Priscilla (18 page)

‘Let's go next door.'

There the crowd was less dense. A fat middle-aged woman reclined on a couch, smoking and chatting to two men. Suddenly, the door opened, letting in one of the masked girls, who ran over to the couch and seized the woman's hand, kissing it. ‘You're not still angry?' The woman deliberately paid no attention, until the girl stopped her kisses and lifted the woman's skirt.

Gillian saw that she had nothing on underneath. Light from a garnet cloth shade fell on a very white belly and a dark triangle. The girl spread the woman's legs, long and fleshy, with rolls of fat above the knees, and buried her face between them. The woman crushed out her cigarette, lay back.

Vertès and Gillian joined the silent circle that formed around the couch. Ten minutes at least passed before the woman, writhing under the girl's kisses, abruptly raised her arms, fists beating against the wooden sides of the couch, back arching, head shaking in every direction, and collapsed, panting, folded in half, still squeezing the girl's masked face between her thighs.

Some images from that night remained so vivid and shameful, that for months afterwards Gillian blushed when she thought of them; and yet she could not stop thinking about them.

It pained Priscilla to have to listen to what a sensational sex life her best friend was enjoying. It was not just that her married life lacked this erotic dimension. Robert and Guy had few friends. ‘They were all forty or over and I found them very old and dull.' Untouched by Robert's fastidious hands at night, posing by day in Schiaparelli's latest outfits, which showed off a figure crying out to be caressed, she feasted on Gillian's stories. The question is, did it stop there?

On 12 July 1977, Priscilla wrote to Gillian in Monaco: ‘It is my birthday today and I'm thinking of you and of our friendship which has lasted 50 odd years of undiluted pleasure and happiness for me and as far as I can recall only one serious disagreement which was my fault anyway!' Was the disagreement over Vertès?

Once Gillian had brought Vertès out of the shadows to meet Priscilla, the artist was in touch with my aunt until his death. But the door is shut on their relationship. Something did happen between Vertès and Priscilla, although it is hard to say exactly what this was.

Priscilla ran down Vertès in her novel. The Priscilla-character Crystal ‘hated him'. She and the character based on Gillian, Chantal, ‘hardly ever discussed him for that reason'.

Was this hatred the source of her later conflict with Gillian? Or could there have been another reason?

The answer lies locked in the portrait that Vertès painted of Priscilla in 1939. While Priscilla was modelling for Gillian, she had also been posing for Gillian's lover.

Their friend Zoë Temblaire was the origin of the story behind the portrait. Gillian heard about it first only after the war. Zoë confessed: ‘At the time, we thought you would be too upset had we told you.'

One year older than Priscilla, curly dark-haired and plainer, Zoë was the third member of their trio, the daughter of Gillian's elephant-faced landlord when the Hammonds lived in Boulevard Berthier. Zoë's mother was a strange, furtive creature; Priscilla would see her hurrying along, hat down to her eyebrows, cheeks rouged, on her way to watch a film.

The three girls had known each other since 1930, but because of a mutual dislike between Zoë and Robert, Zoë had not been invited to Priscilla's wedding.
Zoë told Gillian during a telephone conversation fifty-three years later: ‘I have rarely detested a man so much,' and thought it odd that with her beauty Priscilla should have married him. Gillian explained that Priscilla, recovering from her abortion and penniless, had little choice. ‘She was in very bad shape. Aged twenty-two, marriage to Robert seemed the best solution.' But Zoë's omission from Priscilla's wedding list sparked a grievance that found a destructive outlet.

Gillian wrote: ‘What I most disliked in her after the war was her desire to wound, to hurt one.' The story that Zoë told Gillian about Priscilla and Vertès was an example of Zoë's deviousness.

Zoë's first version was as mixed up as her character, which preferred to live at second-hand through her girlfriends' adventures. This is how Gillian initially came to understand what had happened: ‘Through me, Vertès had met Pris and had asked her to model a hat for the cover of
Vogue
. (The gouache was not used and he gave it to Pris as a present.) I knew that Pris was sitting for him, but she did not tell me that he asked to meet her at the café on the corner of the Rue Cambacérès, the idea being to end up in our usual haunt.'

Priscilla, according to Zoë, met Vertès at the café, but had second thoughts about accompanying him to the maison de passe. Zoë said waspishly, ‘I wasn't astonished at Vertès's behaviour, but what did surprise me was Pris not going to the Cambacérès.' Then: ‘She's such a weak character. She floats along like a leaf.'

Gillian had previously understood that an editor from
Vogue
was present at the sittings. She also knew, by now, Zoë's habit of stirring up trouble between Gillian and Priscilla, ‘always running down one to the other and vice versa, a proper Iago'. Gillian admitted to Zoë, ‘I'd rather have known at the time' – but repeated: ‘Pris and I have never cheated on each other.' She held fast to this conviction for most of her life.

Only the portrait can say what really went on. I look at my aunt's face, inscrutably beautiful, to find a key. Something in the smile that is half formed, as she fastens the straps of her hat, reminds me of Kessel's Séverine. One day a man whom Séverine finds odious makes a pass at her. She rejects him, but feels an indefinable voluptuousness which she does not know how to slake.

For the moment, neither Gillian nor Robert had grounds for suspicion. Priscilla was the outwardly passive young wife of a scion of the French upper classes. Anyone meeting her on the ‘Boule Miche' arm-in-arm with Gillian would have taken them for two well-brought up women bent on having an innocent time, while this was still possible.

Gillian associated certain phrases with Priscilla at this time.

‘Message reçu,' in her laconic voice.

‘Not fit for human consumption.'

‘Chum' – a word that Gillian never used.

Right hand on hip: ‘I must push off.'

When not modelling for Gillian, Priscilla still attended cordon bleu classes. With Zoë, she accompanied Gillian on rounds of magazine offices to give moral support. On chilly afternoons the three women sat in a cinema with their coats buttoned to the neck. In sunny weather, they sunbathed naked on Gillian's fifth-floor balcony in Rue de Clichy. Or went shopping in Rue Bonaparte for slips to wear under their frocks. Gillian passed on to Priscilla her taste for uncluttered couturier clothes.

One afternoon, late spring, they were walking in the Carousel Gardens when Gillian bumped into her deflowerer. The Baron wore his bowler hat and a small, plump, round-faced young woman hung on his arm. ‘My wife Suzanne,' he said with pride.

‘I bet there's been blood with Suzanne,' Gillian remarked after the couple strolled off. Meanwhile, she wrote to her mother that a young man had proposed. ‘I suppose it is flattering, but when I marry, he has got to be
the cat's whiskers
.' She mentioned Vertès only as someone who could further her career. ‘I see a lot of Vertès, we have large teas at the Dôme. He's most cheerful and goes on drawing as if nothing was happening, or ever going to happen.'

Still wanting to be a film star, and feeling depressed about her drawing, Gillian decided to join an acting class. ‘Vertès thinks it an excellent idea. He says that after I've had some training he can surely help me as he knows so many cinema people.'

Priscilla was present when Gillian had her studio photograph taken, and for Gillian's debut performance as Agnès in Molière's
School For Wives
. Gillian's elation was contagious. ‘I felt like I was throwing myself into space . . . I realised that mastering my fear, my painful shyness, gave me a kick. That's when I understood what made me tick.' Priscilla had felt this exhilaration on the ballet floor.

Dressed in her customary black, Gillian chose the part of Sonia in
Crime and Punishment
for a performance to be attended by important agents. Priscilla and Zoë agreed that she looked like a crow among all the gaudily dressed girls. ‘Crow or not, I was the only drama student top impresario André Trives picked out.'

Trives told Gillian to come and see him. She had the physique everyone was looking for, a cross between Michèle Morgan and Simone Simon. ‘At last!'

The snag was the year.

15.
WAR OF NERVES

After the mobilisation scare in the autumn, the streets were no longer dark or empty; there were buses again and Britain's Prime Minister was a hero, as Pétain was to become. Even Robert bought a Chamberlain umbrella, shielding Priscilla with ‘mon chamberlain' from the snow that fell. But the peace was short-lived. ‘In our time' had been the time of her engagement. On her way home from cookery school, she halted before the
Figaro
building and read the newspapers pinned up in glass cases. Fares and stamps were going up. And the price of telephone calls. Vertès did not think there would be a war. Robert was convinced there would.

They were staying at Dinard with Georges and Yolande in August 1939 when the explosive news came that Germany had signed a pact with Russia. Priscilla remembered the last seashore walk, the smell of seaweed and salt. She filled her lungs with the wind blowing from across the Channel.

War was declared a week later. From her hotel room on the Polish border, the
Daily Telegraph
's reporter Clare Hollingworth telephoned the British Embassy in Warsaw. ‘Listen!' and held the telephone out of the window to catch the roar of the invading German tanks. ‘Can you hear it?'

Priscilla and Robert rushed back through torrential rain to Boisgrimot. Robert was mobilised and ordered to a unit near Rouen: to prevent German
agents from working out the size of the French army, a soldier had delivered his call-up papers in person.

He donned a uniform of sorts, a pair of requisitioned dungarees, but had to provide his own boots and a torch. On a moonless night, Monsieur Carer drove them to Carentan. The station name had vanished. Priscilla watched her husband of nine months step on to the train, two haversacks slung across his shoulder, shaking out a handkerchief to wave, and felt like one of the trees stripped of its iron railings in the now anonymous town square. They still loved each other.

Paris was militarised – you needed a pass to enter the city. She was to stay at Boisgrimot, in the care of his mother. Robert had seen too many separations in the last war, people not finding each other again. She wrote: ‘It didn't occur to me not to obey orders. I was used to being treated like a child.'

The chateau overspilled with evacuated Doynels. Yolande and her children; Marie-Thérèse and her children; de Thieulloy children. It had to be explained to them why their fathers had gone away. Georges and Guy had joined their units believing that a trembling Hitler would not attack before the spring. Robert was more pessimistic – the French were gearing up to fight the last war, pushed into this one by the British. With censorship of troop movements, it was hard to know what was going on.

At night in the drawing room, where Yolande with a pained expression stood in for Georges, they prayed for peace. Protected by the priest, the thick-boughed canopy of oak trees and the pigeons in the dovecote, the chateau closed its eyes. Monsieur Carer walked around the house checking the shutters for cracks of light. Priscilla remembered September and October chiefly as a period of religious silence, no bells; and a landscape without signposts. Only the searchlights groping above Caen.

Battle recommenced over the bathroom. Priscilla still insisted on going through Yolande's bedroom, past her sister-in-law's new clothes, sent on approval and laid out on the bed. Priscilla, recognising one dress, did not reveal that she had modelled it. She hated Yolande's deformed elegance, her polite insolence, her virtuous bristle. Yolande, who had not believed for one
second in Priscilla's alleged origins, had started to air gentle doubts about Priscilla's ability to provide Robert with an heir.

On their walks through the garden, Adelaide was asking questions. Yolande, hair frilled out from under another absurd hat, nodded, her powdered nostrils growing wide. Yes, why not? Nine months. She should be pregnant by now. The cries of small boys racing each other along the untrimmed hedges rammed it home. It was one reason why Robert had been called up: he had no children.

Adelaide patted her arm. She had not had her first son René until two years after marrying.

With no maternal responsibilities, Priscilla milked the cows, helped Monsieur Carer to paste brown paper strips on the windows, stitched curtains for the blackout. Talk after dinner was of the Maginot Line, and of the German side of the family. What would happen to them? The room smelled of worn chintz and black felt.