Priscilla (56 page)

Raymond looked at her with a concerned expression and patted her knee. ‘You look pale, darling. Are you tired?'

Priscilla nodded. At last, the train began to move. She looked out of the window. There was Pierre, staring at her from the platform.

38.
THE END

Raymond had concealed Priscilla's illness from her family. Osteomyelitis, which had stopped her from dancing in Paris, had again erupted in her right leg. And then one day she threw up blood.

‘I'm afraid that my news is
not
too cheerful,' Priscilla wrote to Gillian on 18 May 1978. ‘Tomorrow I go into hospital for an operation (next week) on my gullet (gosier?) CANCER . . . Don't fret or worry too much – they say I shall be as good as new in 6 weeks or two months time! Meanwhile, naturally I shall be in pain, but I've felt so bloody awful for 4 or 5 months that I couldn't care less.'

Vivien took a week off to be with her. On the last morning, she asked the surgeon: ‘What are the prospects for my sister? I gather not awfully bright.' The surgeon replied angrily: ‘I have cured your sister' – Priscilla could go home. But she had a hell of a time recuperating, Vivien told me. ‘When she swallowed food, it shot back. Raymond kept taking her abroad. He needed her. He was frightened she might run away and hauled her off, a crime when she was unwell. “Oh for God's sake pull yourself together. You know you're cured.”'

Few understood at the time why Raymond denied Priscilla's illness, or why he insisted on taking her sailing to Elba and Menton. I discovered the explanation only much later. In the summer after her operation, a policeman
had found sixty-seven-year-old Raymond wandering around the centre of Chichester unable to remember who he was. That night, his farm manager received a call. ‘We've got someone here who we think is Raymond Thompson. Could you come and identify him?' Raymond had suffered a nervous breakdown after losing a substantial sum when experimenting with his mushroom business. In one calamitous experiment, he had spread tons of shredded paper on top of the compost.

Raymond's doctor ordered him to go abroad for six months. With Priscilla's help, Raymond improved. But his breakdown impeded her recovery. On a trip with him to Vieux Roquebrune, they stayed in an apartment which no taxi could reach and had to lug their baggage along the road. Priscilla lifted a suitcase and ripped something in her eye.

Gillian was worried. ‘Priscilla is not in good shape, alas,' she wrote to Harold Acton in October 1979. ‘She had a nasty gullet operation last year and now faces on her return to England a cataract operation. I must say, when sorrows come . . . I feel very sorry for her as she can't drive any more. She's got cataracts in
both
eyes.'

Priscilla could not see to read, she stumbled when walking, she was unable to speak properly. But Raymond was intransigent. A concerned Imogen kept calling to be updated on her sister's health, only to be deflected. ‘Oh, she's fine,' Raymond said. ‘Thanks for ringing.'

Stuck up in her bedroom without company, without books, only the television, Priscilla sought relief in half-bottles of Krug.

In the end, it all happened quickly. On Saturday 13 March 1982, Raymond had to go with Tracey to his brother-in-law's funeral at Farley Mount. Tracey put her foot down – they could not leave Priscilla on her own. ‘I said for goodness sake, this was a perfect time for Imogen to come. So he gave in on this day and Imogen was alone with Priscilla all that afternoon.'

Tracey and Raymond had already left when Imogen arrived at 11.30 a.m. ‘The housekeeper let me in. I went upstairs to Pris's bedroom, the Holy of Holies – I'd never been in there before. I found Pris pretty ill in bed, and obviously fading.'

Imogen had brought along one of SPB's early books. ‘I'd chosen it carefully because I wanted it to be about before we arrived on the scene, Mummy and Lalage and me. I wanted it to be pre-us.'

She asked Priscilla: ‘Would you like me to read Daddy's book?'

Priscilla nodded and closed her eyes. SPB had died seven years before – on his own, bankrupt and heartbroken, after Winnie left him and married the novelist who had first proposed to her when she was seventeen.

Imogen sat on Priscilla's bed and began to read aloud. As she remembered it, the passage described their father going into a church.

‘I was in the middle of reading to her when she opened her eyes and looked up and gazed into space, on the track of what Daddy had written. Her mind went off into what the future would be. Suddenly, it impinged on her. Having converted, she was still a Catholic, and what had happened between her and Raymond was not of significance.'

Then Priscilla turned her head and looked at Imogen. ‘Maybe I've never really been married to Raymond. Maybe I was always married to Robert.'

She was finding it harder to speak. From the telephone beside the bed, Imogen rang the Penina Hotel in the Algarve, catching my mother in the middle of a diplomatic function.

‘You need to talk to Priscilla.'

Priscilla's voice was very faint. ‘I think I'm going. I want to say goodbye.'

My mother burst into tears.

Priscilla's last words to her were: ‘Don't worry, I'm living on champagne.'

Two days later, Raymond, who could not cope with her dying and had hidden in the mushroom shed, finally sat down at the end of the dining-room table and wrote to Gillian Sutro. ‘Priscilla died last night of a malignant brain tumour. She died peacefully with
no
pain. Although you were for very many years her closest friend, she did not want me to tell you that she was dying. Love, Raymond.'

She was sixty-five.

39.
AN UNSENT LETTER

Priscilla never realised two desires. She did not publish a book. She failed to bear a child. Her life is a reflection of how hard it was to be fulfilled as a woman, even until recently. The two things she had wanted to do, she could do today, without the help of a man: she could have told her story honestly, and she could have had a child out of wedlock.

In death, Priscilla was denied a third wish. She had requested a Catholic funeral, according to Vivien. ‘She said to our common mother: “If I look as if I'm dying, I must have the last rites.”'

But Raymond refused to summon a priest. He had Priscilla cremated in Chichester.

Imogen was Priscilla's only sister – and blood relation – to attend the service. She said: ‘The impression was given by Raymond that Pris had not been “religious” and the sooner it was over the better.'

Raymond rushed in and rushed out, not pausing to speak to anyone. He was so upset that he had not bothered to register Priscilla's death. ‘I had to register it,' Tracey said. ‘When we asked him about flowers, he wanted a bunch of red roses loose on the coffin. The undertakers warned that they would blow away, so the roses had to be stuck down with tape.'

A small reception was held afterwards at a nearby hotel. My mother could
not reach the service because she was in Portugal, and is terrified of flying. Gillian was conspicuous by her absence. With Priscilla's death half of her had died. Completely distraught, she could not face the funeral of a friend she had adored since childhood.

When Tracey turned eighteen, Priscilla wrote her a letter, but then decided for some reason not to send it. I discovered it folded away in the padded chest. Tracey was sixty-eight when she read this letter for the first time. Priscilla had been dead for almost thirty years.

‘My darling child,

‘As you very well know you are not strictly speaking my daughter, but as far as I am concerned you might just as well be. I have brought you up from an early age with all the love and affection that I would have given to my own child, had I had one. I believe that your childhood has been a happy one. Certainly far happier than my own.

‘It is now my duty to teach you about life as I have found it. I sincerely hope that you won't grow up thinking that divorce is an easy solution to any troubles that may occur. Believe me, it is not. It is a wicked and terrible thing, especially if there are children concerned. Nevertheless, I would urge you, when the time comes, to take marriage very seriously. It is not easy to spend one's life with one man to the exclusion of all others and as time goes by there seem to be more temptations rather than less. I would suggest that you should not consider marriage before you are 21, and if possible leave it until you are 24 or 25. Then you should know your own mind. Not before. Of course, if you fall in love before then you will think, as we all do, that it will last for a lifetime, but we all change as we grow older and it is impossible to know exactly what we want at an early age.

‘Next there is the question of money. You happen to have parents who are both well off and can give you much in life. It will be difficult for you to find a young man who can keep you in the luxury to which you have become accustomed. It is very important in this life to gradually better one's position. Don't believe people who talk about “love in a cottage”. It rarely succeeds. I don't
mean by this that you should be mercenary. God forbid! But don't ever let any man marry you for your money, and make quite sure that he is capable of keeping you, if not in luxury, at least in comfort.

‘Now my last point is a tricky and extremely delicate one. It is a question of morality. Nowadays young girls have a lot of freedom and many of them lead immoral lives. Many marriages are brought about by the fact that the girl is pregnant. Please whatever you do, don't marry for this reason. It is a bad basis for a marriage. If ever you are in trouble of any sort you must come to me and ask my advice. I don't know what I shall say to you because there is no easy way out, but I do know that I shall do my utmost to stop you marrying for such a reason.

‘Should you not come to see me, you might try and find your own solution and here you must beware of upsetting your health. Young and ignorant girls have often lived to regret a hasty decision.

‘Drinking and smoking are to be taken seriously too. Both your father and I and all our friends do both, if not to excess, at least too much.

‘One other thing I would like to mention before I end this letter. Whatever you do in life try not to hurt anybody or you will pay for it in the end. Don't play with people's feelings and don't whatever you do leave your husband for somebody else. It is never worth it.'

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book could not have been written without the assistance of Tracey Maitland, who gave me unrestricted access to Priscilla's papers. For their recollections and encouragement, I am also indebted to Carleton Thompson, my parents John and Lalage Shakespeare, my aunt Imogen Vignoles, and my late aunt Vivien Van Dam. I cannot adequately thank them for their unstinting support. In no instance was there pressure put on me to remove or alter anything that I uncovered about Priscilla's life.

For access to Priscilla's police file and related material in the Musée de la Préfecture de Police archives in Paris, I would like to thank Béatrice Le Fur.

For access to collections of Gillian Sutro's papers and related material, I would like to thank Bryan Ward-Perkins and the Fellows of Trinity College Oxford; Colin Harris of the Special Collections Department at the Bodleian.

For access to collections of S. P. B. Mais's papers, I would like to thank Alison McCann at the West Sussex Records Office in Chichester; Laura Russo at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center in Boston; Jeff Walden at the BBC Written Records Centre in Caversham; Rachel Hassall at Sherborne College; Alexander Waugh. For access to Intelligence reports on Alois Miedl at the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, I would like to thank Eric Van Slander and Rebecca L. Collier.

For access to reports on British internees in France at the National Archives in Kew, I would like to thank Neil G. Cobbett.

For access to his private collection of papers about the women's internment camp at Besançon, and for his patience in answering umpteen questions, I would like to thank James A. Fox; for the recollections of their internment, I would like to thank Rita Harding and Shula Troman. As well, and for permission to use her unpublished diaries and memoir, I would like to thank Yvette Goodden.

For permission to quote from his letters to Priscilla, I would like to thank the estate of the late Robert Doynel de la Sausserie.

For permission to quote from Henri Johanet's letters to Priscilla, I would like to thank Gisèle Levrat.

For access to his father's unpublished memoir and related material, I would like to thank Quentin Tiberghien and his family.

For permission to quote from Robert Donat's letters to Priscilla, I would like to thank Brian Donat and his family.

For permission to use the sound recording of Jacqueline Grant's interview at the Imperial War Museum, I would like to thank Stephen Walton.

For permission to quote from ‘To Your Daughter' in Alec Waugh's
Resentment
(Richard, 1918), and from Alec's letters to Arthur Waugh, I would like to thank Peter Waugh.