Priscilla

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Doris offered Priscilla no sympathy and no financial help. ‘I can’t think how you made such a fool of yourself. I always told you that men are out for all they can get. Perhaps this will teach you a lesson,’ and wrote down the address of an abortionist in Paris.

  SPB, who had quite liked Priscilla’s fiancé, was even less helpful. He had been separated from Doris for twelve years and was based in Shoreham with Winnie and their two girls. When Priscilla asked him for £50, saying that her life was at stake, he refused. He might be a well-known broadcaster, but he was covered in debts following her mother’s divorce case, and having difficulty as it was keeping body and soul together. Plus, he did not approve of destroying life. ‘Why don’t you have the child?’

  Priscilla replied that she did not earn enough to keep herself in her bedsit, let alone keep a child.

  Winnie, whom she abominated, was the only person who tried to talk her out of it, offering to take care of Priscilla until the baby was born, and then Priscilla could have it adopted. ‘But Doris had already persuaded you to have an abortion,’ Winnie reminded her twenty-one years later.

  A clandestine abortion cost about £50 in England (approximately £2,700 in today’s money) – beyond Priscilla’s means. After completing a course at the Triangle Secretarial College, she had found work as a typist in Mincing Lane, translating French correspondence and operating the switchboard for £2.10s. a week. Her only option was to go back to Paris, where abortions were affordable and where she had friends. Priscilla was confident of Gillian’s support.

  Priscilla’s employer agreed to keep open her job for three weeks. She bought the cheapest ticket, then telephoned Gillian to say that she was in trouble and needed her assistance and would she be at the Gare Saint-Lazare at 5.38 p.m.?

  Priscilla began to gather her things as the train approached Newhaven. In the corridor, she observed a man staring. Suddenly, she remembered she had been buying her newspaper at Victoria station when she’d heard a French voice – ‘Oh, elle est mignonne!’ – and on turning, realised that she was the object of the remark.

  Later, Gillian demanded to know every detail of Priscilla’s encounter with Robert. ‘I love hearing how people meet. All the people who have counted in my life have met in the oddest way.’ What seemed a hazard of circumstances had been written at one’s birth, she believed.

  Priscilla’s admirer – he had been addressing a friend – was tall for a Frenchman. He had on an overlong navy-blue coat and a dark brown derby pulled down over his eyes. His gaunt face was lined and he must have been about forty. His feet splayed out as he walked, with a slight stoop.

  Priscilla wondered how anyone could find her attractive in her present state. She did not feel mignonne. ‘I felt like hell’.

  She followed the crowd on to the boat, hoping to shake the man off. She disliked talking to people on trains – one more thing she had in common with her father. ‘In the train and across the Channel,’ SPB wrote in I Return to Switzerland, ‘the Englishman regards his fellow traveller as Cain regarded Abel, and only looks for a chance to eliminate him.’ Her admirer gave the impression from behind as though he might have trafficked in white slaves.

  The sea was calm. She sniffed the air. Travelling the cheapest route at least enabled her to spend longer on the Channel. She found a deckchair and opened her book, looking forward to sitting for the next three hours on deck.

  After a while, she grew aware of someone standing beside her. She turned towards the morning dazzle of sun and sea, and tightened her coat round her body. Trying to keep her eyes averted, she directed her attention at the gulls poised above their shadows.

  And Robert, her Prince of Aquitaine, what did he see? Very blonde untidy hair, eyes of a washed-out blue. Above all, how thin and pale she was. She seemed to have something on her mind and he wished he could help. It was this paternal instinct that made him approach and gently ask, in French, if he might sit down.

  She nodded; fear and rejection may have dulled the voice but without destroying politeness.

  His name was Robert, introducing himself. She explained to Gillian: ‘He spoke no English, so if my French had been non-existent the affair would have ended then and there.’ But her French was as good as her English.

  ‘He told me afterwards that I looked small and ill and he felt sorry for me. He said I was like a cork in a rough sea being tossed hither and thither.’

  She was beautiful, he now saw, the sunlight on her face.

  He asked if she was going to Paris. In her throaty voice, she replied that she was.

  He was travelling with a friend and supposed to be motoring from Dieppe to Rouen. ‘But having made such a charming acquaintance, he intended to take the train to Paris so as to have more time with me.’

  He fell silent after that. Priscilla listened to the seagulls and wondered what was coming next. She felt shy, frightened.

  For something to say, she asked if he lived in Rouen.

  ‘No, I live part of the time in Normandy and part of the time in Paris.’

  She put on her face the same encouraging smile as she wore when a man was telling a story. Slowly, it emerged. He was the youngest and favourite of eleven children. His father had died two years before, but his mother was living in the chateau in Sainteny with his elder brother Georges. The family – deeply conservative and Catholic, Priscilla gathered – was one of the noblest in the north of France and could trace their roots to William the Conqueror.

  ‘But enough said of me. Tell me about yourself. How is it that you speak such excellent French?’ Was she Russian?

  She was English, but had been at school in Paris.

  Her reply did not satisfy him. Why had she spent her schooldays in Paris?

  She looked at him with tired helplessness, fretting her head against the deckchair. The question was innocent enough. She began to shiver.

  Priscilla had flung a net of amnesia over her earliest years, but when questioned with unexpected tenderness by this gangly Frenchman, it put her back in another life. She could feel herself breathing with the tensions of the household in which she had been brought up. Her decision to confide lay behind this future remark of Gillian’s: ‘Through life, I have noticed that on train journeys people often tell one the story of their lives. Things kept to themselves.’

  Three years later, in a blacked-out train during wartime, while on his way to record a talk to British troops in France, SPB also reflected with characteristic inconsistency on our readiness to relinquish our innermost secrets to people we do not know. ‘It is only when notices are put up in every railway carriage warning us not to talk to strangers that we feel the strongest temptation to talk.’ On the boat to Dieppe and on the train from Dieppe to Paris, Priscilla spoke to Robert with the seriousness of someone telling it for the first time.

  Robert confessed a few weeks later that when she had finished talking he looked at Priscilla’s pale face and felt that he wanted to protect her against the world.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  She admitted to not feeling well, but would love a glass of milk. They made their way to the dining car. Robert ordered a quarter bottle of champagne for himself, a glass of milk for Priscilla. She did not enjoy it much because it was boiled, but sipped politely.

  ‘Don’t you ever drink anything stronger?’

  She smiled that she did not drink or smoke – and was constantly being teased at parties. But it made her cheap to entertain.

  He asked where in Paris he could reach her – ‘I said I had no idea which seemed to shatter him slightly.’ He produced his card and made her promise to ring him once she knew.

  Shortly before 6 p.m. the train drew in to Gare Saint-Lazare.

  11.

  THE ABORTIONIST

  A young woman stood in a haze of ascending steam. At the sight of Priscilla, she ran forward.

  It astounded Priscilla to see Gillian, a plump schoolgirl when they last met. Dressed in black, slender, with dark wavy hair, sh
e had grown beautiful.

  They embraced. Priscilla introduced Robert, but he left at once. Gillian had not caught his name. ‘Who was that?’ Her voice was lower-pitched than Priscilla remembered and she spoke English with an accent.

  ‘A Frenchman I met on the boat.’

  ‘He’s very good-looking’ – which surprised Priscilla. Robert had been an attentive listener, but old enough to be her father.

  Gillian grabbed Priscilla’s suitcase and they descended into the Métro. A whirl of hot air rushed up to meet them. Compounded in its suffocating gust were the smells of a Paris she had not seen for five years.

  ‘You haven’t told your parents about me, have you?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  Gillian had booked Priscilla into a ten-franc hotel on the Boulevard Raspail. In a bare top-floor room reeking of drains, she watched Priscilla unpack her few belongings.

  ‘What is going on?’

  Priscilla looked at her with grave eyes and out it came. How Doris had given up the mews house in Kensington – how Priscilla had moved in with Tom Ewage-Brown, who seemed surrounded with glamour to her inexperienced eye – ‘I was so lonely and I hated not having a home’ – how he wanted to marry her – ‘he made me think he loved me’ – how he had not believed in using a sheath – ‘having a toffee with the paper on’ – how she was pregnant.

  Priscilla was calm, but Gillian knew what she must be feeling. ‘What are you going to do?’

  Priscilla stared to one side. ‘I’m going to have an abortion.’

  ‘But I thought you wanted children.’

  ‘I did. But not this one.’ Then her composure cracked. ‘Chou-chou, I am so sorry to bother you with all my worries.’

  The following afternoon, Gillian accompanied Priscilla to the address that Doris had written down. She promised to wait in a café opposite.

  Her long legs moving in her tweed skirt, Priscilla climbed a staircase to a door on the third floor and pressed the bell and when a voice called out she entered. Smoke rose in a grey spiral in a minute vestibule. There was a divan, a table with a jug of water on it, two white chairs. In one of them sat a small owl of a man, fortyish.

  He wanted to know who had given his name. Her mother. He washed his hands and asked her to lie down on the divan and open her legs. He examined Priscilla, still holding his cigarette. When was her last period? Why didn’t she keep the child? She was very pretty. How old was she? Twenty. He examined her at length.

  She re-dressed. He mentioned the price. Gillian had advised Priscilla to say that she was a dancer from the Folies Bergère and that her lover had disappeared and that she had very little money.

  He lit a new Gauloise. So a dancer. He would operate if necessary, but he preferred to try another method first, which would be cheaper for her. He asked her to exercise and dance a lot – ‘to shake it down’. She was to come back in two weeks. He repeated how attractive she was. If she had no money, he hoped that she would be his petite amie.

  Priscilla rejoined Gillian in the café. ‘I think I could use a cognac.’ Before it arrived, she went to the lavatory and vomited.

  Both for the woman and for the person carrying it out, abortion was a crime punishable in France by five years in prison. The only way for a girl in Priscilla’s position to deal with her problem was dangerous and clandestine. When Gillian had helped to make her parents’ double-bed four years before, Victorine, the girl who cleaned for the Hammonds, whispered how she had spent the night trying to bring on a fausse couche with a metal knitting-needle.

  Posters for maladies vénériennes covered the walls of the Métro couloirs; quick relief, discrétion absolute, prix modestes. No telephone numbers, only the names of train stations in sleazy quarters. Priscilla had never lingered before these posters, passing on quickly to the sweet machines that offered Pastilles Vichy. She had no false illusion about what she was planning. ‘One couldn’t have such an operation without one’s health being impaired.’

  Once more, Gillian saw it as her duty to distract Priscilla. They walked in the Jardin de Luxembourg; fed pigeons; sat in the Café Dôme, where the waiters knew Gillian and let both girls stay for ages in front of a glass of lemonade. They walked and talked.

  Gillian was now an art student. In the autumn of 1932, after Priscilla left for London, she had enrolled at Atelier Dupuis off Place Saint-Sulpice. Still determined to be an actress, until that day arrived she was scraping a living by selling her drawings to fashion magazines. The trouble was that magazines paid per sketch – not enough to fund the independence she craved.

  At home, nothing had changed. Her mother continued to shove her father’s bankruptcy in his face. Gillian could not wait to leave their orbit and marry.

  Unburdened, Priscilla longed to hear about Gillian’s love life. ‘I wonder if our tastes are still as different? Do you still dislike dancing and good-looking young men?’

  First love for Gillian had been a disaster, too. She had lost her virginity, aged sixteen, to a French aristocrat in September 1933. At a party given by the editor of Le Matin, she met Yves de Constantin, baron, writer, member of the Cour des Comptes. Unmarried, forty years old, with his first novel just out, he had seemed a judicious choice.

  He had spotted Gillian from across the room and made a beeline. How lovely to meet a true jeune fille, he said, exhaling a black gold-tipped Muratti.

  She looked him in the eye. ‘This jeune fille is sick of being one.’

  ‘How very interesting,’ and wrote down her name in a leather agenda. They must get together.

  He invited her to dine at his apartment in Avenue de Tourville, a tiny room crammed with filing cabinets and a sofa-bed. He showed her his first editions on rag paper of Pierre Frondaie, all signed by the maître, and served veal. Halfway through dinner, he knelt while Gillian was chewing on a piece of gristle. ‘Do you want to do it tonight?’

  She stared at him, thinking how idiotic he looked. For one awful moment his clipped moustache reminded Gillian of her father. But she knew how hard it was for a pretty, unconventional girl in the early 1930s ‘to find someone suitable for the deflowering task’. She nodded.

  Gillian followed the Baron to the sofa-bed. He wore carpet slippers and his trousers, she noticed, hung in a pouch. Moments after what she called ‘his excavation efforts’, Gillian stood in the bathroom doorway and observed him on all fours scouring the bed. ‘No blood,’ he said. ‘None at all.’

  ‘At least you’ve still got nice clean sheets.’

  After her session with the Baron – ‘my aristocrate dépuceleur’ – Gillian felt sore for a few days. ‘Suffering from piles?’ her father enquired.

  Since then Gillian had had other boyfriends. The most serious was a married Hungarian artist who was twenty-two years older, but he saw her only when it suited him. Determined to bring him to heel, she had loftily declared that she would break off their affair unless his behaviour changed. At the time of Priscilla’s return to Paris, Gillian remained in limbo, waiting for her married lover to get back in touch, while enjoying a passade with a young financial adviser she had met on holiday in Houlgate. But her love life would always be complicated. ‘My mother was highly sexed,’ she reminded Priscilla. ‘I inherited her genes.’

  As for the tall, thin man that Gillian had seen alighting at the Gare Saint-Lazare – who, before the week was out, had telephoned the Hammonds to ask for Priscilla’s number – Priscilla had nothing to worry about there. Robert, even if old enough for her taste, looked too distinguished, too charming, too much an arch-Catholic of la vieille France.

  And hadn’t they sworn never to let a man come between them? ‘Pris and I had a code of conduct which entailed no poaching on each other’s premises.’ The two friends had made this promise five years earlier, on the eve of Priscilla’s departure from Paris. Gillian would stick to their pact. It is less clear whether Priscilla did so.

  Priscilla’s new friend Robert ought to have been pleased to be back in Paris. He disli
ked his absences from the Bourse. His habit was to spend two hours each afternoon at the stock exchange, preserving the modest fortune that he had inherited from his late father. But he felt restless since returning from England.

  He did not have a camera or he would have taken a photograph of Priscilla as she embraced her girlfriend on the platform. He began to ask himself if he was in love. He told himself not, but why had she not contacted him? How could he get hold of her? What was her English friend called? Ham – or some such name. He looked through the telephone book and found it. Gillian’s father angrily passed the receiver over to Gillian, who provided the number of Priscilla’s hotel. That evening Robert invited Priscilla to dinner.

  Priscilla felt a surge of relief to hear his voice. Wanting to dress well for him, she put on her stylish green frock with pockets – her only other item of clothing. At 7.30 p.m. a taxi appeared outside the hotel, Robert inside.

  He lived on the other side of the Seine behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, in a modern block like a barracks at the bottom of Rue Nollet. They took a lift to the sixth floor. He had forgotten his keys and a little old woman opened the door and looked at Priscilla with curiosity.

  Robert ushered Priscilla into his bed-sitting room; small, with brown velvet curtains, brown carpet, a bureau. He explained that he shared the apartment with the elder of his two surviving brothers, Guy. His fingers were very long and white as he poured Priscilla an orange juice – he had not forgotten her aversion to alcohol. He worried that she might have telephoned while he was visiting his mother in Sainteny. ‘I thought I might have lost you for good!’

  Priscilla had done all the talking on the boat-train and had not assessed Robert clearly before. Without his hat and coat on, he no longer resembled a slaver. He had jet black hair, amber eyes and a dignified face, like a clean-shaven George V. His grey flannel suit, tailored in London, was cut immaculately. His best features were his hands. Priscilla sipped her orange juice, examining them. She had never seen nicer ones. They were slender and well cared for, like a Byzantine saint’s. She began to feel less shy and afraid.