Laurence encouraged Peggy to continue to shop at Poiret’s, and in 1924 she bought herself a flowing dress in Oriental style that she liked so much, now she had got her figure back after her pregnancy, that she wore it again and again. To go with it she had Stravinsky’s fiancée, Vera Sudeikin, design a golden turban. Man Ray took a series of photographs of her in it, which she adored. Except as a little girl, Peggy never looked more attractive. So pleased was she by the dress that she ordered one for Mary Reynolds too. Mary had by now become a good friend, and was a frequent guest at the Vails’ parties. She was enjoying a wild sex life, partying all the time, but such pastimes were soon to be brought to a halt by a closer encounter than hitherto with someone she already knew – Marcel Duchamp. Mary had been unable to get home after a party and spent the night with Duchamp, who generally disapproved of her way of life, but the next day, out of cash and unable to bring herself to ask him for more than 10 francs towards the fare she needed for a cab home, she called on Peggy to rescue her.
Throughout his life Duchamp was an éminence grise. Aged thirty-seven in 1924, he had returned to France a year earlier after three sojourns in the United States (he first visited New York in 1915), but though he aligned himself with the Surrealists, his work remained independent, and he was never a member of any specific artistic party. As much a theoretician as an artist, he had long since abandoned obviously creative work for chess, of which he was a master. Ascetic and essentially solitary by nature, his life would be bound up with Mary’s until she died, and his aesthetic influence on Peggy was to be profound.
In 1924 the cultural life of Paris was enriched when the Comte de Beaumont initiated a ballet series at La Cigale in Montmartre, producing work by Stravinsky, Milhaud, Honegger and Satie among others, with decors by Picasso, Ernst, Picabia and Miró. Peggy liked ballet, especially as a backdrop to socialising, but she was never much of a one for the performing arts, and the couple grew restless. She had her hair bobbed, which occasioned another outburst from Laurence, and then later in the spring another visit to Europe from Benita and Edward provided a welcome means of escape for a time. Peggy, with Florette in tow, joined her sister in Venice.
She had been there three times before on her trips through Europe with Laurence. Equipped with a little knowledge of her own, she proceeded to act as the family guide. At the end of spring she returned to Paris to find that Laurence had had an affair. His mistress had a baby nine months later, but Peggy reports that they never discovered whether it was Laurence’s doing or, rather improbably, Robert McAlmon’s, or – a welcome possibility – the woman’s husband’s. Peggy forgave Laurence, but the fighting went on as relentlessly as ever. Once, when they were staying at his mother’s flat, they yelled at each other so loudly that Clotilde came in from the next room, immediately took her brother’s part, and told Peggy to get out of the apartment. ‘I was so upset,’ said Peggy, ‘I began rushing around the flat as I was, quite naked.’ The situation was saved by the appearance of Gertrude, who said, ‘This is my apartment, not Clotilde’s, and you are not to leave.’
Restless still, the Vails set off for another holiday, with Clotilde, Lilly and Sindbad, heading first for the Austrian Tyrol. They would spend the row-ridden summer partly with Laurence’s family and partly with Peggy’s. They went hill-walking with the Vails, which Peggy loathed, played tennis and swam. When they joined Peggy’s family poor Benita, still on her European tour with Edward, showered affection on Sindbad; her own attempts at having a child had ended in a series of miscarriages.
Finally shedding their various relatives, Peggy and Laurence made their way back to Venice with Lilly and Sindbad, and here there was a lull in the storm. Laurence knew the city well, as his father had often painted there. Throughout their relationship Peggy had a high regard for Laurence’s intelligence – something she always generously and unreservedly admired in others, thinking as she did so little of her own – and, as she responded positively to the city herself, so she responded to what he taught her about it: ‘Laurence knew every stone, every church, every painting in Venice: in fact he was its second Ruskin. He walked me all over this horseless and autoless city and I developed for it a lifelong passion.’ They started to buy antique furniture for the home they hoped they would some day have – among other things, a thirteenth-century chest, which would end up immured in a country cottage in England. Peggy conceived the idea of buying a palazzo, but was prevented from doing so because her capital remained locked in trusts. Sindbad became rather a bore when Lilly fell ill and Peggy had to look after him ‘every day instead of on Thursdays, as was my habit’.
From Venice they went to Rapallo, where they played tennis with Ezra Pound, who lived there and who had become a friend of sorts; but the place bored Peggy, and the rows with Laurence resumed. On one occasion he smashed a tortoiseshell dressing set that she had acquired after what she calls ‘months of bargaining in the Italian fashion’. Dressing sets were important to Peggy: as a child she had bought an ivory set in Paris, which had long since disappeared, and this one had been intended to replace it. Many years later, in Venice after the Second World War, she herself smashed some tortoiseshell: an anonymous male friend, wishing to patch up a quarrel he’d had with her, brought her a tortoiseshell box as a peace-offering. ‘As she took it from him,’ Maurice Cardiff recalls, ‘she remarked that if it was genuine it would be almost unbreakable. Putting her theory to the test she hurled it onto the marble floor where it predictably shattered.’
Having spent New Year in Rapallo they set off early in 1925 in a leisurely way for Paris. Peggy was pregnant again, her new baby expected in August. As they drove along the Provençal coast they came across a hamlet called Le Canadel, on the Corniche des Maures towards Cap Nègre. It was an enchanting place, and they decided that it was here they would like their home to be. As luck would have it, a tiny, primitive hotel was for sale nearby – La Croix Fleurie, which had artistic associations, since Cocteau had used to spend his winters here with his lover Raymond Radiguet. It was irresistible anyway: ‘a nice little white plaster building in the Provençal style. It had a double exterior staircase ascending to a balcony which gave access to three spacious rooms … The wing consisted of one large room with a huge fireplace and three French windows that reached to the high ceiling and gave out on a lovely terrace with orange trees and palms, forty feet above the sea.’ There may have been no telephone or electricity, but there was a mile of private beach. Impetuously they bought it, but then got cold feet about the price. They managed to wriggle out of the ensuing difficulties and got the sum reduced by a third, provided that they undertook never to use the house as an inn; and they were obliged to repudiate the right to call it La Croix Fleurie.
They returned to Paris in triumph, but as the house would not be ready for them to move into until the summer, when Peggy was expecting her baby, they put off moving until the autumn. In the meantime Peggy decided to visit Benita in New York. Laurence, by now immersed in writing what was to become Murder! Murder!, did not at first want to go, but was persuaded to join her. With them they took a selection of flower collages by Mina Loy to sell.
Mina had arrived in Paris at the turn of the century, and had returned there in 1923 after extensive travels and a chequered, romantic and sometimes tragic life had taken her to South America, Florence, Berlin and New York. Born in London in 1882, she was a highly talented poet – published in the Little Review and by McAlmon’s Contact Editions – as well as a designer and painter. Having very little money, she had to work hard to make a living without compromising her creativity. Her latest idea had been born of frequent visits to the Parisian flea-market, in those days more a place of genuine wonder than it is today, but still only if you could see the potential beyond the junk. Mina had a superb eye, and one of her aims was to train her two daughters, Fabi and Joella, to develop their own. ‘One had to buy the real thing, a piece of old lace,’ she explained, ‘or something funny, but nothing from a department store.’
In the course of several such expeditions Mina had got hold of a number of Louis-Philippe picture frames for a price well below their real value. As her biographer Carolyn Burke explains:
Her latest fantasy, devised to earn the money for a larger apartment, crossed the traditional still-life with Cubist collage. She cut leaf and petal shapes from