Priscilla Read online

  My cousin Tracey’s house near Goodwood dated from the 1960s. One wall was of plate glass giving a view over a long lawn. On another, I recognised Vertès’s portrait of Priscilla. Tracey had laid out on the dining-room table Priscilla’s blue scrapbook and two of her alligator handbags. Also on the table was a shallow cardboard vegetable box containing the papers that Tracey had transferred from the padded chest.

  What could be in those photographs, letters and manuscripts which Priscilla had concealed beneath the television set, directly under Raymond’s unforgiving nose? (‘I remember that chest,’ my mother said. ‘I thought she kept rugs in it.’). I knew from researching a biography how ancient documents can disappoint.

  For the rest of that morning, I read through Priscilla’s scrapbook. Then after lunch I started going through the box. I picked out a black and white photograph, turned it, and found myself staring at an arrestingly beautiful woman who lay sprawled on a loose bed of hay. I had little trouble recognising Priscilla, who was naked from the waist up.

  There were other photos, no less sensational. A chateau. A beach. And portraits of men. One man, in tight swimming trunks and his youthful face masked in a pair of brass goggles, smilingly held up an eel. On the back someone had written: ‘Sainte-Maxime, October 1940’ – that is to say, two months before Priscilla, or la Vicomtesse Doynel de la Sausserie, was arrested and interned by the Germans. But who was this swimmer?

  And this other young man on a ski slope, lying back on the snow and embracing Priscilla – on this occasion wrapped in a fur coat? And the leather-helmeted racing driver gripping the wheel of a Delahaye – ‘Pour toi, Pris, en souvenir de la Coupe de Paris’? And what about this older man, more educated-looking, podgier, in a double-breasted suit of pale grey worsted and wearing spats, who was photographed seated in a room beneath an Impressionist painting? Written in blue biro on the back, in English: ‘Well, here it is – your beloved open fireplace.’ But in what house was the brick fireplace, what city? None of the faces had addresses or names attached. The anonymity, I could not help feeling, was deliberate. The only identifiable face was a signed photograph of Robert Donat as Richard Hannay in The 39 Steps.

  I opened a folder of letters. There were about 150, dated from 1938 to 1947, the year before Priscilla married Raymond. The ones composed in English were mostly from Donat, who wrote in green ink in the last winter of the Second World War. ‘I wish I could undress you very slowly, very, very slowly indeed, and then be wonderfully sweet and kind to the wounds on your tummy, and dress you again in exquisite black-market undies, including sheer silk stockings, and send you back home safely to your mammie and grannie with a copy of Peter Quennell’s latest drivel – just to show you how platonic my love for you is.’ I read on. ‘Darling, where were you born, when, and above all why? Is that really you and are you really real? Can that extraordinary face have been achieved by accident or design? What does it all mean?’

  The majority of the letters were in French, in half a dozen different hands, written earlier to Priscilla when she was at large in wartime France. Like Donat’s, these were surprisingly passionate and tender – and from a period when it was always dangerous to speak your mind. It was astonishing that they had survived at all.

  Fugitives have to travel light – and yet Priscilla had kept these photographs and letters. Had she carried them with her around France? The folder contained envelopes postmarked ‘Brittany’, ‘Paris’, ‘Annemasse’.

  Many were from Priscilla’s husband, le Vicomte Robert Doynel de la Sausserie. There were also love letters from a man who signed himself Emile, and who was cited in the divorce papers that I unfolded from a separate folder, some of which were dated 1943, some 1944, and some 1946, the year in which Priscilla’s first marriage was dissolved.

  In addition, there were letters from lovers named Daniel, Pierre and Otto. Without exception, they cast Priscilla in the role of Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina: a vulnerable, intelligent, sophisticated woman in need of saving. But without surnames or addresses, there was no way of tracking the lovers down, or of matching them with the faces in her collection of photographs. One thing was becoming clear, though: my aunt Priscilla appeared to be having a racy time in Occupied France.

  A few letters dated from after the war. I pulled out one, written in January 1946 from an American naval officer who was impatient to marry her, and containing this tantalising remark: ‘You told me all about your past, darling, and I loved you in spite of it, although if conservative Bostonians heard of it frankly they would be shocked. That was another reason why I thought we should live abroad for a bit; it would be better.’

  Another correspondent, an Englishman, had typed out and sent her the verse of a popular song:

  Oh, they call me Venal Vera,

  I’m a lovely from Geizera

  The Führer pays me well for what I do.

  The order of the battle

  I obtained from last night’s rattle

  On the golf course with a Colonel from HQ.

  I often have to tarry

  On the back seat of a gharry

  (It’s part of my profession as a spy).

  Whilst his mind’s on copulation

  I’m extracting information

  From a senior GSO from GSI.

  I had suspected my aunt of working for the Resistance. Could this be a reference to the sort of espionage that she carried out for them?

  Also in the cardboard box was a thick folder containing a browning bundle of typewritten pages. I leafed through them, but it was hard to concentrate on what I was reading – more or less everything that someone seeking to unravel Priscilla’s enigma could hope for: diaries, fragments of autobiography, medical records, her statement at Lewes County Court, letters (including an unsent one to Tracey), some twenty short stories, as well as the draft chapters of a longer book that Priscilla had begun to write, but not completed.

  I began reading the first chapter, and it became clear that the fiction was not fiction at all, and that what Priscilla had been striving to put down on paper, not merely in this novel but in her short stories, diaries and autobiographical fragments, was nothing less than an account of her years in France.

  I asked Tracey if I might take the box away.

  PART TWO

  6.

  STRANGE EXISTENCE

  Although I could not have written this book without Tracey’s box, I did find some riveting information about Priscilla’s upbringing by going to the more conventional source of my grandfather’s papers. These were lodged with the West Sussex Records Office in Chichester. From his diaries, correspondence and manuscripts, I formed a picture of Priscilla’s early years.

  She was born in the summer of 1916, nine months after a doctor explained the facts of life to her parents.

  Her father, thirty-one at the time, was teaching at Sherborne. His name was Stuart Petre Brodie Mais, which he pronounced as ‘Maize’ – and claimed was Saxon, meaning ‘sons of May’. But everyone knew him by his initials. Priscilla’s mother Doris, then twenty-four, was the pampered daughter of a retired major from Bath and a four-foot-ten-inch Scot of irrepressible efficiency who called everything and everyone ‘bonny’ – with the exception of her son-in-law. The marriage was a catastrophe from the start.

  SPB had met Doris at a tea dance four years earlier. The girl who stood before him in the Assembly Rooms was slim, with pale cheeks framed by a straight fringe of dark brown hair, a narrow oval face and pointed chin – and clustered about by young men. Up until then, at Oxford and in Tansley, where his father had the living, SPB had known only ‘girls of shop assistant type’. He became tongue-tied with sisters of fellow undergraduates. When Doris looked at him with her cat-grey eyes and pouting mouth, he strode up and demanded as many dances as she could spare. She gave him eleven.

  They danced again on New Year’s Eve at the Lansdown Cricket Club Ball. Doris wore a strawberry-pink frock and revealed a taste for schnauzers, biscuits, and gin. At some p
oint, she led him to a dark corner where, without warning, she kissed him. Her kiss overwhelmed him – he forgot, as he later wrote, everything. He looked into Doris’s eyes and holding her long thin hands which, he imagined, ‘bespoke a wealth of character and breeding’, uttered the seven words from which ensued the capital error of his life.

  ‘Does this mean that you’ll marry me?’

  Doris nodded. ‘If you want me.’

  They were married at St Anne’s Church, Oldland, in Gloucestershire, on 6 August 1913. The couple knew nothing about each other, just as they knew nothing about sex. At twenty-eight, SPB had married the first girl of his class that he had kissed. His innocence would be the driver of his torment, a fundamental blankness that remained to the end of his life and clouded his understanding of why people behaved as they did.

  SPB was a schoolmaster earning £150 a year and already in debt; furthermore, he could not take Doris back to Rossall, on the Lancashire coast, since the school did not employ married teachers. Major Snow, her father, had consented to the marriage on condition that SPB insure his life for £1,000 and settle it on Doris.

  His mother begged him to cancel the wedding. ‘You’re going to regret this all your life.’ Rather in the way that Major Snow shuddered to contemplate SPB, so had she formed an ‘ineradicable aversion’ to her prospective daughter-in-law (and after their marriage refused to have anything to do with her). She viewed Doris as a flibbertigibbet out to snare her only child and sensed, correctly, that the pair had no common interests. The Snow family regarded reading as a waste of time (‘I always think that books spoil the look of a house,’ said Mrs Snow). Doris hated walking and was not demonstrative about scenery. She liked playing the pianola, billiards and bridge, otherwise basking in the glow of male attention. She did not like cricket.

  Doris at least had the gumption to try and call off the engagement. A week before their marriage, SPB took his headstrong fiancée to a cricket match from which she bolted. She said she was going home, hated the sight of him, and wanted no more to do with him. It was his last chance and he should have snatched it. But SPB was by then obsessed with the thought of their soon-to-be-life-together, and threatened suicide if rejected.

  The extent of his mistake was revealed on honeymoon in Porlock Bay. He dragged his new wife through thick bracken to watch the staghounds at Cloutsham, Dunkery and Exford. They paddled up Badgworthy Water to the Doone Valley, went bathing at Porlock Weir, climbed to the top of Selworthy Beacon, caught an excursion steamer to Ilfracombe to see his aunt, and watched polo in the grounds of Dunster Castle. The one thing they did not do, according to Vivien who told me this, along with other extraordinary details, was to make love.

  There were two explanations. Doris had her period, which invariably caused her agonies, said Vivien. ‘Ma was used to lying on the sofa and being brought cups of tea and biscuits, with much love and empathy. On the other hand SPB knew nothing of such things, never having had anything to do with young women and their monthly sufferings. So the honeymoon was a disaster, because one of these periods occurred after a week, with Ma expecting tea and sympathy in the hotel lounge, and her adoring husband – who had no sympathy for such lack of ‘oomph’ – going off into the countryside to walk and explore and chat with anyone he met.’

  The second reason was that neither partner knew how to consummate a marriage. SPB wrote that his father had preserved his silence on the topics of money, God, and sex. Major Snow seems to have been just as non-communicative with his daughter. Vivien told me: ‘Ma allegedly had no idea how babies were created, and SPB, apparently, was equally ignorant of the “how”. It took three years before they finally sought advice about procreation, and on 12 July 1916 my sister Priscilla Rosemary Mais was born in Sherborne.’

  SPB’s novels were so autobiographical that they gave me additional information which I did not receive from Vivien. I learned that on the day of Priscilla’s birth he spent the morning at school to keep his mind from brooding. ‘From nine to one I taught, speaking all the time, trying to concentrate on quadratic equations and Army English. I went up at lunchtime and was told to disappear to four o’clock. I went for miles on my bicycle seeing nothing, my mind a blank, except for the ever-recurring sentence: “Oh, God! grant that it may be all right.”’

  He was shown Priscilla in her cot on his return. She had been born at half past one. ‘She is beautifully proportioned and has large blue eyes and regular features.’

  Still, his eldest child made him afraid. The first time he held her, he found it impossible to believe that this new life was part of himself, ‘something which would in the future regard him as her father’. He seems to have infected Priscilla with his fear, planting in her a fundamental insecurity even before she came to consciousness.

  A fortnight on: ‘She has an extraordinary amount of individuality: unluckily, she is terribly frightened of any sudden noise. This must be inherited . . .’ He stood over Priscilla for hours, trying ‘to probe into the future for what it held in store for her’.

  In the summer of her birth, a local fortune teller in Sherborne supplied one of two predictions for Priscilla. I found it among her papers, written in an upright pencilled hand. ‘Generally shrewd, deep thinker, critical and alert. These are her main characteristics. Very secretive, she would make a safe friend to entrust confidences to. But to these qualities must be added a too ardent love nature . . . short journeys are good, especially when unexpected and require to be taken at short notice . . . Her happiest time will come after marriage, which should come early in life and probably to a man older than herself who will be devoted and most kind and generous to her . . . The death of father will end much disagreement.’

  The second prediction took verse form.

  Priscilla was three months old when a former pupil of SPB at Sherborne sat down in his room at Sandhurst and composed a poem to mark her birth. Its author was eighteen and unknown. Published two years later, ‘To Your Daughter’ introduced Alec Waugh’s sole volume of poetry, Resentment. By then, Waugh, who became a sort of muse for Priscilla, was exceptionally famous.

  In the Bodleian Library in Oxford, I ordered up Resentment. Published at 3/6d in July 1918, it was a virgin copy: the pages not yet cut. A young librarian took a table knife out of a drawer and sawed the poem open.

  Dedicated to Priscilla’s parents, ‘To Your Daughter’ is long and rather gloomy. A few lines give the flavour:

  And dust’s the end of every song . . .

  Yet happiness is not life’s aim.

  Unflinching you will face the truth,

  And others not so nobly wise

  Will lay before your feet their youth,

  Their hopes, and their heart’s treasuries.

  So though you deem the gift of life

  Better not had, those others torn

  And bleeding in the throes of strife

  Will thank their God that you were born.

  Priscilla’s first home was a new semi-detached red-brick house overlooking Sherborne Castle, called ‘Coldharbour’. SPB rented it for £35 a year. He had accepted a teaching job at Sherborne after turning down an offer to be the Government Inspector of Schools in Ceylon, mainly out of pressure from his mother-in-law. The jerry-built house was crammed with ugly oak furniture (‘the monstrosities of Maple’) and a Persian carpet that Mrs Snow had bought as a wedding gift, and became associated in SPB’s mind with a period of his life that made him flinch.

  The only child of a preoccupied vicar and a reluctant mother who farmed him out to elderly relatives, SPB knew very little about how to be a husband and a father. This was his first experience of family life and he was shell-shocked. Alec Waugh spent a weekend with SPB, Doris and the four-month-old Priscilla, afterwards describing to his father Arthur the amazing difference between the Waughs’ home life and the chaos of the Mais household. ‘Mais rolls down to breakfast swearing and shrieking. “Your shoe is undone,” says Doris. “Do it up,” says Petre and puts his foot on he
r knee . . .’

  It did not help that Mrs Snow visited often. A son had died young and she found it a burden to be separated from her only daughter. Her visits increased after ‘bonny’ Priscilla’s birth. A photograph in Priscilla’s album shows a tiny woman with round wire spectacles and door-knob cheeks. She has cleared any smile from her face. Her son-in-law longed for her departure, but she seemed to take root.

  An admirer of Thomas Hardy, SPB was one day proud to report that he had spent the morning with the novelist’s wife. Mrs Snow’s acid response was: ‘A most unpleasant and unhealthy-minded writer.’ She accused SPB of being selfish in buying a bicycle: he was no longer a carefree bachelor. ‘You must learn to save for the sake of the house.’ She commented on the size of his appetite, his bad manners and untidiness, and irritated him into saying nasty things to Doris that he did not mean – until the day arrived when Doris, adopting Mrs Snow’s nagging Scots accent, declared that her husband seemed to love the countryside more than he loved his wife.

  Her parents’ antics were Priscilla’s bedtime stories. How SPB walked and biked and ignored Doris, preferring his precious Downs; how Doris had gone off with one of his pupils. Mainly, it was SPB in the wrong – selfish, obsessive, spendthrift.

  ‘Authors as a rule are much better in their books than they are in real life,’ SPB wrote in Rebellion – a novel that he managed to complete in the first fortnight of 1917 while staying with Priscilla at Alec Waugh’s home in North London. This was also Doris’s opinion.

  What Doris was too naïve or inexperienced to recognise was her husband’s predisposition to manic depression. The Downs were not an escape from her; he needed them in order to re-enter himself.

  There are people who walk into a room and immediately hijack it. At Oxford, SPB had been a cross-country running Blue. Alec Waugh remembered him striding through the Courts at Sherborne with a pile of books under his arm, as though limbering up for a marathon. Writers who had been his pupils looked back on him as their best teacher; he fired in them a passion for plays, poems and novels, and gave them a warm and friendly shove into becoming authors themselves. But his energy was fuelled by a bipolar disorder that remained undiagnosed until 1964 and rigged his sails so as to be swelled with any gust of enthusiasm – and to be emptied just as abruptly. ‘He had overflowing enthusiasm, but very little ballast,’ the Master of Sherborne wrote in 1917 after sacking him.