Priscilla (2 page)

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 hands 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.

My mother also told me that Priscilla was at one time engaged to the actor Robert Donat, whom I had seen in
The 39 Steps
, and yet this interested me less than her life in France, even if I did wonder why she had chosen Raymond over Donat.

Priscilla died in 1982, but her fate obscurely moved me. What had gone on in France? What had she done during the war? Why did she not return to England after getting out of the concentration camp(s)? Why did her father – by then a well-known author and broadcaster – never mention on the airwaves or to my mother the fact that his eldest daughter was isolated throughout the war in Occupied France? I pictured her crouched before an illegal radio-set in a Paris atelier, listening to my grandfather's voice on the BBC, speaking to the troops. Did he ever transmit to Priscilla a personal message that only she could interpret, like one of those mystifying coded messages to the Resistance, such as
Venus has a pretty navel
or
The hippo is not carnivorous
? Could Priscilla have been in the Resistance?

And what was the bond that existed between Priscilla and her first husband which compelled her to keep bobbing back to see him, despite the fact that she had remarried?

Raymond's first wife could not be mentioned. She had run off with his best man at the end of the Second World War, leaving Raymond to bring up their two small children. Raymond never forgave her and he never saw her again.

Priscilla was thirty-one when she married Raymond, and a nervous stepmother to Tracey and Carleton, who were six and four at the time. I knew from my mother how sorely Priscilla had wanted her own children, and how the lack of them was a disappointment. When in my forties, having children of my own, I tried to find out more about her, Tracey let me have Priscilla's haphazardly filled scrapbook. I did not suspect that even more intimate details were to come my way and that the scrapbook was but the first in a trail of unexpected discoveries which would give insight into Priscilla's thoughts and feelings at crucial moments in her life.

On the scrapbook's opening page, scissored out of the
Nursing Times
, was a studio portrait of myself at eighteen months. I had always felt a bond with Priscilla (and the times we sat together watching her television served to deepen it), but not until I saw this photograph did I appreciate how she must
have taken an interest in me from early on. Turning the stiff grey pages, I smelled her scent again.

The scrapbook contained articles which intensified Priscilla's mystique. She had ‘danced for Anna Pavlova' in the words of an obituary of her. In another cutting, from a pre-war fashion magazine, Priscilla was pictured
standing on fake snow, modelling Mainbocher's green gaberdine plus-fours. The most electrifying discovery was a report from the
Chichester Observer
that was pasted on the reverse page with Bassano's photograph of me, and referred to an incident that took place in 1950, seven years before I was born.

A woman who won 50,000 francs – about £50 – by backing a 50-1 outsider at a French race meeting and who bought a crocodile-skin handbag with the winnings was fined £35 with £2 costs at Lewes today for customs offences
.

Mrs Priscilla Rosemary Thompson of Church Farm, East Wittering admitted trying to smuggle the bag through Newhaven Customs and making a false declaration to Customs officers. She was said to have been formerly married to a Frenchman and to have escaped from a German concentration camp with papers provided by the Resistance movement
.

Then this:
Until France was liberated she lived the life of a hunted animal
.

The handbag reminded her of Paris before the war. The inside was black-lined and smelled less of alligator than of stale Chesterfields. In it she kept her cigarettes, reading glasses, green Hermès diary and pencil (‘You'll find a pencil more useful,' the shop-lady had said, ‘you can rub it out'). She carried it all the time. One cutting showed Priscilla at the Goodwood Fashion Parade, in a grey flannel suit, white beanie cap; and the bag over her shoulder.

Priscilla had bought it with Raymond's winnings from a horse race in Deauville. It was a time of crippling restrictions. Exchange Control was at its most severe. On 1 September 1950, she and Raymond landed back in Newhaven when a customs inspector approached.