Priscilla (38 page)

Suddenly on her own, Priscilla no longer had access to Robert's food parcels or to Vernier's largesse. Vernier refused to assist further unless she came back to him, which she resisted. Her relationship with him on hold, she made her life day by day, as best she could.

Getting up early for bread with the little money she had left, she might have been back at Besançon. And, anyway, had her departure from there made any difference? The bartering, the queues, the clogs, the green clay soap that never lathered, the ersatz food and cigarettes made from Jerusalem artichokes – all were familiar from the internment camp. Priscilla had learned at Besançon that to survive one had to behave in an extraordinary way, and that everything was ersatz.

She had gone underground, but not to join the Resistance; rather, to dissolve into the crowd. And if, to keep warm and secure a meal, she did things that Priscilla Mais or Priscilla Doynel might have known in their inward conscience was wrong, then she was also part of the mass. She was not unique in the painful choices that she faced, the compromises she made, but representative.

‘To be a hero is honourable; not to be one is not necessarily dishonourable,' wrote the Swiss historian Philippe Burrin. At first glance, I found it embarrassing to discover what Priscilla got up to. Of course, I wished for my aunt to be heroic. I wanted her to be an exception. But she was not an exception, she was an ordinary woman in extraordinary circumstances. Her struggles, bizarre as they are, were not heroic, like the famous Odette Hallowes; or like Yvette Goodden who sheltered a downed Canadian pilot. Neither was Priscilla a grasping tart who sold everyone down the river. Like the Doynels, she was bang in the middle.

This is not a criticism or disparagement. The impulse to cast people as heroes or traitors ignores the muddled and shifting reality of the overwhelming part of the population who drifted nervously with the stream; prudent, unaffiliated, not committing themselves to resistance or collaboration, not fitting into a neat moral category, playing a number of ambiguous and
provisional roles, ready at any instant to change direction with the current. At this dark moment in France's history, a friend of André Gide said that he felt ‘like a cork floating on the filthiest water'. That summed up Priscilla.

She was one of remarkably few English women to have lived in Paris through the Occupation – perhaps one of less than two hundred. She learned what it was to be faced with decisions that her family and friends in England never had to confront, and yet which they judged others for having made.

‘Everything we did was equivocal,' Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, ‘we never quite knew whether we were doing right or wrong; a subtle poison corrupted even our best actions.' Once you opted for Système D – after ‘se débrouiller': in this case, getting yourself the best deals and out of trouble by whatever means – there were no rules about how to act.

With Cornet gone, Priscilla had to be exceptionally débrouillarde. The lack of options open to those, like her, who had no formal education and no political power – women in France could not vote until 1946 – meant that she had to use her body for survival. To ask the question ‘Did she have to sleep with all these men?' is to see it from the wrong angle. Her body was what she had, and it dominated her life in a way that no man's could dominate his. A Frenchman in her position would have had a different experience.

Priscilla's constant need to reach out to men to look after her can seem like sluttishness to an outsider, but it flowed from the unsexual side of her nature. All her affairs were similar in a way, subject to the vagaries of a man and in his slipstream. Although as a woman she formed the majority of the population, she did not enjoy the same choices as Robert or Vernier or Cornet. In the choices that she was forced to make, she was not so different from her female friends and contemporaries who dressed in clothes made of wood pulp – ‘it looked like tweed and dissolved in the rain,' said Yvette Goodden – or smoothed a flask of tinted Ambresoie into their white legs (to ‘give the illusion of the finest silk stockings' promised the advertisement) or dyed their ankles, as did Goodden, with iodine. Morality, truth, love – these values were no less ersatz. Margaret ‘Bluebell' Kelly was aware of the falsehoods that she had to utter after she was accused of supplying false documents. ‘I don't know
how I could lie so convincingly. I think it was because we were living under such tension then that life and death were unimportant.' Their fellow inmate at Besançon, Elisabeth Haden-Guest, also lied: ‘What people call “lies” are substitutes for basic rights. You lie, sure you lie, you might kill to stay alive, women might sleep with men to stay alive (they did in the camps) – you might betray your best friend, your closest family, for your own survival.'

Nothing is easy or completely clear. All I know is that Priscilla, the little cork, made it through the Occupation.
Fluctuat nec mergitur
– storm-tossed but unsinkable.

Now that Daniel Vernier had banished Cornet and secured Priscilla a new identity in his wife's name, he was desperate to resume their affair.

Priscilla kept him at arm's length for as long as possible, but she was in no position to bargain. When she cast around for someone to support her, to provide food and clothes, fuel for her stove, it boiled down to two men: Vernier and her husband. ‘I had the choice of going back to Robert who refused to divorce me, or becoming kept by Daniel. I had no other alternative.'

She had encountered Robert one morning in the street. He lashed his arms around her. How his voice rose. She knew that he was not as dull as he sounded. At least he did not make the baleful demand to know what she had been doing.

Priscilla hated to hurt him. She could sense his terrible unhappiness and did not want to see his eyes looking at her. Neither of them said much. Their meeting was like any meeting between two parties one of whom has fallen out of love. When Robert appealed for Priscilla to return to Rue Nollet, Priscilla told him that she didn't think she could bear it.

‘So the inevitable happened. I went back to Daniel.'

Daniel Vernier rented a garçonnière at 11 Place Saint-Augustin where they could meet when Priscilla was not at the nursing home. He pretended to Simone that he was playing poker, something that he was known to do all night, ‘and quite often poker was an excuse to stay the night with me'. Simone hated the horses, so at weekends Vernier took Priscilla to the races. He
introduced Priscilla as his wife while grimly parading her as his mistress. He knew that he could not make her love him. He was making her pay.

It pained Priscilla to betray her doppelgänger. The real Simone Vernier had five children by now. ‘I was in an awkward position as I was always being invited to their home. In fact, I was treated as one of the family. Daniel seemed to have no sense of shame or guilt where I was concerned, but I suffered enough for two.'

Priscilla now existed on the margins: shuttling between Dr Devaux's nursing home and Daniel Vernier's garçonnière. Frightened that everything she said or did was observed, she learned the trick of the trout, to sneak out of sight behind stones. She avoided people's glances. If she suspected that she was being followed, she darted into a shop and out of the employees' entrance.

Vernier gave her money. She read. She slept. She kept her head low as Simone Vernier. She remembered the two rules of concealment that John Buchan imposed on his hero Richard Hannay: ‘If you are playing a part, you will never keep it up unless you convince yourself that you are it.' And the second: ‘If you are hemmed in on all sides in a patch of land there is only one chance of escape. You must stay in the patch and let your enemies search it and not find you.'

The things that she missed were English films and taxis. ‘There were a few soap-boxes in which one could sit and be pulled along by a bicycle, but the price was colossal' – and she never had the heart, the men were so thin. Without Cornet to drive her, she reverted to cycling everywhere. She had to have a numberplate and a licence; if you could not produce the licence, the handlebars were confiscated.

Fear thickened the air. Everyone hurried and yelled out commands. In July, a grenade had been tossed into the car of the Commandant of Greater Paris; in September, more ‘terrorists' gunned down the SS colonel in charge of the STO. Hitler ordered reprisals. Suddenly, there were many more Germans in uniform.

She concentrated on what was immediately in front of her. One morning, she wheeled her bicycle through the Jardin de Luxembourg where she had
discussed her pregnancy with Gillian. Gardeners had raked the leaves into rusty heaps. A cart rattled by with a girl on it, undernourished and grey-faced; the age her child would have been.

‘One didn't think,' said Yvette Goodden. ‘One lived without really analysing anything. One lived from day to day. The main thing was to live. To have enough clothes, food and not to get into trouble.' These were Priscilla's ambitions. Except that she did get into trouble.

26.
KESSEL

In London, Gillian pursued every lead. She had achieved one modest breakthrough. ‘Through Free French friends, I managed to find out about Zoë whose husband (a naturalised Jew) had been imprisoned in a Stalag; through the Red Cross I sent him parcels.'

But about Priscilla Doynel, her fate: nothing.

On the assumption that the Germans had interned Priscilla at Besançon, Gillian questioned former internees who had escaped back to England through Spain. Some came to work for the Free French in London, among them Rosemary Say and Frida Stewart. But neither they, nor Elisabeth Haden-Guest – who returned in April 1942 – had information.

Gillian pestered her Secret Service contacts. She was most dependent on her thirty-four-year-old pilot, Edouard Corniglion-Molinier. One morning, she heard that he had suffered an accident during a mission and was in a London hospital. Gillian telephoned him and they talked, the Colonel his usual ebullient self: ‘Tu verras que tous fonctionne à merveille – you'll see, everything is working marvellously.' Gillian took him some apples, hoping for a discreet conversation and news of Priscilla. ‘I walked into his room and there lay Edouard surrounded by women, about three or four. “C'est le harem,” I said, dumping the apples on his legs. I pretended the car was waiting outside and wished him a prompt recovery and hopped it.'

Gillian now shifted her attention to a friend of Edouard and Vertès, the novelist Joseph Kessel, whose undercover work also took him into Occupied France.

Kessel had escaped from France to England in January 1943. He impressed Gillian on the evening she met him as ‘a Dostoyevsky figure': a big-boned ‘peasanty-looking' man in a badly cut suit with a shy, gap-toothed smile. Over the sobs of a violin she heard the sound of glass breaking. ‘The waiters seem rather clumsy,' she murmured. But it was Kessel – ‘doing his Cossack number'. His party trick was to chew wine glasses, hurling the broken stems over his shoulder.

They hit it off at once. ‘My deadpan look generally freezes up people famous for their wisecracks.' It had the opposite effect on the Russian. ‘I made Kessel laugh, which is why all his letters started “My little clown”.'

Kessel was not then widely known for
Belle de Jour
; the novel was not published in English until 1962, and then without Vertès's illustrations. But he became celebrated for the words of a war-song that he composed in the course of a few minutes on a Sunday afternoon shortly after his arrival in England.

A favourite haunt in London was Le Petit Club Français off Hyde Park, where he took Gillian. There one night they heard a guitarist, Anna Marly, sing a Russian melody. On 23 May, Kessel was staying in Ashdown Park Hotel in Sussex when, after waking from a nap, he remembered Marly's tune. Phrases surged into his head. ‘Come up from the mines, comrades. Come down from the hills.' With the assistance of his nephew and the hotel's out-of-tune piano, Kessel wrote the words of ‘Le Chant des Partisans', which became the instant anthem of the Resistance.

In London, forty-three-year-old Kessel served as one of de Gaulle's aides-de-camp. He flew to Algeria with him and later joined ‘Operation Sussex', based at a secret location in Hartford Bridge. Kessel was one of fifty agents who took off on midnight flights to gather information from Occupied France. His job was to liaise with agents on the ground, bring back their coded messages and translate these on the flight home, often as the plane was weaving to avoid flak.

Gillian, who sent him to find Priscilla, wrote that Kessel was ‘a brave man when it came to going to dangerous places, but quite incapable of ringing up a woman he fancied in case of a rebuff'. Lovable, naïve, strangely innocent, he had made his initial approach to Gillian through an intermediary, ‘to find out if his advance would be welcome'. Out of some complicated revenge on Vertès, Gillian gave Kessel the green light. But the amount of vodka he consumed was not conducive to a memorable sexual performance.