Priscilla (4 page)

In France, they are known as the Dark Years; in wanting to pull down a padded lid on them, Priscilla was not unique.

I had discovered from reading and talking to people about this period that certain sections of the French National Archives in Paris are still closed to the historian, beginning with the year 1940. The same secrecy surrounds the police archives, or what remains of them – the Wehrmacht when they retreated took back to Berlin the most important files, many of these being shipped on to Russia in 1945. Even now, you cannot discover what denunciations were made against your family seventy years ago in France. Most of the Gestapo's archives in Paris, in particular those concerning the group known as ‘the French Gestapo', were destroyed in the autumn of 1944. Archives in London are hardly more helpful. MI6 keeps secret most of its papers, and the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d'Action (BCRA) for which Priscilla's best friend Gillian Sutro worked, was so afraid of Vichy infiltration that few records were kept.

Aside from the difficulty of access, there is the magnitude of the destruction: those papers burned in courtyard bonfires or dumped into the Seine or obliterated in Allied bombing raids, like the archives of Caen, the city which controlled the region in which Priscilla's Vicomte lived.

Furthermore, this was a time of restrictions. It seems inconceivable in this Internet age that someone could live no more than twenty miles away across the Channel and yet not be able to make contact with their family in Sussex,
by letter or by telephone. But this describes the hermetic news black-out that existed between 1940 and 1944.

The Occupied Zone was sealed off. Carrier pigeons were forbidden, no photographs out of doors were allowed to be taken, and anyone who concealed letters on their person risked severe punishment. The Germans outlawed letters in packages, any writing on the backs of photographs, and books with passages underlined. Priscilla could not write abroad – even if she had the means; paper shortages compelled Jacques Audiberti to compose his novel
Monorail
on strips of wallpaper.

As a result, fewer people wrote things down at the time (and some of the diaries that historians have depended on turn out to have been written up long after the events). As for those who did write to each other in Occupied France, it is surprising how little correspondence has survived. Hard for us to believe, it was not a time to keep letters. And Tracey told me that she had a box of them.

My cousin Tracey's house near Goodwood dated from the 1960s. One wall was of plate glass giving a view over a long lawn. On another, I recognised Vertès's portrait of Priscilla. Tracey had laid out on the dining-room table Priscilla's blue scrapbook and two of her alligator handbags. Also on the table was a shallow cardboard vegetable box containing the papers that Tracey had transferred from the padded chest.

What could be in those photographs, letters and manuscripts which Priscilla had concealed beneath the television set, directly under Raymond's unforgiving nose? (‘I remember that chest,' my mother said. ‘I thought she kept rugs in it.'). I knew from researching a biography how ancient documents can disappoint.

For the rest of that morning, I read through Priscilla's scrapbook. Then after lunch I started going through the box. I picked out a black and white photograph, turned it, and found myself staring at an arrestingly beautiful woman who lay sprawled on a loose bed of hay. I had little trouble recognising Priscilla, who was naked from the waist up.

There were other photos, no less sensational. A chateau. A beach. And portraits of men. One man, in tight swimming trunks and his youthful face masked in a pair of brass goggles, smilingly held up an eel. On the back someone had written: ‘Sainte-Maxime, October 1940' – that is to say, two months before Priscilla, or la Vicomtesse Doynel de la Sausserie, was arrested and interned by the Germans. But who was this swimmer?

And this other young man on a ski slope, lying back on the snow and embracing Priscilla – on this occasion wrapped in a fur coat? And the leather-helmeted racing driver gripping the wheel of a Delahaye – ‘Pour toi, Pris, en souvenir de la Coupe de Paris'? And what about this older man, more educated-looking, podgier, in a double-breasted suit of pale grey worsted and wearing spats, who was photographed seated in a room beneath an Impressionist painting? Written in blue biro on the back, in English: ‘Well, here it is – your
beloved open fireplace.' But in what house was the brick fireplace, what city? None of the faces had addresses or names attached. The anonymity, I could not help feeling, was deliberate. The only identifiable face was a signed photograph of Robert Donat as Richard Hannay in
The 39 Steps
.

I opened a folder of letters. There were about 150, dated from 1938 to 1947, the year before Priscilla married Raymond. The ones composed in English were mostly from Donat, who wrote in green ink in the last winter of the Second World War. ‘I wish I could undress you very slowly, very, very slowly indeed, and then be wonderfully sweet and kind to the wounds on your tummy, and dress you again in exquisite black-market undies, including sheer silk stockings, and send you back home safely to your mammie and grannie with a copy of Peter Quennell's latest drivel – just to show you how platonic my love for you is.' I read on. ‘Darling, where were you born, when, and above all why? Is that really you and are you really real? Can that extraordinary face have been achieved by accident or design? What does it all mean?'

The majority of the letters were in French, in half a dozen different hands, written earlier to Priscilla when she was at large in wartime France. Like Donat's, these were surprisingly passionate and tender – and from a period when it was always dangerous to speak your mind. It was astonishing that they had survived at all.

Fugitives have to travel light – and yet Priscilla had kept these photographs and letters. Had she carried them with her around France? The folder contained envelopes postmarked ‘Brittany', ‘Paris', ‘Annemasse'.

Many were from Priscilla's husband, le Vicomte Robert Doynel de la Sausserie. There were also love letters from a man who signed himself Emile, and who was cited in the divorce papers that I unfolded from a separate folder, some of which were dated 1943, some 1944, and some 1946, the year in which Priscilla's first marriage was dissolved.

In addition, there were letters from lovers named Daniel, Pierre and Otto. Without exception, they cast Priscilla in the role of Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina: a vulnerable, intelligent, sophisticated woman in need of saving. But without surnames or addresses, there was no way of tracking the lovers
down, or of matching them with the faces in her collection of photographs. One thing was becoming clear, though: my aunt Priscilla appeared to be having a racy time in Occupied France.

A few letters dated from after the war. I pulled out one, written in January 1946 from an American naval officer who was impatient to marry her, and containing this tantalising remark: ‘You told me all about your past, darling, and I loved you in spite of it, although if conservative Bostonians heard of it frankly they would be shocked. That was another reason why I thought we should live abroad for a bit; it would be better.'

Another correspondent, an Englishman, had typed out and sent her the verse of a popular song:

Oh, they call me Venal Vera,
I'm a lovely from Geizera
The Führer pays me well for what I do.
The order of the battle
I obtained from last night's rattle
On the golf course with a Colonel from HQ.
I often have to tarry
On the back seat of a gharry
(It's part of my profession as a spy).
Whilst his mind's on copulation
I'm extracting information
From a senior GSO from GSI
.

I had suspected my aunt of working for the Resistance. Could this be a reference to the sort of espionage that she carried out for them?

Also in the cardboard box was a thick folder containing a browning bundle of typewritten pages. I leafed through them, but it was hard to concentrate on what I was reading – more or less everything that someone seeking to unravel Priscilla's enigma could hope for: diaries, fragments of autobiography, medical records, her statement at Lewes County Court, letters (including an
unsent one to Tracey), some twenty short stories, as well as the draft chapters of a longer book that Priscilla had begun to write, but not completed.

I began reading the first chapter, and it became clear that the fiction was not fiction at all, and that what Priscilla had been striving to put down on paper, not merely in this novel but in her short stories, diaries and autobiographical fragments, was nothing less than an account of her years in France.

I asked Tracey if I might take the box away.

PART TWO

6.
STRANGE EXISTENCE

Although I could not have written this book without Tracey's box, I did find some riveting information about Priscilla's upbringing by going to the more conventional source of my grandfather's papers. These were lodged with the West Sussex Records Office in Chichester. From his diaries, correspondence and manuscripts, I formed a picture of Priscilla's early years.

She was born in the summer of 1916, nine months after a doctor explained the facts of life to her parents.

Her father, thirty-one at the time, was teaching at Sherborne. His name was Stuart Petre Brodie Mais, which he pronounced as ‘Maize' – and claimed was Saxon, meaning ‘sons of May'. But everyone knew him by his initials. Priscilla's mother Doris, then twenty-four, was the pampered daughter of a retired major from Bath and a four-foot-ten-inch Scot of irrepressible efficiency who called everything and everyone ‘bonny' – with the exception of her son-in-law. The marriage was a catastrophe from the start.

SPB had met Doris at a tea dance four years earlier. The girl who stood before him in the Assembly Rooms was slim, with pale cheeks framed by a straight fringe of dark brown hair, a narrow oval face and pointed chin – and clustered about by young men. Up until then, at Oxford and in Tansley, where his father had the living, SPB had known only ‘girls of shop assistant type'.
He became tongue-tied with sisters of fellow undergraduates. When Doris looked at him with her cat-grey eyes and pouting mouth, he strode up and demanded as many dances as she could spare. She gave him eleven.

They danced again on New Year's Eve at the Lansdown Cricket Club Ball. Doris wore a strawberry-pink frock and revealed a taste for schnauzers, biscuits, and gin. At some point, she led him to a dark corner where, without warning, she kissed him. Her kiss overwhelmed him – he forgot, as he later wrote, everything. He looked into Doris's eyes and holding her long thin hands which, he imagined, ‘bespoke a wealth of character and breeding', uttered the seven words from which ensued the capital error of his life.

‘Does this mean that you'll marry me?'

Doris nodded. ‘If you want me.'

They were married at St Anne's Church, Oldland, in Gloucestershire, on 6 August 1913. The couple knew nothing about each other, just as they knew nothing about sex. At twenty-eight, SPB had married the first girl of his class
that he had kissed. His innocence would be the driver of his torment, a fundamental blankness that remained to the end of his life and clouded his understanding of why people behaved as they did.