‘As regards your wonderful kindness in paying for my education, thank you so much. Who else was supposed to do it? You can’t just put children into this world and then forget about them . . . or can you?
‘Love, Priscilla’
Upset, unable to see straight, Priscilla had reached for the strongest word she could find: unforgivable. But her father was the one she could not forgive, not her stepmother; and by proxy it was herself she could not forgive, for the mess she had made of her life.
Priscilla’s savage disappointment in herself was the background to the bloodcurdling row which erupted in May 1964, causing her to fall, as she wrote, ‘off the straight and narrow’.
It was raining hard on the day, six years later, when Priscilla met SPB and Winnie at Chichester station and drove them to Church Farm. She never disclosed what made her relent to invite Winnie for the weekend, after vowing never to see her again. Winnie, though, has left an account of the tirade to which Priscilla subjected them.
Ever since Winnie arrived in Hove and usurped the nine-year-old Priscilla, there had been a Greek element to their relationship. Both competing for the same unpredictable man, the two women were never likely to get on. Winnie resented Priscilla for being the legitimate daughter; Priscilla resented Winnie for replacing her as a pseudo-daughter – most hurtfully when SPB was invited in 1933 to make his ground-breaking broadcasts from America. According to Winnie, he and Winnie decided to risk travelling as father and daughter. It worked. President Roosevelt remained unaware that the attractive blonde introduced to him as SPB’s daughter-cum-secretary was actually his interviewer’s common-law wife.
Forty years on, each woman continued to feel an unbridled aggression. Their distress was compounded by a joint sense of exclusion that they were ‘living in sin’: Priscilla because she had remarried, Winnie because she was unable to marry and have the respectable life that she longed for.
The bloodcurdling row at Church Farm sprang from the usual conversation about money. Winnie and SPB had left Oxford four years earlier and were renting a flat in Hove. Before lunch, SPB revealed that he and Winnie were now going to have to move into the charitable home in Lindfield. He worried about what prospects he had at his age of ever earning enough to live on. His financial irresponsibility, on top of flashbacks to her Hove childhood, was the cue for Priscilla to bring up a subject which she considered one of the two misfortunes in her life.
Raymond served the meal that he had cooked, while Priscilla fatally broke her pledge and poured drink after drink for herself and guests and, according to Winnie, grew ever more aggressive and irrational. ‘All her pent-up venom showed in her abuse of her father through life and in the fact that she was unable to have children after her abortion and consequent hysterectomy because we had not stopped her going to Paris for the abortion.’ Winnie protested, reminding Priscilla how in March 1937 they had begged her not to go to Paris.
This was too much for Priscilla. She stood up over Winnie ‘like an avenging angel’, in belligerent fury blaming first her father and then Winnie for her unhappiness. Her ferocity was terrible. She was shaking like a piece of paper. What aggravated Priscilla’s unreasonable hurt was to see Winnie’s name flagged alongside her father’s on his travel books, including the account of their journey through the Vosges, Continental Coach Tour Holiday, which they had dedicated to Priscilla – an unbearable taunt, given her repeated failure to find a publisher.
Winnie, unable to stand more abuse, burst into tears, collected her coat and suitcase, and with SPB walked out in the rain to wait for a bus to take them into Chichester.
This disastrous weekend was one of the last times that Priscilla saw her father and it pitched her back into despair. Soon afterwards came terrible news of her favourite AA member. ‘22 June 1964, Nina found dead in her flat – suicide. End of saga. AA.’ Priscilla never attended another meeting.
‘For the next 12 months I thrived on gin, vodka, brandy, Pernod, and I remember little of what occurred.’ Each new stage of Priscilla’s decline was inexorable. She was in an appalling state, drinking to the point of vomiting. She made a strenuous effort for three months to survive on wine alone, and failed. ‘She was hooked,’ wrote Gillian. ‘She told me that unless she stopped drinking Raymond would end the marriage.’
The nadir was reached one October evening in 1965. Raymond was President of the Mushroom Growers Association that year and host of the annual dinner in Worthing at which Priscilla passed out with a black eye. ‘Had a terrific row with Raymond at the end of dinner on the subject of my drinking and I feel our marriage may have been nearer to the brink than I thought. He thinks that some of our friends now shun us because of “unpredictable” habits.’
Gillian was reminded of her father hiding bottles. It seemed obvious what Priscilla was doing: ‘She was punishing herself by destroying the only thing of value she possessed, her beauty.’
Why this self-destruction? A host of reasons suggest themselves. No children of her own. No luck with her writing. A fractious relationship with a father whom she still loved. The sheer impossibility of talking about the life she had led before she met Raymond. And boredom. ‘Father kept her in the bedroom reading and drinking,’ Carleton said. ‘It was boredom that set the rot in.’
But there was a further explanation which Priscilla had long concealed from everyone: her genuine dread that redemption was impossible in any form.
36.
A SYMPATHETIC PRIEST
‘Before returning home,’ SPB wrote in It Isn’t Far from London, ‘it is worth going inland to see the village of Wittering, with its ancient church in the trees.’
If she opened her window and leaned out, Priscilla could see this over-restored Norman building contructed from random rubble. The church was tantalisingly close. It was also taboo.
Raymond never attended a service. He once donated land when St John’s ran out of graveyard space, but he had no interest in God, and early on conveyed his astringent views to Priscilla. On the one and only occasion when Priscilla said she wanted to go to church, she was cowered by his reaction. ‘Raymond went berserk,’ remembered Vivien. ‘He said she couldn’t, and her being her she didn’t.’
Even so, her stepson Carleton grew up aware that Priscilla was religious. He had cried a lot after his mother’s retreat to Guatemala. ‘So every evening as we went to bed Priscilla would insist on me reading the Lord’s Prayer. I felt that she used the prayer as her guideline.’
Her god-daughter Annette was also conscious of Priscilla’s spiritual side. ‘She used to drive me to Chichester cathedral. “You’re my god-daughter, we’re going to go to church.”’
Priscilla kept silent about her faith. Few people realised that she was to the end of her life a devout Roman Catholic. And yet for a mysterious reason, perhaps implanted in childhood by Boo, or later on by the Doynels, Priscilla came to believe that by marrying Raymond, while her first husband was alive, she had placed herself beyond the Catholic pale.
In Priscilla’s mind, it was not Raymond who stood in salvation’s way, but God. Her adulterous relationship with Raymond constituted a mortal sin in His sight, and Priscilla faced eternal damnation.
Once again, Priscilla confessed only to Gillian the reason why she drank. ‘It was religion,’ Gillian wrote. ‘A convert to Catholicism, she was troubled to the end of her days by the fact she was living in sin when she married en secondes noces an Englishman.’
Priscilla’s confession astounded Gillian, who up until this point had remained unaware what Priscilla’s Catholicism meant to her. Quite apart from the strangeness of worrying about such a matter after the life she had lived, there was the peculiarity of her interpretation. Like her writing, Priscilla’s apostasy was a deeply personal matter; her normal riposte – ‘You wouldn’t understand.’ But it was evident to Gillian that religion was ruining Priscilla’s life, not enhancing it. Gillian discussed the situation with John in December 1965, when they feared – correctly – that Pri
scilla was suffering a breakdown. ‘He thought a priest might sort it out and promised to see what he could do.’
In the event, the Sutros sought the assistance not of a priest, but of a Catholic convert who was one of Priscilla’s favourite writers.
Out of the blue one evening at the Sutros’ flat in 26 Belgrave Square, Graham Greene said: ‘The only thing I envy John is Gillian.’ His remark sank in. ‘When I am feeling low I think of his words,’ wrote Gillian, who later became a neighbour of Greene’s on the Côte d’Azur. ‘Some people thought he was my lover, which was untrue. I was not his type. Ours was a platonic friendship, almost the only one I have had with a heterosexual. When in trouble I always turn to him.’ She did so now over Priscilla, who had included Greene’s classic novel about mortal sin and adultery, The Heart of the Matter, on a handwritten list entitled ‘Books to be taken in case of shipwreck on desert island’.
Gillian had met Greene in 1947 in Rome, where John Sutro was producing Her Favourite Husband; yet their friendship took another decade to bloom. In April 1958, Greene arrived early at a cocktail party that the Sutros were throwing in London, but decided to leave before it started. ‘I was upset,’ Gillian wrote. ‘He said he was in a nervous state and did not feel like meeting people. After brooding a minute or two, he said “I’ll stay if you let me spank you.” I was wearing tight tangerine silk Gucci pants, which I suppose may have given him ideas. “OK,” I said, turning around. “Spank!” He gave me a couple of sharp wallops on my buttocks. “Now I feel better,” he said. “I’ll stay.” I knew Graham Greene’s moods and how to deal with them.’
In 1963, Greene dedicated his book of stories, A Sense of Reality, to the Sutros. He prized his friendship with them for their ‘shepherd’s pie evenings’ at Belgrave Square. Right up until Greene left England in 1966, he walked over to their flat from his rooms in Albany, arriving on the stroke of 8 p.m. and disappearing at 11 p.m. He refused the offer of any fourth guest, preferring the three of them. Gillian sensed that he appreciated the privacy and lack of fuss, so much of his life being spent in hotels. ‘He liked to be able to relax and talk openly about all sorts of things, which is not possible in a noisy restaurant, where he always thought he was being overheard.’
The ritual of these evenings did not vary. First the martini. He never enjoyed a starter, saying it blunted his appetite for the main dish. This was cooked by Gillian using lots of butter. Greene unfailingly took two big helpings. ‘He was dithyrambic over my shepherd’s pie. Other women would try and do the same, but he would say dolefully: “There’s nothing wrong with your pies, but they haven’t got the flavour of Gillian’s. Hers is unique.”’
The meal at which they discussed Priscilla was washed down with two bottles of 1950 Cheval Blanc which Greene had sent round the day before, so that any sediment could settle.
On that evening in December 1965, to their immense regret, he being their favourite guest, Greene informed the Sutros of his irrevocable decision to take up residence in France. He was leaving England early in the New Year. ‘We shall terribly miss our dear friend,’ Gillian wrote.
After treating Greene to her raspberry fool, Gillian broached the subject of her other dear friend, Priscilla, who became, in absentia, the fourth at their table.
Gillian was confident of pricking Greene’s interest. ‘For years, I was the recipient of his love problems to which I listened with patience.’ She intrigued him about Priscilla by saying: ‘She had a rather a rackety life during the Occupation.’
Greene had known Priscilla’s father in Brighton and Oxford. He had not met Priscilla, but no subject was dearer to his heart than her spiritual predicament as outlined by Gillian, who revealed that Priscilla had ‘become haunted by the idea that she is living in perpetual sin’. Greene was packing up Albany for his departure to France, but he promised to help find Priscilla a priest.
On 14 December, Gillian gave him a nudge: ‘Dearest Graham, You kindly said I was to remind you to let me know the name of the Jesuit priest who might perhaps be of help to my girl friend. You thought there was someone at Farm Street who would be just right for her.’ Two days later, in one of his last acts before quitting England, Greene wrote to Father Dermot Mills at Stonyhurst. Unfortunately, Father Mills had left the school six years earlier and there is no record that he received Greene’s letter.
‘Dear Dermot, I have been asked to find a sympathetic priest at Farm Street for a rather difficult case and since your departure and Philip’s and the death of Martindale I know nobody. The case is of a young woman who married a Catholic and became a genuine Catholic as a result after the marriage.’ Greene explained that Priscilla had since remarried a non-Catholic. ‘She is in a very melancholy and nervy condition. She is a friend of a friend and I don’t know her personally but I did explain to her friend that there was nothing that could be done to regularise her position, but I thought it might be of great help to her if she started once again going regularly to Mass and perhaps had a few conversations with a sympathetic priest – not from the point of view of getting anything done but from the point of view of simple encouragement to keep her foot in the door.
‘Apparently her husband is very jealous of the church and this also causes difficulty. You would have been the ideal person to call on, but alas you are far away. I would be most grateful for any counsel which I could pass on to my friend.
‘Affectionately, Graham.’
Timothy Radcliffe, a senior Dominican priest once tipped for the papacy, believed that Father Mills would have been in a position to calm Priscilla’s worries.
Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Priscilla – Radcliffe observed of such converts how often their attraction was to the drama of Catholicism, to living on ‘the dangerous edge of things’. At the same time, they clung to their interpretation of a consoling, unshifting certainty. Cradle-born Catholics, by contrast, said Radcliffe, are accustomed to living in a muddle and in a world where no one is unforgivable. ‘I do not think that anyone is ever “beyond the pale” and it is deeply sad that she thought so. It was not even the case that her position could not have been regularised officially. Since her second marriage was to a man who was divorced then it would not have been recognised as a sacramental marriage by the Church, and so she would not have needed to “fix” it. Anyway, human beings have a tendency to get into messes, which is why we believe in the incarnation. God shared our mess, however deep the shit. A few minutes with a sympathetic priest would have set her mind at rest.’
The outcome of Greene’s intercession is unclear. Priscilla never spoke of it, although she wrote to my mother in 1980, after learning that we had met Greene in Sintra: ‘I love all his books. He lives near my great chum Gill Sutro. She knows him well and is always nattering about him.’ Greene, too, preserved the secret of the confessional, not mentioning it when I spent a day with him in Antibes in 1988, for a profile in the Telegraph magazine – even though, unknown to me, Gillian was keeping an eye on us, asking Greene if we had talked about Priscilla (‘does not recollect’) and writing to him on 29 September: ‘He is the nephew of my late childhood friend Priscilla (the converted Catholic with 2 marriages and a drink problem, I told you about her).’ But through Greene or Father Mills, or off her own bat, Priscilla did meet a sympathetic clergyman.
Fred Cate was the verger at Chichester cathedral, a small, lean, wrinkled man who shuffled down the aisles like a tortoise. He died before Tracey told me about him. She said that whenever Priscilla was in Chichester she found an excuse to slip off and see Cate, and that Raymond never knew.
Cate had worked as a porter at the station. A former Dean described him as a country person, a man of the soil, practical, humble, understanding, able to keep a secret. ‘If you could confide in someone, you could confide in him.’ One of Cate’s jobs was to fill the cathedral’s large cast-iron stoves, each the height of a man. The Dean recalled Cate standing before a stove which he had finished stoking, saying approvingly: ‘He’s the hottest one in the
cathedral.’ I like to imagine him fuelling a similar warmth in my aunt.
In June 1966, less than a year after her breakdown, Priscilla wrote to Raymond. She was almost fifty.
‘Darling, As we are soon to celebrate our 18th wedding anniversary I wanted to tell you how happy you have made me over the years. You have such a capacity to cherish and protect and I will never forget the last few months. You have saved me from myself and I have taken on a new lease of life as you know. Thank you, I love you, Priscilla.’
It is her only letter to Raymond which survives.
37.
DETONATIONS FROM THE PAST
‘Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower,’ wrote Graham Greene.
Despite the affection in her letter to Raymond, her first husband had not faded into the background. He remained a steady presence.
Priscilla once listed the noises that she heard from her window at Church Farm. ‘Hooter – six times a day. Boiler alarm. Electric saw. Tractor. Turning machine. Men cutting up wood and hammering (mending boxes).’ She broke off and for a moment she was back in Boisgrimot.
She had returned in 1947, at the tail-end of her holiday with Gillian, when she had met Raymond. While a captivated Raymond booked telephone call after telephone call to speak with her at Gillian’s deserted Paris apartment, Priscilla was making a pilgrimage to Robert’s chateau.
Nine years later, Priscilla submitted a description of that day to her tutor at the Fleet Street School in High Holborn; in a despairing final gesture, she had enrolled for a six-month correspondence course in freelance authorship and journalism.
‘At last I found the long avenue which led up to the house. I walked slowly towards it with a feeling of unreality. The trees which had been on either side had disappeared, as had the German soldiers who had been camping there when last I saw it.
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