Priscilla (48 page)

PART FIVE

33.
LIVING WITH ANYBODY

Thinking about Priscilla on D-Day, her father placed a bet on a horse. ‘I backed Hycilla because of Priscilla – and won £2. It's the first time I won a horse race for years.'

Eight weeks later, SPB wrote in his journal: ‘PARIS REGAINED. After 4 years and 4 months, I hope to God she's free.'

A fortnight passed before he heard that she was alive.

On 9 September 1944: ‘Grand day. News of Priscilla from Vivien. She's at 98 Rue de Miromesnil, a nursing home, after an operation. I wrote at once and found an airman press photographer going back to Paris to take letter.'

23 October: ‘PRISCILLA at home again. 1st letter for years – a quite casual letter. Flew over from Paris day before yesterday. I phoned at once. Her voice sweet, low & staccato like a child's. Her writing carefree, neat like a child's. What have the bloody Germans done to her?' His first impulse was to write to his thirteen-year-old daughter Lalage. At her school in Cheltenham, Lalage who is my mother, learned that she had another sister.

9 November: ‘An eventful day.' SPB took the train with Winnie to London where he gave a talk on the BBC about ‘How I Failed to Find a Kite' and afterwards met Priscilla at the Great Western Railway Hotel in Paddington.
His daughter – ‘looking younger than ever' – had a French intonation in her cigarette-furred voice. She had not spoken English since 1941.

‘First time I've seen her for FIVE years. She told us her story at night. Three months in concentration camp. Then three and a half years on false papers living with Spaniards, Belgians, Swiss, and always the French Robert cringing in the background.' But SPB's elation was short-lived. Before the evening was out, a tremendous pity assailed him. In a moment of piercing realism, he wrote: ‘She cares nothing for anything except having a good time. She'll probably end by committing suicide. I'm desperately sorry for her.'

Priscilla accompanied SPB and Winnie back to Oxford, staying for a week at 291 Woodstock Road with their eight-year-old daughter Imogen. It was the first time that Priscilla had slept under her father's roof since she was a teenager. She attended a performance of
The Mikado
and a Sunday service at the Dragon School, where SPB was teaching for £1 a week.

But the young woman who had reappeared in his life, showing the detachment that many people feel in moments of stress, was not a daughter he recognised. It shocked SPB to observe how Priscilla had returned home flaunting Arletty's international arse, and was ‘still chasing after or being chased by men of all nationalities'. The Texan pilot she had befriended in Paris joined her in Oxford for the weekend – ‘She lives with anybody!'

In marked contrast, Priscilla's attitude towards her father was ‘cold as iceberg'. Her departure left SPB battling to pacify his troubled emotions. ‘In all morning writing short story about Priscilla.' This missing story, out of all my grandfather's works, is the one I would most like to read.

Priscilla went on to Bath. Vivien, her sister, met her at the station. ‘I saw this woman and I thought, “What the hell's my mother doing there?” – and it was Priscilla, looking exactly like her. Same build of face, same eyes – which I didn't have. She stayed a couple of weeks, we were sisters again, but she didn't want to talk about the horrors. She'd had France.'

It was a liberation to speak her own language – and to play the radio so loud; on 20 November, she listened to news of P. G. Wodehouse's arrest at the Hôtel Bristol.
She felt relieved that no one had bothered to debrief her when she landed back in England or shown any interest in her knowledge of Occupied France.

In London, rare wild flowers bloomed in the rubble. The taxi drivers were politer than their Paris equivalents. Even the Underground was preferable to the Métro; there was not the suffocating whirl of hot air that hit her in the face when she went down the steps. She had forgotten how wonderful porridge, bacon and tea tasted. ‘I was so thrilled at being home at last that everything looked good.'

There was one more family member to meet. One Sunday morning, Priscilla arrived at Cheltenham Ladies' College and treated my thirteen-year-old mother to lunch at a hotel. My mother said: ‘I didn't query, which I think was very odd, that I had a new sister out of the blue. I was far more excited at being taken out to lunch. I was starving at school. I had to live on bread – that's why I never eat bread now – and French mustard, which I kept in the dorm under a loose floorboard, and spread on the bread. So to be invited out to a meal was quite something.' She got on well with her half-sister, despite their fifteen-year age gap. ‘I thought she was beautiful. She had this amazing long blonde hair and attractive face, and an air about her, a confidence.' My mother told me that Priscilla was on her way to see a man, and the man was Robert Donat. ‘She said he was a great friend.'

* * *

Priscilla had escaped Paris with a suitcase. Within weeks, she was in bed with one of most desirable men in England. Gillian Sutro worked hard to promote their romance, having introduced them.

Gillian at the time was having a snatched liaison with the film director Carol Reed, who had turned up on her doorstep one day at 1.25 p.m., when he knew that John Sutro lunched at the Beefsteak. Six-foot tall, blue eyes, aquiline nose, Reed took off his camel-hair coat and asked Gillian for a gin and tonic. ‘As I put on a French record on John's cumbersome machine to remind me of Paris, he pushed his arms round me, clutched my shoulders, and tried to kiss me. “Don't be so silly.” I pushed him off. He was behaving as though time was money.' Reed told her that his marriage was breaking down. ‘Why don't we run off together? It will solve everything.' Gillian opted for an affair, to be fitted in during lunchtimes. ‘For him it was like buying the rights to a book he wanted to direct. I never sensed passion; he kept that for films.' Reed, who went on to direct
The Third Man
, resembled Robert Donat in this respect.

Donat was forever following girls with fantastic legs and moulding them into an ideal of womanhood that he had conceived as a boy. He did this with Priscilla after meeting her at a party given by the Sutros in that first winter of her return in 1944.

He had come from the Westminster Theatre where he was producing a version of the Cinderella story. Gillian steered Donat into the drawing room to meet her long-lost best friend. She had a hunch the two might get on.

On that evening, Priscilla was never so alluring or so alone. She stood by the Sutros' fireplace in her Schiaparelli ivory silk dress that left her neck bare. Donat looked into her ‘mild wild eyes, like a pregnant faun', and was, he afterwards confessed, ‘enchanted'. They talked and the other guests receded.

The Germans banned English films in Paris, but Priscilla knew who Donat was. His hold on the public imagination is hard to exaggerate, even if his name does not register today. In 1939, Donat had pipped Clark Gable in
Gone with the Wind
to win the Academy Award for playing an English public schoolmaster in
Goodbye Mr Chips
. The role had strong associations for Priscilla; her father had been a teacher at Sherborne when she was born. And
it makes me wonder if, in fact, SPB provoked Priscilla, having resampled him, to seek a father-substitute in Donat who, in his most famous screen role, had popularised the novel which SPB wished to have written more than any other.

It would be too much to say that Priscilla's affair with Donat was a deliberate strike at her father, but I notice that SPB in
I Return to Scotland
takes a derogatory swipe at Alfred Hitchcock's adaptation of Buchan's thriller in which Donat made his name. ‘I remember how keen was my disappointment on seeing the film version of
The Thirty-nine Steps
. The film couldn't create in the way that Buchan had created that bold moorland, and failed to arouse in me that state of wild excitement and suspense that I felt all the time that Hannay was on the moors.'

Here, SPB was out on a limb. In this Golden Age of British cinema, Donat was England's leading man, and epitomised an effortless, understated charm. To Hitchcock, who directed him in
The 39 Steps
, Donat had ‘a beautiful dry quality'. An unaccompanied young woman in a humdrum job, reclining in her velvet seat, might with Donat's assistance shrug off the anxiety of the V bombs and for ninety minutes imagine herself playing opposite a man who, in the opinion of one critic, ‘can make you feel like he is in love with somebody, which few actors can'.

The problem was that the thirty-nine-year-old Donat could not spark in himself the same emotion. In 1940, concerned for their safety, his wife Ella had taken their children to Los Angeles. On his own for four years, Donat had rarely been so unhappy as on the evening he encountered Priscilla. He telephoned her the following morning at the Sutros, shaken by what she had unloosed.

Soon afterwards, Donat made a list of the qualities he sought in a partner. ‘She must be physically attractive. How? Voluptuous . . . capable of physical excitement, warm, soft-voiced. She must be capable of being satisfied by me alone.' Furthermore, he wished his Ideal Woman to be calm, warm in temperament, with an intellect superior to his. ‘Conclusion: Happiness only possible if MARRIAGE is possible. Things against marriage – Divorce. 3 children. Ella.
Do I want anyone enough to justify the disentanglement?' His letters to Priscilla suggest that he did. ‘Oh oh oh when am I going to see you?'

Donat bombarded her with letters between January and May 1945. Letters to Darling Priscilladimples; Blessedest babe; Dear Doynel Poynel. He ended one letter: ‘Love and kisses all over the blooming place – I mean
especially
the blooming places.'

Their relationship mimicked the fate of the beard he was cultivating for his next role. ‘The beard, dearest – your beard, darling, all yours – is rather tough and curly without much real shape to it.' Out of a romantic or superstitious habit, he used his/her beard as a barometer, wrestling to give his feelings for her a contour, a significance. ‘I swore I would never again take any woman seriously – and here you are beginning to nestle down snugly under my skin, bother and confound you.'

Convalescing from asthma in Tring, Donat was concerned to hear of Priscilla's visit to a doctor – a complication arising from her hysterectomy in July. ‘What did that doctor say about your poor little inside? I haven't heard from you for two whole days. No wonder I've had a relapse.'

Since her arrival at Lees Place at the end of October, Priscilla had been coy about the network of scars on her stomach and legs, as about her experiences in France. All that Donat had extracted from Gillian was that Priscilla wanted a divorce from the Vicomte. Donat tried to draw Priscilla out more.

‘Why do you enchant me, dear one?'

He discovered her hunger for reading. There was nothing to do in Occupied Paris, she said, apart from read and read. It allowed Donat an entry: ‘Do you ever read plays? I have masses of plays sent to me,' and asked if she would make notes on
Yellow Sands
, the Devon comedy for which he was growing their beard. ‘It's difficult finding a play for myself. What should I do next? Writing to you has eased my wheeze a bit.' His nights, too, had lost their terrors. With her photograph propped up beside his bed, he assured Priscilla: ‘I want a great blaze of sunshine and the good expanses of Somerset to show you on a breezy midsummer day with fat white clouds scudding along the horizon, sitting up beside me on a mountain side. And I want a hell of a lot else beside.'

Envisaging their future, he covered page after page in his green ink. ‘I do miss you quite a little lot.' He wished that she were there right now to hold on to. ‘I'd hold you ever so tight and ever so close and ever so long and ever so nicely.' He yearned to hear her voice, read her words. ‘No letter from you all day Monday and no pigeon post Sunday. How on earth do you suppose I can carry on without you?'