Priscilla (29 page)

When the summons came, Priscilla did not have time to worry. She was shown into a small room and a young fair German in uniform greeted her curtly.

‘I am told that you are expecting a child.' He stared at her. ‘Are you quite certain of it?'

‘Oh yes,' in a feeble voice. ‘Absolutely certain.'

‘Very well. That being so, you will be free to go soon.'

Her legs could hardly carry her from the room.

Early in February, the loudspeakers interrupted a Schubert piano sonata and called out Priscilla's name: she was to report to the Kommandantur.

On the day of Priscilla's departure in spring 1941, she was searched. Her British passport was returned, plus her compact mirror and flashlight. She was handed two typed documents in German. The first entitled her to free transport by bus or train, and asked the authorities to allow her to travel unhindered. The second demanded that she present herself each day to the Mairie of her Paris neighbourhood – she was not allowed to take up residence in any ‘coastal region' – and listed six further orders.

Her husband did not know that she was coming home. But she no longer worried about the possibility of retribution on Robert or his family. Her thoughts were of Daniel, the Scarlet Pimpernel, who cared so much for her that he had risked his wife and children. A strange starved determination to start living spread through her. ‘I was hungry for pleasure.'

PART FOUR

18.
LONDON: OCTOBER 1944

An autumn evening, three years later – after the Nazis had left Paris. Gillian Sutro heard a taxi draw up outside her home in Mayfair. She pushed back the curtain and observed Priscilla step out.

‘She was carrying a suitcase, wearing a navy polka-dot frock. She was suntanned and looked beautiful. I rushed out and we fell into each other's arms. I still remember her first words, “Oh, it's good to see you. I got out just in time.” In the euphoria of our retrouvailles, I hadn't time to ponder her words.'

Jubilant, Gillian bustled Priscilla into the house, ‘a shoulder-bag swinging as she walked through our front door'. Priscilla begged for a cup of tea and collapsed on the sofa while Gillian boiled the kettle.

‘I asked Pris about her journey to England. Being British, she managed to get on to a military freighter. No seats. She sat on the floor, relieved to get away as the witch hunt had started.'

Priscilla could share her bedroom, Gillian said. ‘I told her that John had his own room,' and gave a summary of their marital situation as she helped Priscilla upstairs with her suitcase – ‘which I couldn't wait to open. It was packed with French couture clothes, Schiaparelli, Patou, metres of pure silk . . . which made my British clothes look all of a sudden rather dreary.' An ivory dress prompted Gillian to recount her excitement at discovering that this house,
5 Lees Place, had sheltered Elsa Schiaparelli before the war: ‘It was near her couture shop on Grosvenor Street.' And hanging up the frilly dress in the built-in cupboard, Gillian was carried back to those afternoons in Paris when she had sketched Priscilla modelling Schiaparelli's very latest designs for
Britannia
and
Eve
.

The war dissolved. They were two single girls, sharing secrets. ‘The bliss of seeing Pris again. She slept in my room – there were two beds. We talked and talked about our lives. It took us days, weeks to catch up on our mutual friends, news.'

Priscilla's arrival at 5 Lees Place had a tonic effect on Gillian's husband. Gillian's ugly beast stood looking at her and his thick lips grinned. Gillian noticed how Priscilla hugged him ‘as though she had known him all her life'. The two sat on the sofa while Gillian served drinks. ‘Pris had a sort of cat-like behaviour with men. She stroked John's hand as they talked. John was almost purring as Pris ran her hand over his hair in an absent-minded way. I had not seen her for five years. I had forgotten the caressing act which was second nature to her and which enchanted her admirers . . . I was delighted that John and my closest friend got on so well, as she was to be our guest while she sorted out her life. She stayed for quite a few months.'

I got out just in time
. Only much later did Priscilla's words keep coming back to Gillian. ‘This seemed to me at the time an odd thing to say. Why the hurry after the Nazi departure?' Gillian had used the same phrase in June 1940, when telling John about her exodus from France. ‘But what was Pris fleeing from? I didn't know exactly what was going on in France, except that there were a great many réglements de compte at the Libération. It was called the Epuration and sounded horrid. Women who had slept with Germans had their heads shaved and were paraded in the streets for all to see.' Sure enough, Gillian noticed a ‘roaring trade' in wigs on her return to Paris a few months later. ‘On a windy day I saw a woman clutching her mop of hair as though it were a hat. Une tondue.'

Even so, for the next forty-eight years Gillian chose to ignore Priscilla's words. ‘I loved Pris. We were childhood friends. Anyway, who am I to pass
judgement?' She thrust what Priscilla had said to the back of her mind. ‘I was so excited to see her after so long that her words did not penetrate me until later. But I never forgot them.'

Priscilla was evasive about her activities after her release from Besançon. On 3 December 1963, she stood up at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in London and, in an exercise intended to lay her life bare, condensed into a few lines the three and a half years following her internment. Normally such gatherings are confidential, but – extraordinarily – Priscilla wrote out her speech.

‘I went back to my flat in Paris and tried to make a go of my marriage on the rare occasions when I could see my husband but, in 1942, I decided I couldn't go on. I left home on my bicycle, leaving everything I possessed, and went to stay with friends. From then on until the end of the war I led a precarious existence with no money and false papers, unable to get a job or get a divorce. In 1943, I had a serious internal operation and again in 1944 I had another. When Paris was liberated I was repatriated.'

No mention of any Daniel, Emile, Pierre, Otto.

Nor do her father's diaries fill in the blank. SPB did not hear from Priscilla between May 1940 and October 1944. From what he wrote about her in his autobiography, he seems to have assumed that his daughter had remained interned all this while, either in Besançon or in Vittel; or perhaps she allowed him to go on believing this so that she would not have to account for her actions. Her sister Vivien told me, ‘She couldn't get away till the end of the war. I don't know what went on. There was absolutely no communication at all. No, that's not true. There was one call. I was staying with my grandma in Horsham. Her telephone number was Horsham 87 and I picked it up and said “Horsham 87”, and a man spoke a whole conversation in French. I said: “How did you know I spoke French?” He said: “Your voice is exactly like your sister's,” and he told me the news. She was living in the country, more or less all right.'

And yet she was not living with Robert at Boisgrimot, according to Jacqueline Hodey, the grocer's daughter: ‘After 1940, one never saw her again.'
As far as Hodey and the Carers and the Bezards were concerned, Madame Robert had been uprooted from the landscape as emphatically as the oak trees in the Doynels' avenue.

19.
BRAZEN LIES

So what was Priscilla doing between the spring of 1941 and the autumn of 1944 when she came through Gillian's door in Mayfair?

I had hoped the contents of her padded chest would tell me. I was mistaken. All that the letters made clear was that Priscilla had had a relationship with a Frenchman called Daniel soon after her release from Besançon, and then, or at the same time, with men called Emile, Pierre, Otto. But as to who they were, and in particular Otto, who sounded suspiciously German, I had no answer. And while I had learned more about Priscilla from her incomplete manuscripts, large parts of her puzzle were missing. She remained a passive enigma, drifting in and out of view; a cork on a troubled sea.

There she might have stayed. Without knowing the identities of her lovers, I could not make Priscilla's story with all its ambiguities and blanks come whole. Although I am a novelist, it seemed to me that to resurrect Priscilla in the guise of fiction would not be true to her life, however falsely she might have lived it. And I was troubled by the manner in which the Doynel family had denied her – not mentioning her name in their 1200-page genealogy and killing her off forty years early, at the start of the war.

Then, in the Special Collections Room of the Bodleian Library, less than a ten-minute walk from where I lived in Oxford, I made an elating discovery.
I was in the final stage of putting to bed an edition of Bruce Chatwin's letters, a project which had occupied me intermittently since 1991, when I noticed a reference to a Sutro Collection, recently catalogued and stored in the same building. In no real spirit of expectation, I pulled out the catalogue and saw that the Sutro archive had been bequeathed by Gillian; further, three specific boxes related to my aunt.

I ordered them up. The first box contained letters from Priscilla to Gillian. There were photographs of the two of them in France before the war, on holiday soon after it in Sainte-Maxime, of Gillian's wedding in London, of Priscilla's second wedding to Raymond, and of the Sutros at Church Farm. Interesting, I thought, but nothing more, and opened the second box, which was full of red and yellow notebooks.

Then I read my name.

This was the line: ‘She was never in a concentration camp like Nicholas Shakespeare writes in his piece in
Telegraph
magazine 14 November 1992.' Besançon, Gillian wrote angrily, was an internment camp; but the mistake – which was my mistake, since Priscilla had never spoken to me about it – had a combustive effect, uncorking a lifetime of deliberately suppressed information and of secrets and suspicions about my aunt which Gillian had bottled up, until now. ‘Since reading the brazen lies she told her journalist-writer nephew, I have no scruples over telling the truth about her life and war record in Occupied France. Had she not lied I had intended to keep to myself what I knew.'

A phrase can be a clap of thunder.
Brazen lies? The truth about her life? War record in Occupied France?
In a minor but vital way I was suddenly now part of this story, the reason why Gillian was motivated to fill notebook after notebook with explicit memories of my aunt.

In 1992, Gillian Sutro had been struggling with a memoir. It was her second attempt. She had abandoned an earlier memoir, about her marriage to John Sutro, in favour of an account of her upbringing in France during the 1920s and 1930s. Graham Greene, who lived nearby in Antibes, had encouraged
her: ‘Your life as a girl in pre-war Paris was most unusual. You would be a goose not to make use of it.'

But once again Gillian had become stuck. She groused to Harold Acton: ‘Through following GG's advice and enlarging my canvas, it has meant a great deal more work.' Then one November morning, on her terrace in Monte Carlo where she had moved from London in 1974, she read my interview with Janina David, about growing up in the Warsaw Ghetto – and everything that Gillian had stifled for half a century poured out.

In that interview, I had written:
My aunt, captured in France by the Germans, spent time in two concentration camps. She was tortured and unable to bear children
.

Priscilla had been dead for ten years. All their lives they had been the best of friends, with not the slightest dent apparent in their relationship. But this mention of what our family believed had happened to Priscilla in the war was the back-breaking straw. It galvanised Gillian to recalibrate her past history with Priscilla and to put the record straight – ‘mettre les pendules à l'heure' was her phrase. And in the act of correcting the pendulum she found herself once more pushed back down the years to their Paris childhood: the cafés and cinemas they frequented, the botched abortion, the lavish wedding to the Vicomte at which Gillian had acted as ‘witness', the Hungarian lover they may or may not have shared, up to the moment when German tanks rolled into France, and Gillian fled to England on the last train from Gare Saint-Lazare, distraught at having to leave Priscilla behind.

But Gillian's recollections of Priscilla in pre-war Paris were the least of it. Her project assumed an urgency which the sifting of fifty-year-old memories did nothing to lessen. ‘I was determined to find out more.'

Small details, Gillian believed, can destroy relationships quicker than big knocks. Her husband's brother Edward Sutro had left his wife because of the way she slurped her soup. The two lines that I had written about my aunt became the spark to ignite a pyre that Gillian had unconsciously been assembling under her childhood friend since the moment in 1944 when Priscilla walked through her front door in London. Now, ten years after Priscilla's
death, Gillian made a retrospective decision: Priscilla, apart from lying about the concentration camp, had not told the truth in other areas and had betrayed Gillian by going to bed with Vertès. What consumed Gillian, and stirred her to confront the suspicions and misgivings that she had suppressed, were Priscilla's activities during the Occupation.

‘The Occupation period has always been my obsession,' Gillian wrote in her apartment in Monaco, where she lived alone with her dog. ‘Morbid I agree, but riveting in its horror and humiliation. The way it brought out the best and worst in people. The struggle for survival. How would I have coped with being clamped in a prison camp in Besançon where the Brits were herded by the Germans (this happened to my most intimate girlfriend)?' The question had preoccupied Gillian since her husband's death in 1985 and it dominated her life after she read my article. ‘I have done a great deal of research in those years. Priscilla was far from helpful. She did not wish to talk about the Occupation, later pretended to have forgotten. With persistence I managed to drag some facts from her.' These, coupled with facts provided by Zoë Temblaire, ‘who lived through the Occupation and saw a great deal of Priscilla, plus a book on the Occupation giving certain names, helped me to find out what Priscilla did not want me to know.'