Priscilla (49 page)

And then a new note.

‘I posted to you three times last week – all to Horsham. Did you get them?'

More days passed.

‘I'm wondering are you at Depot Road or at Lees Place and where the hell shall I send this? . . . I phoned you three times and had ordered supper for two at home. Bother you.'

What was distracting her? Why so moody all of a sudden?

He asked her to pass on his love to Gillian – ‘I miss her
terribly
' – as if hoping to reel back Priscilla by invoking the person who had introduced them.

May arrived and the end of the war in Europe. The rest of the world danced in the streets, but Donat stayed indoors. ‘I did not celebrate VE day at all – except with gramophone records. I was alone. Love to Gillian.'

His Ideal Woman, his Cinderella, had disappeared on him. Unaccustomed to rejection, he sensed a rival. It was a colossal letdown to discover that his rival was a pen.

‘I have tried to dial THRU and get THRU to YU – and when I DU you are in a mood so I leave you to your writing – noting with relief and amusement that you are far too busy inking paper to miss anyone.'

Their love affair did not outgrow his beard. ‘My beard will probably disappear Saturday morning . . . Could you bear that?' Once he shaved it, the relationship was over. Priscilla was involved with the secretive book she was writing. And on 1 July, the
Samaria
docked in Liverpool, bringing Donat's wife and children from America.

‘Darling,' Donat wrote to Priscilla. ‘We have come to the end of our tether and don't like to admit it to one another. Isn't that the truth? It is only sensible to end it now before it becomes too hurtful.

‘Due in the main to circumstances you have had a pretty thin time of it, I know, and you have been so good about it and thoughtful and considerate, but my conviction has nothing whatever to do with circumstances and I should be a hypocrite to pretend that it had anything to do with the return of the family. It hasn't. I just feel, deeply and truly, that I am not for you nor you for me. I have always tried to be honest with you and I have never pretended with you – nor can I now. So please forgive me if I am hurting you (I would not willingly do so). And forgive me for all my shortcomings. And thank you from the bottom of my heart for so much. Robert.'

Even so, it rankled. What was she writing? How could it have been more important for Priscilla Doynel to put pen to paper than to be with Robert Donat?

Priscilla's husband continued to reach out during this hectic period. It was a measure of their deep affection that they kept up good relations and went on saying very tender things to each other, despite not having a physical relationship. After the war, Priscilla discussed her marriage with Vivien, who was left with the definite impression that once Priscilla's honeymoon was over she and Robert had not attempted to have sex again.

So often people escaped the stresses of the Occupation by going to bed with each other. But the war had cruelly exposed Robert's impotence. He was forced into becoming a ‘wittol', a word presumed by Collins Dictionary to
have fallen out of usage by 2011, describing a man who tolerates his wife's infidelity.

One can safely presume that Priscilla's situation was not unique in an era when few discussed what went on in their bedrooms. Alec Waugh's first marriage was never consummated, which drove him to seek a divorce. It would have been reasonable for Robert to be bitter when Priscilla did the same thing, but there is no evidence that he blamed her. On the contrary, he never stopped wanting to look after her, as if his failure to perform was the fuel for his tenderness.

Writing from Paris, Robert thanked Priscilla for wishing him a happy birthday on 3 March and bringing back happy years. He begged Priscilla to take care of her health. It concerned him how she was coping financially – in an emergency she must draw on funds that he had lodged with Samuel Montagu – and he advised her to buy ‘a small detached house in London'. He apologised that his letters were thin on news, ‘but as you know I see very few people'. Apart from Zoë's father, he mingled with none of Priscilla's Paris friends and rarely left his apartment. ‘Two days ago I took my first taxi (50 francs to go the Champs-Elysées to see a film of Danielle Darrieux). It was all right, nothing special. Since the war, she's aged a lot and her face has withered.'

A visit to London in November 1945 persuaded Robert that Priscilla would never come back to France with him. With a sadness that he was unable to vanquish, he wrote that he had instructed his lawyers to draw their matrimonial affairs to a close. ‘I don't have the heart to say anything more to you today.' On 11 March 1946, he attended a regimental reunion in Paris, the date coinciding with the anniversary of their encounter in 1937 on the boat-train from Victoria. ‘What a lot has happened since that day. Despite all the sorrows, I don't ever forget the very great joy you have given me, for which I thank God every day.'

Soon afterwards, he dined with a neighbour who had hired as a servant a Hungarian prisoner of war: an aristocrat who, after dinner, played some Hungarian romances on his violin. ‘He played very well, and for me especially the little air which they played in the boîte of the Rue Marbeuf where we went
before the war. This air had a charming title. “Just one girl is in the world for me”. In Hungarian: “Csak Egy Kislany Van a Vilagon”.'

1946 was a record year for the number of divorce petitions in France. On 16 July, Robert consented to a civil dissolution of their marriage. As a devout Catholic, he continued to think of Priscilla as his one girl in the world, but in so far as it concerned the French State, Priscilla was free. After eight and a half years of a celibate and childless marriage, she had reached the end like a train shunting into the station, slowing down, last roll of the wheel and shudder, release of steam, slight rocking back. Over.

Too many men passed though Priscilla's life in the months that followed. She was desirable and pitiless. Her womb removed, it mattered little whom she slept with, whom she hurt.

In the grey peace of London she and Gillian went out dancing, to the Milroy Club in Hamilton Place or the 400 Club in Leicester Square. ‘Darling, you certainly have enough boy friends,' wrote one admirer. Her father put it down to ‘having a good time', but there is something frantic and joyless about Priscilla's promiscuity, as though an essential part of her had not come back from France and there had never been any return. Some gate in her had closed with Pierre's desertion. She was free, and yet like Shula Troman her true imprisonment began the moment she landed in England. Troman said: ‘I didn't cry on my first night of internment, but I cried on my first night of liberty. The war ended and it all came to me what I lost with my liberation, what I don't dare say to anyone: that the années de liberté were my four years in prison. In the camp I was free. How could I have known, how could I have been so deformed in my thoughts? It's complex, life, isn't it? Full of contradictions.'

After Donat came Edward Fay, a one-eyed American naval captain whom Priscilla had met in Plymouth when staying with Berry, her former room mate at Besançon. A disoriented Fay wrote to her: ‘I feel completely lost – don't know which way to turn.' He thought of Priscilla every five minutes and lived for her letters. He treasured one sentence that she had written him: ‘I love you more than words can say and nobody else exists as far as I am concerned.'
He wrote back: ‘My darling, as you would say, me too.' Demobbed, Fay travelled from Boston to London fully expecting to make Priscilla ‘Mrs Fay', and was miserable when she broke off their engagement. ‘Frankly, the months I spent with you were the happiest in my life.' He had had no inkling that she was juggling other suitors.

Priscilla kept their letters, the bad things they wrote as well as the good:

There was Charles from University College, Nottingham, who composed a gleeful poem celebrating ‘Your figure divine, your complexion so clear, your teeth so white and your eyes without fear . . .'

There was Max, an emissary of her husband's, who dropped off at Gillian's house a pink dress and a pair of shoes that Priscilla had left behind in Paris. ‘It's perhaps better I don't see you. The most beautiful memories have their price. I know that you continue to be terribly attractive and you are still young. If my friendship can be useful to you one day, whenever and wherever, let me know and I'll do everything in my power.'

There was François, a Yugoslav, who wrote from the Carlton Club: ‘I cannot go on like this. Good-night, sweetheart, bon soir, gardez-vous bien; je t'embrasse et en fin je reste toujours ton ami devoué.'

Gillian's notebooks mention two other men. The film director Anatole de Grunewald (‘a proper shit, I warned her') who left Priscilla in the lurch at the
Mayfair Athenaeum with an unpaid hotel bill: ‘She sold her jewellery to pay the bill' (and in the process discovered that Daniel Vernier's sapphire ring was phoney). And Jacques Labourdette, a French architect and brother of the famous French actress Elina Labourdette, who in similar circumstances abandoned Priscilla at the Mamounia Hotel in Marrakesh.

Priscilla was engaged at the time to her future husband Raymond. The wedding invitations had been sent out when, according to Gillian, ‘she hopped it to France a day before, in order to go to Sainte-Maxime with Jacques'. Raymond came rushing after, and telephoned Gillian in Rue de Clichy, ‘very pissed and agitated', shouting: ‘I want to beat up that bastard!' Gillian tried to calm him, she did not know where Priscilla was. She advised him to go home.

A horror with a foxy face was how Gillian described Labourdette. She had been present in Paris when he promised to leave his rich wife for Priscilla, ‘and coolly discussed in front of me on Fouquet's terrasse his plan to murder his wife by making it look like suicide. A plot to make her write some letters. I told Pris to be careful as I thought she could end up an accomplice.' But the melodramatic plan fell apart in Morocco after Labourdette's wife discovered his elopement and threatened to remove her dowry. ‘Jacques packed his bags during the night and tore back to France leaving Pris with the hotel bill, no
money for her plane fare. She rang up Raymond who behaved very well. He flew to Morocco, paid up the hotel and took her home. I don't think he ever forgot the incident.' This story doubly explained Raymond's possessiveness and why, once Priscilla arrived back in England with him and their wedding eventually happened, she did not leave his side for the next thirty-four years.

‘I have always advised you to find a really rich man,' Berry had written from Plymouth. ‘You could not be happy on small means. Believe me, it is not amusing to have to count pennies.'

The pennies that it required Priscilla to keep up her striking appearance were itemised in a bill, dated February 1947, for clothes from Betty Lyng's Exclusive Dress Agency in Knightsbridge.

1 black evening cape £10 [at least £330 in today's money]

1 black lace dress £10

1 tweed coat £10

2 black afternoon dresses £10

1 brown dress £10

2 bags £2 corset £6

1 black shoes £2.

Marriage to Raymond Thompson – a thirty-three-year-old divorced Englishman who sailed his own yacht and owned a Lancia Aprilia – guaranteed Priscilla financial and emotional security. After being rejected by her father, here was a man absolutely anchored to her. It was his one overwhelming virtue: he was dependable to be there, shouting and screaming maybe, but he was never going to leave her.

‘She met Raymond in Paris.' Gillian was present. In October 1947, she and Priscilla took the Golden Arrow to Sainte-Maxime for a fortnight's holiday, stopping off in Paris. It was their first time together in France since 1940. They slept on camp beds in Gillian's apartment and dined at La Crémaillère. At a party, Priscilla came under the scrutiny of a dark-haired Englishman
wearing a cravat. He looked at her through thick black-framed spectacles, not taking his eyes off her.