Priscilla

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Writing from Paris, Robert thanked Priscilla for wishing him a happy birthday on 3 March and bringing back happy years. He begged Priscilla to take care of her health. It concerned him how she was coping financially – in an emergency she must draw on funds that he had lodged with Samuel Montagu – and he advised her to buy ‘a small detached house in London’. He apologised that his letters were thin on news, ‘but as you know I see very few people’. Apart from Zoë’s father, he mingled with none of Priscilla’s Paris friends and rarely left his apartment. ‘Two days ago I took my first taxi (50 francs to go the Champs-Elysées to see a film of Danielle Darrieux). It was all right, nothing special. Since the war, she’s aged a lot and her face has withered.’

  A visit to London in November 1945 persuaded Robert that Priscilla would never come back to France with him. With a sadness that he was unable to vanquish, he wrote that he had instructed his lawyers to draw their matrimonial affairs to a close. ‘I don’t have the heart to say anything more to you today.’ On 11 March 1946, he attended a regimental reunion in Paris, the date coinciding with the anniversary of their encounter in 1937 on the boat-train from Victoria. ‘What a lot has happened since that day. Despite all the sorrows, I don’t ever forget the very great joy you have given me, for which I thank God every day.’

  Soon afterwards, he dined with a neighbour who had hired as a servant a Hungarian prisoner of war: an aristocrat who, after dinner, played some Hungarian romances on his violin. ‘He played very well, and for me especially the little air which they played in the boîte of the Rue Marbeuf where we went before the war. This air had a charming title. “Just one girl is in the world for me”. In Hungarian: “Csak Egy Kislany Van a Vilagon”.’

  1946 was a record year for the number of divorce petitions in France. On 16 July, Robert consented to a civil dissolution of their marriage. As a devout Catholic, he continued to think of Priscilla as his one girl in the world, but in so far as it concerned the French State, Priscilla was free. After eight and a half years of a celibate and childless marriage, she had reached the end like a train shunting into the station, slowing down, last roll of the wheel and shudder, release of steam, slight rocking back. Over.

  Too many men passed though Priscilla’s life in the months that followed. She was desirable and pitiless. Her womb removed, it mattered little whom she slept with, whom she hurt.

  In the grey peace of London she and Gillian went out dancing, to the Milroy Club in Hamilton Place or the 400 Club in Leicester Square. ‘Darling, you certainly have enough boy friends,’ wrote one admirer. Her father put it down to ‘having a good time’, but there is something frantic and joyless about Priscilla’s promiscuity, as though an essential part of her had not come back from France and there had never been any return. Some gate in her had closed with Pierre’s desertion. She was free, and yet like Shula Troman her true imprisonment began the moment she landed in England. Troman said: ‘I didn’t cry on my first night of internment, but I cried on my first night of liberty. The war ended and it all came to me what I lost with my liberation, what I don’t dare say to anyone: that the années de liberté were my four years in prison. In the camp I was free. How could I have known, how could I have been so deformed in my thoughts? It’s complex, life, isn’t it? Full of contradictions.’

  After Donat came Edward Fay, a one-eyed American naval captain whom Priscilla had met in Plymouth when staying with Berry, her former room mate at Besançon. A disoriented Fay wrote to her: ‘I feel completely lost – don’t know which way to turn.’ He thought of Priscilla every five minutes and lived for her letters. He treasured one sentence that she had written him: ‘I love you more than words can say and nobody else exists as far as I am concerned.’ He wrote back: ‘My darling, as you would say, me too.’ Demobbed, Fay travelled from Boston to London fully expecting to make Priscilla ‘Mrs Fay’, and was miserable when she broke off their engagement. ‘Frankly, the months I spent with you were the happiest in my life.’ He had had no inkling that she was juggling other suitors.

  Priscilla kept their letters, the bad things they wrote as well as the good:

  There was Charles from University College, Nottingham, who composed a gleeful poem celebrating ‘Your figure divine, your complexion so clear, your teeth so white and your eyes without fear . . .’

  There was Max, an emissary of her husband’s, who dropped off at Gillian’s house a pink dress and a pair of shoes that Priscilla had left behind in Paris. ‘It’s perhaps better I don’t see you. The most beautiful memories have their price. I know that you continue to be terribly attractive and you are still young. If my friendship can be useful to you one day, whenever and wherever, let me know and I’ll do everything in my power.’

  There was François, a Yugoslav, who wrote from the Carlton Club: ‘I cannot go on like this. Good-night, sweetheart, bon soir, gardez-vous bien; je t’embrasse et en fin je reste toujours ton ami devoué.’

  Gillian’s notebooks mention two other men. The film director Anatole de Grunewald (‘a proper shit, I warned her’) who left Priscilla in the lurch at the Mayfair Athenaeum with an unpaid hotel bill: ‘She sold her jewellery to pay the bill’ (and in the process discovered that Daniel Vernier’s sapphire ring was phoney). And Jacques Labourdette, a French architect and brother of the famous French actress Elina Labourdette, who in similar circumstances abandoned Priscilla at the Mamounia Hotel in Marrakesh.

  Priscilla was engaged at the time to her future husband Raymond. The wedding invitations had been sent out when, according to Gillian, ‘she hopped it to France a day before, in order to go to Sainte-Maxime with Jacques’. Raymond came rushing after, and telephoned Gillian in Rue de Clichy, ‘very pissed and agitated’, shouting: ‘I want to beat up that bastard!’ Gillian tried to calm him, she did not know where Priscilla was. She advised him to go home.

  A horror with a foxy face was how Gillian described Labourdette. She had been present in Paris when he promised to leave his rich wife for Priscilla, ‘and coolly discussed in front of me on Fouquet’s terrasse his plan to murder his wife by making it look like suicide. A plot to make her write some letters. I told Pris to be careful as I thought she could end up an accomplice.’ But the melodramatic plan fell apart in Morocco after Labourdette’s wife discovered his elopement and threatened to remove her dowry. ‘Jacques packed his bags during the night and tore back to France leaving Pris with the hotel bill, no money for her plane fare. She rang up Raymond who behaved very well. He flew to Morocco, paid up the hotel and took her home. I don’t think he ever forgot the incident.’ This story doubly explained Raymond’s possessiveness and why, once Priscilla arrived back in England with him and their wedding eventually happened, she did not leave his side for the next thirty-four years.

  ‘I have always advised you to find a really rich man,’ Berry had written from Plymouth. ‘You could not be happy on small means. Believe me, it is not amusing to have to count pennies.’

  The pennies that it required Priscilla to keep up her striking appearance were itemised in a bill, dated February 1947, for clothes from Betty Lyng’s Exclusive Dress Agency in Knightsbridge.

  1 black evening cape £10 [at least £330 in today’s money]

  1 black lace dress £10

  1 tweed coat £10

  2 black afternoon dresses £10

  1 brown dress £10

  2 bags £2 corset £6

  1 black shoes £2.

  Marriage to Raymond Thompson – a thirty-three-year-old divorced Englishman who sailed his own yacht and owned a Lancia Aprilia – guaranteed Priscilla financial and emotional security. After being rejected by her father, here was a man absolutely anchored to her. It was his one overwhelming virtue: he was dependable to be there, shouting and screaming maybe, but he was never going to leave her.

  ‘She met Raymond in Paris.’ Gillian was present. In October 1947, she and Priscilla took the Golden Arrow to Sainte-Maxime for a fortnight’s holiday, stopping off in Paris. It was their first time t
ogether in France since 1940. They slept on camp beds in Gillian’s apartment and dined at La Crémaillère. At a party, Priscilla came under the scrutiny of a dark-haired Englishman wearing a cravat. He looked at her through thick black-framed spectacles, not taking his eyes off her.

  Poor eyesight had thwarted Raymond Thompson’s ambitions to be a pilot. Demobbed from Air Force Intelligence, he had followed his father, a wealthy insurance broker, into Lloyd’s, but resigned shortly before meeting Priscilla; he was still jarring from the shock of his failed first marriage in 1946, after his wife, according to Gillian, ‘ditched him for his best friend at an airport leaving him with the children’ and went to live in Guatemala. Professionally and personally speaking, Raymond was in a terrible state when he introduced himself to a tanned Priscilla. Gillian recalled: ‘We were sunburnt, slim, and wore the minimum.’ While Gillian went on exhausting walks through the streets of Paris with her new lover, film director Henri-Georges Clouzot, Priscilla was left on her own with Raymond.

  He told her of his marital situation, how he had escaped into drink and gambling, his passion for sailing, his abhorrence of the City, how keen he was to start another life in the Sussex countryside, this time as a market gardener.

  Priscilla gave him the sketchiest account of her life in France. Like everyone she knew, she talked of anything but the Occupation. ‘One asked nothing in Paris in those days,’ wrote Martha Gellhorn. ‘There was a terrible discretion between friends, after the years of separation, and not knowing what the friends had thought or done or where they had been.’ Even so, it touched Priscilla to discover their overlapping histories. Raymond’s ex-wife, Carmen Hochstetter, had attended Priscilla’s cookery school in pre-war Paris. Carmen’s mother was Doris’s ex-bridge partner. Carmen’s elder sister Sylvia had been seduced by Priscilla’s first love – Gillian’s brother Nicky. And a connection closer to home: Raymond and Carmen had rented a cottage during the war in the same Sussex village where Doris had come to live. They had Paris and Bosham in common.

  After a few days in Paris, Priscilla and Gillian continued on to the French Riviera. A smitten Raymond wrote to Priscilla from his hotel in Rue d’Alger. ‘I don’t often write letters unless I have to – (& this is not a “have to” letter in the accepted sense) – consequently I’m not much of a hand with a pen.’ What he wished falteringly to say was that ‘Paris is very empty and autumnal without you’ and that ‘I can’t help thinking of you lying in the sun building up that “honey-brown” tan & wishing that I were with you.’

  Back in England, Raymond could not erase Priscilla from his mind. ‘The other day I saw “2000 Women”. Have you seen it? A film of life in a German internment camp for women in France. It made me think of you & wonder what it was really like.’ Priscilla had been due to return to London with Gillian the following Sunday. Anxious to speak to Priscilla on her way through Paris, he booked a call to Gillian’s apartment – but no response. ‘Have I got the number wrong or have you escaped again?’ He tried several more times. Then, ominously: ‘I shall have to put you on a chain!!’ She had arrived back at 5 Lees Place when he wrote inviting her to a race-meeting at Fontwell Park (‘We could go together? Why not? Why not?’). Although Priscilla did not enjoy horse racing, she accepted.

  Tough-as-teak, upright, unswerving in whatever course he set himself, Raymond had the attributes of his cross-Channel ocean racer, Mary Bower; and he adored Priscilla until her death. But in an adverse wind, he could be dictatorial, intractable and jealous. His manager at Church Farm, John Bevington, described him as tunnel-visioned on certain things – ‘and very bad-tempered if you didn’t do what he wanted. Once he’d gone off the boil with you, you never got back into his good books.’

  Introduced to Raymond, Vivien found him prickly. ‘He was atheist, domineering, and had a chip because his wife had left him. And Priscilla was still always frightened, hated rows and generally a timid sort of person.’ Vivien advised Priscilla to take more time before deciding to commit. Raymond might offer long-term security; but he might prove to be a most unsuitable liaison.

  Gillian was warmer in her encouragement, writing to Priscilla in the New Year, after Raymond threw a party in Paris for Priscilla’s friends: ‘I thought Raymond quite human. He is not ugly either. I rather admire his “hawk” profile and I like the way his hair grows. You were looking pretty and very happy.’

  Raymond was convinced that he had found a stepmother for Tracey, born in 1942, and Carleton, born in 1944. He had agreed to a divorce on condition that he had custody, but his wife refused to give up the children unless there was a woman in the house. Vivien said: ‘He was looking for a mother for them and this is exactly what Priscilla was looking for: two children to mother – and so, eventually, they got married.’ The reaction of Raymond’s mother clinched it. ‘Priscilla will be wonderful with them,’ she decided after meeting her. ‘She has a face which shows truth and sincerity.’

  Their marriage on 4 June 1948 at Caxton Hall Register Office in Westminster attracted headlines. ‘VICOMTESSE WEDS’. ‘BRIDE WAS IN GESTAPO GAOL’. ‘She was Nazis’ captive who was arrested by the Germans and kept in a concentration camp.’ The French press joked that she was exchanging one set of chains for another.

  Afterwards, the couple assembled for a group photograph with their witnesses. Gillian was in Paris, but John Sutro was there, and Vivien and Doris. Once again, there was a father-shaped absence. ‘The 31-year-old bride is a daughter of Mr S. P. B. Mais, the author.’

  Priscilla wrote only one sentence about her wedding day. It hints at a pattern of hard drinking and horse racing: ‘Couldn’t get out of bed until Ray fetched me Amber Moon’ – a pick-me-up of Tabasco, raw egg and whisky. It was also Derby Day, and directly after the reception they went to Epsom to watch the race, won by My Love.

  In the evening, Raymond drove Priscilla in his silver Lancia to their new home in Sussex by the Sea.

  34.

  LIFE AS A MUSHROOM FARMER’S WIFE

  Wittering was where the Saxons first landed in England, a village of thatched cottages with small gardens that smelled of honeysuckle, mud and rotting seaweed.

  Inevitably, SPB had written about it, after taking the inward journey by boat from Bosham. ‘I disembarked on a long sea wall, fringed with tamarisk and gorse. There was a gorgeous medley of inland and marine flowers, of land and sea birds, of marsh and meadow.’ From near here, Vespasian began the conquest of Britain, King Canute defied the waves, and Harold spent the night before making his unfortunate visit to William of Normandy. Twinned with the French village of Moutiers-les-Mauxfaits, Wittering was a reminder that Britain was occupied too, but never had to process the trauma since the occupiers had never really left. ‘From the point of view of history you could not hit on a better place,’ SPB wrote in It Isn’t Far From London (1930). ‘Pitch your tent or stay your caravan in the Wittering fields and you will find yourself transported not seventy miles or seventy minutes from Hyde Park Corner, but back to ad 700 in the days of St Wilfrid of York, seven million miles away from the noises and odours and distractions of a civilised world.’

  But not even this distance proved far enough for Priscilla.

  Raymond had bought a seven-bedroom red-brick Georgian house next to a grey stone church. Church Farm was originally the beach cottage for the Dukes of Richmond. It was ramshackle, with an untended walled garden and a view of the Isle of Wight. There was no furniture. They ate their meals sitting on packing cases. Priscilla laid felt on the staircase and stained the floorboards in their bedroom. She found the all-important padded chest in an antique shop in Peacehaven.

  To make the place homely for their house-warming party, Priscilla’s mother Doris came over from Emsworth, where she was now living, and sewed the curtains.

  Doris had been abandoned – again. She had spent the war in Bosham, pretending to be the wife of Surgeon Lieutenant-Commander Bertie Ommaney-Davis. Then in March 1948, Bertie asked Vivien, whom he called Widge, because she was
quite small, to visit him at the Royal Naval Hospital Haslar, where he worked. ‘Widge, I’ve something to tell you. I simply can’t stand your mother another minute. I’ve been appointed to Malta and I’m not going to take her with me. I’m going to buy her a cottage in Emsworth, with an allowance.’

  The cottage into which Doris had since moved was less than six miles from Wittering. A dutiful Priscilla used to drive over with Tracey and Carleton for lunch. The atmosphere was formal, Tracey remembered. ‘We knew her as Mrs Davis, and she served stewed rabbit.’

  Vivien told me about the rest of Doris’s life. In Malta, Bertie got married to a South African with an enormous nose, but appointed back to Haslar four years later, he decided that he needed Doris’s cottage for himself and his new wife, and turned Doris out. Vivien wrote to him: ‘That’s a shit’s trick’ – and never spoke to him again. Homeless once more, and still legally bound to SPB, Doris went to stay with her mother in Horsham, thirty miles away.

  Vivien said: ‘At some point she met Lambert White, a married fruit importer in London. He fell for Doris and bought her a flat in Shepherd’s Bush.’ When his wife died, Lambert moved in with Doris. They had boiled eggs for supper and lunched every day at the Portman Hotel. ‘After one lunch, Lambert says he has to go and have a pee. My mother waits in the hall. The porter, not looking, crashes into her with a huge suitcase and breaks her hip. She’s eighty-three.’ With Vivien’s help, Priscilla put Doris and Lambert into a nursing home in West Wittering, one room with a wide bay-window and a brass plate on the door: ‘Colonel White & Mrs Davis’. There, just up the road from Church Farm, Doris drank gin, played bridge and did the hard Telegraph crossword, but she failed to complete the puzzle of her relationship with Priscilla, despite their proximity. Vivien told her son: ‘I never want to be like my mother who was so cold-hearted and selfish and when she had money never helped anyone else out.’ Priscilla felt the same.