Priscilla (17 page)

Readers enticed by the image of a woman advertising ‘Madame Schiaparelli for the blue hour' had no idea that this figure was the twenty-three-year-old Vicomtesse Doynel de la Sausserie. Priscilla modelled for Gillian throughout 1939: in hat and veil; wearing gloves; in a violet evening dress with puffed shoulders.

Priscilla had been chaste two years; Gillian anything but. During those afternoons when Priscilla posed for her, they came clean about their private lives.

Gillian was leading the kind of existence – free, adventurous, with no taboos – which in less than a year the Vichy government would condemn for having caused the fall of France. In the summer after Priscilla's abortion, she had contracted gonorrhoea from a British lieutenant-commander whom she had met on holiday in Saint-Jean-de-Luz. He had come up to her when they were having coffee: ‘I feel you don't like me.'

‘You're too classy,' she said clumsily. Anyway, she was in love with her married Hungarian artist. But Gillian was also her mother's daughter. She never stopped believing that ‘un homme et une femme qui couchent pour la première fois, ça peut-être de la dynamite.'

For months afterwards, her mother questioned Gillian. Had she heard from that charming naval officer?

‘No, nor do I wish to.'

‘She only likes dagoes,' her father said.

Gillian laughed. She longed to answer: ‘Dagoes haven't given me the clap.' Instead, she said: ‘That's right. Only dagoes.'

Her nightmare, Gillian told Priscilla, was to be caught by her father behind
the curtain, straddling the bidet while sluicing herself with permanganated water. This needed to be done twice a day and the bidet scrubbed with disinfectant. The treatment went on for three months and to pay for it Gillian had to persuade her Aunt Muriel to give her the post office money that Muriel was saving for Gillian's twenty-first birthday.

But she had infected her married lover, Marcel Vertès. In a Paris museum, he slapped her twice to relieve his feelings.

Vertès had been in Budapest when he started ‘peeing razorblades'. He sent Gillian a furious letter, the first he had ever written her, ordering her to go to a reputable doctor for treatment. Gillian destroyed it. She did, though, keep 600 of his subsequent letters. ‘From the day I met him in 1933 until his death in 1961 we loved each other, we hurt each other, we lost each other and found each other again, each of us living different adventurous lives, but never stopping thinking about each other. That sort of passion does not go with marriage.' In its humid sexual nature and pathological jealousy, Gillian's twenty-eight-year affair with Vertès was everything that Priscilla's virginal marriage with Robert was not. But in their own ways, both relationships were as important, as enduring.

Whether Vertès went to bed with Priscilla, as only much later Gillian decided he may have done, is impossible to say with certainty. The question is crucial because it led to so much more knowledge about Priscilla than would otherwise have been available. What is undeniable is that Vertès was a pivotal presence in both of their lives in the months up to the Occupation. It was during this period that he painted the portrait of Priscilla which hung at the bottom of the stairs at Church Farm.

If ever a man was likely to come between them, it was Marcel Vertès. Unknown in Britain, he is famous if at all for the Oscar he won in 1952 as costume designer for the film
Moulin Rouge
, about the artist Toulouse-Lautrec.

Vertès's work was frequently mistaken for Lautrec's. His talent was to remember a woman's body, still or in movement. Sinuous, sensual, executed at speed, his drawings were erotic without being sordid. In 1948, Vertès had
dinner in Paris with Lucian Freud and Christian Bérard at La Méditerranée and he drew ‘on some bits of paper tablecloth little girls sucking erected penises, very erotic and somehow not disgusting'. Gillian later tried to buy them, but was outbid.

Vertès was born in Budapest. His older sister advised him when he was fourteen: ‘Be a painter and you can have a studio filled with big couches covered with furs and naked ladies.' Aged seventeen, he worked for
Fidibus
, an erotic magazine, and for
Le Courier de Budapest
, drawing the faces of murderers and their victims. He went to the morgue to sketch their heads, and his friend Alexander Korda wrote the text. In 1919, in Vienna, he won a prize given by the Red Cross for his drawings of starving Austrian children, and met a Polish girl, Dora. In 1920, they left for Paris. They married in 1926; he was thirty-one, she twenty-four.

In Paris, he earned his living from drawings, paintings, magazine covers, book illustrations. In 1928, he illustrated Joseph Kessel's scandalous novel,
Belle de Jour
. Most of all, Vertès loved to draw Gillian, etching her outline on a piece of copper using an old-fashioned gramophone needle. There are numerous drawings of her in his letters. Gillian as naked centaur. Gillian sprawled across a hotel bed. Gillian sketching in an open book propped up by a man's penis, presumably the artist's. ‘Vertès's letters acted on me as an aphrodisiac, not well written but erotic and full of sperm juice.' The last time she saw him was at lunch at La Méditerranée in June 1961. After the meal, he
wrote to her: ‘Gill, qui a été inspiratrice de presque la totalité des dessins . . . ton ami qui t'aime, Marcel.'

Like SPB, Marcel Vertès was a loner who belonged to no movement – fragile, stubborn, moody, impatient. He had a springy walk, and when rattled one eyelid would twitch. If he loathed what he was looking at, he would say in an accented voice, ‘Interesting. Très intéressant.' He had said this to Gillian at their first meeting five years earlier.

In London at the time, Priscilla learned the details of Gillian's romance only on her return to Paris. The relationship had begun inauspiciously. Gillian wrote of that wintry afternoon in 1933: ‘Strange that encounters which are going to shape one's life don't seem so very important at the time.'

Oscar Kokoschka, the famous painter, had told Gillian to try her hand at fashion drawing; failing that, theatre decors or costumes – ‘but stop your
ghastly
nude drawings.' A composer friend of her parents agreed to write a letter to Vertès who had designed costumes for his operettas. Armed with this letter, Gillian had turned up at 5 p.m. at Vertès's studio in 78 Rue de la Faisanderie. She was sixteen. Vertès was thirty-eight and still married to Dora.

Gillian found herself standing before a brusque man, large glasses on his nose, shaving cream around his ears and on his head a bizarre round hat. There was a table covered with China inks. The telephone was hidden by copies of
Vogue
.

His green eyes examined her. They were pale, flecked with orange, and one eye was greener than the other. A small dog yapped at his feet.

She admired his drawings, she blurted; she needed advice.

‘I heard the sound of footsteps. Mrs Vertès appeared. A handsome middle-aged thick-set woman, a bit on the heavy side. Vertès did not bother to introduce us – anyway he had forgotten my name.'

Gillian sat stiffly staring at her shoes and the dog while a heated conversation took place in Hungarian. ‘We eyed each other for a few seconds, unaware that afternoon that the three of us were going to be involved in a long tug of
war which only death would end. After a glance at the girl in the shabby clothes, Mrs Vertès walked out. Nothing to fear from that shy little figure.'

After his wife had gone, Gillian showed Vertès her drawings. ‘I'm experimenting, trying to find my style.'

He flicked through them. ‘Interesting.' But her nudes were like firemen. Why had she picked on him to learn about fashion drawings? She had chosen the wrong man. In a gruff voice he said, ‘Come back when you have found your style,' and returned to his work.

She gathered up her portfolio, said goodbye and left. Kokoschka had been nicer.

Gillian was drawing in her room three days later when she heard ‘Dago on the phone!' and ran downstairs, wondering who it could be. Vertès. He apologised for having been so unpleasant and invited her to dinner next evening.

‘But I haven't found my style,' she said, taken aback by his volte-face.

‘Vous le trouvez. Come without it at eight o'clock, chez moi,' and rang off.

He had given her a meal in his studio. Dora was not present, only his dog.

After dinner he said: ‘You're not a virgin, are you?'

She looked at him, shocked. ‘No.'

‘Anyone at the moment?'

She shrugged. ‘One makes do.'

‘How old are you?'

‘Sixteen, nearly seventeen.'

Another evening, he took her to a café, his vile dog Billy pulling at the leash.

On the way home, they stopped before her building. To his surprise, she stayed rooted to the pavement, looking at him: ‘I would like . . .'

‘What?'

‘I would like you to embrace me,' she murmured.

He hugged her to him, kissing her on the nose in an extraordinarily innocent way.

She pressed the bell, ran upstairs.

‘What's funny?' he asked many months later.

She laughed, throwing a pillow at him.

‘Well, I went to see you to be my maître and I ended up being your maîtresse.'

Their affair was now in its sixth year.

Vertès had a Buick, black with tan leather seats. Hood down in the summer, he drove Gillian to an auberge in Ville d'Avray. ‘I was called Madame instead of the inevitable Mademoiselle which made us laugh. I always looked like a schoolgirl, une jeune fille bien élevée, Koestler called me.' Vertès said that Gillian was too young to smoke – her cigarettes had to be bought for her. But as Gillian crisply observed to Priscilla, she was not too young to bed.

The majority of their rendezvous were in maisons de passe. Paris was full of discreet places of assignation for couples without suitcases, the addresses passed around by word of mouth. Nothing from the façade indicated that the building was anything other than a respectable hôtel particulier.

Vertès's favourite maison de passe was in Rue Cambacérès. Gillian described to Priscilla her first visit. Her outfit: a tartan skirt, but no petit culotte underneath, exactly as Vertès had instructed. Her perfume: ‘Shocking', from a bust-shaped bottle that he had given her. A pretty blonde soubrette with white collar and cuffs ushered her into the lift. The small stylish room was furnished all in black. Headlights from passing cars lit up rose-coloured paper pompons, brushes filled with strands of hair, and two night tables, each with a napkin carrying the words: ‘Bless the love you owe your life'.

Gillian also went with Vertès to the notorious One-Two-Two in Rue de Provence. When his finances were low, they ended up in less grand establishments, smelling of cheap powder, where the madam asked, ‘C'est pour un moment ou pour l'après-midi?' There was a wash basin, a collapsible bidet hidden behind a ramshackle screen, thin walls. ‘We listened once to a couple next door making love. The woman said, “Fort, fort, trésor.”'

The madam always banged on the door if they overstayed their ‘moment'. Vertès used these places to gather material for his lithographs. Gillian said:
‘I would suggest other quarters that I had heard about. So we explored crummy rooms frequented by whores.'

One rainy night Gillian suggested the Panier Fleuri, the brothel where Robert had taken her and Priscilla. Both girls had longed to know what went on upstairs. Gillian was now able to report back. While she sketched Priscilla wearing a pair of Schiaparelli beach pantaloons, she revealed what she had seen.

Vertès escorted Gillian through a metal door and paid the fee, 30 francs for men, 20 for women. They climbed to the first floor. Lined along the corridor were eight portable bidets filled with water. Two women stepped out of a door, in long white cotton shirts and wearing black velvet masks, and quickly washed, wiping themselves with a serviette, and left as fast as they came.

‘This looks promising,' said Vertès, pushing Gillian after them.

They entered a crowded room smelling of tobacco ‘and wet dog'. A heavy-jowled man in a leather jacket sprawled across a couch, two women in his arms. On Gillian's right, a soldier, belt still on, made love standing up to a woman whose feet did not touch the ground. On the carpet, a man in a taxi driver's cap was spread on his back, a woman's mouth in his black pants. Gillian watched a blonde girl allow, ‘with an expression of tragic indifference', a couple to mount her from behind. Was she drugged?

Gillian felt ashamed, but also disturbingly excited. She leaned against Vertès, who put his arm on her shoulder. He slipped his hand under her bodice and cupped her breast with his palm. A warm flush burned through her. Soft, moist, every nerve taut, there on the couch right away, she could . . . But he removed his hand. Unappeased, humiliated, she turned on her heels. She tried to leave, but Vertès held her, whispering reassurances, and she stayed.