Priscilla (11 page)

A young woman stood in a haze of ascending steam. At the sight of Priscilla, she ran forward.

It astounded Priscilla to see Gillian, a plump schoolgirl when they last met. Dressed in black, slender, with dark wavy hair, she had grown beautiful.

They embraced. Priscilla introduced Robert, but he left at once. Gillian had not caught his name. ‘Who was that?' Her voice was lower-pitched than Priscilla remembered and she spoke English with an accent.

‘A Frenchman I met on the boat.'

‘He's very good-looking' – which surprised Priscilla. Robert had been an attentive listener, but old enough to be her father.

Gillian grabbed Priscilla's suitcase and they descended into the Métro. A whirl of hot air rushed up to meet them. Compounded in its suffocating gust were the smells of a Paris she had not seen for five years.

‘You haven't told your parents about me, have you?'

‘Of course not.'

Gillian had booked Priscilla into a ten-franc hotel on the Boulevard Raspail. In a bare top-floor room reeking of drains, she watched Priscilla unpack her few belongings.

‘What is going on?'

Priscilla looked at her with grave eyes and out it came. How Doris had given up the mews house in Kensington – how Priscilla had moved in with Tom Ewage-Brown, who seemed surrounded with glamour to her inexperienced eye – ‘I was so lonely and I hated not having a home' – how he wanted to marry her – ‘he made me think he loved me' – how he had not believed in using a sheath – ‘having a toffee with the paper on' – how she was pregnant.

Priscilla was calm, but Gillian knew what she must be feeling. ‘What are you going to do?'

Priscilla stared to one side. ‘I'm going to have an abortion.'

‘But I thought you wanted children.'

‘I did. But not this one.' Then her composure cracked. ‘Chou-chou, I am so sorry to bother you with all my worries.'

The following afternoon, Gillian accompanied Priscilla to the address that Doris had written down. She promised to wait in a café opposite.

Her long legs moving in her tweed skirt, Priscilla climbed a staircase to a door on the third floor and pressed the bell and when a voice called out she entered. Smoke rose in a grey spiral in a minute vestibule. There was a divan, a table with a jug of water on it, two white chairs. In one of them sat a small owl of a man, fortyish.

He wanted to know who had given his name. Her mother. He washed his hands and asked her to lie down on the divan and open her legs. He examined Priscilla, still holding his cigarette. When was her last period? Why didn't she keep the child? She was very pretty. How old was she? Twenty. He examined her at length.

She re-dressed. He mentioned the price. Gillian had advised Priscilla to say that she was a dancer from the Folies Bergère and that her lover had disappeared and that she had very little money.

He lit a new Gauloise. So a dancer. He would operate if necessary, but he preferred to try another method first, which would be cheaper for her. He asked her to exercise and dance a lot – ‘to shake it down'. She was to come back in two weeks. He repeated how attractive she was. If she had no money, he hoped that she would be his petite amie.

Priscilla rejoined Gillian in the café. ‘I think I could use a cognac.' Before it arrived, she went to the lavatory and vomited.

Both for the woman and for the person carrying it out, abortion was a crime punishable in France by five years in prison. The only way for a girl in Priscilla's position to deal with her problem was dangerous and clandestine. When Gillian had helped to make her parents' double-bed four years before, Victorine, the girl who cleaned for the Hammonds, whispered how she had spent the night trying to bring on a fausse couche with a metal knitting-needle.

Posters for maladies vénériennes covered the walls of the Métro couloirs; quick relief, discrétion absolute, prix modestes. No telephone numbers, only the names of train stations in sleazy quarters. Priscilla had never lingered before these posters, passing on quickly to the sweet machines that offered Pastilles Vichy. She had no false illusion about what she was planning. ‘One couldn't have such an operation without one's health being impaired.'

Once more, Gillian saw it as her duty to distract Priscilla. They walked in the Jardin de Luxembourg; fed pigeons; sat in the Café Dôme, where the waiters knew Gillian and let both girls stay for ages in front of a glass of lemonade. They walked and talked.

Gillian was now an art student. In the autumn of 1932, after Priscilla left for London, she had enrolled at Atelier Dupuis off Place Saint-Sulpice. Still determined to be an actress, until that day arrived she was scraping a living by selling her drawings to fashion magazines. The trouble was that magazines paid per sketch – not enough to fund the independence she craved.

At home, nothing had changed. Her mother continued to shove her father's bankruptcy in his face. Gillian could not wait to leave their orbit and marry.

Unburdened, Priscilla longed to hear about Gillian's love life. ‘I wonder if our tastes are still as different? Do you still dislike dancing and good-looking young men?'

First love for Gillian had been a disaster, too. She had lost her virginity, aged sixteen, to a French aristocrat in September 1933. At a party given by the editor of
Le Matin
, she met Yves de Constantin, baron, writer, member of the
Cour des Comptes. Unmarried, forty years old, with his first novel just out, he had seemed a judicious choice.

He had spotted Gillian from across the room and made a beeline. How lovely to meet a true jeune fille, he said, exhaling a black gold-tipped Muratti.

She looked him in the eye. ‘This jeune fille is sick of being one.'

‘How very interesting,' and wrote down her name in a leather agenda. They must get together.

He invited her to dine at his apartment in Avenue de Tourville, a tiny room crammed with filing cabinets and a sofa-bed. He showed her his first editions on rag paper of Pierre Frondaie, all signed by the maître, and served veal. Halfway through dinner, he knelt while Gillian was chewing on a piece of gristle. ‘Do you want to do it tonight?'

She stared at him, thinking how idiotic he looked. For one awful moment his clipped moustache reminded Gillian of her father. But she knew how hard it was for a pretty, unconventional girl in the early 1930s ‘to find someone suitable for the deflowering task'. She nodded.

Gillian followed the Baron to the sofa-bed. He wore carpet slippers and his trousers, she noticed, hung in a pouch. Moments after what she called ‘his excavation efforts', Gillian stood in the bathroom doorway and observed him on all fours scouring the bed. ‘No blood,' he said. ‘None at all.'

‘At least you've still got nice clean sheets.'

After her session with the Baron – ‘my aristocrate dépuceleur' – Gillian felt sore for a few days. ‘Suffering from piles?' her father enquired.

Since then Gillian had had other boyfriends. The most serious was a married Hungarian artist who was twenty-two years older, but he saw her only when it suited him. Determined to bring him to heel, she had loftily declared that she would break off their affair unless his behaviour changed. At the time of Priscilla's return to Paris, Gillian remained in limbo, waiting for her married lover to get back in touch, while enjoying a passade with a young financial adviser she had met on holiday in Houlgate. But her love life would always be complicated. ‘My mother was highly sexed,' she reminded Priscilla. ‘I inherited her genes.'

As for the tall, thin man that Gillian had seen alighting at the Gare Saint-Lazare – who, before the week was out, had telephoned the Hammonds to ask for Priscilla's number – Priscilla had nothing to worry about there. Robert, even if old enough for her taste, looked too distinguished, too charming, too much an arch-Catholic of la vieille France.

And hadn't they sworn never to let a man come between them? ‘Pris and I had a code of conduct which entailed no poaching on each other's premises.' The two friends had made this promise five years earlier, on the eve of Priscilla's departure from Paris. Gillian would stick to their pact. It is less clear whether Priscilla did so.

Priscilla's new friend Robert ought to have been pleased to be back in Paris. He disliked his absences from the Bourse. His habit was to spend two hours each afternoon at the stock exchange, preserving the modest fortune that he had inherited from his late father. But he felt restless since returning from England.

He did not have a camera or he would have taken a photograph of Priscilla as she embraced her girlfriend on the platform. He began to ask himself if he was in love. He told himself not, but why had she not contacted him? How could he get hold of her? What was her English friend called? Ham – or some such name. He looked through the telephone book and found it. Gillian's father angrily passed the receiver over to Gillian, who provided the number of Priscilla's hotel. That evening Robert invited Priscilla to dinner.

Priscilla felt a surge of relief to hear his voice. Wanting to dress well for him, she put on her stylish green frock with pockets – her only other item of clothing. At 7.30 p.m. a taxi appeared outside the hotel, Robert inside.

He lived on the other side of the Seine behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, in a modern block like a barracks at the bottom of Rue Nollet. They took a lift to the sixth floor. He had forgotten his keys and a little old woman opened the door and looked at Priscilla with curiosity.

Robert ushered Priscilla into his bed-sitting room; small, with brown velvet curtains, brown carpet, a bureau. He explained that he shared the
apartment with the elder of his two surviving brothers, Guy. His fingers were very long and white as he poured Priscilla an orange juice – he had not forgotten her aversion to alcohol. He worried that she might have telephoned while he was visiting his mother in Sainteny. ‘I thought I might have lost you for good!'

Priscilla had done all the talking on the boat-train and had not assessed Robert clearly before. Without his hat and coat on, he no longer resembled a slaver. He had jet black hair, amber eyes and a dignified face, like a clean-shaven George V. His grey flannel suit, tailored in London, was cut immaculately. His best features were his hands. Priscilla sipped her orange juice, examining them. She had never seen nicer ones. They were slender and well cared for, like a Byzantine saint's. She began to feel less shy and afraid.

Guy, four years older, bustled in with his long-standing girlfriend, Georgette Graeff. She was a dressmaker, originally from Alsace, in her mid-thirties. Her hair was dyed blonde and she had kind, large brown eyes. Georgette and Guy had been together fifteen years, despite his family's disapproval. Priscilla learned that Robert's widowed mother was opposed to the idea of their marrying, but Guy refused to give Georgette up: instead, he had taken the dramatic move of rejecting his birthright in favour of his middle brother Georges, the only son with children. Georges had assumed the position as head of the family and inherited the family's main chateau in Sainteny.

The old woman announced dinner. They went into a dining room full of heavy marble-topped furniture. Over a reasonably good meal, Priscilla's confidence grew and her voice relaxed. Guy had been at the races with Georgette – who groaned that he spent as much time gambling on the horses as Robert spent at the Bourse. Priscilla liked her. She did not like Guy. He was cross and rude to Georgette, and fussed over Robert as if he was his mother.

Coffee was taken in Guy's room, which was furnished identically to Robert's, except that the carpet and curtains were green. Georgette questioned Priscilla about England. Was the food in England so appalling? Priscilla defended dishes like porridge, suet pudding and mint sauce. Robert grimaced. Mint sauce was the limit.

The brothers' talk was about war. There was an atmosphere of unease in Paris that March; in England, it had been less noticeable. Robert had volunteered in 1916, when he was seventeen. He feared another European conflagration, in which France and England were certain to be beaten. Priscilla could tell that his experience in the trenches had marked him.

To change the topic, she asked Robert if he travelled much. That set him off on his favourite subject: every summer he and his other brother Georges visited Hungary where they had friends who owned estates teeming with pheasants and wild boar. His greatest pleasure was hunting, he said.

At the end of the evening, Robert took Priscilla back to her hotel in a taxi. She found him soothing and different from the juvenile South African she had left behind in London. He promised to telephone the next day. He left without trying to kiss her.

Robert invited Priscilla to see the Bluebell Girls at the Folies Bergère. The dance troupe comprised twenty girls who looked just like Priscilla, all blonde, British and over five foot nine. They were choreographed by an Irish woman, Margaret Kelly, whose title on the programme – ‘Maîtresse de Ballet' – brought back memories of Madame Nesterovsky.

Another evening, they sat in a boîte in Rue Marbeuf and listened to a violinist play a Hungarian romance.

A fortnight passed.

Robert took her dancing. He was an indifferent dancer. He had no idea that Priscilla was following the orders of an abortionist.

It was obvious to Gillian, joining the couple under the Coupole, that Robert was falling for Priscilla. Also, that Priscilla was no longer concerned about their age difference. ‘I have never met anyone so gentle and sweet.'

One night at Jimmy's, among the couples dancing was a tall, wafer-thin woman. She wore a beaded, Chinese style copper-coloured dress and a matching skull-cap on her cropped hair. Priscilla asked the waiter who she was. The Georgian princess Roussy Mdivani. The sight of her on the dance floor, bare feet in flat gold sandals, provoked Priscilla to jump up and lead
Robert, who did not seem to mind how foolish he looked as his pigeon feet struggled to follow the tango. The scene was unbearable to Gillian: her young friend who had wanted to be a dancer, who had wanted a baby, dancing away her child. ‘Pris danced non-stop hoping to bring a miscarriage. We left the nightclub at five in the morning feeling exhausted.'