The Love-Charm of Bombs (58 page)

But these months were not solely frightening. As in the war, this period was enlivened by intense friendships, with Hilde and Peter becoming close to the English novelist Rex Warner and his wife Frances. Rex Warner was in Berlin working for the educational branch of the Allied Control Commission, based at the Technical University, which was in the British zone. For Hilde, this was a triumphant moment because it was her first proper friendship with a London intellectual. The two couples were soon meeting almost every day. Rex Warner was part of a set in literary London that included Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, Rose Macaulay and Henry Yorke. He had been at Oxford with W. H. Auden and with Cecil Day-Lewis, with whom Rosamond Lehmann was currently having an affair. At the end of the Second World War, Rosamond had reported to a friend that she had got to know Rex and become very fond of him. ‘He is a wonderfully nice man, full of goodness and intellectual vigour, pouring down pints and pints of beer all day.' According to Rosamond ‘no one ever suffered less from angst, and it's so refreshing'.

In fact, by the time that he arrived in Berlin, Rex was indeed suffering from angst. At Graham Greene's party for François Mauriac the previous spring he had met Catherine Walston's close friend Barbara Rothschild, who had recently divorced Baron Victor Rothschild and was as glamorous, rich and sexually liberated as Catherine Walston herself. Surveying the crowd at the party, Catherine dismissively informed Barbara that there was not a single man worth speaking to in the room. Barbara replied that there was actually one, pointing out Rex Warner, and suggested that the two women had a bet to see who could talk to him first. Rex was as quickly smitten as Barbara was, and they began an intense affair. During his stay in Berlin, Rex was writing to Barbara every day. Frances knew about the affair and knew too that he was planning to leave her when he returned to London. He was convinced that he ought to have the integrity to act on his feelings rather than living a lie, and that he was incapable of having a mere fling with a woman he loved this much. After visiting Barbara in April he wrote to his friend Pam Morris that he had ‘at last found everything I want'.

Hilde and Peter were not yet aware of the tension within the Warners' marriage, although they noticed a sadness on Frances's part. They also did not know how much Rex disliked his life in Germany, although he was pleased to have made a few close friends. At the end of June he told Pam Morris that he was planning to leave Berlin as soon as possible, ‘never having enjoyed a city less'. The tensions in his marriage were exacerbated by the political situation. ‘Perhaps things aren't rather serious, but there is always the chance of the Americans doing something foolish.' The Warner family left Berlin on 14 July and Rex went straight from the airport to Barbara Rothschild's house in the village of Tackley, near Oxford, where he and Barbara would invite Graham Greene and Catherine Walston for weekend visits that summer. At the end of August Graham pleaded with Catherine to arrange another long Tackley weekend.

Given the political situation, Hilde and Peter had also decided that the safest course was for Hilde and the children to return to London, which she planned to do at the end of July. However, she was delayed by Christine contracting appendicitis and could not leave until the end of August. First she took the children for a much-needed holiday to Bellagio on Lake Como in Italy. The peace and the beautiful scenery were a relief after the dangerous summer in Berlin, but Peter had forgotten to send Hilde any money, and she was lonely with just the children for company. However she had told Hansi she was there, and her friend passed on her whereabouts. Luciano, Hilde's Italian count, telephoned from Milan and then arrived in person, hiring a motorboat to take Hilde to an open-air dance across the lake at Lermo. Hilde was charmed by his naive cheerfulness and love of pleasure. He stayed for two days, entertaining the children by the lake during the day, and then departed. Hilde was left with a memory of ‘a moment, perhaps the only one in my life, of Baudelairean perfection'. She never saw him again.

At the end of September Hilde returned to Wimbledon, that ‘green grave' she had left two years earlier, hoping never to return. ‘In Wimbledon', she wrote in her autobiography,

 

where I was to spend the next fifteen years, one grows old before one's time. Time passes so slowly in this green, restful, peaceful place that one pays no attention to it as in the days of youth, while secretly, mercilessly, it takes its course, so that in old age one is amazed to find oneself cheated of a long span of life.

 

She was enchanted by the green melancholy beauty of her garden, but it was a grave nonetheless.

 

Hans Flesch-Brunningen,
c
. 1948

 

Hilde's English social life felt extremely narrow after the excitement in Germany. Peter remained in Berlin, reporting that the city was dying and that everybody had given up hope that it could still come right. ‘Deep gloom has descended upon everything . . . the city is so overwrought that before long it will be ripe for the Russians and they will just squash it.' Hilde was relieved to be away from the danger, but she was increasingly lonely and there were few people to see except for Hans Flesch-Brunningen, who regularly took her to Soho or to the theatre. The previous August, Flesch's wife Tetta had died. Hilde and Flesch had corresponded throughout her time in Berlin and now that she had returned they settled into a companionship that was becoming increasingly necessary to both of them. Hilde later wrote that at this point Flesch became at once ‘a male friend, a female friend, a brother; he was a substitute father, only nine years younger than my real father would have been; he was Vienna to me.' Spending time with him, she was transported into an Austria which no longer existed, but which she still desperately needed. She loved and respected Peter for his German intellect and humour, but she could still succumb to the lure of a more gallant and florid old-world charm.

Flesch's appeal also lay in his need for a kind of intimacy that Peter seems not particularly to have desired. Peter wanted to know that Hilde was there; ideally in the same house as he was, or if not, then at least accessible by letter. But he found it relatively easy to go for long periods apart, as long as he knew that ultimately they were a unit, taking on the world together. There were times when Hilde appreciated the freedom offered to her by this kind of marriage. She could go to Vienna and recover the single life of her youth; she could engage in brief love affairs with a British press officer or an Italian count. But in day-to-day life she wanted a more sustained and intimate companionship than Peter was prepared to offer. She needed to be with someone who would enter into her concerns and share them because they were hers. When she wrote to Peter in Berlin worrying about the debts they were accruing in London, she was informed that she should stop fretting because debts were unimportant in the general scheme of things. This was frustrating because it suggested an unwillingness to experience the world on her terms. The fact was that she was worried, and she needed Peter to sympathise with her anxieties. Flesch did, and this came to matter more and more.

However, Hilde and Peter's marriage had not yet run its course. In November they met for a holiday and parted on passionate and congenial terms. Although Peter was not able to return for Christmas he begged Hilde to come out to Berlin, and in February 1949 he was pleading with her to have another child after he finally returned.

 

I must write something that has gone through my mind all these days during the trip, and it is now becoming an obsession with me: I do so want another daughter. I know you will scream and spit at me and all the rest, but there it is. Please, please, Mummili, think it over, or rather feel it over, if you can. The reason is simply that I'm so missing the child we lost. Anthony is a golden treasure fallen straight from heaven but he is another, a different child, not that one. It may all sound very stupid and illogical and sentimental and it may also be because I'm away from you all and miss you so – there are moments when I feel I simply cannot bear being separated from the children a day longer – but somehow deep down it worries away at me, and I just want to have that child.

 

He was aware that he had no right to suggest such a thing, given that he had been absent for so long. But he was doing all he could.

 

I work like blazes, and I shall go on working and we shall be all right. In any case when I get back to England we must get a house. On that my mind is made up. We must get a house with a garden.

 

And his letters were filled with uncharacteristic affection and longing in the lead-up to his return to London, which was planned for May. ‘Love to you, my darling,' he wrote in March; ‘I know you're a good wife to me, and much more than that, and I'd never exchange you for anybody or anything else, my sweet. I love you very dearly.'

In fact Peter did not return in May, although there was a brief visit to London in April which he looked back on as a sweet dream; real while it lasted and unreal once it was over. Hilde, he wrote, had been unspeakably good to him; like a mother to a sick child. He was aware that he had behaved childishly and asked her to forgive him. He had noticed and appreciated every moment of her care and love.

In May 1949 the Soviets finally ended the blockade, humiliated by the success of the air lift, which had made it clear that the Western Allies were able to provide Berlin with food and fuel by air indefinitely. But relations between the occupying powers were no less hostile. ‘I'm tired, tired, tired of Germany, of this hopeless people, their hopeless stupidity, arrogance and all the rest of it. I cannot live here any longer,' Peter wrote to Hilde at the end of June. The Germans had been acceptable in 1945 and 1946 when they were miserable and defeated. He had felt then that it was possible to improve them, but now he was sure that it was impossible.

 

They're lost to humanity, but the dreadful thing is that they're no exception and that humanity is lost to itself. I really think the world is finished. It has become such a bloody awful place. Look at these monstrous Americans! And the Russians – no, no, no – I have sympathy with no one, they are all awful. That we of all people should have to live to witness the triumph of brainlessness and collective idiocy – I find that a bit strong.

 

Finally, in July, he returned to London, where he joined Hilde in Wimbledon, that green grave that both found at once so alluring and so stultifying.

Peter came back to London just before the release of
The Third Man
in August 1949. The film was an immediate triumph, winning the Grand Prix for best feature film at the International Film Festival at Cannes in September. It immediately imbued the ruins of post-war Vienna with iconic power. Here was the squalor of the sewers, the dreary decadence of the theatre and clubs, the shabbiness of the Sacher Hotel, transformed into a landscape which seemed to typify the post-war world. Elizabeth Bowen was among those who praised the film's portrayal of the city she and Graham Greene had visited together. It was, she wrote in 1955, ‘so like Vienna as we saw it at night', though she also had wonderful daylight impressions of the stupendous perspectives of a city that now seemed more spectacular than Rome. The film captured the imagination of Greene's contemporaries partly because it seemed poised between the eras of post-war and Cold War, between ruin and reconstruction, between cultures of decadence and austerity. Greene claimed to be unexcited by the film's success; he was more preoccupied by the relationship with Catherine, who had gone to Achill without him, leaving him with an awful pang as he addressed his letters to the cottage where he had been so happy. But even this was an appropriate response to the triumph of a film which he had written by her side, and which showed love at once as all-conquering and as ultimately solipsistic and doomed.