Priscilla (24 page)

After a reception in Moore Street and a dinner at the Carlton Grill, the couple were driven twenty miles to Nonsense House, a small rented property near Slough, not far from Denham Studios, which was to be their base for the next three months. As the chauffeur carried in the same battered suitcase which Gillian had lugged from Rue de Clichy, John said with a satisfaction that infuriated Gillian: ‘Well, we're spliced.'

The word snapped something. ‘Spliced,' she said, tugging off the ring and throwing it out of the bedroom window. ‘John looked stunned. I realised I had hurt him. And said “Why do you use that word?” I rushed outside to search for the ring, John lumbering behind. I needed a torch as it was dark.'

The chauffeur appeared, alerted by the commotion. He wondered what they were doing rootling through the bushes – ‘instead of being in bed as newly-weds'. It took forty-five minutes on all fours to find the ring, ‘by which time we were too exhausted for anything but sleep'.

‘Let's go to bed,' Gillian said. ‘Tomorrow is another day. It can't be worse.'

She took possession of the master bedroom and installed John in the second front bedroom. ‘After all, it was the agreement.' Her wedding night turned out to be even more chaste than Priscilla's.

Night after night German bombers thrummed over Nonsense House. The rooftops of Slough were jaggedly black against the copper glow. A single bomber could start up to 150 fires in a three-mile radius. The raging flames kept Gillian in ‘a state of permanent tiredness, living on one's nerves, smoking too much, going out most nights'. She wrote in her notebooks of the long months that followed: ‘I was very unhinged during those war years,' and cited as contributing factors her strange marriage and her brutal separation from
Vertès. But another reason for her frenetic behaviour was ‘my worry over Priscilla – no news at all from her'.

She shared her worries with Vertès, who had got in touch, sending a hurt note from the Waldorf Astoria after learning that she was to be married. ‘You're starting a new life. You must try and distance yourself from me. I've already taken enough years of your life.' Gillian's reply is lost, like all her letters to him, but in it she appears to have offered up the example of Priscilla's fidelity to Robert as a model to which she could aspire, from now on, in her relationship with Vertès: she could be faithful to Vertès despite her marriage.

Vertès, for whatever reason, was doubtful. He wrote back on Christmas day: ‘It's so touching, it's so good and kind of you to assure me of your fidelity . . . but do not compare yourself to Priscilla, mon amour chérie, because Priscilla does not like physical love. But you, you cannot change your temperament.'

49th Parallel
kept John away at the studios during the day. For three months, Gillian sat in sullen silence at Nonsense House, glaring with loathing at her smouldering surrounds. She was back in her own country, but it did not seem so to her. Stranded at the end of a long lane in this ‘aptly named' house with a pond, and looked after by a dour couple with eyes like black olives, Gillian felt herself to be ‘this Brit-Frog', a foreigner with an accent. ‘Through my marriage I had gone back to square one again. I was a phantom wife.' What pained her most was the total disregard for France of the people she met. ‘I suppose they felt that France had let England down and now they were left alone to face the Nazis.'

Determined to maintain a connection to France, Gillian visited the Labour Exchange after she and John moved to London in the New Year. ‘I said I wanted to work for the Free French. The woman said in the bossy way of civil servants, “Mrs Sutro, you can't pick and choose. You'll be put where you're most use.”' Somehow Gillian landed up in censorship and was given an exciting ‘black list' of people to report on. The outgoing French mail was dumped on her desk, any mention of bomb damage to be censored in case the enemy
gained possession of the mailbags. The letters were mainly from the wives and sweethearts of soldiers and sailors posted abroad. ‘They all reflected sadness, fear, loneliness.'

Their sentiments reinforced Gillian's sense of isolation. ‘As well as missing my friends, I longed to speak and hear French.' In her lunch breaks, she tore back on the number 25 bus to the two-room, first-floor flat which John had rented in Avery Row. ‘I yearned to sit again at the Dôme, Deux Magots, Café de la Paix.' She made herself a Nescafé and put an old French record on her portable gramophone, which had to be wound up like a clock. Chewing a biscuit and sipping her instant coffee on the sofa, she listened to Josephine Baker in her childish voice sing ‘J'ai deux amours, mon pays et Paris'; or Maurice Chevalier, ‘Paris, reine du monde'. Turning back the hours.

And in the evenings haunted the bars and lower ground floor restaurants of the expatriate French: Le Petit Club Français, Prunier's, the York Minster, Le Coq d'Or, Les Ambassadeurs in Hanover Square. ‘I was avid for news of Paris. At the Petit Club Français one heard snippets of information.' The worst problem was said to be the heating. People wore wood-soled shoes. The black market flourished. Everyone bicycled, except the Germans; and the ‘collabos' who had cars.

The owner of the French pub in Soho, hearing Gillian speak French, once passed her a slice of contraband beef hidden under pommes frites (Graham Greene told her it must have been horse-meat: ‘Didn't it taste a bit sweet?'). With butter and margarine rationed, oranges and bananas never seen, and her weekends spent picking nettles in the ditches near Denham (‘thickened with powdered milk they made quite a good soup'), Gillian chewed the steak in silence, savouring the images that it released, of tournedos in the Café de Paris, hot chocolate and warm brioches at the Café Weber. ‘They brought back recollections of Priscilla and Vertès.'

Still with no news of Priscilla, Gillian resigned from the censorship department in October 1941 and went to work for the Free French secret service, or BCRA. She was employed as a bilingual steno-typist for £17 a month. The first premises were at no. 10 Duke Street. She had to be there at 9 a.m. to take
down words phonetically on a small machine. She never learned shorthand and had trouble deciphering what she had written. ‘A man hearing I could draw said I would be far more useful in their cartographic section.'

At her art school in Paris, Gillian had learned the elementary rules of poster-drawing – invaluable for stencilling names – and was an old pro with tire-ligne, ruler and compasses. ‘The BCRA work required exactitude and preciseness.' Day after day, she stood over a map of the country the Germans had compelled her to leave, selecting and marking up targets for the RAF to bomb.

‘Bombing expeditions were based on exact locations of German munitions, hideouts, trains carrying food to Germany or loaded with stolen works of art, hangars where Stukas lay camouflaged, ready to tackle their next bombing of England. I would have cold sweats wondering if I had located the right target.'

Her target was at times no more than a rough plan originally drawn on lavatory paper or a ripped-off corner of restaurant table-paper. One night, from a crumpled sketch ‘brought back from France by a Free French parachutist who had found German munitions stocked there', Gillian had to stencil in ‘Aubagne' as a bombing target. The name was new to her. She perused the maps in the map-room, where the gloomy Madame Passy was in charge, and calculated the kilometres. There was a sense of fear and secrecy about these bits of paper.

Through her work for BCRA, Gillian came to know agents who parachuted into France, like Vertès's friend, the novelist Joseph Kessel. ‘In London,' Kessel wrote, ‘all the surviving leaders of the Resistance turn up sooner or later. Framed by the great bay windows of a Chelsea drawing-room, I talked with three men who had been sentenced to death, who smiled as they looked out on the trees in the garden, and who were going back to France to resume command of their group and turn into shadows once more.' In addition to Kessel, there was Gillian's boss, Colonel ‘Passy' (‘a tall, balding top-booted man'); Wing-Commander Edward Yeo-Thomas (‘The White Rabbit'); Pierre Brossolette (‘Brumaire'); the actor Claude Dauphin; the aviator Edouard
Corniglion-Molinier; the Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler (who worked at the Ministry of Information and whom Gillian met through Vincent Korda). Chief of operations was Colonel Roulier, who became ‘Rémy'. ‘Kessel m'a beaucoup parlé de vous,' he told her.

Gillian took advantage of her position. She was attractive, a Francophile, available. ‘While John was working on a film in Denham, I was carousing at night.' Several agents became lovers. ‘Corniglion loved me, so did Kessel; for the others, I was a beautiful girl of whom they were determined to obtain the favours. Some lovers overlapped when we moved from Avery Row to Lees Place. The prospect of death at any moment increased the sexual urge. One lived in a state of fatigue mingled with a sense of urgency.'

It was natural that Gillian should ask her lovers, when on their missions to France, to find out what had happened to Priscilla.

Of the French agents whom she charged with this task, none amused Gillian more than a pre-war friend of her husband's, Edouard Corniglion-Molinier. ‘He was a colonel serving in the Free French Airforce. Later, he became a general. A skilled pilot, a friend of de Gaulle and a shameless womaniser.' Gillian had met him at Wood Cottage, a weekend retreat near Denham which John rented after giving up the lease on Nonsense House. ‘My colonel was living in the next cottage with a French woman, Madame Roquemaire, who had been torpedoed and had her buttocks bitten by a shark.' A Rabelaisian character who considered himself irresistible, Corniglion-Molinier possessed what Gillian called ‘l'oeil rigolard' – the grinning eye. Witty, with a humorous face, he knew how to make a woman laugh, and how to seduce. ‘I don't think he failed when he set himself a goal.' He succeeded with Gillian.

He invited her to Claridge's. The hotel – a convenient short walk back to Avery Row – offered quite a cheap three-course meal. The head waiter was a sturdy Frenchman, and doted on Gillian, who always sat at the same table and treated the place as her bistro du coin.

Life was never dull with the Colonel, who talked non-stop. ‘He told me that he had a weakness for English girls, and that virgins smelled of shrimp as they never used or possessed a bidet.' He was proud of his penis which, he
proclaimed, had served him well. ‘It was a quite memorable one because of its slight curve and perfect size. “Très rare, et très apprécié” – these revelations delivered during meals at Claridge's.'

Even more than to seduce women, the Colonel loved to fly. Gillian knew of his operations to France. She called in a favour.

‘As I was worried about her, I told him about Priscilla who had married a Frenchman but who had kept her British nationality. As far as I knew, she was still in Paris, although her husband had some chateau in Normandy. Edouard thought my friend was in a bad position as the Nazis had brought in a decree stating that hospitality given to Britishers, military or civilian, had to be declared at the Kommandantur before 20 October 1940. After that date, anyone harbouring a Britisher without informing them would be shot. I told Edouard about the weedy husband and the brother and sister-in-law. I felt sure they would denounce my friend! “In that case,” Edouard said, “she'll have been interned in the Besançon camp for Britishers.”

‘“Are you sure?”

‘“Quite sure,” he said. “Hope she's not Jewish.”

‘“No, she's the sort of girl Germans go for – blue eyes, fair hair, tall, with a marvellous figure.”

‘“Why didn't she come to England?”

‘“She loved Paris and has many friends there.”

‘“She's made her choice,” Edouard said, “and can only blame herself for whatever happens. So stop worrying about her.” He gave me a sexy look. “Worry about me instead.”'

Gillian wrote in her notebook: ‘Although I was not to know the facts, I was right to be worried about her fate.'

PART THREE

17.
BESANÇON

Priscilla was woken by the bell ringing. Bleary-eyed, she opened the door of her apartment and saw a gendarme standing in the freezing darkness. He asked her to pack a suitcase.

‘What have I done?'

‘We have orders to pick up all British subjects.'

He had received his instructions at 5 a.m. All over France that morning, without warning and with military efficiency, the same procedure was taking place – wherever a woman with a British passport had registered with the Kommandantur.

The gendarme allowed Priscilla to dress in private. From her bedroom, she quickly telephoned her sister-in-law, Guy's wife Georgette, who was back in Paris. As Priscilla replaced the receiver, she could not help regretting that had she stayed the night with the Scarlet Pimpernel, as he had pressed her to do, she might have avoided this trouble. ‘The news would be all over Paris in a few hours and I could surely have got down to the south and perhaps to England, given sufficient warning.' She packed into her suitcase the book she was reading, culottes, a pullover, ski gloves – it was bitingly cold; on the way out she grabbed her fur coat and handbag.

The blackout was still in force and she followed the beam of the gendarme's torch down the stairs to a waiting car. She could make out people watching
in silence from windows and balconies. The gendarme said nothing and neither did Priscilla as they drove to a building which she recognised: the police station where she walked each day to sign her name.

Inside, chaos. ‘Women of all sorts and sizes, of all colours and of all nationalities were gathered there. They had only one thing in common: a British passport.' She presented hers to a policeman, who took down the details. Priscilla was one of 1,965 British women recorded by the Germans as living in the Paris area and arrested on 5 December 1940. Approximately only a quarter had been born in England.