Mina had known Eugene Vail in Paris twenty years earlier, and had got to know Laurence and Clotilde in Florence – it was they who had encouraged her to go to New York to sell her designs. Once in America she had played a role, though not one to her liking, in Laurence’s play What D’You Want?, and had met and fallen in love with the extraordinary pugilist-poet Arthur Cravan (who claimed to be a nephew of Oscar Wilde, a relationship that was never proven). She later followed him to Mexico, where they married. Towards the end of 1918 Cravan, as erratic as he was romantic, conceived the plan of purchasing a boat and sailing it to Chile. He took up a collection and bought a hulk, which he proceeded to patch up. When it was ready he went for a test sail in the Gulf of Mexico, and was never seen again. Whether he was wrecked or whether he ran away is not known, but he left behind a pregnant wife. Mina was still grieving for him when the Vails agreed to take her work to New York for her and try to sell it in 1925.
Laurence invented a title for the collection, ‘Jaded Blossoms’, and Peggy organised exhibitions for it at department stores and art galleries, as well as having a showing of Mina’s drawings and portraits on Long Island. The catalogue, written anonymously by Laurence, boasted of Mina’s grand English background – in fact it was relatively humble. But the portraits sold, as did the Jaded Blossoms, and the reviews were good. More importantly for Peggy, she had discovered a gift: although most of the clients were friends or members of her extended family, she found she was not only quite good at selling, but had an appetite for it. There was no need for her to make use of her gift, because she had money already, and in any case her upbringing militated against her working seriously in any kind of commerce. That was a field better left to the Guggenheim and Seligman men.
The Vails wanted to avoid having their new baby in France, for the same reason as before, and set about looking for a place to stay temporarily in America, but both of them quickly became fed up with New York (neither of them ever liked living in America), and preferred to return to the greater freedom of Europe. Once again, Florette came too. This time, in an attempt to stop her fussing, they’d told her the baby was due much later than in fact it was.
At the end of July they settled at Ouchy, near Lausanne in Switzerland. Gertrude Vail organised a doctor, an easy task for her, since her hypochondriacal husband had frequented practically every sanatorium in the country, and the Vails, with Florette and now Clotilde in attendance, moved into the Beau Rivage hotel, taking an extra room for the midwife they’d engaged, a handsome woman whom Peggy later (mischievously?) wrote that she’d felt attracted to.
The physician had told Peggy that she would give birth between 1 and 18 August, but the baby took its time. True to form, on the night of the seventeenth Laurence flew into a temper in the hotel restaurant, and tipped a plate of beans into Peggy’s lap. Perhaps he was just desperate about having to compete for attention with yet another person. Whatever the cause of his anger, its effect was to trigger his wife’s labour. Laurence attended the birth, which took place the following evening at about ten o’clock. Peggy, who had had a hard time giving birth to Sindbad but who refused chloroform on this occasion, went through such pain that in the end she had to beg the midwife for ‘a few whiffs’, although she didn’t scream once. Laurence and Peggy now had the daughter she’d promised him. They named the baby Pegeen Jezebel.
Peggy was convinced that she would never have another child. It was eight days before she could get out of bed and transfer to a chaise longue. One day when the midwife was out and Peggy was alone with Pegeen, ‘she began to cry. I could hardly walk across the room to her and I felt as if all my insides would fall out. I nursed her for a month and then I couldn’t any more.’
By now Peggy and Laurence had had enough of Ouchy and Lake Geneva, and were impatient to get down to their new home on the Corniche des Maures, which was ready for them. The plan was that Laurence would drive there (the Lorraine-Dietrich, which he’d collected from Paris in the meantime, was a two-seater), while Peggy and the children, together with Lilly, the midwife and most of the luggage, would travel down by train. They got as far as Lyon, where they had to change, and were told that there would be a wait of forty-five minutes before the onward train left. Depositing the midwife, the baby and the luggage – fifteen suitcases – in their compartment, Peggy and Lilly took Sindbad with them in search of some lunch. But when they returned, the train had gone – it had left a few minutes early. The midwife had never travelled anywhere before, and Peggy was beside herself. She got the station master to telegraph ahead to the next station and have the train stopped there long enough to deposit her party and her luggage. She picked them up on the next train, which also obligingly stopped for two minutes. However, the shock of the experience had the immediate effect of drying up her milk, and the hungry Pegeen had to make do with powdered milk for the rest of that day.
The new house was on the edge of the little village of Pramousquier, no more than a railway station and a handful of houses on the St Raphaël – Toulon line, and still an attractive seaside resort. Pramousquier was to be the scene of some happiness and one tragedy, and the stage on which a liberation took place which would radically alter Peggy’s life.
‘Promiscuous’ was what Florette called the place – a laboured but still witty pun which Peggy chose to attribute to her mother’s inability to pronounce the village’s name. As it lay four hours by train from Toulon in one direction, and four hours from St Raphaël in the other, the Vails bought a little Citroën runabout to use as a workhorse, in which Peggy learned to drive. The nearest town of any consequence was Le Lavandou.
It wasn’t idyllic at first. Food had to be kept in an old icebox, which was constantly running out of ice. The beautiful but rocky Provençal countryside was not the place for dairy farming, so regular forays had to be made for milk. They hired Italian maids, who were illegal labour and worked for cash, and were therefore cheaper than regular French employees. They were, however, sluttish and lazy. On the other hand, Peggy’s money and Laurence’s taste ensured that their comfort was not otherwise compromised. They imported the furniture they had bought in Venice, to which Laurence added sofas and armchairs. He’d already had a studio built for himself near the main house, and in time they added a library, another studio over the garage for Clotilde, and later a small house for their friend Robert Coates and his wife.
When the local railwaymen went on strike for more pay, the Socialist precepts inculcated in Peggy by her old teacher Lucile Kohn paid off in an unexpected way. Peggy had been sending Lucile $100 at more or less regular intervals since she had come into her inheritance. Laurence objected to this, and disapproved of Peggy’s Socialist tendencies, believing that all political movements, especially those of the left, were ‘so boring’. Despite this, Laurence, who understood the French character well, proposed that they subsidise the strikers to the tune of $1000 – a suggestion which Peggy was happy to go along with. The strike was more like a ‘work-to-rule’, since the trains continued to run; but as a result of their support only the Vails benefited from the railway’s services, which included a daily delivery of ice for the old tin icebox. This was thrown off the train in a sack near where the line passed their house, but sometimes the railwaymen threw it out near the neighbouring village of Cavalière by mistake, and Peggy had to leap into the Citroën and fetch it before it melted. Once the strikers had brought their action to a successful conclusion, in gratitude the Vails were given the right to travel free on the branch line which connected Pramousquier with Cavalière, where there was a grocery, and Le Canadel, where they often drank a few pastis at Madame Octobon’s little bar-restaurant, which also let out a few rooms, made use of by Vail guests when there wasn’t enough space at Pramousquier.
Gradually they settled down to a sort of routine. Peggy enjoyed being the mistress of the first real home she had ever had in her own right, and promptly began to annoy Laurence with her habit of keeping precise, even