Priscilla (15 page)

Increased acquaintance with Yolande only served to make her more unpleasant. Georges's glacial and exalted wife did not alter one jot her opinion of Robert's long-legged and shy English fiancée. ‘Elle ne dit jamais un mot!' her voice rising in a determined effort to maintain her top-dog position. She bent her playing card and waited for it to snap back. Her complaints were various: Priscilla never played belote, never joined in the conversation, never offered an opinion about Art or Music, never . . .

But Yolande's conversations were about people whom Priscilla did not know, about politics, which she did not understand. Just looking at Yolande made Priscilla cough.

Their battles formalised over what Priscilla called ‘the bath question'. There were only two baths at Boisgrimot, zinc tubs with swan's neck taps, installed by Robert's father. Adelaide, the reigning queen, had access to one of them; Yolande to the other. Everyone else was supposed to wash out of buckets. Priscilla's gentle insistence on using Yolande's bathroom – reached by walking through her bedroom – ratcheted up the hostilities.

Strangely for one so timid, Priscilla was not at all in awe of Yolande's husband Georges. When, on the second evening, Georges had another of his grand explosions, Priscilla was comforted by a sense of déjà-vu. Instead of shrinking with everyone else behind the uncomfortable Louis Quatorze
settees, she took strength from one of SPB's bedtime stories, about his grandfather in Georgeham, a man of extraordinary irascibility who once whipped the village blacksmith and left a scar on his back. Priscilla's father had been the one family member not afraid of him.

On the other hand, Priscilla got on famously with Robert's traditional Catholic mother, Adelaide. Priscilla wrote: ‘She was very agile for her age. She walked up and down stairs several times a day and she still had quite good eyesight and could hear everything one said in spite of her 85 years.' A portrait in the drawing room showed the young Adelaide to have been attractive – ‘more so than any of her daughters'. But she had exhausted herself giving birth to eleven children and now looked forward to joining her husband in the family crypt. Her single outstanding desire – having given up on Guy – was to see her youngest son Robert married. She had heard glowing reports of Priscilla from Guy and Georgette.

Priscilla became very fond of the old lady. It helped that Adelaide had a tricky relationship with Yolande, who, to Adelaide's impotent fury, had taken control of the kitchen and housekeeping. Adelaide viewed Priscilla as an ally who was likely to be more amenable. ‘She could not have been nicer to me.'

Adelaide leaned on her arm in walks around the garden. They sat on a bench side by side. Once, they were chatting with Robert when he was called away to see Monsieur Bezard. Priscilla looked out over the tennis court, the cooing pigeons, someone riding through the trees, the sweet-smelling bonfire, the gap in the hedge where the late Vicomte liked to blast away at hares from his wheelchair. She would come to recognise that rarely a day went by without Robert thinking of Boisgrimot.

Bells were ringing across the field. In the declining light, Priscilla led the old woman, the ferrule of her stick crunching on the gravel, slowly down the avenue to Vespers. Talk was of Robert. He had told his mother. ‘She was overjoyed at the idea of his settling down at last.' He had not yet asked Priscilla, but in the morning he was taking her into Caen to propose formally. The city – forty-five miles away – had an excellent jeweller's.

Adelaide, getting ahead of herself, held her hand and patted her while giving Priscilla advice on her future life. Where she would live, what she would do, and about children. Priscilla would have children, not so many as Adelaide perhaps – but lots of them.

Priscilla's blushing face studied the dovecote. Dimples appeared with reluctance in her cheeks as she pretended to have no idea what Adelaide was talking about. But her heart pounded.

13.
LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN MAN

At twenty-two, Priscilla's vulnerability was part of her appeal. Most men flatter themselves that certain women want looking after. She brought that sense out in a lot of them. She had the careless allure of Grace Kelly which Alfred Hitchock sought (but failed) to put on screen in
Marnie
. Interviewed by the
Daily Express
in Bodega Bay, the director remarked that people had the wrong idea about Grace. ‘They think she is a cold fish. Remote, like Alcatraz out there. But she has sex appeal, believe me. She has the subtle sex appeal of the English woman and this is the finest in the world. It is ice that will burn in your hands.'

This was Priscilla's impact on a young French aristocrat in Caen only a few days after her visit to Boisgrimot. She had not exchanged a word with him. It was one of plenty of instances of men being electrically attracted to her across a bar, a room, a street.

On the night of Sunday 2 October 1938, feeling lovestruck, the Marquis de T. walked back along the deserted Boulevard des Alliés to the restaurant where he had spied Priscilla earlier in the week, and handed a letter to the patron, asking him to give it to that lovely girl, which he did. Air raids were feared and de T., recently mobilised, had spent the previous days painting the streetlamps. But his mind was not seething over the political crisis. In the
dim blue light, there would have been something ghost-like about him.

‘Mademoiselle,

‘I am the officer whom you saw at the Brasserie Chandivert. I don't know what you think of me or if you think of me, or even if you noticed me. Myself, I think about you constantly. I have managed to find out your name and address, and this morning I commit the folly of writing to you.

‘I hope that my letter moves you and that you won't be annoyed at my audacity. As for me, I fear nothing except that you will be angry with me or that someone intercepts my letter.

‘That night, when you went out to the kiosk on Boulevard des Alliés to buy a newspaper, I desperately wanted to talk to you, but I did not have time because you walked back into the restaurant. I don't know if you will be returning. Meanwhile, I can't imagine life without you. The last time I saw you, as you entered the restaurant, it seemed to me that you looked at me and I can't forget that look.

‘Since I saw you, I have not stopped thinking about you. I can't go into the Chandivert without looking at the place where you were sitting. I can't walk past the hotel in the Place Royale without imagining you in the reading room, your back to the window, your legs stretched out on a chair, your head turned to a book of which I regret not being able to read the title. Time and again, I have asked myself what could explain your presence in Caen. I rather presumed that the gentleman who tracked you like a shadow had to be your brother or that a marriage proposal must have been the reason for your visit. I am very unhappy because I refuse to believe that a young woman as beautiful as you isn't engaged, or at least loved by some young man. At any rate, I try to convince myself that you don't love him back.

‘You will consider me completely mad for writing these things to a young woman whom I have hardly glimpsed. You mustn't, because I mean everything I have just written. I hesitated before doing so, then I realised that this is my only chance of seeing you again, which is why I have decided to risk everything. I know nothing about you and yet I have to see you again, whoever you are, wherever you are.

‘I wait anxiously for your reply.

‘Lieutenant de T., Pax-Hôtel, Rue Vanquelm, Caen, Calvados.'

She had kept the letter, but then most would. You would sense at once the character of the person who wrote it, a romantic who has given everything, exposed himself totally. But Priscilla never saw him again, not as far as I know.

And she had a further reason for saving his letter. The Marquis de T. was a reminder, the last before she committed herself irrecoverably, of the life she might have led. Only a day or two before, another upper-class Frenchman, ‘the gentleman who tracked you like a shadow', had asked her to marry him.

In the Hôtel Place Royale, in the room where she had been reading, Robert reached out for her hand. Priscilla was not an obvious catch, as can readily be seen by a bleak inventory of her life to this climactic moment. Her childhood was a fragile amalgam of the betrayals, deceits and self-deceptions of those people she depended on to offer her protection and example. If you are rejected by both parents, you would go into another world. You would build a shell, first possibly with books and then by seeking love through men. She was beautiful and so she attracted them, but not one of them was willing to commit himself, at least not convincingly, not until Robert. When finally he proposed in the febrile last days of September 1938, at a time of unprecedented public apprehension – when, as her father wrote in his diary, ‘we couldn't believe that there could be no war' – she accepted.

The date was set for 15 December 1938, the wedding to take place in Paris, at Saint-Honoré d'Eylau, the Doynel parish church in Place Victor Hugo – once Priscilla had completed her instruction.

Religion was not the impediment that Robert had feared. Vivien said: ‘Pris had positively wanted to become a Roman Catholic like him.' Priscilla informed the priest in Paris that her grandfather was a Derbyshire vicar, and her father a lifelong and devout member of the Church of England, who prayed daily and had ‘a good working relationship' with God: ‘Nous sommes Catholiques-Anglais,' SPB would inform a French priest in the late 1940s.

Immediately on his proposal being accepted, Robert travelled to England,
not to request SPB's permission for Priscilla's hand, but rather to ask Doris in Cornwall. The pair hit it off, Robert later joking that if he had met Doris before meeting her daughter ‘he would have made love to her'. But in a letter to Priscilla at the time, Robert vented his exasperation at the English, their grating pace. The train down to Exeter was ‘a real wheelbarrow'; in the restaurant car, an Englishman with round blue eyes had described as ‘slow' the waiter who ended up not serving Robert's meal; on the train from Dieppe, another Englishman offered to teach Robert to speak English ‘very
slowly
'. He exempted his little cork: ‘I love everything that surrounds you, everything that you can see with your eyes, everything that you love. Je te quitte, mon petit bouchon.'

So began Priscilla's three-month engagement, a sundial that marked only the bright hours.

They broke the news to Gillian over tea at the Café du Rond Point. On 22 October, Gillian wrote to her mother in New York: ‘She is marrying Robert in December and is busy getting her “trousseau” together. She's going to London on Wednesday till the wedding. After, she will live in Paris.' Gillian suspended her reservations. ‘I'm so glad she is getting married and has found someone to look after her as she never had a very happy time up to now.'

On her arrival in London, Priscilla was surprised to see the guards no longer wearing bearskins but tin hats. There were anti-aircraft batteries along Horse Guards Parade and the traffic lights were protected by black metal shields with crusader crosses cut out. Four weeks after the signing of the Munich Agreement on 30 September, the euphoria that SPB had recorded was less evident. Then, he had written in his diary: ‘The scene of joy is so great that I can't even bawl a prayer of thanksgiving to God. It seems quite impossible to believe. Yet the
Daily Express
says Peace. I dare not write it in capital letters lest it should be false news.'

Priscilla's request for money to buy a wedding dress brought her father down to earth and up against his own shortcomings. On 31 October, SPB wrote: ‘I saw Priscilla today for longer than I have for years. It is queer for a father to see his twenty-two-year old daughter only in taxis and a few minutes at a time. She is happy about her forthcoming marriage – and curiously
sympathetic about my own great unhappiness in being deprived of her when she was small. It is even more curious how detached I have become. It seems strange to me that I should ever have been so unhappy as I undoubtedly was, and I should never have told her. She found out and wept, so she says, on finding out in
These I Have Loved
. Apparently both she and Vivien were taught, deliberately taught, to hate me.' But he enjoyed seeing her. ‘So long as she is happy, I don't mind. She's had a poor deal all through life.'

On 16 November, ‘a memorable day', SPB escorted his daughter to the station where Robert had first noticed her. ‘At tea I met Priscilla, and Priscilla and I sitting outside the Ladies lavatory at Victoria station had a heart-to-heart talk about her failure as a daughter. I gave her £60 as a wedding present [approximately £3,200 in today's money] and felt mean. It is I who have failed as a father. We were getting nearer than we have ever been when the train was due to go. Robert apparently knows about her abortion and about my separation from Doris.'

Why SPB did not then attend Priscilla's wedding in Paris is a mystery. Perhaps he could not stomach the prospect of seeing Doris, whose legal case against him still smarted. Perhaps Winnie put her foot down. Or maybe he was too involved in his work. In January he wrote to his producer: ‘My own daughter was married on the 16th Dec, but from that day to this I have had my nose well down into my children's thriller and written to no one about anything.' It may have been more important for him to finish his Buchanesque novel than to witness Priscilla's marriage.

But he followed the news of it. ‘
The Times
which refused to print the announcement of Imogen's birth two years ago now prints my other daughter's engagement top of its list.' He glued the
Daily Telegraph
's report into his journal. ‘I console myself with this sort of press cutting. The world may be in a very dangerous state, but it is still ridiculous.'

FAMOUS BROADCASTER'S DAUGHTER TO MARRY
.