When Anne settled in London, Elsie sold Hazel Crescent and returned to Great Tew to live with Maud and Arthur. Anne didn't actually love Elsie—“That would be too strong a word”—but she was grateful to her, and often went back to the Falkland Arms to see her “old folk,” as she called the three people who had raised her.
In February 1958 Lexie Jones died in Tasmania, and two months later Anne began her postgraduate studies for a Diploma in Psychological Medicine at the Bethlem Royal and Maudsley hospitals in southeast London, called the “joint hospitals” then, often called the Maudsley today.7 Anne's intake of twelve young doctors, “mostly shabbily dressed but several of whom were to become eminent in their fields,”8 now entered the medical subculture of psychiatry, ruled at the Maudsley by the Australian psychiatrist Sir Aubrey Lewis, an “obsessional polymath” who ran its Institute of Psychiatry with a mixture of chivvying and criticism so fierce that one survivor admitted, “I owe Lewis one thing, at least. Once you had suffered the experience of presenting a case at one of his Monday-morning conferences, no other public appearance… could hold any terrors for you.”9
Many of Anne's contemporaries—many indeed eminent and still practising—have talked to me about these years at the Maudsley, but about Anne they talk unhappily. Some of them followed John Varley in Anne's affections. Most of her friends and lovers were doctors or psychiatrists, who spend their lives trying to help people to live. Anne Darquier's story is a harsh subject for them; for Anne herself, the ending of her long relationship with John Varley, however tortured it was, intensified her loneliness. “She was a friendly person, but guarded…REMARKABLY silent.” At the same time, “everyone liked her… she was an attractive person, with abilities,” and she flourished at the Maudsley, where her true gifts were put to use. One of her former pupils described the mental hospitals and observation wards in which Anne worked—Bart's, the Maudsley, all were grim, cockroaches everywhere: “Nightingale rows of beds, both sexes, the demented with the young, all kinds of mental illnesses all mixed up together, they dressed and undressed in public—rape was common; it was appalling. When a duchess came to open a new wing instructions were given to keep certain patients out of sight.” When Anne saw a nurse pouring hot tea over a screaming, hallucinating patient, locked in the padded cells of the observation ward at the Maudsley, she told Aubrey Lewis that the place was “pure evil.” “To say that to Lewis took some saying, but Anne identified with the needs of people and she would not lower her standards of the way that they should be treated… she was very sympathetic to human distress.”10
Academically, she had the same problems. Her dissertation, “Some Considerations in the Evaluation of Psychotherapy,” was an essay—and an undistinguished one—rather than a piece of scientific research, and unlike all the others of her year, who offered copious thanks and acknowledgements to the professors and lecturers who had nurtured them, Anne thanked nobody. But she performed well in psychotherapy seminars, and impressed her fellows and her professors with her particular gift, an ability to see connections. She understood anguish, and she was clinically astute. She had—would still have—many friends from her years at the Maudsley.
The Maudsley nurtured psychiatrists who followed both Freud and Jung, but it was Jung, the less paternal, the dreamer, the believer in roots, culture and the unconscious, whom Anne chose to follow next, a dangerous journey for which she needed luck, and she did not get it. By 1961 she was Dr. Anne Darquier, BA, BM, B.Ch Oxon., DPM. She was thirty-one, and whilst at the Maudsley had already begun her training to become a Jungian analyst. For Anne this was not a soft option; she had found the medical work for which she had an exceptional talent. By 1963 she was senior registrar at the Westminster Hospital, and had completed her analytical training at the Jungian Society of Analytical Psychology, then in Devonshire Place, near Harley Street. She was to live in this part of London for the rest of her life.
Anne's training analyst was Robert Hobson, a consultant physician at the Maudsley during her years there, who had qualified as a Jungian analyst in 1954. He was a clever and creative doctor and a famous and pioneering psychiatrist of his time, the president of the Analytical Society and a man who had met and corresponded with Jung. Hobson was a “golden boy” who seemed arrogant to some and seductive to many. He was a northerner, with a formidable stammer and much charm, and he liked to shock his pupils by lecturing on the psychopathology of the foreskin. Views about him vary: he was seen as charismatic but flirtatious, warm but intrusive, an inspiring and generous teacher but dangerously vain. During the war Hobson had been a surgeon lieutenant on the Arctic convoys, which carried specially trained “human torpedoes”—heroic frogmen who sat astride high-explosive warheads and guided them to their underwater target in the Arctic wastes.
Hobson should have been the piece of luck Anne needed, the man who took her apart and put her together again, which is what a training analysis should be. Through a strange conjunction of his inadequacies and Anne's savage circumstances, this did not happen, although Hobson's therapeutic belief was that “the therapist's task was to ‘reach the heart of loneliness and speak to that. ’ ”11
At the Maudsley it was felt that Hobson had picked Anne out. Such recognition by “the famous man of his age” was to prove a poisoned hon our. But Anne left her training analysis licensed to practise, and Hobson called her “the most brilliant Jungian of her generation.”
Louis Darquier fitted happily into Franco's Spain, protected as he was by prominent members of the government, in particular by Antonio Barroso y Sánchez-Guerra. After the war, Barroso rose higher and higher within Franco's stratosphere: by 1956 he was head of Franco's Military Household, then Minister for the Army. After his retirement in 1962 he remained a rich and powerful force in Spain, heavily involved in business and industry. In return for favours previously received, Barroso “helped Louis all his life, always…he paid for hospitals, everything.”12
Louis' aliases varied between Destève or d'Estève or Roussel; sometimes he was Jean, sometimes Jean étienne or Juan, sometimes Léon, but for men like Barroso, he was still Baron Darquier de Pellepoix. Despite his protection by the Francoist hierarchy—much boasted about privately—“there was never, never any money.” Fascist Spain, puritanical and poor, was not Paris, and Louis' old life of wining, dining and gambling was over. Also, there were tens of thousands of fleeing Milice, Nazis and fascisti making demands on Franco's purse.
Louis worked at many jobs, much as Anne was to do. In one way he was happy, because every job he had involved using words. By 1950, “looking ten years younger,”13 he and Myrtle were living in a room in calle Férnandez de la Hoz; nearby, unknown to Myrtle, Louis paid a cleaning lady with six children and many relatives, all living in a two-room flat with no bathroom, to take in Teresa.
Louis was working at the Ministry of Education's Central School of Languages, in the beautiful building which also houses the Falange Española.14 He was also given work by the diplomatic office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; he taught French at the Ministry of Defence, and translated for the Red Cross and for Radio Nacional—Abel Bonnard and Alain Laubreaux worked in the French section there too. As a freelance translator Louis could work in French, English and German; he was considered one of the best of all the translators, if not the best, within the group of French refugees, and he translated Franco's speeches into English.
As the years progressed he began to add “Baron” to his name, and eventually gave up all pseudonyms. He then added an apostrophe from the name of a favourite purloined ancestor, Seigneur étienne d'Arquier d'Estève, ennobled in 1655, whose eldest son had been a Louis and whose surname Louis Darquier had used on his first arrival in Madrid. Louis and Myrtle began to call themselves Barón y Baronesa Louis d'Arquier de Pellepoix. He liked to be called “the Baron,” “el Barón,” she “Baronesa”— but all the exiles in Spain used aristocratic names; it helped them get jobs. Louis also claimed to be a university graduate with a degree in s
cience. He was wont to say that no member of the French colony was a stranger to him. This was hardly the case, but he mixed happily enough amongst the “Maquis blanc,” as the exiled war criminals were sometimes called, “strutting round the streets wearing his monocle, his eyebrows raised and his utterances full of disdain.”15
Every Sunday these outcasts would meet for Mass at St.-Louis des Français, the old French church just off the avenida, in calle Tres Cruces, and afterwards would eat together at the Posada de Mar, a fashionable fish restaurant in the avenida itself. Who, if anyone, paid the bills is a puzzle, because in the 1950s Spain had not yet begun to find economic salvation in the tourist industry, and all of them worked for minimal pay.
Louis did not go to Mass, but never missed these lunches; they were the centre of his world in Madrid. He always went alone, without Myrtle, but as soon as Teresa was old enough, she was taken to see him there. Later these gatherings—tertulias—moved to the Café California in the street next to the church.16 Most of the French collabos were accredited as foreign journalists by Franco's Ministry of Information, whether they wrote a word or not. Here they came to talk, united by hostility to de Gaulle and, after 1954, by the Algerian war. These Frenchmen of the extreme right remained passionately nationalistic, and the excesses of the French forces in Algeria during the long and losing battle to keep it quite lifted their spirits. Maurice-Yvan Sicard, Doriot's PPF national secretary, was an early refugee in Madrid, and he spoke for all of them: “I am a patriot and all my thoughts, all my efforts converge on my country: France.”17 From time to time they welcomed important guests—a network of friendships and influences whose names are only muttered in Madrid to this day—the Marquis de Grijalbo, de l'Encomienda, Juan Perón, Patrice Lumumba, Xavier Vallat, General Weygand. There was always someone who could pay Louis' bills.
The war exiles met in restaurants, sometimes seedy, sometimes grand. Horcher's, opposite Retiro Park, was opened in 1943 by Otto Horcher, former manager of Maxim's in Paris and thus known to all. Horcher's private dining rooms sheltered many such an encounter, as did the International Press Club or the Edelweiss, where fifteen or so Nazi exiles would eat at the same table every Friday.18 All this went on, year after year, until the 1980s, when one by one the old men died off.
After the Organisation de l'Armée Secrète (OAS) was formed in 1961, there were many more meetings in obscure rooms in the outer suburbs of Madrid. The OAS was a terrorist army with roots in every part of that French right which had produced Charles Maurras, Marshal Pétain and Louis Darquier. Its aim was to resist the granting of independence to Algeria. In 1962 only 10 percent of the French people voted against ratifying de Gaulle's final negotiations for Algerian self-determination; much the same percentage of the French people vote for Jean-Marie le Pen today. This terrorist organisation—which attempted the “Day of the Jackal” assassination of de Gaulle in 1962—provided a last, and muffled, frisson of excitement in Madrid for Louis' collabo subculture.
As Pierre Darquier had often insisted, every member of the Darquier family suffered because of Louis. In Cahors, Pierre is still spoken of as “a good man,” but “the town is ashamed to have had Darquier as mayor,”19 and so Pierre has nothing—no street, lane or cul-de-sac, salon or school— named after him. Of Pierre Darquier, unwilling parent of his second son, “Zéro, vaut mieux pas prononcer le nom ici ”—“Nothing, it's better not to say his name in Cahors.”20
By 1945 Louise had only one son left in France, Jean, and he was childless. In the last decade of her life “Madame Louise” was lonely, white-haired but still fine-skinned and beautiful. She turned to religion, and threw herself into good works, knitting and crocheting for babies, unmarried mothers and charity sales. She crocheted altarpieces and lace for priests' albs, and visited the sick at the cancer hospital at Villejuif, just outside Paris.
After the war Darquiers could not easily visit Cahors. At the Liberation the editor of Louise's old family newspaper was shot for collaboration, and the Journal du Lot was shut down. In Cahors, Louis was “une crapule”: “C'est pas une gloire pour le pays, on aurait préféré qu'il soit plutôt de Castres ou Carcassone”—“He brought no glory to our town, we would have preferred that he came from Castres or Carcassone.”21 But Louise returned regularly. She would stay at the Hôtel des Ambassadeurs— demolished now—and summon safe old friends and former servants to visit her. Some greeted her with real affection; some found her capricious and affected, and the airs she put on tedious. Every day she would visit Pierre's tomb.22
She never ceased to grieve over Louis, but varied her comments about him according to her audience. His name never passed her lips with male family friends in Cahors, but to women she spoke of him often: “She admired him very much,” one of them remembered. With others, Louis was her lame duck, and she wept and moaned that he was the nightmare of her life. She knew that should he be caught he would be shot, and was in a permanent state of nerves, anticipating telegrams from Spain bearing such news.
Louise rarely talked about her other sons, except to complain about their wives. One reason for this concentration on Louis was that he wrote to her from time to time to ask for money, or sent messengers from Spain on a similar mission. Louise would tell them, “He has no money and neither have I,” but she was convinced that he “had an excellent position with General Franco who was his adviser, and who appreciated Louis' qualities very much.” In Cahors today, distant relatives who were subjected to this kind of conversation complain, “In my family we were not proud to be connected with the Darquier family.” One Cadurcien friend added, “Louise defended Louis until the end, but he was a salaud pure and simple. There are collaborators, even celebrated ones, for whom one can find excuses, even Laval, but with Darquier there is not one ray of light.”23
In 1954 Louise went to Madrid for Teresa's first Holy Communion. Teresa was eight when she met her grandmother. Louise pulled her round by the shoulders and placed her in front of Louis, saying: “Well, you can't renege on this one.” Louis never had. On one occasion, when there was no money at all, he took a tin of condensed milk to Teresa and because she “lived so far away and he had no money, he walked all the way to give it” to her. As she grew older, he would visit her three or four times a week.
Teresa was the image of Louis, though darker of hair. About her childhood she felt, like Anne, “rather like a car one has to garage out because it will be damaged if it stays out in the open,” and she “wished he had chosen the garage more carefully.” But Louis educated her properly, and according to Louise, who was Teresa's godmother, General Weygand was her godfather, and was present at the Communion ceremony she attended in 1954. According to Teresa herself, neither was there but Wey gand's wife was her godmother, with Louise her proxy; but Louise told with pride the story of General Weygand and Teresa's christening time and time again.24
In 1956, just after Anne graduated from Bart's, Louise Darquier died in Neuilly, and was taken back to Cahors to be buried with Pierre. Louis seems to have made a useless attempt to return to France to see her before her death. He liked to say that he had an Oedipus complex, and there was always a photograph of Louise next to his bed. Facing it, on the other side, was the saucy photo of a younger Myrtle, in a swimsuit with her stockings half-rolled down her thighs.
Myrtle was still trying to emulate Louise, and she was never, ever, seen without a hat. After Louise's death, “The silver went to René, the gold to Jean, and something to Anne to allow her to finish her studies.”25 What Louis got was obviously immediately sold, or hocked, because the only family heirlooms he left behind were the odd bit of crested silver, a teapot and two or three spoons and forks.
By now Louis was balding, “fat and tall—a large human being. Very bumptious. He didn't behave very well—he was very tiresome with young girls.” “People were very sorry for Myrtle,” who was “depressed and drinking heavily… she became enormously fat.”26 Louis had a big hole in his leg from his operations after 6 February
1934, and a finger that didn't work, about which he made unedifying and constant dirty jokes.
Assorted collections of the Jones family would visit Myrtle and Louis in Madrid. Myrtle reciprocated by sending her multitude of nieces and nephews little presents and letters and cards over the years. Louis the Baron and Myrtle the Baroness are mentioned in all Jones family documents, but Myrtle was not in touch with her daughter, which pleased no one in Tasmania, while those who knew Myrtle and Louis in Madrid say that they “did not think about Anne, did not talk about her.”
To the end the Jones family resolutely refused to see the exact nature of Myrtle's addictions, nor of the strange bond between her and Louis— the miserable dwellings and physical battering she endured. Louis' temper was still terrible; he still hit Myrtle. She spent her days writing letters, drinking, trying not to drink, reading novels, and “desperate for company.” “Her friends were her family, who visited her from Australia and to whom she wrote all this time.” She was “a hopeless housekeeper who could not do normal things like cooking and shopping.”27
Myrtle drifted around the outer reaches of the British expatriate community, which, though generally very pro-Franco, mixed not at all with German or French war criminals. She, married to one, was, necessarily, an outsider. They knew of her—vaguely—at the British church of St. George—“she was Australian and there was some scandal about her…a false passport?” She would borrow novels from the British Council library: “She was very kind, very gentle, big, tall, a very strong woman with a large bosom,” and would bring them occasional gifts of chocolates. She tried the British embassy, but met with a cold shoulder. Louis Darquier, war criminal, was absolutely unacceptable, and Myrtle was tarred with the same brush. Eventually the Baroness was allowed entrée on the basis that no one, anywhere, could match her devotion to the British royal family. In Tasmania, the family were told that ultimately Louis was welcomed there too.28
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