The Love-Charm of Bombs (39 page)

In January 1945 Charles departed for Canada. ‘I suppose I could have gone on year after year representing my country abroad without knowing much about what was going on at home.' But as it was, he was in for an intensive period of re-education and felt like a new boy at school. The letter Elizabeth wrote him on the eve of his departure was a manifesto of her faith in his love.

 

We are so close to each other in understanding, closer than words could make us that I think you must know this . . . You know, too, don't you, that you take with you my real life, my only life, everything that is meant by my heart. I am in your keeping. And you are in mine.

 

She was aware that the last four years had seen him vacillating between love and detachment, and that he had not been faithful to her. She knew that he was seriously considering marriage to his cousin, Sylvia Smellie. ‘E says she would not mind me marrying S so much, it would be like “marrying myself”,' Charles had written in his diary in December. Yet Elizabeth kept her belief in the fairy tale alive because she was now unable to imagine happiness without him.

During the war Elizabeth Bowen wrote an essay called ‘The Art of Reserve, or, The Art of Respecting Boundaries' warning her readers of the potential hazards of unrestrained love and friendship. ‘We rush, we storm our approaches to other people,' she complains here, wondering ‘what is at fault – the age we live in, fever and insecurity?' It is because people matter so much – ‘perhaps they matter too much' – that ‘we risk disillusionment, tragedy, when we pursue them wrongly'. She advocates quietness, which will allow the infinite possibilities within a single human relationship to unfold slowly and deliberately – ‘magical silences, delicious chance meetings, the sweet-smelling hour in the garden after the rain, the evening by the fire, the sudden talk by the window looking out at the snow'. She urges her readers to learn how to pause and to respect boundaries.

There is a note of regret here; she chastises herself, together with her readers. Throughout her life, Elizabeth crashed noisily into friendships which she often had to extricate herself from heartlessly when they became too consuming. And she did not heed her own advice when it came to love. Here there was no pause and no restraint. ‘She said she thought that if we had married we would have been perfectly happy together,' Charles had written just over a year into the relationship in November 1942. Her only chance of survival was to convince him that he felt it too. And there were moments when he did, though he found it hard to admit. ‘E has become the centre of my life,' he observed in February 1943.

 

As usual I struggle with my love for her and with a lamentable but characteristic panic. I insist in my own mind that I do not love her, because I am not ‘in love' with her; that however is true in a narrow sense in that I do not desire her. Yet what I feel for her is quite different from friendships . . . Of course with E I have found the perfect companion and intelligence and above all a power of expression superior to my own . . . insensibly she has put at a distance not only all rivals, but all rival memories . . . I am being absorbed by a love which wishes to penetrate and possess.

 

In February 1944 he observed less romantically that it was impossible for him to express adequately what she had been to him without sounding as though he were writing an obituary for
The Times
.
Through her, he had grown up, and he wished for both their sakes that they could have met ten years earlier. It is unclear what might have been the result of this. Elizabeth would still have been married. Perhaps Charles thought that if Elizabeth could have wrought her consuming magic while he was still in his twenties he might have been saved from his own callousness; that without those extra ten years of transient love affairs he might have been able to live up to Elizabeth's own unwavering image of his steadfastness.

But for her part, Elizabeth exonerated herself for her lack of restraint and wove Charles into her own image of unchanging love. ‘Outside us neither of us when we are together ever seems to look,' Stella claims to Robert in
The Heat of the Day
. ‘How much of the “you” or the “me”
is
, even, outside of the “us”?' It is too late to ponder the merits of retaining or reinstating the boundaries between them when their consciousnesses have already merged. And that merging is itself inextricable from the war which forms the background of their love. They are ‘the creatures of history, whose coming together was of a nature possible in no other day'. War itself effects ‘a thinning of the membrane between the this and the that'; and ‘what else', the narrator asks, ‘is love?'

 

 

See notes on Chapter 13

14

‘A collective intoxication of happiness'

January–June 1945

 

By January 1945 the German army was largely confined within the boundaries of Germany itself, although there was still some fighting in Hungary, Poland, northern Holland, Scandinavia and northern Italy. It was clear that the war would be over within a few months. ‘Let us be of good cheer,' Churchill told the Commons on 18 January; ‘Military victory may be distant, it will certainly be costly, but it is no longer in doubt.' On 4 February, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin met at the Black Sea resort of Yalta in the Crimea to decide on the future of post-war Europe. Between them they divided Germany into four zones (France was to have one as well), decided on questions of German reparation and reconstruction, and agreed to cooperate in the planned United Nations organisation. Around them, the war continued, with the Allies doing everything in their power to force the unconditional surrender of Germany. On 13 February Britain and America began three nights of brutal bombing in the German city of Dresden; by 15 February, the resulting firestorm had destroyed fifteen square miles of the city centre. ‘I feel the war may end any week, do you?' Rose Macaulay wrote to her friend David Ley on 14 February. ‘I mean, the European part of it. There will be horrible celebrations and exultations, which I shan't like. But what a relief, all the same.'

However, the bombing of London continued into March, and according to William Sansom a new neurosis was developing. People were anxious about being killed by the last bullet. On Sunday 20 March London was hit by its last V-2, which landed just inside Hyde Park by Marble Arch. Lying in bed, late in the morning, Graham Greene heard ‘a huge crash, followed by a terrific rumble and the sound of glass going', and went to Hyde Park to survey the damage. A week later, the V-2 attacks stopped altogether. The final rocket explosion was heard on 27 March and the last flying-bomb arrived the next morning. The Allies had overrun the launching sites in Holland. ‘It really looks at last as though the war might be over soon,' Greene wrote to his mother. ‘One feels one won't have much energy for peace.'

In Europe, the last stray territories were falling to the Allies. Warsaw was conquered by the Russians on 17 January and Budapest in March. On the western front, Britain and America cleared the west bank of the Rhine, capturing Cologne. The British and Americans began simultaneous offensives from the north and south of the Rhine, encircling the remaining 325,000 German troops defending the Ruhr at the start of April. Then amid the triumphant accounts of victories came news of a sadder kind. On 12 April Roosevelt died, aged 63. Churchill now reported that Roosevelt had already been visibly weakening at Yalta:

 

His captivating smile, his gay and charming manner, had not deserted him, but his face had a transparency, an air of purification, and often there was a faraway look in his eyes.

 

However, the critical state of the President's health was not known to the general public and his death came as a shock. ‘Early this morning Peter woke me to tell me that Roosevelt had died last night,' Hilde Spiel wrote in her diary. ‘Dreadful shock.' She found that everything seemed suddenly overshadowed by Roosevelt's death.

 

Vienna is freed, war closing to its end, everything looks well, Peter works a lot and earns a lot of money making a good career as well, and there I sit quite disheartened and disconsolate over Roosevelt. He was the embodiment of integrity and human decency.

 

 

Henry Yorke spent the spring of 1945 worrying about the welfare of Mary Keene. He would never quite acknowledge responsibility for her daughter Alice, but he did now join Matthew Smith in trying to find somewhere for Mary to live. While they addressed this question, Mary took Alice to stay with Dylan Thomas and his wife Caitlin. She was pleased to escape both the bombs and Bunny Keene, whom she was now in the process of divorcing.

Henry missed Mary in her absence and was jealous of Dylan Thomas. ‘Darling, darling, I'm so very glad the journey went off all right,' he wrote after her departure in February. ‘Everything here is horrible. Fog today too.' The previous day a bomb had gone off above the Yorkes' house in Trevor Place. His letter ended plaintively:

 

I can't sleep.

My new book is no good.

So altogether I'd better stop.

I miss you terribly.

Love from Henry

 

Mary began by enjoying her stay in Wales. She was missing Henry and, perhaps most of all now, Matthew. ‘I think about you always as I used to think about Henry,' she had written to Matthew the previous autumn. ‘Oh I adore you my darling like no one else on earth.' But she liked being with Dylan Thomas. ‘I don't take Dylan nearly so seriously as you do,' she told Henry, adding provocatively that the poet had taken her ‘very much under his wing'. For his part Henry filled her in on gossip from the office, complained about the lack of pretty girls and teased her about life in Wales, asking if the innkeeper gave sufficient food to his dogs.

 

I fear they are ravening for poor little Alice, the little innocent can't know what a succulent feast she would make, particularly in these years of lean dog biscuits. I have your shriek in my ears as I write this and that must be my comfort for it is all I have.

 

At the beginning of March, Mary's peaceful life in Wales was shattered when a neighbour, jealous over reports of Thomas's flirtation with his wife, entered the cottage with a gun and began to shoot at random. ‘Dearest dearest,' Mary wrote, reporting the incident to Henry, ‘tears will be falling on this letter before I'm halfway through.' She described how the flimsy asbestos walls were flecked with machine-gun bullets, doors had been broken in and a madman with a gun in one hand and a hand grenade in the other had generally terrorised them. ‘I feel as weak as a kitten.' She was overcome with a sense of her own ‘alone-ness and innocence'. She wanted to come back to London but she did not want to be a burden for Henry and Matthew. ‘When in trouble I have the feelings of an institution child, my anxiety is not that I have nowhere to live but that I am a responsibility to my friends.'

Both Henry and Dig wrote back immediately to comfort her. ‘My dearest darling,' Dig's letter began, adding that she had missed Mary ‘dreadfully' and hoped she would come back soon. ‘What a terrible experience you had, I was horrified! You might have been shot. I know I should have dreamt about it every night if I'd been you.' She then recounted the gossip from London (chiefly that she had seen a lot of Matthew, who had been very nice and very amusing), before observing that Mary's time in Wales sounded extraordinary and asking provocatively ‘would I have liked it, do you think?' Henry's letter was more consistently consoling. ‘My darling darling darling, what a day and what an escape,' he began. ‘You must have had the most terrible shock, and I only hope you are beginning to get over it now.' He assured her that he was doing all he could to find her somewhere to live. He and Matthew met almost daily and Henry did all the talking while Matthew sat there saying ‘I know I know I know'. And he promised her that she would never be in real need so long as he and Matthew were alive, adding that ‘little Alice must always be on a bed of roses'. A week later he told her rather heartlessly about a claim he was making with the insurance company for jewellery that had been stolen from Dig. The man at Cartier was going to ‘prepare a “scheme” of a few “pieces” for her, which means I suppose that she will be literally brilliant with diamonds quite soon'.

Mary replied caustically that she was glad to hear about Dig's jewellery, wondering if he could ‘slip in a bit for me'. She felt terribly separated from him. ‘I don't dream or dare think of seeing you.' Her news was of police interrogations (she had informed the policeman that the shooting was worse than anything she had experienced in the Blitz) and of her impending appearance in court. She was losing patience with Dylan, who now seemed to be ‘an extraordinarily abnormal person', and was spending her days waiting for the post and longing for the city. It is clear from her letters that her expectations of Henry were becoming lower and lower in his absence, and in this respect she was realistic. Henry missed her, but he had moved on and retreated into the safety of his day-to-day life with Dig. Mary later wrote to her daughter Alice: ‘There was a hole there. He only really existed in other people. He was living off the fat of other people and once the fat had gone, he would go.' This was a statement written in bitterness but it is not dissimilar from opinions expressed by more friendly observers. Henry had been awakened by his wartime experiences into a form of passion he had rarely experienced before. Now it was over and he had indeed gone.