By the 1960s brighter men than Franco had begun to prise his hands from total control of the Spanish economy, and the starvation wages earned by the populace—and Louis Darquier—enabled the country to turn its face towards tourism. Whenever Franco appeared in public, his subjects were still required to give the fascist salute, and they had to drape their windows with Spanish flags as he passed by. Policemen were still everywhere, but tourism added another government department to Louis' portfolio—he became translator at the Ministry of Information and Tourism. Translating pamphlets on Spanish paradors alternated with other government jobs and work for publishing houses in Madrid and Barcelona.
By now he was earning more, and he could afford to ride again— “Baron Darquier… tall, very elegant, monocle, extremely polite but distant,” often came to collect his work from the ministry “in his riding clothes, with a whip under his arm.” Myrtle, brought up on a horse, was incapable of doing the same, but Louis could now afford to take her out to dinner every Wednesday. They had a daily, “the only person Myrtle had to talk to,” and at last a piano.29
At this time, based on the similarity of their names, Louis was investigating his connections to Joan of Arc, while Myrtle would talk of her descent from Inigo Jones. Louis still dabbled in his pet subjects; it was said that his connections got him special permission to work at the National Library of Madrid on secret Masonic documents for a book about Freemasonry, which he never finished.
As was the custom in Franco's Spain, in 1965, for his twenty years of service to the Spanish state, and after the same number of years in assorted rooms and lodgings, Louis was given, for minimal rental, an apartment in Madrid. He was sixty-seven and Myrtle seventy-one: this was their first home, a very modest apartment, jerrybuilt—“anyone could have lived there,” and did; their tower block was surrounded by many others, constructed for a similar purpose. Their apartment on the ninth floor had a terrace and, at last, more than one bedroom, but their furniture was “rubbish,” the place “a tip,” with “photos everywhere.”30 And they were near the insalubrious Manzanares River, which at that time smelled to heaven in the summer and was infested with mosquitoes. This was the apartment the Jones family were so happy to visit, and here Myrtle lived until 1970, her kitchen lined with photographs of the British royal family.
Louis' contribution to Spain's welfare was modest too. What brought him this reward was translating The Red Book of Gibraltar for Fernando Maria Castiella, Franco's hard-line Foreign Minister from 1957 to 1969. Louis would proudly point out the silver tray given him by Castiella as a token of recognition. In 1963 Castiella formally demanded the return of Gibraltar from Britain, and the Red Book, which details the Spanish claims, was written after the British prime minister Harold Wilson told the House of Commons in 1964 that “Franco was a fascist… and the shit hit the fan. After that things were very difficult for years about Gibraltar.”31
Life improved greatly for Myrtle after 1963, when Australia sent its first consul-general to Spain, then opened an embassy in 1968. Myrtle would “come to the embassy with the slightest problem, and constantly told stories about rescuing children in wartime, of crossing the Pyrénées with them. She was very sentimental, soft… she was certainly an alcoholic… she never mentioned Anne, not once.” One of the Australian officials, John Booth, was repeatedly invited by Myrtle to visit them at home, but he was officially warned: “You don't want to accept invitations of this kind.” All the same, he felt so sorry for them that he went three or four times, sometimes for dinner. When Louis and Myrtle talked about themselves, they said not a word about politics—they were aristocratic refugees “in trouble.” On one occasion Louis took Booth into his study, and “there was a photograph of eight men marching down some street, dressed in raincoats and jackboots.” Louis did all the cooking, wearing a tall white chef 's hat on his large head, monocle screwed in, looking ridiculous. Though Booth found Louis charming—and a very good cook—and met Myrtle's sister Olive, he knew Myrtle best: “a sad woman. Desperate for friends…always something wrong with her… little illnesses, problems… She was an amazing royalist.” Booth thought she was a baroness, because she constantly referred to it.32
Throughout his life in Spain, Louis' anti-Semitic ravings did not cease; he would explain how after the First World War Jews had taken control of the grain cartels and set France on the road to ruin. Franco's full name was Francisco Franco Bahamonde, and his wife was originally Carmen Polo y Martinez Valdes. Louis would insist that both of them were Jewish: “Bahamonde is a Jewish name, and so is Polo.” At Sunday lunches his fellow exiles would tease him: “You see a Jew in your soup.” “I see a Jew in my soup because there IS a Jew in my soup.” His favourite hobbies were genealogical study into his purloined Darquier ancestors and reading encyclopaedias of French history. Otherwise he spent his spare time inveigling himself and Myrtle into as many embassy parties as possible.
Both of them needed embassy life, because while Louis' Spanish was adequate, Myrtle's remained “disastrous”; she would make her daily laugh when she asked for a cockroach—cucaracha—to stir her coffee, instead of a teaspoon, cucharadita. Although it was later strenuously denied by the French diplomatic service, Louis claimed he was a welcome guest at the French embassy in Madrid, received every 14 July by the ambassador. Mostly this was not the case, but when Baron Barbara de Labelotterie de Boisséson took over as ambassador in 1964, life became much easier for the French exiles. “All the old collabos were there” every year to see Boisséson weep as he paid homage to Pétain on Bastille Day.33
Teresa was a grown girl when she first met Myrtle. Sometimes Louis took his daughter on holiday, pretending to Myrtle that he was alone; on other occasions he would take them both, and farm Teresa out somewhere. He would visit her in the mornings; the rest of the day he would spend with Myrtle in their hotel. Did Myrtle know? Perhaps. When they finally met—which they did only three or four times—Teresa liked Myrtle. “She was a very sweet lady. Alcoholic. Always drunk.” Louis' favourite holiday spot was the beautiful port of Santander in the north, on the Cantabrian coast, where he liked to be photographed exposing his hefty body, biceps clenched in the pose of Hercules.
Louis remained Myrtle's hero, and in his limited way Louis was good to her. He tried to cure her alcoholism and to protect her from the insults that came her way, the people who would not know them, the places where they were never invited. Louis became almost entirely bald, and Myrtle even larger. She could do nothing for herself, and needed constant looking after, but she still had “a lovely sense of humour,” and this kept them together. Louis remained a womaniser and a loudmouth, always telling the same stories—“He repeated himself like garlic.” So did Myrtle; everyone heard her tales about rescuing children. One of Louis' most unchanging repetitions was to tell Myrtle how much he loved her. Once Myrtle said to Teresa, “Oh God, how I love that man.”
After 1944 René Darquier came back from Argentina occasionally, but he never saw Louis again, while Louis, if he mentioned René at all, despised him because he was “in trade.” The French medical profession was purged at the Liberation, but publicly Jean Darquier, though compromised, was never brought to justice. However, he did not progress in his career: “To carry the name of Darquier in those days was not easy… people did not want to know Darquiers.”34 Jean settled in St.-Tropez, and in the sixties both he and René separated from their wives. In Jean's case he acquired a young female companion, which did not disturb Janot, who seems to have shared his St.-Tropez villa until the end, and who paid for the upkeep on the Darquier tomb in Cahors until her own death in 1997.
René Darquier died in 1967, contemplating his orange groves in Agadir. He was only sixty-six, but though the one who suffered the most, in later life he was the most fortunate of the Darquier brothers. On rare occasions Jean was visited by the police in search of “the wanted party,” but always denied any specific knowledge of Louis' whereabouts and activities, though he knew he was in Madrid.3
5 Louis, on the other hand, said that Jean visited him every year. Janot kept in touch with Louis. She had always liked him, and wanted René's children, two of whom had married Jews, to visit him. None of them ever did.
After René's death came others, more worrying for Louis. Many of his colony were living in wretched circumstances as they got older; in 1968 Alain Laubreaux, exactly Louis' age, died in Madrid, and so did Abel Bonnard, a closer compatriot. For Louis, however, 1968 marked the end of his death sentence, which expired in March of that year. In twenty-one years no French government had made any serious attempt to find him; now extradition was no longer possible. But his exile for life remained: he could never return to France. Shortly after his amnesty, Louis asked the French embassy for authorisation to return to France for “family reasons.” Although Labelotterie was ambassador in 1968, there was no reply.
Myrtle still had her British passport; she could leave Spain. Every year she went to Gibraltar to see her English doctor and dentist, and she could cross the border to France to go shopping or to meet the travelling Joneses in Paris. On one rare occasion she went with Teresa. They crossed the border at Irún/Hendaye; Louis left them at Irún station, with tears in his eyes. Returning from Hendaye, Teresa watched Myrtle walking down the platform ahead of her, peeing as she went, oblivious to this habitual result of her drinking. At the same time, when visiting Joneses saw Myrtle in Madrid, they only noticed that she still managed to be the cynosure of all eyes.
Mostly Myrtle drank wine, but she drank anything she could lay her hands on, like most alcoholics; she drank cognac if offered, and was seen to finish off a bottle of Mirabelle in one sitting. Opposite the tower block in the quiet street where they lived is a handful of small shops. There is a dry cleaner's where Louis is remembered as a Frenchman who always wore a small French flag in his buttonhole, and a little further down an off-licence, all too familiar to Myrtle; she was, on the very worst occasions, seen in the neighbourhood very drunk.
By the end of the decade Louis had started his own translation service from home, which was why, in April 1969, Myrtle signed a contract to translate into French a catalogue for the museum of Santa Cruz. She was seventy-five, and had little French and no Spanish.36 When she fell ill, Louis could not cope at all. Her sister Hazel, living in Beirut at the time, was summoned to look after her, and on 18 June 1970 Myrtle died of a heart attack in the Red Cross Hospital in Madrid. Eight days before, her first and possibly only husband, Roy Workman, died in Northampton.37 Louis finally discovered that Myrtle was older than he.
Myrtle was buried the following day, in the British Cemetery in Madrid. John Booth, of the Australian embassy, went to the service at St.-Louis des Français, and was intrigued by the people there: “Darquier had very few friends to carry Myrtle to her grave.” One who did so noticed how exceptionally heavy Myrtle was, while Booth noticed that the few mourners were “elderly mostly and strange-looking.”38
I was sent to see Anne Darquier in 1963. I was twenty-five years old, and Anne only eight years older. By this time she was very successful. Besides being senior registrar at the Westminster Hospital she held teaching and clinical research posts at the Middlesex and Hammersmith hospitals, and at Bart's. As a doctor she was on a fast track, and she began earning money before any of her medical fellows. She was always absolutely frank about money: she loved having it. Friends floated in and out of her various flats around Harley Street, and she was known for her extravagance with taxis, if not much else. Later she became a consultant to the students at King's College, London, and she had also begun a private practice.
When others talk about Anne's particular skills as a therapist, always they mention her singular empathy: this was her great gift, something which came from her own experience of pain. There was a sense of instant comprehension about her, which made it particularly easy for a foreigner such as me to talk to her. She was down-to-earth, and her gentle, often smiling charm was balanced by the steely mind and determination she had demonstrated even as a child. With her patients she listened, she sympathised, she understood, but above all she was honest and direct, never given to psychobabble of any kind; and with me at least, she laughed a lot. Raised by Elsie and Maud, Anne was good at laughing, and she had an excellent sense of injustice. This was marked in her: she had that acute British awareness of class divisions; she did not like them.
Generally Anne was silent about her family, and she kept herself to herself. As I had never known a psychiatrist before I met Anne, and knew nothing of Freud, Jung, or any principles of analytic behaviour, the stories she told me about her own life seemed perfectly normal to me—and still do. Yet in talking to me about herself, however little, she broke a strict professional rule. For 99 percent of our time together over seven years, Anne looked after me and concentrated on changing my life, which she did. But Anne was not the kind of therapist who did not give her opinions. She told you what she thought, she told me something about her past—not much, but enough—although she should not have done so. For the rest, I liked hearing the little she told me; we sometimes laughed about our various furies; we never laughed about dysfunctional families, and never about childhood anguish. We discussed our political opinions, and shared a black-and-whiteness about injustice which was certainly naïve, but was comforting at the time. Anne's method of therapy was not maternal, nor was it de haut en bas.
Outside the hospitals and doctors' rooms in which Anne passed most of her adult life, the men she chose and who chose her were the usual mélange that awaits any woman who remains unmarried at thirty-five. I was told, “Her men were all alcoholics or rejecters in one way or another”; but rejecters and alcoholics can also be lovely men. She still supported her “old folk” financially and visited Great Tew, or May Rapley in Sussex, bearing cream cakes. May, Gilbert and her godson Alistair always returned to the Falkland Arms for holidays, or came up to London to see her. She took Alistair out to restaurants, opera and theatre, embarrassed him by shouting “Olé! ” and clapping to Spanish dancing, hoped for a university career for him, and was very much the favourite aunt of a favoured nephew.
Elsie and Maud grieved that Anne had not married John Varley, who had sometimes driven her to Great Tew and had met with their approval. When Maud died in 1964, Arthur and Elsie left the Falkland Arms, and three years later Arthur died too. Anne had loved Maud and Arthur, but then everyone loved them. With Elsie it was different; she was more of a prickle pot, but the bond remained. Later Anne bought a car, an Austin 1100. Shortsighted, unable to drive, she offered it to Alistair, and said, “I want you to take me up to see Nanny.”
Carl Jung wrote: “Only the wounded physician heals.” That would be the diagnosis for Anne: she was a wounded healer, who could heal others but could not heal herself. By the late 1960s she was on the treadmill of a high flyer. She had substantial hospital and other commitments, and a thriving private practice. She worked unsparingly, at the call of her patients night and day, at home and abroad. She would even make midnight appointments to see undergraduates who needed her at King's College. Anne never became proficient in the requirements of academe: she left behind no written body of work. What is remembered is her singular concentration upon her patients; in the public wards at the Maudsley it required extra effort to take over from her, because the patients had become so dependent upon her intense care.
She worked too hard, and had perhaps become too successful. One colleague, who disliked her, told me, “She gave far too much, she wasn't professional,” and added—shades of Myrtle—“Anne lived with and by fantasies.” “She would make a pass—not necessarily sexual—at anyone with power.” “She only wanted to make money; she'd help anyone with status.” Of this litany the attribute I recognise is that she gave too much; the rest, true or not, used to be par for the course for any successful working woman.
By 1968 Anne had grown into a way of life in which her silence about her own past, the black hole of despair she kept to herself, were both aspects of her pers
onality she used to bring force to her healing of others. By then, if she still loved clothes, you would not have known it to look at her, and her apartment was ruthlessly functional and untitivated. It was clear that whatever she had learned late in life about self-indulgence or fripperies had quite slipped away. She lived through her work, her colleagues and her friends, who were numerous, and the patients whose lives she changed. She was sociable, but within limits; she disliked sharing the family Christmases of her friends, and began to have increased difficulty in sleeping. She took pills for that, and often looked exhausted. Swinging London of the sixties, all around her and making life brighter for so many, made little difference to her, although she was only in her thirties.
When Anne's half sister Teresa was twenty-one she came to London as an au pair. Teresa wanted to meet Anne and talk to her; they shared “not having a mother… the most painful thing in the world”—but when she rang, Anne “put the phone down on her, saying she wanted nothing to do with her family.” They never met.
In 1968 Teresa married a British journalist and went to live in Oxford. She lived there for some years, and her children were born there, so that both Louis Darquier's daughters knew the town well. Anne was often nearby, visiting Elsie at Woodstock, though by 1968, when she became a senior lecturer at Bart's, her workload had become “appalling.”
When psychiatrists become ill, when they know they are not coping as they should, there is an accepted routine which must be adhered to. In the last year of her life, Anne knew she was existing on alcohol and pills. She had learned to drink in the Falkland Arms as a young girl, with her Canadian Air Force boyfriends during the war, and with her Oxford friends thereafter. Her mother was an alcoholic; Anne was not, but she knew how to use drink to ease stress. Like many doctors, she had easy access to drugs to lessen every kind of pain, and she was prescribing for herself, always a dangerous thing for a doctor: “Anne knew she must look for help.”
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