilla had not slackened. According to Gillian: ‘Daniel was mad about Pris who in turn was mad about Pierre.’
He called her ‘Petite Pris de mon coeur’. They spent their first night together on 8 December. The letter that he wrote next day makes it unlikely that Priscilla was frigid. ‘It’s in our bed that I’m writing to you and I imagine your body that I love so much is lying next to me, pressing up against me. What a miraculous night, chérie, and I have only one desire: to start it all over again. What a marvellous day it’s going to be when we’re both once more on this bed which has obligingly offered itself up to our revels. Then it won’t be only one or two hours, but four or six hours of unsatisfied desires, and finally the total communion of our two bodies. I love your eyes, Pris darling, I love your mouth, your ears, your breasts on which I adore to rest my head, your shapely legs, your chest . . . there’s no part of your beautiful body which I want to leave alone.’
Pierre was back in Paris the following weekend, meeting her in the apartment of his great friend, the publisher Henri Johanet, now working in Annemasse for the Red Cross. Johanet – nicknamed ‘Kikki’ – had escaped his POW camp and felt unable to live in safety in Paris, but he had kept a third-floor garçonnière in 28 Rue de Turin. He offered it to Pierre and Priscilla as a bolt-hole. Johanet was the ‘specialist’ who had provided Priscilla and Pierre’s brother Alain with false papers. And Johanet helped further: as a ‘pigeon’ to deliver Pierre’s letters from Annemasse to Priscilla.
Pierre’s letters are remarkable for their candour. This was a period when everyone in Occupied France talked in a furtive way around subjects, weighing every word that they spoke in public or over the telephone, or wrote down on prized sheets of paper. Yvette Goodden exchanged three typed sentences with her husband during the entire Occupation. Their letters took five months to arrive and had to remain open for the censor to read and, if necessary, to scissor out offending words.
No such restraint hedged Pierre’s correspondence. He knew about Daniel. (‘Understood about D.’). He knew about Otto. (‘O. back, you must now lead a quieter life’). It had no effect on his feelings. ‘Oh my love how I miss you.’
In Paris, her emotions were twisted, confused. First, she had stolen the affections of Simone’s husband; now of Simone’s brother. She thought of Emile in Fresnes, Robert in Boisgrimot, Otto in Avenue Bosquet. She wrote to Pierre: ‘Je suis aimée, mais par qui???’ She was loved, but by whom? ‘I’m frightened of loving you because I know it will make me suffer.’ She alluded to Pierre’s mocking smile. She was careful to play down what they had as ‘a loving friendship’.
But Pierre swept aside her concerns, writing from his bed at 5 Rue du Faucigny in Annemasse: ‘My body is avid for your caresses – my hands look for your body because they love to wander over their property – I love every bit of you and I’m happy and proud to think that you have made me a gift of yourself and that you belong to me in your entirety. For my part, I offer myself to you body and soul. I am really desperate to see you again because without you, my love, I can’t go on living. I often think of our love. I find it beautiful and pure. No one can trouble it. Until very soon, petite Pris Chérie. How I envy this letter which tomorrow will have the great good luck to be in your hands. I love you, I love you, I love you. My love. Me too. P.’
‘Me too’ was Priscilla’s expression. In the beam of Pierre’s beautiful pure love, she conquered her reservations. ‘I fell madly in love with the one person I should have avoided at all costs. He knew about Daniel and me, and yet he made love to me.’ He was stuck in a marriage de convenance, he told her, but he planned to begin another life with Priscilla. ‘He gave me every encouragement. In fact, we often talked of where we would live and what we would do.’
First on their wishlist was a child. Both of them wanted a daughter. They had a name for her: Carole.
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br /> What Priscilla delayed telling Pierre until the New Year was that she had undergone an operation in September to drain a cyst on her right ovary. Their daughter might have to wait until Priscilla’s ovary had healed. Pierre was reassuring. ‘How hurt I was, my love, to learn that for the moment there’s no hope for our girl. I had already got used to the idea and was so happy. Fate does everything for a reason, and perhaps fate is making us wait for her a little more before giving us this great joy.’ When she received this letter, Priscilla at last allowed herself to trust in Pierre’s declarations that once she was pregnant with Carole he would leave his wife and ‘run away with me’. Meanwhile, she tried to conceive.
At 11 a.m. on 27 January 1944 Pierre arranged to meet Priscilla at a racecourse near Paris, in the Yearling section. ‘Believe me, little Pris of my heart, when I say: satisfy yourself by looking at the horses, but don’t place any bets. Our love is too great and precious to risk losing a fortune.’ To play Cupid, Pierre relied on Zoë, alibi in all Priscilla’s relationships at this period. ‘Tell dear Zoë to go there and she will lead me to you.’ He proposed that without wasting time at the races he and Priscilla install themselves in Zoë’s apartment.
After a weekend in Boulevard Berthier, he loved Priscilla even more. They met throughout February, March, April, lodging with Zoë or shutting themselves up in Kikki Johanet’s bolt-hole. ‘There we would stay for two or three days,’ Priscilla remembered, ‘never going out, eating cold things brought up by a restaurant, and making love.’ Priscilla was responsible for bringing clean sheets. In the blackouts they lit candles. The flirtatious Kikki, under the self-appointed guise of her ‘guardian angel’, wrote to Priscilla on his return to Annemasse: ‘You tell me you’re living without electricity, but intimacy is much nicer and sweeter by candlelight, as many demonstrations have convinced me!’
Pierre repaid Zoë her discretion, using Kikki’s connections with the Red Cross to trace Zoë’s husband, who remained a POW in Germany. Pierre wrote to Priscilla: ‘You can tell her that for more than two months no one has received news of the prisoners. But I hope to be able to give you more information when I come.’
All through this time, Pierre was mindful of Otto in the background. Taking Priscilla to Dijon. Taking her for a golfing weekend to Louvain (‘I imagined you, my love, at your first golf lesson’). Taking her to see Max Stocklin – whose role in buying up textiles for Bureau Otto may have brought Stocklin into contact with the Duboyon family (the cloth from whose three factories near Tourcoing was sent back to Germany to make uniforms). Taking Priscilla to meet Johnny and Wolff and perhaps Alois Miedl. Above all, protecting her from the Gestapo: in February, the Gestapo had started rounding up married women without children for compulsory labour service in Germany. Pierre wrote respectfully of Priscilla’s German guardian: ‘O. back, I hope that nothing’s going to alter our wonderful plans.’
Their latest plan was to marry.
On 4 May 1944, Priscilla angrily petitioned Robert a third time. Again, his lawyer turned her down. ‘In the hope of returning his wife to the family home, in spite of her conduct and the particularly harmful character of things said at their meeting, Monsieur Doynel opposes the demand for a divorce.’ Three weeks later, on 24 May, Robert sent Priscilla a passport photograph of himself taken at the time of their encounter at Victoria station in 1937. The message on the back is hard to read, but it stops the heart. ‘Your poor little Poppet who wishes that you did not [illegible] for one day. Thanks for the memory.’ He was smiling.
This was not how he appeared to Zizi Carer at Boisgrimot. The steward’s daughter had a powerful recollection of Robert slumped in an armchair in the drawing room. ‘I looked through the window and I thought, “Is he sleeping or praying?” He prayed a lot.’
31.
CHANSON D’AUTOMNE
The announcement of the D-Day landings was first picked up by a German wireless operator in a reinforced bunker right next to Pierre’s family home in Tourcoing. The phrase was broadcast over the BBC at 9.15 p.m. on 5 June, and logged, apparently, by Horst Wenzel. ‘Second half of message, Blessent mon coeur d’une langueur monotone, recorded.’ The words were the most important that German Intelligence had intercepted since Max Stocklin installed his clandestine transmitter in Saint-Cloud. After writing them down, Wenzel snatched off his headset and called out to Colonel Helmuth Meyer, head of the radio-team. Seconds later, Meyer emerged from the bunker and walked fast across the lawn.
The German general who requisitioned their large house on Avenue de la Marne had thrown out the grand piano when he evicted Pierre and his parents in 1940. He required his men to tune their ears, but not to Schubert. In September 1942, he ordered Organisation Todt to construct, as part of the Atlantic Wall, a thirteen-room brick blockhouse in the neighbour’s rose garden, dividing the tennis court where in childhood Pierre had played with Simone and Alain. This was the Wehrmacht’s listening post for broadcasts originating from England. A team of 30 translators and technicians monitored goniometers and oscilloscopes in two radio rooms, recording all messages, friendly or hostile, within 1,000 kilometres. The equipment was sensitive enough to eavesdrop on air raid wardens chatting to each other on the South Downs. Several of the programmes recorded by the Germans featured Priscilla’s father.
But it was not SPB’s voice which Horst Wenzel had heard declaiming the second half of a verse from Verlaine’s ‘Chanson d’Automne’. The first line – Les sanglots longs des violons de l’automne – had been broadcast by the BBC successively on June 1, 2 and 3, and meant that the Allied invasion was imminent. The second line signalled that the invasion was to begin within 48 hours, according to an Abwehr informant in the Resistance.
Also cupping their ears for Verlaine’s text on this windy Monday evening were SOE saboteurs and regional leaders of the Resistance. Upon hearing the B message, they were to start blowing up railway stations, main lines, bridges and viaducts.
Clutching Wenzel’s transcription, Colonel Meyer burst into the Duboyons’ dining room where General Hans Von Salmuth sat playing bridge. The bluff Von Salmuth said ‘I’m too old a bunny to get too excited about this,’ and went back to studying his cards.
Meyer sent a teletyped message to Field Marshal Von Rundstedt in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, but the elderly Commmander-in-Chief did not believe the report. ‘As if General Eisenhower would announce the invasion over the BBC’ – and in a poem! The information was not passed on to his subordinate Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, who might have acted.
Since December, Rommel’s black convertible Horch had been a familiar sight at 8 Avenue de la Marne, an imposing Edwardian pile modelled on the Petit Trianon. Rommel had taken to driving to Tourcoing every two weeks and disappearing into the radio room followed by his dachshund puppy Elbo. Alerted by headlights from convoys of lorries moving at night on England’s south-west coast, Rommel expected an attack very soon; the likeliest location was between Calais and Le Havre, the narrowest part of the Channel.
The recalcitrant Von Salmuth was in charge of this stretch. In January 1944, Rommel had stood in the Duboyons’ wood-panelled drawing room – where Daniel and Simone had held their marriage reception – and ordered him to lay a mine every ten yards along the coast. Von Salmuth, ‘a thoroughly rude fellow’ in Rommel’s opinion, blustered that this would take a year and anyone who tried to tell Rommel different was ‘trying to flatter you or was a pig idiot’. Rommel quietly asked everyone in the room to leave and then, on the Persian rug in front of the black marble fireplace, gave the Commander of the 15th Army the carpeting of his career.
But on that drizzly June evening of the landings, Rommel was away in Germany, and no further action was taken. Four hours later, at 1.11 a.m., came news that Allied paratroopers had begun dropping over Carentan. At 5.20 a.m. the garrison on Pointe du Hoc reported the presence of four cruisers. The wet fog concealed that they were part of a fleet of 5,000 ships and landing craft. At 6.30 a.m., 132,000 British, American and Canadian t
roops began streaming ashore on the north Normandy coast in the largest maritime invasion in history.
In Boisgrimot, Priscilla’s husband woke up on what had become the front-line, his sleep interrupted by explosions in the marshy fields north of Sainteny. Dropped in a Force Six wind, the dummy rubber parachutists or ‘explosivpuppen’ detonated as they landed. Dawn exposed them for what they were: floating scarecrows designed to maximise confusion. Lured by the spectacle of tattered parachutes in the hedgerows, farmers’ wives ran outside to shear off the silk.
D-Day caught Priscilla in Le Havre, sixty miles away – with Otto Graebener. He had hastened to the port to supervise the onward passage of Alois Miedl’s precious cargo of paintings, transported out of Amsterdam by a Dutch shipping company.
There was a power cut that day and the next. With Otto down at the docks, Priscilla sat in the dark and listened to the distant concussion. 9,210 aircraft had left Britain in the early hours. By the day’s end, they had dropped nearly 12,000 tons of bombs, most of them on Saint-Lô and Caen. Leaflets swirled down, urging citizens to abandon Le Havre and find refuge in the countryside. But Priscilla was too frightened to step outside.
The Resistance had cut telephone lines. In the news blackout, neighbours turned to each other for information. In Sainteny, it was forbidden to talk in more than groups of three. If Yvonne Finel saw villagers assemble, she strode up and demanded to know what they were discussing. Monsieur Philippe had draped white nets over his gooseberry bushes. The Germans suspected that he was signalling to enemy pilots and arrested him, summoning Finel to judge. He explained that he was putting up the nets to stop birds eating the gooseberries. True or false? the Germans asked Finel. ‘No, he’s lying,’ she replied. Monsieur Philippe was executed.
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