Marriage to Peggy curtailed Laurence’s freedom; she knew it, she was jealous of his company, and yet felt unable to satisfy him. So they took it out on one another. They were caught in a vicious circle which it would take a long time yet to break. Meanwhile, their incompatibility invaded every part of their lives. Laurence says that he tried to teach Peggy about the things which interested him, but as she had a perfectly biddable mind and profited happily from the education of other male companions, his allegation that ‘she knew nothing when I met her and doesn’t know much now’ is more a reflection of the failure of their relationship than of her. The sharpness of his tongue didn’t help. He was particularly unsparing about Florette. Once, flirting with his mother-in-law at dinner, he tickled her playfully. ‘Shush,’ she is reputed to have replied, ‘Peggy will see, Peggy will see, Peggy will see.’ Florette’s mannerism of repeating things threefold is exploited in Murder! Murder!:
Without waiting for outside encouragement the door caves in. Is it the mistral? The police? No, it is Flurry, my mother-in-law, paying an informal morning call.
‘What’s this about murder, ’bout murder, murder …’
Agitatedly, Flurry proceeds to make herself at home. Having flung one of her two extra cloaks on a chair, she places the other one on the bed. Then, having removed the cloak she wears, she puts on the lighter of the two extra cloaks. Then, having found the lighter one too light …
And so on in a similar vein. Shortly afterwards, Laurence goes on to mock Florette’s meanness, and writes of her ‘large, flabby face … All the woes of Israel seem to be assembled on her dark face.’
After a visit late in the year from Peggy’s sister Hazel, who was already divorced from her first husband and about to marry number two, a London-based American journalist called Milton Waldman, the Vails took a house on the Riviera for the winter of 1922–23, where Peggy became ill and spent her time re-reading Dostoevsky. The fighting continued. Peggy was always able to use her money as a stick to beat Laurence with; indeed it was her only defence, and whenever he wanted to be generous with her money (since he had relatively little of his own) it gave her a perverse pleasure to frustrate him. This time it was over a loan of $200 to their friend the writer and art critic Robert Coates, to enable him to return to the United States.
Peggy was well aware of the power her money gave her, and she used it throughout her life, often cruelly, to bolster her low self-esteem and to help her stand up to the sexism which many of her men displayed. Often generous in important matters, she was nearly always – but by no means consistently – mean in the little things. This was a trait acquired from her forebears, which she could no more help than the shape of her nose or her weak ankles. But at this period she might have felt a sense of justification. It was she who paid for most of their expenses. Now she purchased a second-hand Gaubron from ‘one of my cousins in the automobile business’. The car wasn’t up to much, but they hired a chauffeur and Laurence learned to drive, which immediately caused him to fall in love with fast cars. They returned to Paris in the New Year, exchanged the Gaubron for a new Lorraine-Dietrich, one of the most expensive marques available, and welcomed Peggy’s older sister, who had come over from the States to be with her for the birth of her child, now only two months away. Benita was horrified at Peggy’s manner of living.
In the following month, April, the family crossed the Channel to London. It had been decided that the baby, who had been given the provisional nickname ‘Gawd’, should be born outside France to avoid the later risk of French national service should it turn out to be a boy. Peggy and Fira Benenson found a house to rent in Holland Park, while Benita and her husband Edward, joined by Florette, took rooms at the Ritz Hotel in Piccadilly. Florette had been kept in ignorance of the pregnancy until now, to minimise the chance of her making too much of a fuss over the imminent arrival of her first grandchild.
Michael Cedric Sindbad Vail put in his appearance on 15 May 1923. Peggy nursed him for a month, until her milk gave out. A month later, she and Laurence were back in Paris with their little boy for the 14 July celebrations – a three-day binge for Laurence – which featured a drunken attack by Malcolm Cowley, Laurence and others on the unfortunate patron of the Rotonde. Once the partying and the vandalism were over, the Vails took a house in Normandy for the summer. Peggy missed Benita, who had returned to New York, but they had a constant stream of visitors, including Man Ray and Kiki; Harold Loeb; Clotilde and her latest lover; the poet Louis Aragon; and, on one occasion, James and Nora Joyce, en route to visit their daughter Lucia, who was attending a boarding school on the coast.
Their rootless life continued. Sindbad (as he came to be called – the name was Laurence’s choice), attended by an English nanny called Lilly who, Peggy noticed, had a magnetic effect on men, went with them. They travelled back to Capri in the autumn, where Laurence got into yet another fight, with a new lover of Clotilde’s, broke a policeman’s thumb and was sent to jail for ten days. Laurence’s bad behaviour, exacerbated by alcohol, continued throughout his life until age mellowed him; but he behaved, as far as one can judge, worse during his marriage to Peggy than at any other time. He constantly longed to get a reaction out of her, but she maintained an almost glacial and calculated indifference. It was however an indifference that extended to almost everything about her, as if she were watching life rather than participating in it; and though such an attitude was a fashionable pose at the time, Peggy was like a sleeping beauty, waiting to be woken up by the right stimulation. Laurence wasn’t her Prince Charming.
The Vails spent the winter in Egypt with just Lilly and Sindbad in attendance, and while Peggy followed the prevailing fashion and collected large numbers of pairs of earrings, a habit she never abandoned, Laurence bought himself brightly patterned bolts of cloth in the souks and had coats-of-many-colours made up. He also indulged himself, with Peggy’s consent, in a night with a Nubian belly-dancer who, he told her later, wore white underwear and ‘had a very high bed. When he could not climb up to it she took him under the armpits and lifted him up like a doll.’ She also gave him crabs, which not unnaturally horrified Peggy.
Apart from Laurence’s habitual tantrums and Peggy’s quibbling over money, this seems to have been a relatively happy period for the couple. Leaving Sindbad in a hotel with Lilly, they explored Upper Egypt before returning to Cairo and, again leaving Sindbad and Lilly, travelling to Jerusalem. Peggy had responded enthusiastically to ancient Egyptian art and architecture, but in Jerusalem she was repelled by the sight of Orthodox Jews at the Wailing Wall: ‘It mortified me to belong to my people. The nauseating sight of my compatriots [sic] publicly groaning and moaning and going into physical contortions was more than I could bear, and I was glad to leave the Jews again.’ In the New Year they returned at last to Paris, successfully smuggling in all the wares they had bought, together with a gigantic rag-doll stuffed with four hundred illegal Turkish cigarettes.
Owing to the arrival of Sindbad, the rooms at the Lutétia were now too small, and Peggy, whom motherhood suited when it suited her, had already promised Laurence ‘a girl next time’. The family moved to a rented apartment on the boulevard St Germain, at the heart of the Left Bank, appalling their aristocratic landlord by shifting all his good Louis XVI sofas, tables and chairs into a back room and replacing them with fashionable rustic French furniture. They stayed for six months through 1924, holding another round of wild parties, though this was seldom to Peggy’s liking. She was scared that some of the guests (Laurence, it will be remembered, tended to invite all and sundry) might make off with the silver, and she hated having to clean up people’s vomit the following day, or to change the sheets on her bed after someone else had made love in them. On the morning after she would purge the apartment, Lysol bottle in hand. Insult was added to injury by the fact that at the time Peggy scarcely drank; there can be nothing more boring to a non-drinker than a drunk, and she found herself frequently surrounded by them. For similar reasons, the long nights idling on the terraces of bars bored her to sleep.
Florette, back in Paris to hover over her daughter and grandchild, attended one or two of these parties, and on the whole enjoyed them, though she became enraged when Kiki once drunkenly called Man Ray ‘a dirty Jew’, and made her feelings known. By now she had made friends with Gertrude Vail, but the two women’s attempts to lure their married offspring back into the wealthy