Priscilla (39 page)

On the first occasion when he came back with Gillian to her house, he fell asleep in his underwear on the sofa. In the morning, he could not remember a thing. ‘Est ce qu'on a chuté? Did we do it?' with a sheepish expression.

‘Not exactly.'

She served him breakfast in her kitchen and left. ‘I said I had to rush off to BCRA to draw maps for bombing targets.'

Gillian perceived Kessel as a masochist who enjoyed carrying his cross, and he viewed her in a similar light – ‘We're from the same tribe.' She wrote: ‘Kessel and I shared a common kink. He wrote
Belle de Jour
because he loved his wife, but had not lust for her. It was the same situation as I had, which
was one of the reasons we understood each other so well. We knew that one could love without desire and desire without love.' For Gillian,
Belle de Jour
was Kessel – as in pre-war Paris it had been Priscilla.

When Gillian looked back at their affair, she was grateful. ‘Kessel was responsible for my writing career. He loved my letters, said I had a style of my own, colourful and sharp – probably because I am a spectator as well as wanting to live my life, which I did.'

Furthermore, it was Kessel who would eventually track Priscilla down in Paris. But that was still eighteen months away, by which time Priscilla had got herself into an awful lot of trouble.

All of a sudden Emile Cornet was telephoning her. She had not seen him since the morning when she heard the Gestapo coming up the stairs and escaped through a back door; had decided, in fact, ‘to have nothing more to do with him'. Then there he was, in Paris, calling her from a small hotel on the left bank, pleading in a thin unfamiliar voice, needing help.

Without a word to Vernier, Priscilla bicycled to Cornet's hotel. ‘He was ill and had abscesses all over his back.' She stayed and nursed him for three days. She felt sorry for him, was how she explained it. Deliberately, she had left behind her French identity card in the name of ‘Simone Vernier': she feared his violent response were he to discover that she was now passing herself off as Daniel's wife.

Evicted by the Gestapo to Belgium, Cornet had honed his jealousy to a trembling point, and blamed Vernier for his arrest: ‘He always vowed that Daniel did this to him.' But that told only half the truth.

Cornet's expulsion had followed Göring's decision in early 1943 to suppress the black market, after the French Ministry of Industrial Production informed the German authorities that contracts could not be honoured without long delays, owing to incredible corruption and rampaging inflation. Anyone who worked for Bureau Otto had to close their offices and suspend contraband activitities. The docks and warehouses in Saint-Ouen were shut down. Trafficking was made illegal – for everyone, ‘without any exceptions'.

Only the creator of Bureau Otto remained immune. A grey and protean ectoplasm, Hermann ‘Otto' Brandl drifted above the sparring factions of Göring, the Abwehr and the ultimately victorious Gestapo, and continued to sell gasogenes across the border into Spain under the protection of the German War Office. But those who had worked for Brandl were not so fortunate. It shocked several of his suppliers to find themself thrown into Fresnes – notably Brandl's ‘principal agent' Max Stocklin, who, like Cornet, had flouted Göring's injunction; Stocklin was reported by Allied Intelligence to be engaged in ‘a big smuggling racket in German foreign exchange' after the Gestapo found ‘a large amount of gold on him'. Stocklin was one of 1,859 arrested.

All of which makes it hard to explain Cornet's decision to return to Paris other than his obsession with Priscilla. He knew the dangers: the Gestapo had warned Cornet upon ejecting him the first time ‘that if he set foot in France again he would be shot'. He was taking his life in his hands – hers too – when he arrived from Belgium, lovesick, broken in health, and begged Priscilla to come to his hotel. How petrified both must have been at the appearance of two men in SS uniforms with SD on their sleeves who entered his room without a word of introduction and levelled sub-machine guns.

Priscilla and Cornet were driven to the Gestapo headquarters in Rue des Saussaies. Cornet was cross-examined and transferred to a cell in Fresnes. Priscilla was questioned closely for nearly two days – then suddenly and wholly unexpectedly released.

Had she had her false papers on her, Priscilla believed that she would ‘no doubt have been shot' for suspected espionage or abetting the enemy. It is impossible to know. But even if she did make the right call in shedding the identity of Simone Vernier when she visited Cornet, it fails to explain the Gestapo's behaviour.

Think of it: an Englishwoman, daughter of a prominent BBC broadcaster, let out of Besançon to have a baby, who did not have that baby, who had already committed a serious breach of her conditions by not signing at the police station in Batignolles, who against Vichy law had abandoned her husband and home, who had been living in adultery with one black market
trafficker that we know about, and associating with several others. Whatever light Priscilla is held up to, she does not look like someone whom the Gestapo would let go easily. To persuade them, it needed a person of influence.

Max Stocklin? Conceivable – at the time of her release by the French police. Now it seemed less likely. Freed on bond, Stocklin was on no better terms with the Gestapo than Cornet. Stocklin's other protégé, Henri Chamberlin? A distant possibility. He had sensibly detached himself into the Gestapo camp and had a record of bribing them to set free at least two women he was involved with. But this does not mean that Chamberlin achieved the same result for Priscilla, and nothing in the available records connects him to her release.

Gillian Sutro believed that someone very high up had arranged matters with the Gestapo. In her opinion, the evidence pointed to another lover of Priscilla, who – in the photograph that I had seen in Priscilla's papers – sat waiting for her beside a warm fireplace in an apartment hung with Impressionist oil paintings. The man who signed himself in his only surviving letter to her: ‘Otto'.

27.
‘OTTO'

The address had been typed over with XXXs. When I rubbed a crayon across the thin blue paper, I could make out 3 Mozartstrasse, St Moritz. The date was ‘4-3-1947'. The letter was typewritten, in English:

‘My darling little Pris!

‘Since I came home from France in June 1946 what they did with me I will tell you when we meet again. I am searching for you little Pris all over Europe. Nobody has seen you any more and your last letter which I got is dated November 44. All my notices they took away and so I haven't had no addresses of you or your family in England.

‘First of all, how are you? What have you done in all these years? I have the feeling that you are living in England? Is that true. And your health? Poor little thing had to suffer so much while living in Paris. Everything turned out well? Pris – darling, how much I have thought of you all these 2 years. We were so sweet together and Pris is carved very deeply in my heart. Do you remember when we drove with the bikes to town having lunch together or seeing your friend Zoë (I wrote several times to her and no answer). What a shame I was always in a hurry, but when I tell you why you may understand it now.

‘Now I tell you a little bit of myself. I am very well with the French and Americans. Nearly all my property is intact and the factories working on full
capacity. I am one of the rare ones who got already several times a visa to Switzerland. My health is better than ever and I am full of ideas for the future. One of it is to live in England.

‘In May I come to Paris. Couldn't we meet there? And how are your friends Daniel V. and all the others? Poor little Pris she was always surrounded by too many people. And Emile? Poor boy had also to suffer. You don't know that I helped him sending him parcels to Fresnes . . .

‘Now darling let's get in touch again. I know that I'll meet you very soon again. We have so much to talk and I love to see you on the bike or swimming or guiding the car from Dijon to Paris. In my thoughts I took you so many times in my arms – oh Darling Pris. Whenever I can do anything for you just let me know. You are still a little baby and I must take care of you.

‘Heaps of good wishes, so long little Pris.

‘Otto'

The Rue des Saussaies is a short street. The building where the Gestapo had interrogated Priscilla curves into Rue des Cambacérès with its maison de passe where Gillian first made love with Marcel Vertès. At the end of her life, Gillian came to believe that to the same maison de passe, no more than a few yards from Priscilla's cell, Vertès took Priscilla after painting her portrait in 1939.

Priscilla declined to go to bed with Vertès in the version which Gillian first heard from Zoë Temblaire. In her Iago-like way, Zoë later radically altered her account. In the 1960s, following Vertès's death, she wrote Gillian a ‘nasty' letter, insinuating that the pair had indeed slept together in Rue des Cambacérès; moreover Priscilla had boasted about it. Greatly upset, Gillian tore the letter into pieces and tried to forget Zoë's damaging claim, but she could never snuff out entirely the punishing image of Priscilla's transgression. ‘I discovered that in the Thirties Vertès had gone to bed with Priscilla. Neither came out well. He half-lied and only admitted in a roundabout way by saying she was frigid. After the war, I mentioned the Priscilla episode in a letter and he answered that he had swallowed far more unpleasant affairs than an hour
at the Cambacérès with my closest friend. True. Nevertheless I was disappointed with both of them.' Gillian felt that Priscilla's behaviour had been disloyal, treacherous and ‘very shabby'; further, it broke the two girls' cardinal rule. ‘Had I known, I would
never
have put her up for months at Lees Place after the war.'

Priscilla's suspected fling with Vertès was one of two posthumous grudges that Gillian held against her best friend. ‘What distressed me was that she had betrayed me twice. Once before the war by going to bed with a man I loved, and bragging about the fact to Zoë quite cynically. Then during the war, while I was working for my country, she in Paris was going to bed with a well-known Nazi close to Göring and Hitler.' The man's name was Otto.

Gillian remembered how Priscilla was ‘very cagey about this Otto character which struck me as odd. I had always suspected the worst about Otto when she first mentioned him. It took me a long time to drag the truth out of her, bit by bit, year by year. She did not want to talk about Otto. I was determined to know . . .'

Priscilla had volunteered few details. Otto had offices off Avenue Foch ‘dealing with export/import of various goods'. Maxim's was his regular canteen. He had plenty of money, was not in uniform and had access to high-ranking Germans. ‘Pris told me that he presented himself to her as a Swiss businessman, a fact I never believed.'

On holiday together in Sainte-Maxime, Priscilla let slip that Otto was Swiss-German. But this was not enough for Gillian. ‘I went on until she admitted he was a German. He was married and had a child. “Otto” was a code name . . .' That he was ‘very present' in her life during the Occupation was the most Priscilla allowed.

It was their last conversation on this subject. Gillian put Otto aside for forty-five years, until my two sentences about Priscilla in the
Telegraph
magazine goaded Gillian to pick up where she had broken off. Gillian recalled Priscilla's words when they embraced on the Sutros' doorstep in October 1944: ‘I got out just in time.' She reflected: ‘She had the fair hair and blue eyes that the Nazis admired.' Determined to nail Otto's identity once and for all,
Gillian contacted those who had known Priscilla in Paris, among them Gillian's sister Jacqueline and Harold Acton. ‘Next I interrogated Zoë who had met Otto. She filled in the missing facts.'

The interview with Zoë Temblaire took place over the telephone, the first time they had spoken since 1963. ‘I told her my grievance over her deviousness between Pris and myself, telling each one nasty facts about the other. She remembers nothing. Anyway, whatever she said she regrets. She remembers Church Farm. We discussed Priscilla's character. Zoë said, “Elle était insaisissable – she was impossible to pin down.”'

Otto was the only lover of Priscilla that Zoë had liked. He was ‘très distingué'. Zoë had met him ‘quite a few times, always in the evening for drinks and delicious amuse-gueules and canapés, which Otto prepared.'

‘Where did he live?' He had a splendid flat in Avenue Bosquet (‘probably belonging to the Jew who had fled'). There was never a maid in sight, Zoë said. ‘I imagine the flat was cleaned during the day.' Paintings hung on the walls, she remembered. ‘They were pretty, but I did not recognise any old masters!'

‘Did Pris live there?'

Zoë did not know. ‘Pris seemed to move from one place to another.'