Priscilla (43 page)

What inferences would Priscilla's friends have drawn had they spotted her in Maxim's with Otto Graebener? Pass by stiff-necked, without a nod? This was not Zoë Temblaire's reaction. Her Jewish husband was a POW, but Zoë was happy to enjoy Graebener's hospitality when Priscilla invited her to join them; by accepting Otto's story that he was Swiss, she participated in the same
deception and self-deception as Priscilla. The neutralising choices that both of them made were not innocent, more a matter of selective ignorance.

Generally speaking, it would have been considered compromising to be seen at the same table with a German. On her return to Paris from Boisgrimot in October 1940, Priscilla had picked up a leaflet in the Métro which enjoined every self-respecting Frenchman to slap a woman who paid too much attention to a member of the occupying forces. In February 1942, another underground newspaper,
D
é
fense de la France
, warned those who slept with the enemy: ‘You so-called French women who give your bodies to a German will be shaved with a notice pinned to your backs “Sold to the Enemy”!' In November 1943, armed men burst into a café in Plouhinec south of Boisgrimot, disarmed a German officer and shaved the head of the girl sitting beside him.

Between 1940 and '41, the writer and biographer Gitta Sereny worked as a nurse looking after abandoned children at Château de Villandry in the Loire. ‘The atmosphere of Occupied France was very tendu, very tense,' she told me. ‘It was important not to be seen talking to a German, oh my God.'

After 1941, the same rule applied to the occupying forces. The Wehrmacht introduced tough measures following the first attacks on Germans. No overly intimate relations with French women. No taking the arm of ‘any female person' in public. No riding with a woman in a vélo taxi. No exchange of photos. No marriage.

Sereny examined two figures at the core of the Nazi regime: Franz Stangl, Commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp, and Albert Speer, Hitler's chief architect and Minister for Armaments whose Organisation Todt oversaw the building of the Atlantic Wall. She knew personally both men and in writing their biographies had the courage to explore their good qualities as well as their faults, Speer in particular.

I had sought Sereny out before when in search of an explanation. She was the one I trusted most to place Priscilla's situation in context. The experience that Sereny shared with me of her time as a young Hungarian nurse in Occupied France, living in the same chateau cheek by jowl with German soldiers, and accepting invitations to dine at Maxim's, was illuminating.

‘The Occupation was quite dangerous. It was also exciting in its own way. If you were against the Germans in your mind but able to communicate with them, you were in a good position. If you were polite, they readily gave you food, medicine – anything. I was looking after children, sixteen refugees. They gave sweets to the children and the children backed away and finally put their hands out.' It did not disgust Sereny to observe herself mimic the children. ‘The Germans were very strong, very sure, very handsome. They were well dressed, in uniforms that were always fitting, and never looked untidy. They were everything that the English, so far as we knew, were not. And they had won the war. I had quite a life. I didn't sleep with them. But I was on good terms with them, both officers and men, and they were happy to listen to a young Hungarian aristocrat. They were lonely, everyone loathed them. For an attractive young girl to talk to them as human beings and take their minds off what they were doing was a thing for them. Let's face it, the Germans were actually quite nice, you know. I quite liked the Germans.'

A surprising number of Frenchwomen liked the Germans. The actress Arletty: to whom was attributed, probably wrongly, the saying ‘My heart is French but my arse international', and who lived in the Ritz with a Luftwaffe colonel. The couturier Coco Chanel: who in a small room also at the Ritz conducted her affair with an Abwehr officer in charge of pricing textiles for Bureau Otto. By October 1943, some 85,000 French women had children fathered by Germans – 4,000 in Rouen alone; enough to populate a town, or go on the First Crusade.

There was a dearth of available men, for one thing. More than a million had died in the First War. Nearly two million were prisoners in Germany. Young Frenchmen were most lacking in those areas to experience the largest influx of Germans – Paris, the north and east, the Atlantic coast. ‘The prestige of the stranger, the hint of perversity and adventure, the persuasive white dress uniform of a Luftwaffe pilot, the dinner in sumptuous surroundings – a German boyfriend offered immediate and solid advantage', argued the historian Hanna Diamond. She quoted a woman in the Toulouse resistance who remembered how women ‘wanted to enjoy themselves, to make the most
of their lives, because they saw that the years were passing by and that things would not change.' Going to bed with Otto Graebener did not make Priscilla anti-French or anti-English; it was not proof of political affiliation. It made her a woman who wanted, in the drabness of that moment, to be a woman. In the memorable words of Joseph Paul-Broncour, France's representative to Switzerland, to his mistress Marga d'Andurain (alias Magda Fontanges, alias Madeleine Coraboeuf, alias Baronne Thévenin), a woman of charismatic liability who seduced Mussolini and later became Henri Chamberlin's mistress: ‘When I think of your lovely body, I don't give a damn about Central Europe.'

The pressure of wartime meant not only French and Germans jumped into bed. Most Englishwomen imprisoned with Priscilla in Besançon took comfort in physical relationships.

Jacqueline Grant before her arrest had a lightning affair with an English Spitfire pilot based in Le Touquet – ‘very good-looking, I can't remember his name, the quickest love affair on record'.

Some affairs were even more peremptory. Rosemary Say was seduced by a young French soldier on a train from Dijon to Paris: ‘Our conversation had run its course. He rose and jammed his heavy kit bag up against the carriage door. The blinds were still down, so no one could see in from the corridor. He sat next to me and gently lowered me on to the carriage bench without a word being said. We made love. It was brief, perfunctory and almost totally silent. We both felt comforted.' She made love on another occasion in a brothel in the Septième, with a tall, fleshy police officer from Toulouse, moustached, who had agreed to post a letter to her parents. The price was to go to bed with him. In the charged atmosphere of the Occupation where so many interests coincided, Say's Besançon friend Sofia Skipwith had fleeting sexual encounters with numerous strangers. A relative of Skipwith elaborated on her promiscuity: ‘When I say promiscuous, I mean the sleeping-with-the-window-cleaner-and-postman-sort of promiscuous.'

At least two fellow internees shared Priscilla's experience of falling for the enemy. Antonia Hunt was arrested by the SS following her release from Caserne Vauban and, like Priscilla, felt a debt of gratitude to a member of the Gestapo
who had been tactful. Starved of affection, and believing that she owed her life to him, Hunt encouraged her German interpreter at Rue des Saussaies, Karl Gagel, to fall in love with her. ‘I was content to let each day happen. With my naturally affectionate nature, I trusted him and thought I loved him too. He kissed me . . . it was in the Tuileries Gardens. There was nothing unusual in France about a young man and a girl kissing each other in public, but I wondered what on earth they would say if they knew that one was a Gestapo interpreter and the other an English prisoner.'

Elisabeth Haden-Guest courted greater risks with a young SS officer billeted on her in a chateau near Saint-Briac. In his scarlet-lined cloak, black boots and with a book of poetry in his hand, the ‘more than handsome' Fritz Reinlein was irresistible. ‘We became lovers: it was his first time. We made love often, with urgency and passion.' If discovered, she knew that it might mean death for both of them. ‘I remember so well how death seemed worth it . . .' Her love life, as with two of Haden-Guest's previous lovers, both French, was predicated, like Priscilla's, ‘on the fact that we had no hope of a future because in the future there was war and death. My relationships with them were entirely based on catching the last bit of life and poetry and music and Christmas, drinking it in and storing it up for the time to come of coldness and aloneness. I shall never forget or regret the intensity of those lovers born out of despair.'

Few women embodied these contradictions more succinctly than the double-agent Mathilde Carré, the Kleines Katchen of the Abwehr of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Priscilla was seven months into her second marriage when she had to endure the details of Carré's trial in January 1949, after Carré was charged in Paris with the crime of Intelligence with the Enemy. How many of the ‘little cat's' experiences did Priscilla recognise? The effect of Stuka dive-bombing near the Maginot Line, where Carré had worked as a nurse – ‘in moments of great personal peril a person's entire being responded with almost sexual anticipation'. The ride back in the rear of an unmarked Abwehr car. The villa in Maison Lafitte. The seduction by the Intelligence officer – in Carré's case, a short-sighted sergeant called Hugo Ernst Bleicher, who entered her bedroom, locked the door.

‘Nevertheless you went to bed with him,' chastised the Parisian judge.

‘Well, what else could I do?'

Carré's answer to her own question: ‘What must be done; survive, of course.'

The best thing to do was eat the bacon. Only those who were there at the time undertood this. Priscilla understood. Her friend Zoë understood. And so did Gitta Sereny. ‘I was never hungry,' Sereny told me. ‘I went to Maxim's time and again. It was Maxim's or Flore. You didn't eat in Flore; in Maxim's you ate.'

‘Well, here it is – your beloved open fireplace.' Otto Graebener's snug drawing room at 3 Avenue Bosquet was a tempting sanctuary when Priscilla compared it with her unheated, airless Gestapo cell in Rue des Saussaies. Hardened by her losses in love, she took a pragmatic attitude to this educated German who played cricket and fives, and spoke fluent English; who had galloped to her rescue.

Perhaps later there was a bitter aftertaste mingled with shame, but at the time she hid her face in his mane. She accepted Graebener's gifts; his ‘exquisite cigarettes' and couture dresses. She invited Zoë to join them for canapés in his apartment. She stayed with Graebener in between his business trips to Spain and Germany, on the understanding that he shielded her from the Gestapo. But her heart was not scratched. This was about to change.

To recap. In the winter of 1943, her possessive lover Emile Cornet was in Fresnes prison, and Priscilla was under the Gestapo's instructions not to communicate with him. Robert remained based in Boisgrimot, impotent and neurotic and refusing to divorce. Daniel Vernier continued to take her to the races at weekends, seeing Priscilla on his own at 11 Place Saint-Augustin when he was meant to be at a ‘poker evening', or inviting her to a family dinner like the one on that cold December evening.

In the years ahead, she would once or twice find herself going back to this moment when something in her chest slid sideways.

30.
PIERRE

A wind was blowing and there was no one in the street as Priscilla bicycled to the Verniers for dinner. She was tugging off her ski-gloves when a man entered the room, quiet, watchful, blue intelligent eyes, a mocking smile. He wore an English suit and a shirt monogrammed with the initials PD.

Simone introduced her eldest brother Pierre.

He had arrived from Annemasse on the Swiss border. In October 1940, following their ejection from their home in Tourcoing, the family had bought a factory manufacturing nylon stockings under the brand name ‘Callipyge'. Soon after his meeting with Priscilla the emblem for these stockings became a blonde in a tight-fitting dress, and parading the unofficial motto, ‘La déesse aux belles cuisses': the goddess with beautiful thighs. The image was painted on mirrors and showed the young woman's long hair piled high, just as Priscilla wore it at this period because of electricity cuts.

Pierre was thirty-two, married with three small children, a practising Catholic, Anglophile, upper class. His father was a Viscount to the Holy See and the Vatican's ambassador to Monaco, a title that Pierre inherited after the war. But on that December evening in 1943, all consideration of family, class, religion suspended itself. Simone explained how Priscilla was an English friend living precariously in Paris. With the stillness that anticipates a light going out, Pierre stood there helpless, Priscilla too, in her divided skirt. ‘That meeting of you was a so marvellous thing,' he wrote to her in English.

A song half-buried came back, the sound of her abusive ‘stepfather' Boo humming ‘I never seemed to know what love meant, dear, till I met you/I never thought that two hearts as one could beat so true.' She had been mistaken before, but not this time. For the next eight months, Priscilla came to feel emotions different from any that she had experienced hitherto. In Pierre's presence, she felt her full height, as if the tips of two searchlights had met.