When SPB was skimming the waves, no one was more invigorating; anything seemed possible. ‘Then everyone wanted to be near him,’ said my mother. But the down periods were costly, confusing, painful and chaotic, and made him hard to live with. Then his black moods and self-generating dramas threatened to capsize his professional contacts, as well as his nearest and dearest.
Priscilla grew up listening to SPB remonstrate with her mother: ‘But you loved me once.’ And Doris snapping back: ‘For God’s sake, don’t keep harking back to the past ages – I may have liked caper sauce once, but I’ve out-grown my love for you, and nothing can bring it back.’ The quarrels were protracted and savage – the clocks never wound up, the flowers always dead, the silver unpolished. Doris frequently was left weeping on the floor.
When Priscilla was three, Doris shifted her affections from SPB to another young man who had been his pupil. Neville Brownrigg was a demobbed lieutenant from the 20th Hussars whom SPB had taught at Rossall before the war, ‘an unruly angular Irish boy of no intelligence but a certain ease and charm of manner’. SPB once invited Brownrigg home to Tansley, where his mother viewed him in the same incinerating light as she did Doris. ‘He’s a born parasite. He’ll eat all you’ve got and then rob you and run. You’ll see.’ But SPB admired Brownrigg, a good cricketer, for his wildness and courage. ‘He had no brains, but he was great fun and never cared what he did.’
They had met again, in 1919, on the station platform at Tonbridge where SPB had gone from Sherborne to teach. Brownrigg was staying nearby with his uncle, out of a job after five years fighting in Egypt and France. In an impetuous move, SPB invited Brownrigg to stay in the large house that Tonbridge School had provided. He needed a secretary, while his wife and daughter, he felt, could do with the companionship.
In the High Court seventeen years later, Justice Sir Alfred Bucknill observed the outcome with bewilderment: ‘I am sorry to say that the result of Mr Mais’s kindness was that his wife and Mr Brownrigg fell in love and misconduct started between them.’ Doris was twenty-seven. Her relationship with someone four years younger marked the start of what the Divorce Court judge described as ‘this strange existence of Mr and Mrs Mais’.
A brown envelope in SPB’s archives contained cuttings from The Times, the News of the World and the Daily Mirror – which devoted its front page to the story, under the headline ‘PETITION DISMISSED IN COMMUNITY’S INTEREST’.
On 16 July 1936, in one of the most publicised cases of the year, Doris Mais had sued Priscilla’s reluctant father for divorce. She wished to dissolve her broken marriage to a spouse with whom she had not lived since 1925.
Doris’s case being weak, for those days, counsel advised her to cast SPB in the role of sexual pervert. In a move no modern court would condone, Doris summoned Priscilla to give evidence against her father. Priscilla’s humiliating experience in the witness box forced her to relive her childhood in churning detail.
She remembered her parents as always on the move, carrying their unhappiness with them. The fraught atmosphere had helped to make Priscilla a difficult and neurotic child. Doris’s mother guarded Priscilla ‘like a dragon’. Redundant, her father fed on the patter of his daughter’s feet, her thrice-repeated ‘g-night, Daddy’ after he left her to go down to supper, ‘and even her cries at night’.
Her cries pursued SPB to Tonbridge, to Lincolnshire, to Hove; even to Wengen where he took Priscilla skiing, her first trip abroad. The following summer they travelled to north Devon. He wrote in his autobiography: ‘One of the happiest holidays I ever spent was at Woolacombe in the society of my daughter Pris when she was about six years old. We spent a golden, unforgettable month together which passed like a dream, of which I remember very little beyond continually rolling down the steep sand-dunes, getting hot sand in our hair and clothes and then washing it off in the cool sea.
I do not think I have ever been so close to her in my life before or since, and I do not mind betting that Pris has forgotten all about it.’
The only flaw in an otherwise perfect holiday was his daughter’s habit of screaming aloud in dreams.
Priscilla’s nightmares continued to torment her, no matter how many times she changed address. The last home that the Maises shared together as a family was a sea-front flat in Hove where Priscilla lived with her parents, Brownrigg, and Priscilla’s baby sister, born in 1920 and christened Sheila Vivien. Her father had given up teaching for journalism and worked at the Daily Express as the film and drama critic. Dropping her off at school on his way to the station, he noticed that Priscilla did not like passing the same people. He wrote in his diary that she disliked ‘all shut doors and the noise of the water running out of her bath’. He listened to his daughter tap the wall with her fingers. ‘Screams at night after visit to cinema and dreams of attacks by wolves.’
Priscilla’s shrieks tracked the disintegration of her parents’ marriage which had been tumbling about her ears since she was born.
SPB appears to have had no inkling of his wife’s affair with Brownrigg until Vivien was four years old. In May 1924 Doris confessed – telling an incredulous SPB that his secretary-cum-chauffeur had been her lover, was Sheila Vivien’s father and that she had never loved anyone in the world as much. Justice Bucknill’s comment: ‘I cannot think of any act more blameworthy than the act of a wife who over a period of years permitted misconduct in her husband’s house with a young man whom her husband has brought to the house and befriended.’
Overnight, SPB’s world had collapsed. He was to be permanently injured by Doris’s flagrant adultery. He wrote that he did not feel that he could visualise his wife in the arms of another man and live. In Hove, he wandered vacantly over the Downs – once or twice through the night. ‘On these smooth slopes all tangles seem to come unravelled, and all problems solved.’ But not even long walks on his cherished hills consoled him. Something had harassed him ‘to the point of a morose insanity’, observed Henry Williamson, later the author of Tarka the Otter, who came to know him at this time. In a novel that Williamson wrote about SPB, he recalled Priscilla’s father striding at a furious rate, ‘and though it almost exhausted him, he breathed, when I was near him, I noticed, almost silently through his open mouth. He seemed to be walking to escape his thoughts; a horsefly had got into his brain.’
SPB’s one consolation was his daughter. He looked forward to a time when Priscilla would be able to join him on his walks. Thank God, he wrote, there was still Priscilla. ‘She at any rate would provide him with a purpose in life.’
Priscilla was eight when Doris – following Brownrigg’s abrupt departure – took up with another lover, a journalist on SPB’s newspaper. To escape censure, the couple went to live in Paris. Vivien accompanied them on the stormy crossing: ‘I can still see a big communal cabin with bunks and me lying on one, moaning.’ Priscilla remained behind in Hove with SPB, and at the end of a year was to choose between coming to France or staying in Sussex. Doris now wanted a divorce. To facilitate this, SPB grudgingly agreed to remain celibate for twelve months, in order to be perceived as the innocent party.
Their time together in Hove was the most precious that Priscilla ever spent with her father. They trotted on horseback along the cliffs at Rottingdean. They went to the cinema and fed pennies into the slot-machines on Brighton Pier and bathed off Brighton beach. They explored SPB’s childhood haunts in north Devon, searching for prawns in the pools that he had fallen into as a small boy, and joining a stag-hunt. A hunt meet for SPB was the symbol of a lost England. They were not father and daughter as they followed the hounds on foot through the long grass, but two companions. He read to her in bed, and after she went peacefully to sleep he wrote in his diary, relieved: ‘Love of unlocking doors. Collecting cigarette cards and leaving them about. Tousled head on her pillow.’
If Priscilla did not grow up with the Darwinian instinct that would allow her to home in on a person who was right for her, then her father was largely to blame. Her only chan
ce, with a mother like Doris, lay in SPB seeing her through her childhood years; his dependability was her one possibility of redemption. But Priscilla was severely under-parented.
It is hard to tell the exact point when she became ‘the girl who gets let down’. Probably in May 1925 when, almost immediately reneging on his agreement to remain celibate, SPB brought home Winnie Doughty, a teenage Irish model not much older than his daughter. According to Priscilla, they hated each other at first sight. Priscilla resented someone taking her mother’s place, and became ‘rude and tiresome’ to Winnie, who was jealous of Priscilla and wished her out of the way.
Less than a year later, to stop Winnie leaving him, after she threatened to go off with a young novelist, SPB offered to sacrifice the most precious thing he possessed. A dismaying entry in his diary reads: ‘I sent a cable to Doris telling her she could keep Priscilla just to make Winnie happier.’ Down the corridor, he heard a child howling and return to sleep. At the age of nine, Priscilla packed a small suitcase and feeling, as she put it, ‘unloved and unwanted’, took the train to Newhaven with her father.
It was a golden day. She remembered the game they played on the train, counting haystacks on one side of the carriage against the other. And SPB’s story – invented to distract her – about a lady who could breathe under water and had discovered caves full of jewels on the ocean floor. Already, Priscilla followed her father’s example and wrote down stories in a green notebook. ‘Wonderful stories of princes and magic,’ SPB described them in the journal that he had kept since he was thirteen. He urged Priscilla to keep a journal, too.
SPB saw her off on the boat. Both dreaded their impending separation. ‘Priscilla like myself cannot eat before going away. Purposely one numbs oneself. How one clings to last moments, the dinner the night before, the promises to write, the sailing of the boats.’ He was left with the harrowing image of Priscilla standing against the rails. He must have suspected the damage he was doing, because the expression in her face continued to pursue him. ‘The dawn of sickness. The puzzled blue eyes.’
When he chose Winnie above Priscilla, apart from sabotaging Doris’s plan for a divorce, SPB caused irreparable harm to his daughter. How he squared it in his own mind was a mystery. Priscilla went from being the purpose in his life to nothing, catapulted aged nine into redundancy. It was a rejection from which she never recovered.
An early witness to SPB’s terrible legacy was an English girl living in Paris. Priscilla met her that spring, not long after she was collected off the boat at Dieppe. I must now properly introduce Gillian Sutro, who was to be a most important mine of information and a close friend of Priscilla for the rest of her life.
7.
GILLIAN
‘Two gazelles,’ murmured someone who observed them after they were reunited at the end of the Second World War. A dark foil to her taller blonde friend, Gillian was raised to Priscilla’s height by the charisma of her deadpan looks. ‘I possess,’ Gillian wrote of herself, ‘the capacity to hide rancour behind a mask of indifference.’ Small, with long black hair, big slanting green eyes, and noticeable cheekbones, which she emphasised by sucking in her lips, Gillian could be mistaken for the actress Vivien Leigh, and sometimes was. Men found her beautiful as women found her husband ugly. In a hectic private life, Gillian’s lovers included the writers Joseph Kessel and Arthur Koestler; the film directors Carol Reed and Henri-Georges Clouzot; and the Hungarian artist Marcel Vertès.
Gillian was startlingly clear what her appetites were, and honest about the fact that she was highly sexed. Priscilla was relatively monogamous by contrast. Her sensuality is frustrating to pin down. She aroused it in others, to a pitch that rendered men helpless, and as a result had many experiences, which shaped her life; but how much she needed sex or enjoyed her sexuality is harder to establish, and I repeatedly searched for clues. Beyond doubt is that the two women’s tastes in men – with one possible and divisive exception – could not have disagreed more.
Priscilla was attracted to youth; to good looks, good dancers. Gillian recoiled from anyone who resembled her handsome father. ‘I like tired-looking faces, odd, moody, obsessed people, loners. I dislike jaunty cocky men. My instinct is to bash their ego.’ In the improbable event of their falling for the same person, they had a code of conduct drawn up by Gillian when they were teenagers. ‘Never poach on a girlfriend’s territory and don’t inflict bastards into marriage.’
Everything else, they viewed with the same eye.
Gillian is a key figure in Priscilla’s story. Their ‘rackety’ backgrounds, as Gillian put it, were interchangeable to a striking degree. They would grow up together in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, attending the same lycée, and sharing a governess and ballet-teacher. And both handicapped by ‘impossible parents’.
Gillian’s mother Daphne was the daughter of Albert Gamage, founder of a London department store that in its day rivalled Selfridges. In 1914, Albert had packed Daphne off, at the age of twenty-one, on a cruise to see the world and to sever her relationship with a rich socialite. But at a dance in Ceylon, Daphne met Cyril Hammond, ‘a wild, hard-drinking Anglo-Irish tea-planter’ – twenty-five years old; Trinity, Cambridge; rowing Blue; Irish Guards. Gillian wrote: ‘They were glued together by the sex urge, like stamps to an envelope.’ Unlike with the Maises, congress occurred almost instantly. They married in secret, to the fury of Daphne’s mother, in the local registry office.
Gillian’s parents were young, good-looking, well educated, with enough money, but flawed. Their pattern was set by the time they arrived in France after the First World War – a pattern of bridge parties, alcohol and sex, into which they stitched Priscilla’s mother. Prominent members of Paris’s 30,000-strong English community, the Hammonds had settled in the north-west outskirts in 1921, and were to be influential figures in Priscilla’s childhood. They were also responsible for Doris coming to live in France.
In 1925, her new lover Dominic Bevan Wyndham-Lewis had suggested to Doris that they emulate Gillian’s father, whom he had known in the army, and cross the Channel to avoid the outcry provoked by his elopement with the wife of a fellow journalist. They rented two rooms in the Hôtel de la Bourdonnais, near the Eiffel Tower, where Doris adopted the name ‘Mrs Wyndham-Lewis’ and tried to forget that she had a husband in England.
The parties, the dances, the time on their hands. At a young age, Priscilla exchanged her father’s literary circle in Hove for a worldly expatriate clique – promiscuous, gossipy, dependent on the lowness of the franc – in which Gillian’s parents set the tone and pace.
The Hammonds and ‘Mr and Mrs Wyndham-Lewis’ went out a great deal. Like Doris, of whom she was strangely jealous, Gillian’s mother was a bar-addict. The two women sat beside each other on high stools at the zinc counter, beautiful legs crossed seductively, as they thought, beneath their Poiret frocks. After her miserable years in Hove, Doris, in her tight-fitting emerald cloche hat, was in her element flirting with Cyril.
Back in 22a First Avenue, Hove, SPB groused that his estranged wife, to whom he continued to send a monthly allowance, had got in with the worst possible set. ‘She drinks, she smokes too much, she’s extravagant, she appears to be living entirely for dancing . . .’
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 Do
ris, 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.
Priscilla Page 4