No wonder that she was physically ill. Other people seemed to have mended better than she had. Rose was happily married at last, or so it seemed, with a baby daughter and homes in Paris and the ski resort of Megève; Desmond had Agnes and a baby son, Sean, born that June. With a successful novel behind him, he now had a film project, Stranger at my Door, which starred Agnes and was about to start shooting in Dublin. His shoes were perfectly dry.
13
The Burden of the Day
Nineteen forty-eight had started out hopefully enough. At the beginning of the year Anita had written to Marjorie: ‘I won my case yesterday and have a decree.’ Within two weeks of her divorce Anita left Oranmore and Peter Wilson, and sailed to America with Marjorie and Jack, then met Philip in San Francisco, ‘on the express written understanding’, or so she wrote to Rose, that ‘it was to decide the course of our lives’. The couple visited Rose’s brother Bill Vincent in San Francisco and confirmed their engagement to him, but it wasn’t that simple. Philip had managed to become engaged to another girl at the same time, Eileen Sybil Phipps, a niece of the Duchess of Gloucester. Anita supposed, reasonably enough, that the other engagement had been broken off, since Philip showed her the plans of his house in Australia and wanted her to decide which walls to knock down. However, at the same time, the other fiancée was buying her trousseau.
Anita, looking forward to getting married and a new life in Australia, flew back to London. Philip arrived in England soon afterwards and insisted that she stay with Rose at a house she was renting at Frensham, a small town near Guildford in Surrey, since, if it were known that Anita was in London, there would be a scandal. Philip then came to Frensham and told Anita he could only think of one way of ‘playing it now’, which was to gain time by shamming a broken leg. Rose’s doctor, Teddy Sugden, obligingly set Philip’s leg in plaster. Philip then urged Anita to fly back to New York, where he would join her later.
‘I still never doubt he would follow but get rather jumbled,’Anita wrote to Bill Vincent, in a mournful account of the proceedings. Too jumbled to follow Philip’s instructions, she stayed in England. Philip took his bogus broken leg to Hermione Ranfurly’s house and she agreed to let him stay on condition he told her the whole truth. In fact he told her that Anita was in America, and then fetched Eileen for inspection. On reading his engagement announcement to Eileen in The Times, Hermione called Philip ‘a sneaking shit who has never loved anyone in his life’ and turned him out of her house. Anita, at Frensham, collapsed with nervous frustration. Rose went to London to confront Philip, who told her that he thought he must go through with the marriage to Eileen. He wrote Anita ‘a footling epistle’, which said that he loved both Anita and Eileen equally.
Although Anita mentioned some of the consequences of this extraordinary jilting to Bill Vincent – collapsing in hysterics in the Ruck-Keenes’ London flat and having to be given morphine by the ever-obliging Dr Sugden, being carried to a nursing home where the Duchess of Gloucester’s ladies-in-waiting came to question her about Philip – she didn’t tell Bill the whole story. At Frensham she had tried to slit her wrists. When she was back in Ireland, devotedly looked after by Peter Wilson, she wrote to Rose: ‘I could have sworn that at least I was in my own clothes but find Rosie’s dear little white angora jacket ruined! That is the final straw – in Rose’s jacket!’ She tried to analyze what she had done, writing to Rose:
It was the fact that I had idolised Philip and idol to unbelievable trickster was a mighty fall – I had for 6 years selected him as the chevalier sans peur et sans reproche – to find a schzophrenic [sic] and the basest kind of liar was more than my reeling brain could stand.
Philip’s behaviour is arguably harder to understand. What was the point of proposing marriage to two girls when, sooner or later, leg in plaster or not, he was bound to be found out? Philip had had a particularly tough war, returning to Australia from the fighting in New Guinea ill and skeletally thin. Perhaps suffering had affected his sanity, as it did so often to those who had to survive the peace somehow.
While Anita was still recovering in London, Rose left the uk to avoid paying £20,000 income tax. Peter Wilson was sent for to bring the addled Anita back to Oranmore, a labour of love willingly undertaken. Back in Ireland, Anita insisted that she had made a complete recovery. She wrote to Shane: ‘Just a line to tell you I am completely over my breakdown and off to Glaslough … the moment I could bear to face the fact of Parbury’s baseness I could laugh it off.’ And to Rose: ‘I’m over it over it over it … Once I could force myself to realise coldly he was everything I did not want him to be than [sic] suddenly I began to laugh at myself for being “had” – so completely unutterably “had” – led up the garden path of history.’ She delighted in her surroundings, or said that she did: ‘The castle is lovelier than ever – what lights – what flowers – baby seals – kittens – gorgeous vegetables to eat.’ And, above all: ‘The reality of dear Peter … one person with one mind – a straight gaze, eyes 2 inches apart.’ She was about to go to Glaslough where ‘with enormous pleasure I am going to give the cowboy chaps I had made in Wyoming for Philip to Peter instead!!!’
Peter’s way of celebrating Anita’s recovery was to frantically socialize, something that he usually tried to avoid. He and Anita called on neighbours, planned a lunch out, a trip to the Balinrobe races and a dance where Anita would wear a spectacular American evening dress. They were both deluded in thinking that all was now well. How could a woman who had expected to fly to Australia and begin married life with the man she had loved and yearned for for six years, settle down contentedly in the mouldering Irish castle she had longed to escape – and with a man she didn’t love? It was beyond endurance.
Philip Parbury’s wedding took place on 7 July 1948, an occasion that Anita marked by swallowing a bottle of aspirins and other tablets, washed down with half a bottle of whiskey. By the time Peter found her, she was going cold. Peter made her vomit to bring up all the drugs. He was convinced that she hadn’t meant to kill herself but wanted a few hours of oblivion to get her through the day. By that stage he was as exhausted as she was. He hired a nurse for a few days and realized that it would be a long time before Anita was over it, over it, over it. But the Leslie way was to make light of things. Anita told Rose: ‘Mummy has written a really funny letter: “Her needs were so modest – one Australian bounder with hookworm – not a peer or millionaire …”’
Peter stayed at Oranmore when Anita went to Glaslough and, once away from him, she appreciated him less. To Rose:
I realised 2 years ago we could never share life – he likes so much that I don’t and to share a home with him drives me nearly mad – not to mention the complications of his wife and son … see I can’t marry him and settle – he is too old – it wouldn’t work – it doesn’t work now! … I am the destruction of his happiness … So once again I have got to organise a cleavage and desert poor faithful Pete.
Another man was causing her problems too. Her brother Jack, who had cracked up in the prison camp, was again nearing breakdown and Anita felt that she was ‘the only bolster that poor conflicting mind has between him and the world’. She took him to see ‘a famous doctor’ and resigned herself to looking after him indefinitely. These were not ideal circumstances for a woman recovering from a suicide attempt.
So much happened during July that Anita didn’t mention the August publication of Train to Nowhere. It is hard to know when she wrote the book while restoring a castle, losing a lover and coping with family problems. The book was subtitled ‘An ambulance driver’s adventures on four fronts’, carried a foreword by Alex, now Field-Marshall the Viscount Alexander of Tunis and was dedicated to Jeanne de L’Espée and the ambulancières of the 1st Armoured Division, and to the memory of Lucette and Odette Le Coq.
It is an extraordinary, unforgettable book and reviewers recognized Anita’s ‘impersonal integrity’ and her unique point of view – ‘a terse, keen reticence and the summing up of dea
dly situations in a line or two …’ (The Times). It sold out quickly, was reprinted twice and then went out of print. For some years after the war, people wanted to read only about situations with which they were already familiar: Dunkirk, the D-Day landings, the death of Hitler. It was too soon to offer new revelations. In 1949 Elizabeth Taylor’s fine novel A Wreath of Roses was published. In it, a man admits to a woman whom he has just met that he is writing a book about the war. Her reaction is this: ‘“The war and his experience in it”, she thought. “Unreadable!”’
Viscount Alexander expected as much. In his foreword, he wrote: ‘Our gallant French allies’ … contribution to the war is too little known by the world at large.’ Even now, after a spate of books and films about the war, few of us are familiar with the 1944 Allied invasion of southern France, the exotic and slightly crazy Zouave troops who served in the French infantry, or the suffering of French civilians under German bombardment, stumbling out of their bombed houses, carrying dead babies in their arms. It is telling that when Anita revised her wartime memoir in 1983, she left out the episode of the exhausted French woman shooting two German prisoners, realizing that even forty or so years later, it was too distressing to read about. As Christopher Hitchens wrote: ‘Real history is more pitiless even than you had been told it was.’
Train to Nowhere is lightened by the appearances of the ambulancières in their red lipstick, their hair somehow styled in complicated rolls even when there was hardly any water to wash in, turning up on parade with their legs browned with tanning lotion to give a boost to dispirited soldiers. Twenty years after Anita’s book was published, another book by a female soldier appeared: the Israeli Yael Dayan’s A Soldier’s Diary. Yael, daughter of a general, shares Anita’s view that women in the front line are a gladdening and civilizing influence – the way they hang bits of mirrors on trees to fix their make-up distracts from the shock of war. The French female soldiers of the 1st Armoured Division, many of whom, like Anita, were awarded the Croix de Guerre, did not even have the right to vote. That came in 1945, long years after the overprotected British servicewomen had been part of the electorate.
It would appear that there were no publication celebrations. The Leslies were concerned about Jack, who was now having sleep treatment for his nerves. At the end of August Anita removed him from a nursing home as his treatment there sounded alarming: ‘10 days unconscious and 4 of hallucinations caused by some drug that sweeps debris out of the mind!’ It had been a bad idea to expect Jack to settle down to managing Glaslough straight from a prison camp. ‘It’s been the ruin of him and now we are going to have a long tricky time to get him balanced mentally.’
Shane was now ‘running (?)’ as Anita put it, the estate, while Marjorie spent a lot of time in America, her arrivals and departures causing disruption. Anita wished that she would make up her mind where she wanted to live, although she herself was as indecisive as her mother. She wrote to Rose: ‘I don’t know what to do with myself. I can’t bog down at Glaslough – can’t spend another winter here [Oranmore] with Peter – it’s too futile. The alternative is to try to get some sort of job.’ And then, not for the first time: ‘Peter does worry me – he is so irresponsible and unreliable about his own affairs.’ He was now farming at Oranmore in a small, and loss-making, way, devoting all his time and energy to four bullocks and seventeen acres. ‘There is a constant fuss on,’ Anita complained to Rose, begging her to come and stay.
Instead, in November, Anita went to stay with Rose in Paris, in Rose’s suite at the Hôtel de Vendôme. She attended a reunion with some of her wartime colleagues, and went with Rose to the couture shows. Rose paid all of Anita’s expenses and bought her a coat that cost seventy pounds. It should have been a happy escape from the blustery west of Ireland but it wasn’t because Rose looked so ill, which was the way that Anita felt. But she wasn’t ill; she was pregnant.
14
Charades at Castle Leslie
Everything comes to him who waits, Bill King must have thought. He had loved Anita for five years. An early, undated, letter of his declared: ‘Anita, dear heart, oh the awful gloom of leaving you again. I fell so in love with you in a week it’s just unbelievable.’ And now he was going to marry her. He didn’t mind that she was carrying Peter Wilson’s baby. From another undated letter: ‘I want your happiness but we must think mostly for the baby. What are you going to call him? I think Eton is a good idea. All the Etonians I know have benefitted from it.’ Just before their engagement was announced at the end of December 1948, Bill wrote to Shane:
Dear Sir Shane, As you have heard, Anita has promised to be my wife.
For me it is a great fulfilment because I have been in love with her for five years of war and peace … I am not a healthy man, nor ever will be but I have enough to keep her in reasonable comfort until the socialists scoop the pool, when we shall probably become professional yacht hands.
In this letter, Bill made it plain that he intended to remain a Protestant.
Bill was highly amused by the Leslies – ‘fun was a word much on their lips’, he observed. Arriving unexpectedly at Glaslough – his telegram hadn’t arrived – he found Anita and Marjorie arguing about the breeding of greyhounds, ‘topply table covered with Ming … the yowls of nervy greyhounds as they slipped on the parquet’. Bill’s family had come from County Galway but it was only when he went there with Anita that he discovered this, and that his grandfather had been a professor at what was then Galway’s Queen’s University, as well as a famous archaeologist.
The bride-to-be was bird happy. To Rose: ‘Such a whirl – but I crave protection and tenderness and loving care and am so glad we are going to get married … Bill’s radiant happiness and unselfishness has given me a kind of fire – mentally I’m alright again – only physically a bit peaky.’ What she was doing may not have struck Anita as particularly odd. As Shane was to point out in his book Long Shadows (1966): ‘Cherished records have been at the mercy of those whose advantage is to conceal illicit infusions under the façade of wedlock.’ The illicit infusions had to remain a secret. Anita made plans: after the hastily arranged wedding at Glaslough, she and Bill would stay with Rose at her chalet in Megève, where Bill could ski. Then Anita would make a furtive return to Dublin to give birth in June, leaving the city before anyone caught sight of the baby, whose official birth date was August. She would lie low until the baby could be shown to friends and family. This concealment would entail taking the baby on a round-the-world voyage on the 24-foot waterline ocean racer that Bill was having built. It didn’t seem such an outlandish idea to a woman who had joined the army in order to escape from her first husband.
When Anita was happy she could never recognize someone else’s pain. Before her wedding she wrote to Rose from Glaslough: ‘Darling Pete arrives for Xmas – he is glad too.’ Peter was far from glad but tried to cope with the situation by joining in with the wedding plans. During that fraught December, he wrote frequently to Rose, leading her to believe that he and Anita together had decided on her marriage to Bill, and that Bill himself understood that he would have Anita’s companionship only on a part-time basis. At times, in this flurry of correspondence, Peter, now divorced, is convinced that Anita would have married him had not the Bishop of Galway and Peter’s own antipathy towards the hypocritical Catholic church made this impossible. He believed that Anita was marrying Bill for his, Peter’s sake, and this made him even more devoted to her than he had been for the last ten years. At other times he tells Rose that Anita is unable to love anyone and that he pities Bill, whom he recognizes as loving Anita as much as he, Peter, does. He insists that he must attend the wedding, since he is the only person who can lace Anita into her corset to hide the baby, whom he refers to as ‘little Rose’.
He rails against the Leslies, whom he considers theatrical, publicity-mad show-offs; the Jews in Palestine who, he claims, are fighting the Arabs with American and Russian weapons; and the situation in France, which he considers make
s the country unsafe for Fleur, Rose’s little daughter, who Peter suggests should be sent to Oranmore. He writes to everyone who he suspects might think that Anita has callously thrown him over, and claims to have had his ego boosted by two offers of marriage since the announcement of Anita’s engagement. The cascade of letters, flitting from Anita’s corset to the war in Palestine to his complicated financial situation, make him sound raving mad rather than heartbroken and bereft. Anita ignored his true state of mind. To Rose: ‘Bill and Peter want me to have a white wedding to annoy Paul! They are both so sweet and tender and loving and want to look after me – such big love.’
Like a little girl playing dress-up, she raided Glaslough’s attics for her bridal attire. ‘Can I wear the old lace veil symbol of virginity or will my friends laugh!!!’ Her dress was first worn by a Leslie bride in 1890, the bodice now let out by the blacksmith’s wife, the orange blossom headdress ‘woven with wire by Monaghan’s “modish coiffeuse”’. There would be a bower of flowers from the greenhouse and a dispensation for the mixed marriage by the bishop. Marjorie was in America and would miss the wedding, as would Rose, but this didn’t dampen Anita’s spirits. She was ready to face the future. To Rose: ‘If I think more about other people’s happiness I won’t get so wrought up in myself … I am getting excited … at being able to give so much happiness by just stopping my distressed sulks.’ Distressed sulks were a bit of a euphemism to describe the recent suicide attempts. She insisted that Peter felt as happy as she did: ‘Pete looking 20 years younger and in terrific spirits is enjoying the shooting here.’
The Rt Hon. Winston Churchill, had he remembered that less than a year ago Anita had asked him to meet her then fiancé, Colonel Philip Parbury, may have been surprised to receive an invitation to her wedding to Commander William D. King. He and Mrs Churchill were unable to attend but sent a congratulatory telegram. In spite of his plans to supervise the fitting of the corset, Peter couldn’t go through with it. He couldn’t face the church service either but for Anita’s sake, he told Rose, he went to the reception at the flower-bedecked castle, which, to add to his distress, was full of Bill’s relations. Living a lie was beginning to tell on him.
Telling Tales Page 13