Priscilla by Nicholas Shakespeare

Author:Nicholas Shakespeare
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

The Germans enforced most of these rules. Yvette Goodden was barely a month back in Paris when one morning at 5 a.m. the Gestapo knocked on her door to check that she did not have a wireless or telephone and also that she had her young son Michael with her – the reason for Goodden having been freed. Every morning she repeated to her son, ‘Allons, viens, on va signer,’ and they walked to the police station. If she wanted to go away for the weekend, the policeman, whom Michael knew as ‘Monsieur Signer’, allowed her to sign in large letters across two days. Out of doors, mother and son talked in French. Goodden said: ‘I stopped speaking English with Michael in the street so as not to draw attention.’

Not to speak English was one of the deprivations that caused Priscilla most grief. That and her childlessness, her false position reinforced by the priority ration cards to which, as an expectant mother, she was entitled. She did risk riding a bicycle, though.

On Saturday, Robert arrived from Boisgrimot. ‘He could still muster no enthusiasm.’ They did not say much; Priscilla did not like to ask him or even to ask herself his thoughts. Every subject was a bed of nettles; they skirted, spoke of nothing, except on the subject of his farming produce – how most of it went to feed the occupying forces, with the rest flowing out to Germany at rock-bottom prices. They lay with their arms around each other for warmth. She was supposed to be pregnant, but she felt like one of the prams in the exodus which had not contained any baby. His impotence was France’s. ‘He soon went back to Normandy and to his gloom.’ She was almost relieved that the conditions of her release prevented her from following.

‘I love you,’ Robert wrote, in letters adjuring her to be happy.

‘I love you,’ she wrote back. But they were saying ‘I love you’ to plug the gaps, forestall discussion, and signal, against all evidence to the contrary, that everything was going to be fine.

It was not. ‘His letters became more and more neurotic and depressed.’ Boisgrimot had suffered a plague of rats. Then an infestation of beetles. The pupils had been taken out of school for three days to help hunt down the beetles and destroy them.

Now when they were together, hardly a day passed in which Priscilla was not exasperated by Robert’s morose inertia. It was not simply that she blamed him for Besançon and for not giving her children. He had no flavour for her. And after so long a drought, she wanted flavour. As Priscilla wrote of her alter ego, Crystal de Brie, in the novel that I found in her stepdaughter’s box: ‘Most of her friends were having affairs and how could anyone be expected to live in chastity for years on end?’

Priscilla’s most revealing portrait of herself at this time is contained not in her novel, but in a story that

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