There are lots of sub-plots to the story. Before the war Priscilla had a botched abortion in Paris; at about the same time she had her portrait painted by (and possibly slept with) the Hungarian painter Marcel Vertès, once famous for the Oscar he won in 1952 for designing the costumes in a film about Toulouse Lautrec. Vertès was the lover of Priscilla's best girlhood friend Gillian, and another layer is added to Shakespeare's narrative by the fact that while Priscilla is leading her complicated (to use a morally neutral word) life in occupied Paris, Gillian is in London working for the Free French — and seemingly sleeping her way through many of them as well. One of these lovers was the celebrated writer Joseph Kessel, author of the novel Belle de Jour (later a famous film starring Catherine Deneuve) about a woman whose husband cannot give her physical satisfaction. This leads her to throw herself into a life of promiscuous sexual pleasure. This was partly Gillian's story with her vicomte who turned out to be impotent, and although she seemingly remained fond of him as a kind of father figure, sexual satisfaction had to be found elsewhere. There is a lot of sex in this book. After the war Gillian had an affair with Clouzot, and Priscilla with the British cinema heartthrob of the day Robert Donat, whom she had met through Gillian's filmmaker husband. 

 

To characterise Priscilla's turbulent life in occupied France, Shakespeare quotes André Gide's comment that during the Occupation he had felt "like a cork floating on the filthiest water". To the extent that Shakespeare sketches any explanation of Priscilla's personality, it lies perhaps in his careful reconstruction of her dysfunctional childhood. Her indescribably selfish father and mother make the parents in Henry James's What Maisie Knew seem like model parents. Her father, S.P.B. Mais, was first a schoolteacher, who became a prolific writer and then a BBC broadcaster as famous in his day as J.B. Priestly. 

 

His frivolous and empty-headed wife soon left him for a series of drunken cads but he would not grant her a divorce because the scandal would have tarnished his career. He set up with a younger woman barely older than his daughter Priscilla who found herself buffeted between these various households and who may have suffered an attempted rape by one of her mother's lovers. Her marriage to the vicomte, kindly but ineffectual, seems partly to have been a search for an anchor in her life. 

Piecing together this strange story has involved Shakespeare in considerable detective work. Ever since the classic The Quest for Corvo by A.J.A. Symons where the biographer becomes himself a protagonist in the search to uncover hidden lives — this device was used more recently in The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal — one of the pleasures of reading this kind of book is following the author on a journey which can involve false trails but also sudden breakthroughs. Shakespeare starts with a trunk of letters, papers, photographs and scrapbooks that, unknown to anyone, Priscilla had kept hidden under the television set in her bedroom all the years that she lived with her second, English husband.