Priscilla (10 page)

Doris had to change her name to Mrs Ommaney-Davis, although she and SPB remained legally married. Meanwhile, Winnie, who had changed her name by deed poll to Mais, remained unmarried, with Priscilla, the legitimate daughter, a standing reproach to her two illegitimate daughters. It was something that Winnie lay awake thinking about every night. Four years later, when they moved to Oxford, she remained in a permanent panic, not only about what was going to happen if their new social circle found out, but anxious as to how SPB would earn a living. ‘The ensuing scandal did nothing to enhance his repute among his public,' she wrote in an unpublished memoir – yet another instance of my extended family and their friends writing stuff down, and so enabling me to reconstruct their story. ‘Lectures, broadcasting and commissioned work all suffered.'

It is not too much to say that Vivien had her life altered by the scandal. She told me that after the
News of the World
printed a double-page spread on the court case, ‘I wasn't fit to know. I got an exemption from my matriculation
and I had to lodge with the cleaner.' To avoid anyone suspecting her of being Sheila Mais, as she had been christened, she changed her name to Vivien Irving and went to work as an au pair in Germany.

Doris's divorce case was partly why Priscilla left London early the following year. She wanted to wait in Paris until the dust had settled. But that was not the only reason. She was also three months pregnant.

10.
MEETING ROBERT: 1937

The encounter that marked Priscilla's whole life took place after she had spent five years back in England, on a fine spring day in 1937, at a moment when she least expected kindness.

On that morning, 11 March, she had caught the train from Victoria. She bought a newspaper, then stumbled – no hat on, gripping an ochre suitcase – along the platform and into the carriage, upholstered corner seat, with a book.

Under a grey lamb coat, a gift from her mother on her twentieth birthday, she wore her one and only black suit. She had £5 in her pocket, borrowed from a friend.

The train journey – second-class, to Newhaven – was tedious. She cleared a patch on the pane and stared out in detachment at the green fields, struggling to break her connection with the past.

The fields threw her back against her will to another spring day and SPB seeing her off at Newhaven – alone again – on the French steamer. But it hurt Priscilla to think of her father. They were too similar, as her mother kept pointing out. Always remembering and regretting mistakes.

Priscilla drummed with her fingers on the window – another of her father's traits. She had wanted a child so much. She felt sick and young and very frightened. And Tom, the man who had got her pregnant, not even seeing her off.

The truth was, Priscilla did not much care what happened to her.

There is such rich detail both in her unpublished novel and in her diaries that we know to a remarkable degree what she was thinking. We even know what she replied when the passport inspector at Victoria station enquired how long she planned to be away: ‘It depends on a lot of things.'

Being under twenty-one, she had needed her parents' consent for a new passport. She had sent a wire to her mother asking her to come urgently to London. Doris, self-engrossed and living in Tintagel with her besotted young naval surgeon, was irritated more than shocked to learn that her daughter was expecting a child by a feckless South African, Tom Ewage-Brown. Priscilla had met him after Doris announced that she was moving with Bertie to Cornwall and Priscilla would have to find digs and earn a living. Tom was renting the next room in Priscilla's Earl's Court hostel, thirty years old, in advertising, drove a Ford V8 very badly and owned an exotic uniform, from the period when he claimed to have fought in Bolivia. They had moved in to a double room in Lexham Gardens on his promise to marry as soon as he was earning enough to keep them both. But no sooner were they installed than Priscilla discovered that she was pregnant and that Tom had a Chilean girlfriend. His reaction was hysterical. She should have been more careful, they could not afford it, she had got herself into this mess, she could get herself out.

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 £2.10
s
. 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