Пол Престон – Doves of War: Four Women of Spain (страница 6)

By the next day, reflecting on the incident, she wrote: ‘The trouble with my flirtation is that all it has done is to wake me up and make me want Touffles to make love to me even more than I did before. Oh hell and damnation.’³² ‘Make love’, of course, meant rather less then, as this passage illustrates, than it does now.

Day after day, she wrote of missing Touffles. On 2 February, she wrote perceptively: ‘I think the trouble with all of us is our age and suppressed sex. I would like to have a hectic affair with someone but of course never will.’ The next night, however, she came very near. After a cocktail party and dancing into the early hours, ‘Alvaro took me home and came into the apartment where he made love to me on the sofa too divinely for words. It was heaven and again I behaved outrageously and let him do even worse things than before.’ She refused to have sex with him and was amused by the fact that he clearly believed her to be much more experienced than was actually the case.³³

On her return passage on the SS Paris, she wrote: ‘I hate to be all alone, I feel scared and depressed.’ Her essential insecurity was revealed in other diary entries. ‘Everyone on board is sweet to me and they all seem to like me so much. It is so lovely to know people like you. If only I have changed enough to make Touffles like me too.’ The round of cocktail parties and dancing terminated on the last night on board in a dramatic encounter with a French diplomat. ‘God knows why but this evening I went off the rails and was mildly raped. I can’t think why I let Mr Brugere do such a thing, I must have been crazy.’ Having been assaulted by the man on deck, she later went to his cabin, ‘so now I don’t know whether I am still a virgin or not. I think not. It was heavenly but frightening.’ She left his cabin ‘feeling very ashamed and yet all excited and happy in a way’. The event seemed to unleash a hitherto repressed passion. After a ‘hot’ encounter in a taxi with a film director ‘Frenche’ whom she met on the ship from New York, she wrote: ‘I seem to have become so damn oversexed that I just can’t stop myself. I don’t know whether it is suppressed sex bursting forth or my thyroid pills or what, but the effect is incredible for the erstwhile priggish me.’ On returning to Chirk, she took up riding with a vengeance. She started to dream about Touffles again. Life in London was an endless kaleidoscopic social round in which she occasionally bumped into ‘that filthy fucking Frenche’. She took singing and piano lessons, fenced most days, regularly went to the theatre and the cinema, often visited the hairdresser and fashion shows and consulted more fortune-tellers. Despite her sexual progress, she was still young enough to sit with friends and be scared by talk of ghosts.³⁴

In early March, Prince Ali appeared in London. Revealingly, Pip refused his dinner invitation to spend time with her father. ‘Papa and I get on so well. We talk for hours every evening. He knows so much about every subject. I wish I had his brains.’ When she did go to see Princess Bea, she found her heartbroken by the death of her son Alonso. Pip got news of her beloved Touffles who, as befitted the son of a German princess, had joined Hitler’s Condor Legion and was now flying as an observer in German bombers. As always, being reminded of Touffles provoked her into a flirtation. At a society hostess’s dance, she ‘spent most of the evening dancing with crazy Francis Cochrane to whom I got engaged just for fun. He is great fun and dances quite well. So now I have a fiancé for a change. I shall break it off again soon.’ Nothing more was heard of him thereafter. Her social life was more of a whirlwind than a roundabout. When she was not in the country, at the races or at Brooklands, she took every advantage of what London had to offer. A typical day would see her rise late, and after breakfast, practise fencing or do some work in relation to the small stud farm at Chirk. She would then lunch at the Ritz or the Savoy with friends. Lunch would be followed by shopping, a dress fitting, the hairdresser and then tea with some family friend. In the evening, she would attend one or more cocktail parties, a dance in the home of some society hostess or the theatre, the ballet or the opera, then dinner, perhaps at Quaglino’s or the Savoy Grill, then on to the Café de Paris or a nightclub. She attended a number of legendary operatic occasions, including Eva Turner and Giovanni Martinelli singing Puccini’s Turandot at Covent Garden. Dancing until the early hours of most mornings, she met lots of attractive men but nothing came of her flirtations with them.³⁵ When, on 24 March, she finally got a letter from Touffles requesting her photograph, she pranced down the passage ‘singing at the top of my voice’. Already thinking of going to Spain, she started Spanish lessons.³⁶

The ceaseless round of fun was beginning to pall when her life was changed by a chance conversation with her mother – ‘so nice the way she leaves me to myself, no advice, no orders, just perfectly sweet’. On Easter Sunday, 28 March 1937, she wrote: ‘This evening after dinner we began to talk about Spain and Mama suddenly said that Gabriel Herbert was out there doing nursing and smuggling medicines etc. I said, ‘‘God I wish I was’’ so Moke (Monica FitzClarence, a friend of Margot’s) said ‘‘Why don’t you?’’ I explained I would have long ago if I had thought for a moment Mama would let me.’ To her astonishment, her mother said that she would give Pip permission if she produced proper plans mapped out and aimed to do important work out there – ‘but I must find out and arrange it myself and she can’t help me. So now I must see Mrs Herbert and Princess Bea and see what I can do to help. My chance at last I hope!’ Margot had not expected such a burst of focused energy and was horrified. She regarded Pip as ‘both frivolous and pretty. She loved hairdressers, young men and cream buns. She would go to several cinemas in one afternoon and I deplored that she would not face up to anything serious.’ The Spanish Civil War was rather too serious even for Margot. Pip herself was enthused by the idea of going to Spain and determined to overcome all obstacles. She was desperate to be of some use. ‘It is a bore to look so young and silly, it will be very difficult to make anyone think I really mean it and am capable of doing it.’ She now asked her mother to let her take first-aid classes as well as Spanish lessons. She also spoke to Mrs Herbert and her daughter Laura, who was soon to be married to Evelyn Waugh. Presumably on the basis of communication with her sister, Gabriel, Laura told Pip that ‘it was awfully difficult to get in now.³⁷

Perhaps she was inspired by her mother’s earlier example running a hospital in Egypt. It is an extraordinary coincidence that the mother of the only other British woman to volunteer to work for Franco, Gabriel Herbert, had also worked in that Egyptian hospital. Gabriel Herbert herself was a competent and energetic young woman. In September 1936, she had gone to Burgos and returned to London with a list of medical supplies requested by the Junta. She then returned to Spain with an ambulance. With a second vehicle sent in November, it became the Equipo Anglo-Español Móvil de Servicio al Frente. Gabriel Herbert herself acted as an intermediary between the medical team in Spain and the London committee of the Catholic Bishops’ Fund for the Relief of Spanish Distress. Pip’s reference to her ‘nursing and smuggling medicines’ was a misunderstanding of Gabriel’s activities in taking supplies into Spain.³⁸

Pip’s Spanish progressed quickly. Nevertheless, while she tried, in a desultory fashion, to find out more about going to Spain, she began to see a lot of ‘the most gorgeous tall hero called John Geddes’, a fashionable young man-about-town. They danced together, got drunk together and talked about their respective broken hearts, she about Touffles and he about a girl named Ann Hamilton Grace who had ditched him. They walked their dogs and within a couple of weeks of knowing him, she could write: ‘I dote on him and hope I will see him again soon.’³⁹ By 13 April, they were lovers. She found the experience physically painful ‘but it was fun’. ‘I still don’t feel even a twinge of conscience or remorse. And oddly I don’t like him any more or less.’ After sleeping with him a second time, she wrote: ‘He is an absolute darling although definitely rather a cad.’ She was taken entirely by surprise, at the end of April, when he asked her to marry him. She was emboldened to refuse after being told by her cousin, Charmian van Raalte, that she had had a letter from Touffles ‘who is livid because I have not written for ages’.⁴⁰ She was also distracted by Gaenor’s coming-out dance at Seaford House which was to be attended by 650 people including the Duke and Duchess of Kent. At dinner beforehand, she was delegated to look after the then seventeen-year-old King Faroukh of Egypt whom she thought ‘a dear and we got on like billyoh’. Rather alone in London, he was taken by Pip to Regent’s Park Zoo, the Tower of London, St Paul’s Cathedral and several theatres.⁴¹