The Love-Charm of Bombs (26 page)

But Elizabeth's friends had no doubts about her loyalty to Alan. May saw at once that he was extremely kind and sensitive, and saw Elizabeth's internal tensions as keeping ‘her every relationship in suspense except perhaps that with her husband'. Each day, at 5.40 p.m., Alan came home to Elizabeth, asked her where the cat was, and enquired about her day. He complained about the practical matters she should have attended to; she looked flustered, laughed and pretended to be helpless. ‘Alan's tenderness for her,' wrote May, ‘took the form of teasing and she obviously enjoyed it. I never saw real strain or needling between them, never for a second. Love affairs were a counterpoint . . . But the marriage was truly “home”.' May herself, though jealously possessive of Elizabeth, found visiting her a lonely experience without Alan present to spread his balm of kindness among guests when Elizabeth was too imaginatively preoccupied to do so. In
Bowen's Court
Bowen describes the marriage of her ancestor Henry III as offering a homecoming or return:

 

I believe his love for his wife to have been from the first domestic rather than passionate. At the same time, that love was enduring, noble and happy: Margaret was his cousin, his mother, his only friend.

 

Elizabeth's own need for the stability provided by her marriage became particularly evident in wartime. ‘War makes us more conscious, anxiously conscious, of the value of everything that is dear and old,' she wrote in a 1942 essay on the home, at the height of her affair with Charles. ‘Above all, the home means people – their trust in each other, their happy habits of living, the calendar, year by year, of family life.'

The happy habits of the dear and old formed a secure base from which Elizabeth could explore the intoxication of the new. Since the 1930s, she had been involved with a succession of lovers. The passionate affair with Humphry House was succeeded by the abortive liaison with the caddish Goronwy Rees and then by the two-year affair with Sean O'Faolain. The role of these men was partly to compensate for the deficiencies in Elizabeth's marriage, which was limited conversationally as well as sexually. In 1942 in a rare moment of complaint to Charles, Elizabeth grumbled that Alan was like a character in a Chekhov play who always repeated the same lines at his entrances and exits. But arguably, Elizabeth loved multifariously not because of Alan's inadequacy as a husband but because of her own extreme capacity for love; for opening herself to other people. In 1937 May Sarton had spent a single night in bed with Elizabeth, which she saw as prompted by Elizabeth's sensitivity ‘to atmosphere, to place, to the total content of a moment'. Elizabeth, May wrote, ‘was willing to go deep into friendship in a few days or even hours if she felt an affinity'.

Elizabeth herself explicitly associated this quality with her gift as a writer. Writing to Humphry House, she worried that what he said about her ‘overwhelming love' for him made her feel dishonest. She warned him against mistaking ‘an artist's impulse and wish for everyone to live at full height for an ordinary or better woman's craving for love', insisting that she was a writer before she was a woman. She lived, from moment to moment, at full height. Alan, Humphry and subsequent lovers each believed that they were the most important person in her world because, when she was with them, she believed it too.

For Elizabeth, this precluded remorse. In October 1941 Charles recorded that Elizabeth had informed him that a sense of guilt seemed to be specifically ‘a middle-class complaint – not enough humility and sense of limitations'. She did not feel guilty because she lived according to her own, rigorous code of conduct. May Sarton wrote that Elizabeth made it clear by her own life that it is possible, with sufficient adventurousness, discretion and discipline, to ‘engage in extramarital affairs and keep one's dignity and one's personal truth intact, without hurting one's life partner'. Whether or not Alan was in fact hurt, Elizabeth, who was often judgemental about the conduct of her friends, condoned her own behaviour.

The tideless present of wartime London was the ideal habitat for a woman who was already able to exist intensely in the present moment. Elizabeth could tie herself powerfully to several people at once because she met each of them in a separate world; each encounter shut out past and future. ‘Vacuum as to future,' she wrote in
The Heat of the Day
, ‘was offset by vacuum as to past.' And of course in wartime, when any moment could be their last, many of the inhabitants of London were experiencing the world in similar terms. Henry Yorke's lovers who died each night in each other's arms were the ‘campers in rooms of draughty dismantled houses' described by Elizabeth Bowen in
The Heat of the Day
. ‘The extraordinary time,' Bowen observed in a passage that was cut from the final draft of the novel, ‘exonerated, contented, transfixed' wartime lovers. They were exonerated from guilt, transfixed in the moment. A moment, she wrote in the publisher's blurb for the book, has the power ‘to protract itself and contain the world'.

Charles Ritchie was less capable of surrendering to the protracted moment than Elizabeth Bowen. He was always aware of the future; of the woman he must eventually marry, the life he wanted to lead. In June 1941, shortly before he began his affair with Elizabeth, he observed in his diary that years of promiscuous love-making had, in the words of Robert Burns, hardened ‘a' within' and petrified the feelings. Less accepting of vulnerability than Elizabeth, he distrusted his love for her and constantly compared his feelings for her with his feelings for other women. ‘Would I ever have fallen for her if it hadn't been for her books?' he asked himself in September. ‘I very much doubt it . . . It's as if the woman I “love” were always accompanied by a companion spirit infinitely more exciting and more poetic and more profound than E herself.' He resented their roles as older woman and younger man. ‘She treats me as though I were a boy,' he complained; ‘I am perpetually showing off to her, like a male coquette.' It was only in bed that their roles reversed. Here her face – ‘powerful, mature, rather handsome' with a family resemblance to Virginia Woolf – was eclipsed by her body, ‘that of a young woman. The most beautiful body I have seen. It is pure in line and contour, lovely long legs and arms and small almost immature firm breasts.' On her side, Elizabeth too was conscious of Charles's comparative youth. In
The Heat of the Day
, which is dedicated to Charles, she makes Robert ‘five or six' years younger than Stella and describes ‘his youthfulness – something moody, hardy, and lyrical which his being some way into his thirties had no more than brought to a finer point'.

 

 

By December 1941, the joys of the respite from bombing were starting to fade as winter set in. As a Canadian, Charles Ritchie was appreciative of the chance to survey the peculiar landscape of wartime London: the tree-lined avenue in Hyde Park, echoing with the noise of soldiers' boots at dusk, alive with desire; the girls, watching the soldiers watching them, twisting and turning and giggling as they walked; the young men in guards uniforms drinking martinis in expensive restaurants; the aesthetes dancing in the Ritz bar after a day at the Ministry of Information; or the prostitutes lining Piccadilly while just behind them an old man made a bonfire of dead leaves in Berkeley Square. But he was depressed to observe a general deadening of feeling that winter.

 

The capacity for sympathising with other people's troubles seems to have completely dried up. Do we ever think of the thousands of starving people in Europe? Do we sympathise with the sufferings of the Russians? I doubt it . . . It seems that now the response to suffering is dead . . . We have long ceased to find the war thrilling – any excitement in the movement of historic events is gone.

 

Londoners may have ceased to be thrilled, but the news from both North Africa and Russia was hopeful. In Africa the British had launched an attack on 18 November which resulted in the retreat of the German and Italian forces from the Libyan port of Tobruk. In Russia the Germans had been victorious in the Ukraine but were held up outside Moscow in November. ‘Old men in clubs are puzzled by the Russians' successful resistance,' Charles Ritchie observed; people were surprised that so backward a country could manage the organisation of a modern war. On 6 December the Russians startled the Germans by counter-attacking with 100 fresh divisions.

The next day, the Japanese attack on the American fleet in Pearl Harbor brought the war in the Far East to centre stage. Churchill went to America to confer with Roosevelt, with whom he had signed a ‘Joint Declaration of War Aims' in August, and Britain waited to see if the Americans would finally fully commit themselves to the war in Europe. Ritchie reported that Londoners were sardonically delighted by the Japanese invasion because it would bounce the Americans into battle.

 

The picture is that of an over-cautious boy balancing on the edge of a diving-board running forward two steps and back three and then a tough bully comes along and gives him a kick in the backside right into the water!

 

The final kick was provided by Hitler himself on 11 December, when Germany declared war on America. Meanwhile there was news of British losses in the Far East. Japan captured Hong Kong on Christmas Day and the Japanese advanced towards Singapore.

In London, the war was still experienced on the map. On leave from the marines, Evelyn Waugh described London itself as ‘crowded and dead. Claridge's slowly decaying. Wine outrageous in price and quality, sent round daily from the Savoy. Newspapers always late and usually deficient.' Graham Greene, like Waugh, was pleased to return to the action, boarding a ship for West Africa in December. Once on board, he was told that two other ships had been torpedoed on the ship's previous convoy. He was getting closer to the danger once again. On 3 January 1942 Greene arrived in Freetown, Sierra Leone, a place he had fallen in love with on a visit seven years earlier. He recorded in his journal that ‘it felt odd and poetic and encouraging coming back after so many years. Like seeing a place you've dreamed of. Even the sweet hot smell from the land . . . was oddly familiar.'

Sierra Leone was crucially positioned, at the border of French Guinea and close to Senegal, both of which were in the hands of Vichy France. Freetown itself was a necessary port of call for all shipping convoys from Egypt or North Africa. The broad aim of the British in West Africa was to gain ground for the Free French. In September 1940 Evelyn Waugh had been involved in Operation Menace, an unsuccessful mission to take the port of Dakar in Senegal and install General de Gaulle. This was Britain and the Free French's first offensive and they hoped that control of Dakar would be a preliminary to winning the whole of French West Africa for the Free French cause. However, the Vichy authorities surprised the attacking forces by refusing to transfer their loyalty to de Gaulle and instead opening fire on the British ships. Their primary weapon was the battleship
Richelieu
,
which was equipped with formidable fifteen-inch guns. ‘Dakar has set us back badly,' Rose Macaulay observed to her sister at the time; ‘De Gaulle obviously misjudged.' This was Waugh's first overseas assignment in the marines and he found the defeat dispiriting. Reading letters from home about the raids in London while waiting for a ship back to Britain from Gibraltar in October, he felt less heroic than those who had stayed behind. ‘Henry Yorke no doubt fighting fires day and night. The armed forces cut a small figure. We are like wives reading letters from the trenches.'

Now the
Richelieu
, which had been damaged in the battle, was being repaired in Dakar. If it was seaworthy, the ship would represent a considerable potential threat to British shipping, so Greene's chief task in West Africa was to obtain information about the state of the ship. Initially, he was flown to Lagos for three months' further training; while there he spent his time coding and decoding information, socialising with the colonials and turning cockroach-hunting into a sport. In March 1942 he was ready to start his posting in Freetown, which he found was unbearably hot and subject to severe water shortages. ‘Nothing that I ever wrote about this place is really bad enough,' he told his sister. In Lagos, Greene had been officially working for the Department of Trade, but he was now instructed to assume the identity of an employee of CID Special Branch, despite the fact that he spent very little time in police headquarters. His job was bureaucratic, chiefly involving decoding and replying to telegrams, writing reports and processing the reports of his agents. Ambitiously, Greene wondered about opening a brothel in the Portuguese territory of Bissau, just down the coast from the
Richelieu
, in which the Madam could obtain information from the clients. However, his superiors in London discouraged the venture.

Spying appealed to both the romantic and the novelist in Greene. ‘I suppose . . . that every novelist has something in common with a spy,' he wrote in his autobiography; ‘he watches, he overhears, he seeks motives and analyses character, and in his attempt to serve literature he is unscrupulous.' He liked subterfuge and he liked storytelling, and at moments he could now believe that he was instrumental in the war effort. For years afterwards, he had self-aggrandising dreams about his own spying activities, imagining on one occasion that he and his brother Raymond were espionage agents in Hamburg. Cornered by the Nazis, they snatched their attackers' guns, clubbed them and shut their bodies in a cupboard before escaping in an aeroplane.