Priscilla Read online

  DEDICATION

  TO LALAGE, IMOGEN, TRACEY AND CARLETON

  EPIGRAPHS

  ‘Everything is simple in men, and in women, if you look at them from the outside, and watch them, hesitating and laughing on the brink of the world. And everything is simple too, long afterward, when life is over and done with and you explain them after their death, looking back on lives which are now only history. It is while it is still unfolding and still taking place that fate is obscure and sometimes mysterious.’

  JEAN D’ORMESSON, At God’s Pleasure

  ‘Well, there are worse things than fornication.’

  ALLAN MASSIE, A Question of Loyalties

  ‘Tell all.’

  GRAHAM GREENE TO GILLIAN SUTRO

  CONTENTS

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPHS

  PART ONE

  1. The Interrogation: 1943

  2. Church Farm: 1957–66

  3. The Alligator Handbag: 1950

  4. Truck Driver

  5. The Padded Chest

  PART TWO

  6. Strange Existence

  7. Gillian

  8. SPB

  9. Married Alive: 1936

  10. Meeting Robert: 1937

  11. The Abortionist

  12. Boisgrimot

  13. Letter from an Unknown Man

  14. Vertès

  15. War of Nerves

  16. French Resistance

  PART THREE

  17. Besançon

  PART FOUR

  18. London: October 1944

  19. Brazen Lies

  20. Paris: February 1941

  21. Daniel Vernier

  22. Emile Cornet

  23. L’Affaire Stocklin

  24. Resortissante Britannique

  25. ‘Simone Vernier’

  26. Kessel

  27. ‘Otto’

  28. The Missing Box

  29. Graebener

  30. Pierre

  31. Chanson d’Automne

  32. Tondue

  PART FIVE

  33. Living with Anybody

  34. Life as a Mushroom Farmer’s Wife

  35. Too Much Gin

  36. A Sympathetic Priest

  37. Detonations from the Past

  38. The End

  39. An Unsent Letter

  PICTURE CREDITS

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  SOURCES

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE

  CREDITS

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  PART ONE

  1

  THE INTERROGATION: 1943

  On the third day the Gestapo appeared with machine guns and drove Priscilla to 11 Rue des Saussaies. She was taken to the basement and stripped. The air was thin, sucked into the cellars by a hand-turned ventilator. Beneath a strong electric bulb a grey-uniformed woman conducted a full and humiliating body search for cyanide pills, and picked through her clothes. Then she was ordered to dress and led upstairs into a large room where a man interrogated her for twelve hours.

  Priscilla was accustomed to strangers asking probing questions. In the internment camp at Besançon, she was obliged to fill out forms which demanded to know her family descent, blood group, names of parents, political persuasion, religion. She had to write the answers in duplicate, and it was confusing if you did not speak German. The Commandant had reprimanded one internee for writing ‘domestic servant’ in the space for religion.

  This was more invasive, headier. More personal.

  The man talked in French, but it was obvious that he spoke English. It served nothing to lie, his manner said. Where had she been at school? What books did she like reading? He asked about her mother and father, branching off into her marriage and lovers. He checked her replies against the two identity cards which the Gestapo had found on her, and against her previous interrogation by the French police. He was well prepared and ruthless.

  When had she first come to France? Why had she stayed? The occupying authorities had released her from Besançon, he noted, because she was expecting a child. What had happened to the baby?

  It died, she said.

  His eyes looked at her and dropped back to her French carte d’identité no. 40cc92076, in the name of Priscilla Doynel de la Sausserie and registering her as ‘sans profession’. This card was no longer valid; it had run out in October the previous year.

  He picked up her British passport, flicked through the pages. Mais, Priscilla Rosemary, b. 12 July 1916, Sherborne (England). Height, 5’9”. Colour of eyes blue.

  The passport – no. 181523 – was issued in London on 10 March 1937, nearly two years before her marriage. She had clung on to it against everyone’s advice and not thrown it down the lavatory as her French sister-in-law had urged. But it was fortunate when Priscilla visited Cornet at his hotel that she had stuck to her old identity. If caught with her false French papers, in the name of Simone Vernier, she would have been executed.

  Simone Vernier, Priscilla Mais, Vicomtesse Priscilla Doynel de la Sausserie – she was scattered among these identities, left alone by the Germans because of her blue eyes and blonde hair. She remembered her best friend Gillian before the war, sucking in her cheeks: ‘La beauté, c’est notre première carte d’identité.’

  This last identity was Priscilla’s most convincing in Nazi-occupied Paris. Because at some point during the second day her interrogation was broken off: a person of influence with the Gestapo had intervened. In the evening, she was released. She was asked to sign a document with her answers written out, confirming that this was an accurate account. Then she was driven to the nursing home in Saint-Cloud, which she had given as her address.

  2.

  CHURCH FARM: 1957–66

  My aunt Priscilla, my mother’s sister, was a figure of unusual glamour and mystery in my childhood. She lived on a mushroom farm on the Sussex coast with her second husband Raymond, a jealous man who never let her far from his sight.

  Priscilla invited us for weekends at their home in East Wittering, and whenever her name was mentioned on the journey from London I craned forward in the back of my parents’ car. From an early age, I was conscious that my aunt was the sort of woman that men fell for. Both my parents loved her, but were unable to puzzle out the riddle of her relationship with Raymond, one of the most difficult men they had ever met.

  Inevitably, as our mauve Singer Gazelle turned into the lane leading to Church Farm, there would be speculation about how late we were going to be, and whether Raymond, a tyrant for punctuality, would – this time – serve mushrooms. The promise of a mushroom is hard to recapture today; mass production has rendered the taste mundane. But to a seven-year-old boy accustomed to the flavour of cod’s roe (‘the cheapest food we could buy, then,’ said my mother), a mushroom in the early 1960s was a fantastic thing – almost as exotic, in its way, as my aunt.

  Her home was a red-brick Georgian house built next to a twelfth-century church. There was a courtyard with an injured poplar in it, and stacks of empty fish boxes for growing the mushrooms in. The ‘growing rooms’ were sinister-looking Nissen sheds, thirty of them side by side, long, low with curved asbestos roofs. I was under firm instructions not to enter. My shoes risked picking up a dangerous virus called ‘La France disease’, which, if spread, could wipe out Raymond’s crop. So I never saw inside a shed. But I do recall buckets of disinfectant and the damp, musty smell of compost.

  Church Farm was not a house for a small child. I have memories of foreign housekeepers; cold stone floors with lead-piping between the flagstones; aggressive little dogs with yellow paws, from Raymond’s sodium spray; and a swimming pool clouded with dark green algae, so that I was never able to swim in it. The pool water w
as used to cool the Nissen sheds. Everything circulated back to the forbidden mushrooms, the small, white Agaricus bisporus species known as ‘champignons de Paris’. Direct sunlight caused them to lose their whiteness – another reason Raymond would not let me enter the sheds. He only ever turned on the lights for watering and picking. For the rest of the time, he kept his mushrooms at a temperature of 64 degrees Fahrenheit, on a diet of horse manure and gypsum, in darkness. ‘Kept in the dark and fed on shit’ was his formula for a successful flush.

  Raymond, with his eagle-beak nose and black-rimmed glasses, was quite terrifying. At Church Farm, he commandeered the whole of the downstairs for his office. Board-meetings took place at the dining-room table, at which Raymond, in cut-off gumboots, liked to sit so that he might monitor his staff. He had a cowbell which he wildly shook when Priscilla was wanted on the telephone, or for meals. A formal lunch, cooked by him, was eaten at 1 p.m. – sharp. Once, his daughter Tracey rang to say that she had a puncture. He ordered her: ‘Fix it, but don’t be late for lunch.’

  Raymond’s fag at Harrow had taught him how to cook. Partial to sauces, he was proud of his blanquette de veau; otherwise anything that did not involve mushrooms. It was unbusinesslike to give them away or dish them out to guests, and this extended to relatives. Priscilla had warned us that if we wanted to pick them, Raymond would insist on charging the full market rate of five shillings a punnet. The bad ones he sold at the end of the lane.

  Raymond liked to be in charge, doing everything. The few meals he permitted Priscilla to make were steak and kidney pudding, risotto, and stuffed peppers – dishes with which I was already familiar. When my mother married, Priscilla had handed on these recipes, on which my mother soon became entirely dependent. Although I never succeeded in tasting a mushroom during my visits to Church Farm, in another respect I grew up on Priscilla’s cooking.

  My father was then a poor journalist, earning £500 a year, and he felt a frisson whenever he entered Priscilla’s house at the prospect of meeting her smart roguish friends like the Sutros, and going out to expensive restaurants, which Raymond would pay for, and eating his luxurious meals. ‘Church Farm was bitterly cold, austere, with rotten furniture. But behind it all there was something romantic.’

  Raymond had raced Bugattis at Brooklands before the war. He boasted that Priscilla was a good driver too. Although I never remember my aunt at the wheel, I marvelled that Raymond chauffeured her each time in a different sports car: a black Aston Martin, a second-hand red Ferrari, a green Hotchkiss – and once, a Facel Vega which was supposed to go 100 mph backwards as well as forwards. In excess of this speed, he liked to accelerate us along the Birdham Straight, a long flat stretch between Wittering and Chichester.

  In addition to his cars, Raymond owned a succession of motor yachts. Each year, he sailed Priscilla over to France, once taking my father as a crew member. Horse racing was another passion. He never missed Goodwood and, after he died, his daughter Tracey buried his ashes under a tree in the Veuve Clicquot enclosure.

  An enthusiastic gambler, Raymond wrote down his bets in a pocketbook, but he was not an automatically good punter; in 1957, the same year that my parents drove me for the first time to Church Farm, his nephew calculated that Raymond spent £210,000 on horses (at least £4 million in today’s money) – and won £211,000. Depending on his luck, he was as likely to treat everyone in the vicinity to dinner as to buy Priscilla a silk scarf embroidered with previous Derby winners. Losing was another matter. His nephew recalled once hiding behind the sofa, shaking – ‘because that old kitchen door he came through would be slammed shut and he’d come in ranting and raving, throwing books at things, and go to the whisky bottle’.

  From my eavesdroppings in the car, I picked up that my uncle was capable of sweeping acts of generosity, but kept his wife on a short leash. Priscilla could sometimes rely on receiving his winnings in France – at which point she would bolt to Hermès and spend an exorbitant sum on an alligator handbag.

  Raymond was proud that in sixteen years of marriage he and Priscilla had never spent a night apart; if he had a business meeting, he made sure to return the same evening. None the less, the extent to which Raymond controlled Priscilla was blatant even to me, and I recall feeling that my aunt seemed out of place – a prisoner, almost – at Church Farm, despite her surrendering acceptance. When you enter a room and everyone’s talking, you end up being drawn to the silent one. Even though I was only a child and Priscilla a woman in her late forties, I felt protective of her.

  ‘She was an immensely private person,’ my father said. ‘You felt she was concealing a lot of things.’

  Because the main room in the house was Raymond’s office and everything had to be perfect for the buyers, the obligation on me was to disappear. On hot days, Priscilla went outside and sunbathed naked in a sheltered part of the walled garden. I was not allowed to see her unless I announced myself, and she quickly covered herself up. I remember her frowning over a book or a crossword, cigarette between fingers – she smoked a lot. And never far away a glass of something with a slice of lemon in it. Most of the time, she vanished upstairs.

  Upstairs was Priscilla’s domain. She spent long periods on her bed reading, or playing cards, or asleep. She was famed for her ability to sleep, and Raymond contended that she would do so with a pillow over her head, sometimes till noon.

  Their bedroom above the kitchen looked out over the courtyard and the lane to the church. Her dressing table was arranged with hairbrushes, combs, mirrors, all enamelled. There she sat, in a nightdress and matching dressing gown, brushing her long blonde hair. ‘She liked to brush for a hundred strokes,’ said Tracey.

  I have a vivid memory of the room because at the foot of the double bed was the first television I laid eyes on. As prosaic now as the taste of mushrooms, it was regarded, then, as the ultimate in luxury to have a television set in your bedroom. The compact, bulbous screen rested on a wooden chest which had a padded top, striped black and white, and it was a special occasion as a boy to be allowed to sit and watch, sometimes with Priscilla. The earliest films I can recall were viewed from my aunt’s bed which, even when she was not seated beside me, had the smell of the scent that she always wore, and which I associate with the characters whose dramas I tried to follow on screen. I cannot remember anything about this scent, except that it was strong; but I asked my mother and she said that it was Calèche by Hermès.

  For me, the best times were the evenings, after Raymond and Priscilla had taken my parents, together with the Sutros or whoever else was staying, out to dinner at the Bosham Sailing Club: in my memory, I watch them speed off, then go and switch on the television very low, careful not to disturb the French housekeeper in the downstairs wing, or Viking the smelly schnauzer who slept in the bedroom. As soon as I hear the car returning, I scarper back to my room and listen to the disquieting sound of Priscilla stumbling down the passageway.

  One of the few paintings I remember at Church Farm was a glassless Peter Scott of flying ducks that hung over the drawing-room fire. Whenever the exposed canvas grew too smoke-blackened, Raymond took it outside and scrubbed it with soap and water from a bucket.

  My favourite image of my aunt was a portrait of her as a young woman that hung on the wall at the bottom of the staircase. It was by the Hungarian artist Marcel Vertès and captured Priscilla as she had looked in pre-war Paris.

  The gouache was painted in 1939 when Priscilla was twenty-three. It showed her wearing a gold-flecked jacket and green hat designed by Elsa Schiaparelli, for whom she modelled at the time. ‘Priscilla had few clothes,’ said my mother, who inherited a black corduroy coat from her, ‘but they were always smart, couture, and very expensive.’

  Although my aunt must have been double the age of the young woman in the portrait, she resembled her: tall, a little less slim, but with her ash-blonde hair falling loose, and the same horizon-blue eyes. The artist had caught a vulnerability which I recognised. The way that she raised her h
ands to her chin to fasten the straps of her hat was how I had seen people pray in church, with their eyes open.

  From the beginning, I am sure of two things. First, her sheer attractiveness. She reminded me of Grace Kelly in one of the films I watched in her bedroom. She laughed, and I remembered my grandfather, his smoky laughter, rising across the South Downs. Her laugh was rejuvenating, and I noticed that my parents changed in her company, perhaps returned to the young man and young woman they were before they had children, when they lived in France. She transformed their mood, and mine: in a strange way, she was the delicacy that we went to Church Farm always hoping to savour, our champignon de Paris.

  The second thing I am sure of was her sadness. She seemed weighed down by a past that I could never work out and nor could my father. ‘I suspected she’d had an extraordinary past, but she never spoke about it and one would never ask her.’ This aloof, indefinable sadness was her bedrock.

  3.

  THE ALLIGATOR HANDBAG: 1950

  My parents gave me some basic facts.

  Priscilla had grown up in Paris, where she had trained as a ballerina.

  She had worked in pre-war Paris as a model.

  She had lived in France during the Occupation and spent time in a concentration camp, or possibly two. My mother said: ‘That’s what I was told by her when I was seventeen – at Church Farm. She was captured and tortured by the Germans. I presumed she couldn’t have children because she had been raped and caught an infection.’

  She had been a vicomtesse; her first husband an aristocratic Frenchman who never ceased to love her.

  Most incredible to me, given Raymond’s possessive nature, was that Priscilla travelled every year with Raymond to Paris where the couple met up with the Vicomte, her ex-husband. Being a Catholic, the Vicomte still considered Priscilla to be his wife. (In order to marry him, my mother said, Priscilla had to convert to Catholicism.) I loved his nickname for her: ‘my little cork’ – although why he called her this was not explained.