Priscilla (7 page)

Georges Carpentier's bar off the Champs-Elysées was a favourite. Another haunt was the Cintra. Afterwards, they might join friends at Scheherazade. Priscilla remembered seeing Gillian's mother dance a Black Bottom stomp with someone she fancied, her belly rubbing against her partner's groin. It was heady stuff for a young girl, and a change from the slot-machines on Brighton Pier.

Two more inconsiderate mothers would have been hard to find. Daphne, though toothy, fancied herself to be irresistible, which made her contemptuous of other women – Gillian included – and explained why she was late for drinks and dinner parties. The sole occasions on which her punctuality could be depended were bridge parties.

Daphne's weekly bridge afternoons were sacred. Her regular partner was Doris, who behaved in the same regal way – down to smelling like her (of Shalimar). Gillian was made to assist with the sandwiches, as was Priscilla when it became Doris's turn to play hostess. Towards seven, Gillian's father, ensconced in armchair, pipe in hand, would shout – one eye on the clock, thinking of dinner: ‘When are those bloody women leaving?' Across the table, Mrs Hochstetter would become fidgety while Daphne, who hated losing, pretended not to hear. ‘Really, partner,' she liked to scold Doris, ‘you are not concentrating.'

To ease the tension, Doris would lay down her cards and wander over to the Hammonds' satinwood piano. Gillian observed how Doris's playing aggravated Daphne's jealousy. ‘My mother did not take into account that children are voyeurs. Small, silent, nosy, prowling around with lethal innocence.'

Gillian's father, though more handsome, took after his friend Wyndham-Lewis. Both were members of the Savile Club, both veterans of the First World War, both pipe-smoking drinkers, with vile tempers; both randy.

Cyril Hammond had not longed for children at all: ‘I don't want my wife turned into a milking cow.' His wife gave him four – Nicky, Gillian, Jacqueline and Nigel. Gillian found him opaque, impenetrable. ‘My father really was a pig.' She loathed him, and he her. He would glare at Gillian: ‘Always being different.'

Gillian's father had an aversion to people enjoying themselves. At their rented house in Chatou, he stalked into Gillian's bedroom and tore back the
sheets, shouting: ‘Get up, you slut.' One evening when Gillian was in her teens, he chased her round the table because she was wearing a trouser suit. If a boyfriend rang, he yelled out: ‘Dago on the phone!' He always used that expression for a slightly dark-skinned man, and dark-skinned men accounted for most of Gillian's boyfriends.

A financially reckless philanderer, Cyril Hammond was an army man without an army. He battled to conduct his home life with the discipline of a former Guards officer. ‘But he treated the family far worse than soldiers,' Gillian wrote. A creature of rigid habits, he expected his wife's inedible meals to be served on the dot – and everyone to be turned out impeccably. He wore thick wool khaki knee socks and shaved every morning, save for the neat stiff military moustache that he never discarded. On evenings when he did not don a dinner jacket, he wore a blazer with Irish Guards buttons which he took care to polish every day. Dinner over, he immersed himself in a book.

When she thought of her joyless father, Gillian visualised a skeletal figure sunk back in his armchair, twiddling his moustache and reading Evelyn Waugh, P. G. Wodehouse, Somerset Maugham – and war memoirs. He was hooked on battles. The German officer who occupied their Paris apartment in 1940 said approvingly, examining the shelves: ‘The English officer is very knowledgeable about history.'

Gillian tensed to recall the hollow snapping sound of books being opened and banged shut to let the dust fly off. The
clop-clop
was like a sharp slap in the face. Nor did she forget the
glou-glou
of wine being poured from bottle to glass when no one was around.

Drunk, her father bragged about women. One of his conquests was Priscilla's mother. Gillian once overheard him boasting. ‘At the drop of a hat, she'll lie on her back, hooves in the air.' Gillian wrote: ‘He had sampled Doris. I remember thinking how odious he was to speak in such a way of a woman he had bedded.'

This was the society into which Priscilla first came to live in 1926, a skinny, nervy child, as Gillian recalled, tall for her age, with pale lank hair scraped back from her face. Paris would be her home for the next seven years.

* * *

Priscilla's new ‘stepfather' Dominic Bevan Wyndham-Lewis was, when her mother met him, a satirical journalist on the
Daily Express
, thirty-three years old, a short, stocky, combative Welshman with a box face, receding black hair and fierce blue eyes. In the family he became known as Boo. He was a friend of Hilaire Belloc, who described Boo as the wittiest man he had ever met – this despite his pronounced stammer, a result of two bouts of shell-shock in France. At the
Daily Express
, he had shared an office with SPB – who described Boo, later, as ‘a bald, irritable man who quarrelled violently with everyone in a very excitable voice that rose almost to a treble as his anger became less restrained'. Boo in his turn parodied SPB as a travel writer of such classics as
With My Wombat in the Vosges
. He wrote a humorous column which he signed ‘Beachcomber' and on defecting to France bequeathed the pseudonym to J. B. Morton, who made it famous. During the eight years that Boo lived with Doris in Paris, he wrote tart biographies of three French kings, and compiled a well-received anthology of bad verse,
The Stuffed Owl
. He described himself as ‘impulsive, lazy, easily imposed upon, distinctly Celt, full of strong loves and hates'. To Priscilla, he was a temperamental and difficult man, a recent Catholic convert who ultimately never forgave himself, or Doris, for the fact they were living in sin.

‘I thought he was wonderful,' said Vivien, who had originally christened him ‘Boo'. ‘I couldn't understand for many years why Priscilla hated him more than anyone.'

But hate him she did. A photograph in Priscilla's album shows her standing on the beach at Brighton between her father and Wyndham-Lewis: SPB holds her left shoulder, Boo her right. His face has been scratched out.

* * *

At the time, Priscilla explained only to Gillian the cause of her rupture with Boo. Until war separated the two girls, they knew the backwaters of each other's lives, every painful detail. ‘My most intimate girlfriend' is how Gillian described Priscilla in one of her notebooks, adding ‘Pris and I were birds of a feather.' Priscilla felt the same strong pull: ‘We were closer than sisters.'

But their lifelong friendship was slow to germinate. Thrown together because of their parents, and enrolled at the same lycée at 25 Rue Alexandre Dumas and in the same ballet class, they began by disliking each other enormously.

Promiscuous, and mired in her own vapours, Doris had nevertheless brought up her daughters ‘fairly strictly'. She made Priscilla wear her hair in plaits and forbade her to read newspapers or visit the cinema. If she attended a concert, she needed a chaperone. And politeness at all times. Aged fifteen, Priscilla was stopped from going to the theatre after she uttered the word ‘bugger'. She did not smoke, or drink anything stronger than milk and orange juice.

Gillian considered Priscilla an inexperienced ignoramus and a prig. Although one year younger, Gillian was the more mature and street-wise. Her obsession was the cinema – her ambition to be an actress. Ever since
Priscilla could remember, Gillian had adopted the habit of not smiling.

Smiling, Gillian had read, would give her lines.

Indifferent to film, Priscilla had never heard of Gillian's icon, Greta Garbo, nor the stars whose photographs Gillian pinned to her bedroom walls, cut out of film magazines like
Pour Vous
and
Cinémonde
. Instead, Priscilla's brightest moments came when she was alone in the two-storey studio apartment in Rue Galvani, which Boo rented from 1930. In the sitting room, the Maples Persian rug was rolled up so that she could put on a record and invent a dance. There on the polished parquet floor, Priscilla Mais balanced on her sandalled toe and pretended to be Anna Pavlova.

Her cheerful Russian governess Nina had introduced her to Pavlova. Priscilla was mesmerised when she watched her perform ‘The Dying Swan' at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. She moved as Priscilla had never seen anyone move. Priscilla stuck a newspaper cutting of the dancer into her first scrapbook – ‘On shoe tip she had looked more like an air-borne sylph and less like an earth-bound woman' – and above the photograph wrote her own name, ‘Priscilla Mais'. Pavlova was what Priscilla, still a shy and relatively passive girl, now decided that she wanted to be.

Enrolled with Gillian in Madame Nesterovsky's class, Priscilla impressed the teacher with her physical grace – unlike Gillian, who detested ballet, and was, Priscilla felt, ‘about as graceful as a young elephant'. For four years, she attended lessons. ‘I studied ballet-dancing very seriously as I intended to make it my career. It was a passion – I never had any doubts that that was how I wanted to spend my life.' But her passion was cut short brutally.

On 23 January 1931 Pavlova died of pleurisy at The Hague aged forty-nine. One afternoon, Priscilla raised her right leg and felt an ache. Within hours, she came down with a high fever.

Round the corner in Boulevard Berthier – where, following Cyril's bankruptcy, the Hammonds had moved to a studio a few months before – Gillian overheard her parents discussing Priscilla. A priest was by her bed, Priscilla's mother was away with Boo in London, it was all very sad.

‘Is she going to die?' Gillian asked hopefully.

Priscilla's illness was a flare-up of a baffling pain in her jaw. Exacerbated by her concentration on ballet five days a week, the soreness had crept into her legs. The diagnosis: osteomyelitis, a serious bacterial infection of the bone.

Priscilla ran a temperature of 104 degrees Fahrenheit for seventeen days. ‘She was at death's door,' Vivien said. ‘They carved open her upper legs, scraping them down to the bone, leaving hideous open wounds three inches wide and eight inches long – and this before penicillin or painkillers.'

Doris hurried back. Priscilla told Gillian: ‘She found a priest praying at my bedside and very little hope left for my survival. As soon as I saw her, I took a turn for the better and gradually got stronger, until after three months I was allowed to leave the nursing home. I couldn't walk, of course, and had to be carried everywhere.'

Gillian was ashamed of her earlier reaction and decided that if Priscilla recovered she would be ‘very, very nice to her'. She visited Rue Galvani and was startled to find a plump-looking girl lying on a bed with her blonde head completely shaved, an image that Gillian remembered sixty years later.

Priscilla's high fever had caused her hair to fall out. Doris's hairdresser insisted that it would never grow again unless it was all clipped off. Doris had clicked the scissors.