‘From a distance the chateau looked as I remembered it: a long, rectangular building without much claim to beauty. As I got nearer I noticed an air of complete dilapidation: all the windows had been blown in, the roof had caved in and the façade was scarred with shrapnel and bullet wounds. Nearby farmers had stored their hay and straw in what had once been the rather grandiose sitting-room.
‘I turned and fled.’
At the time of her visit to Boisgrimot, Robert was in Paris, where he lived for the rest of his life. She imagined him asleep or praying in his chair, or alone in his narrow bed. The man of gloom, unconsoled, the Prince of Aquitaine, his tower in ruins. ‘He became very, very sombre after the divorce,’ said Zizi Carer, the steward’s daughter.
One June day in 1948, Priscilla stubbed out her cigarette and telephoned him.
‘Why did you ring me?’ he asked.
‘Because I wanted to tell you myself of my remarriage. I didn’t want you to hear it from someone else.’
His reply ended a long silence. ‘I suppose I ought to wish you happiness. But I don’t want you to be happy with anyone else.’
This wasn’t a question of selfishness, he said; it was how he felt.
Priscilla’s final identity was Mrs Raymond Thompson, Church Farm, East Wittering. But her past did not go away. It kept on detonating.
In her bedroom, in the garden, wherever she was, she was conscious of Raymond: moody when bills came in, listening to the weather forecasts, going out late at night to regulate the temperatures or stoke the boiler, with frosted fingers harvesting the mushrooms, each one having to be picked up individually and twisted. He was never far away. His first wife had run off with his best man. He was not going to let that happen again. He found it hard to tether his jealousy, though. ‘Anybody who got close to her,’ Vivien said, ‘Raymond was awful to.’ His jealousy extended to Priscilla’s family, friends, former lovers – even to her God. Only with her first husband did he, out of some unexplained motive, slacken the rein.
Maybe Raymond sensed that he was being over-restricting and that in this one area – which anyway posed no threat – he had little choice but to relent. I am not certain how else to explain his decision, after they had been married ten years, to allow Priscilla to meet up with Robert in Paris.
My parents were among the few members of Priscilla’s family whom Raymond could tolerate. When we moved to Paris in the late 1950s, Raymond and Priscilla came over each summer to stay. Tracey was living with us in Rue Jean Nicot, and she remembered how during their visits, from which I retain a clear and evocative image of my aunt sunbathing on our roof terrace, Priscilla would take the opportunity to go off and see someone: ‘There was always that one person, “the friend”.’
Robert wrote to Priscilla only once following her remarriage – in 1958, twelve years after their divorce. ‘Give me a sign when you’re coming in June. I’d be happy to see you again for a few moments.’
Half a century after we left Paris, I accompanied my father back to France to stir up memories of his days there, first as a student immediately after the war, then as a teacher, next as a journalist and latterly as a diplomat. He had not visited the city since 1961. Images from his past slowed his step from the moment we arrived at the Gare du Nord.
We were crossing Pont Alexandre III, when my father pointed towards the right bank. The quay was deserted; these days no private boats were permitted to tie up. He was gazing down to where his twenty-eight-year-old self had jumped from a deck, holding a rope.
‘Raymond had a state-of-the-art motor-cruiser, and on one memorable occasion in 1958 he invited me, an agile young man then, for a crossing of the Channel to help with locks between the mouth of the Seine and Paris.’ Vulture was a converted motor torpedo boat with a speed of 20 knots. A plaque in the wheel-house saluted her role at Dunkirk.
‘We moored there, directly below the Grand Palais. And Robert came on board for a drink one evening.’
The person who my father recalls stepping into the saloon was a tall, slim, distinguished-looking man, elegantly dressed and rather gentle, and much older than Priscilla. ‘He could have been her father. He was plainly pleased to see Priscilla, whom he regarded still as his wife. And it was clear in a way I didn’t understand that Priscilla felt she was still married to him. It was the only time I ever got a hint of her Catholicism, because she never discussed religion. Raymond was putting up with it, tolerantly in the background. The two of them chatted amicably for an hour and that was it.’
But their ‘few moments’ together reignited something.
My mother told me: ‘I remember Priscilla saying she met Robert every year, always with Raymond, and they always had lunch.’
In the fields around Boisgrimot, mines and anti-tank rockets continued to maim farmers and children. In a drought year, a Wehrmacht helmet, a belt buckle, a Mauser and the turret of a German tank were discovered in the moat. As late as 2002 bodies were being unearthed from the ditches, giving flesh to the idea that Normandy had been martyred to save the rest of France.
Robert died in October 1978, aged seventy-nine. He was buried in Sainteny churchyard next to his brother Guy, whom he had outlived by two years. Priscilla was not at the funeral, even had she been told about it. But she had never ceased to think of him.
‘To be beautiful, one has to suffer,’ he told her more than once.
Robert was not the only person from her past who kept surfacing. Whenever in later life Priscilla waited for someone, she caught herself half-hoping to see a man with the initials PD embroidered on his Sulka shirt. Gillian knew how she felt. ‘The only man she was in love with was Pierre.’
Priscilla’s heart when she thought of Pierre, the sheen of his voice in a blacked-out bedroom, flailed around inside her like a hooked fish.
He had returned to his wife, but he never let go of Priscilla. ‘I love you, Pris of my heart, I love you piercingly,’ he wrote from his desk in Annemasse. ‘You know that I love you most in all the world – yes, you know – and you know also that my greatest joy will be to see you again.’
Then, on 16 April 1946, three months before her divorce and one year and six months before she met Raymond, a thunderbolt: ‘My love, How dearly I would like to say that “our” daughter has been born, but this was not fate’s wish. And so I’m writing to tell you that on 13 April at 11.40 p.m. Carole Duboyon “my” daughter made her entry into the world. You can imagine my joy at having a girl, and you can see how, in wanting her to be part of my happiness, I have given her the same name which we chose for our child. Her birth was the simplest and easiest one in the world.’
Carole had Priscilla’s clear, bright blue gaze. ‘Her hair is a little sparse at the moment, but she promises to grow into a very sympathetic blonde. When I catch her looking at me, I recognise the same soft and sly expression that I love to see in your eyes.’
His daughter’s birth in Croix did not stop Pierre from pursuing Priscilla to London the following month. ‘I place you first before everyone, Pris dear.’ In May, and again in July, they met at the Esplanade Hotel in Warwick Avenue. Before their second encounter, Pierre imagined himself coming back into her room, ‘and I am naked like the last time . . . and you are offering me what belongs to me, that is to say, your lips, your body, your soul. I kiss you everywhere EVERYWHERE EVERYWHERE. PIERRE.’
But Priscilla was going mad, leading a life incomprehensible even to herself. After her turbulent years in France and divorced at last, she was crying out for permanence. She wanted to settle down. She wanted a home. She loved Pierre, but these snatched visits left her stricken. When he kissed Priscilla goodbye, he was returning to be with the daughter they had talked about having. To the end of her life, this conversation would dart out from behind a rock and swim up.
Their love affair played itself out during a business trip which Pierre made to Bradford in January 1947. He telephoned again and again from his hotel, panicking when Priscilla failed to answer. Could she have forg
otten his arrival? Enshrouded in a northern fog that limited his vision to a hundred metres, he ‘exteriorised’ his fear of losing her. ‘For the first time I feel alone, terribly alone. I have the impression that I’ve been abandoned.’
His instinct was correct. Once Priscilla had accepted Raymond Thompson’s proposal, she wrote to Pierre requesting that he not contact her.
Priscilla had been married to Raymond for four years when Pierre sent her a short handwritten letter, dated 7 November 1952. Her chest thudded as she read it. ‘My dear Pris, I’m writing to you with some very sad news: the death of my sister Simone Vernier.’ She had died on 31 October after a short illness. ‘I know that you loved her, and that’s why I’ve overcome my emotions to send you these quick lines.’
The death of her ‘double’ during the Occupation moved Priscilla to break her silence. Her condolence message elicited one further piece of correspondence. It was the last love letter that she kept – possibly the last she received.
‘Pris darling, Thanks for your letter. Thanks for your telegram. I was so sad not to be able to write to you on your birthday on 12 July. I thought of you a lot on that day and I abided by your wish expressed in your letter before last: not to write to you again.’ But if Priscilla could see a way to be in London on Saturday 13 December, he would be overjoyed to spend a moment with her. ‘I hug you hard, hoping to be able to tell you very soon “Me too”. Pierre.’ Priscilla felt dizzy. She had recovered from her heart-break. And yet, and yet . . . she did want to see Pierre again – ‘just once’. She wrote back to say that she was prepared to come by the Esplanade Hotel in Warwick Avenue. But she dared not tell Raymond, who was bound to be furious. He was already aware of her unfortunate passion – ‘Do you still think of Pierre?’ he had once asked out of the blue. And then whispered, before she had time to formulate a reply, holding her close, ‘You won’t ever leave me, darling, will you?’ ‘Of course not, you old silly,’ and she kissed him fondly.
Even so, guilt crept over her. While Raymond never articulated his passion like Pierre, he had given her far more devotion. When the day arrived, she wrote a note to Pierre. She had changed her mind. They had missed their chance, there was no going back. She took a taxi to Warwick Avenue and handed the note to the porter.
But Priscilla did see Pierre again. Later that very same morning she joined Raymond at Paddington station. Just when she hoped to have put Pierre behind her, Priscilla had a rush of blood to her head and felt her face burning at the sight of him standing next to the ticket collector. He had grown stout and his hair had thinned. He wore a dark grey suit and a subdued tie. ‘His thick white silk shirt had his initials engraved in blue.’
Raymond had been buying a newspaper. He took her arm and urged her towards the train. Priscilla was abreast of Pierre and kept her eyes to the ground. Her heart roaring in her ear, she passed through the gates, almost touching him, and walked in quick steps down the platform, without glancing back.
She sat with Raymond in a carriage that they had to themselves.
Raymond looked at her with a concerned expression and patted her knee. ‘You look pale, darling. Are you tired?’
Priscilla nodded. At last, the train began to move. She looked out of the window. There was Pierre, staring at her from the platform.
38.
THE END
Raymond had concealed Priscilla’s illness from her family. Osteomyelitis, which had stopped her from dancing in Paris, had again erupted in her right leg. And then one day she threw up blood.
‘I’m afraid that my news is not too cheerful,’ Priscilla wrote to Gillian on 18 May 1978. ‘Tomorrow I go into hospital for an operation (next week) on my gullet (gosier?) CANCER . . . Don’t fret or worry too much – they say I shall be as good as new in 6 weeks or two months time! Meanwhile, naturally I shall be in pain, but I’ve felt so bloody awful for 4 or 5 months that I couldn’t care less.’
Vivien took a week off to be with her. On the last morning, she asked the surgeon: ‘What are the prospects for my sister? I gather not awfully bright.’ The surgeon replied angrily: ‘I have cured your sister’ – Priscilla could go home. But she had a hell of a time recuperating, Vivien told me. ‘When she swallowed food, it shot back. Raymond kept taking her abroad. He needed her. He was frightened she might run away and hauled her off, a crime when she was unwell. “Oh for God’s sake pull yourself together. You know you’re cured.”’
Few understood at the time why Raymond denied Priscilla’s illness, or why he insisted on taking her sailing to Elba and Menton. I discovered the explanation only much later. In the summer after her operation, a policeman had found sixty-seven-year-old Raymond wandering around the centre of Chichester unable to remember who he was. That night, his farm manager received a call. ‘We’ve got someone here who we think is Raymond Thompson. Could you come and identify him?’ Raymond had suffered a nervous breakdown after losing a substantial sum when experimenting with his mushroom business. In one calamitous experiment, he had spread tons of shredded paper on top of the compost.
Raymond’s doctor ordered him to go abroad for six months. With Priscilla’s help, Raymond improved. But his breakdown impeded her recovery. On a trip with him to Vieux Roquebrune, they stayed in an apartment which no taxi could reach and had to lug their baggage along the road. Priscilla lifted a suitcase and ripped something in her eye.
Gillian was worried. ‘Priscilla is not in good shape, alas,’ she wrote to Harold Acton in October 1979. ‘She had a nasty gullet operation last year and now faces on her return to England a cataract operation. I must say, when sorrows come . . . I feel very sorry for her as she can’t drive any more. She’s got cataracts in both eyes.’
Priscilla could not see to read, she stumbled when walking, she was unable to speak properly. But Raymond was intransigent. A concerned Imogen kept calling to be updated on her sister’s health, only to be deflected. ‘Oh, she’s fine,’ Raymond said. ‘Thanks for ringing.’
Stuck up in her bedroom without company, without books, only the television, Priscilla sought relief in half-bottles of Krug.
In the end, it all happened quickly. On Saturday 13 March 1982, Raymond had to go with Tracey to his brother-in-law’s funeral at Farley Mount. Tracey put her foot down – they could not leave Priscilla on her own. ‘I said for goodness sake, this was a perfect time for Imogen to come. So he gave in on this day and Imogen was alone with Priscilla all that afternoon.’
Tracey and Raymond had already left when Imogen arrived at 11.30 a.m. ‘The housekeeper let me in. I went upstairs to Pris’s bedroom, the Holy of Holies – I’d never been in there before. I found Pris pretty ill in bed, and obviously fading.’
Imogen had brought along one of SPB’s early books. ‘I’d chosen it carefully because I wanted it to be about before we arrived on the scene, Mummy and Lalage and me. I wanted it to be pre-us.’
She asked Priscilla: ‘Would you like me to read Daddy’s book?’
Priscilla nodded and closed her eyes. SPB had died seven years before – on his own, bankrupt and heartbroken, after Winnie left him and married the novelist who had first proposed to her when she was seventeen.
Imogen sat on Priscilla’s bed and began to read aloud. As she remembered it, the passage described their father going into a church.
‘I was in the middle of reading to her when she opened her eyes and looked up and gazed into space, on the track of what Daddy had written. Her mind went off into what the future would be. Suddenly, it impinged on her. Having converted, she was still a Catholic, and what had happened between her and Raymond was not of significance.’
Then Priscilla turned her head and looked at Imogen. ‘Maybe I’ve never really been married to Raymond. Maybe I was always married to Robert.’
She was finding it harder to speak. From the telephone beside the bed, Imogen rang the Penina Hotel in the Algarve, catching my mother in the middle of a diplomatic function.
‘You need to talk to Priscilla.’
My mother burst into tears.
Priscilla’s last words to her were: ‘Don’t worry, I’m living on champagne.’
Two days later, Raymond, who could not cope with her dying and had hidden in the mushroom shed, finally sat down at the end of the dining-room table and wrote to Gillian Sutro. ‘Priscilla died last night of a malignant brain tumour. She died peacefully with no pain. Although you were for very many years her closest friend, she did not want me to tell you that she was dying. Love, Raymond.’
She was sixty-five.
39.
AN UNSENT LETTER
Priscilla never realised two desires. She did not publish a book. She failed to bear a child. Her life is a reflection of how hard it was to be fulfilled as a woman, even until recently. The two things she had wanted to do, she could do today, without the help of a man: she could have told her story honestly, and she could have had a child out of wedlock.
In death, Priscilla was denied a third wish. She had requested a Catholic funeral, according to Vivien. ‘She said to our common mother: “If I look as if I’m dying, I must have the last rites.”’
But Raymond refused to summon a priest. He had Priscilla cremated in Chichester.
Imogen was Priscilla’s only sister – and blood relation – to attend the service. She said: ‘The impression was given by Raymond that Pris had not been “religious” and the sooner it was over the better.’
Raymond rushed in and rushed out, not pausing to speak to anyone. He was so upset that he had not bothered to register Priscilla’s death. ‘I had to register it,’ Tracey said. ‘When we asked him about flowers, he wanted a bunch of red roses loose on the coffin. The undertakers warned that they would blow away, so the roses had to be stuck down with tape.’
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