The Love-Charm of Bombs (64 page)

Guy's reappearances prepare the ground for Jane's encounter with an actual lover at the end of the novel. In the final scene she is sent to Shannon Airport to meet the rejected suitor of the hostess at the castle. Their eyes meet and, in the final sentence, ‘They no sooner looked but they loved.' As far as Antonia is concerned, Guy ‘came back, through Jane, to be let go'. Jane's progression to an actual love affair enables her to dispel his presence. But Jane is merely an inexperienced girl and there remain two disappointed women still grieving in his wake. Antonia, otherwise suave and self-sufficient and endowed with much of Bowen's professional persona, wonders why she was not loved enough; why Lilia swayed him with her beauty. Lilia, who each day confronts ‘the day's disillusionment' and finds that ‘disappointment for ever is fresh and young', is gradually deteriorating, gaunt with solitude, alone in a lonely house in a lonely novel.

If in writing
A World of Love
Elizabeth was asking herself in part whether the ecstatic fairy tale of their love was enough to make the loneliness worthwhile, then the book's answer is ambivalent. As Charles said, it was a book that contained their ‘shared illusion of life'; it was their book as much as
The Heat of the Day
. But this time their love affair emerged as more sad than triumphant.
The Heat of the Day
had germinated from the shared joy of their wartime experiences. As long as Alan had been alive, Elizabeth had a stable base and family in him, and had sought in Charles an imaginative outlet through which she could explore love, and herself as a lover. This resulted in the fairy-tale world which could be sustaining for Elizabeth as a woman and a writer and which generated
The Heat of the Day
. And if the mood of this novel is the mood of Elizabeth and Charles's wartime love affair, then it also came to dominate the mood of their post-war love, allowing their love to amount to far more than the sum of its parts. Yes, they saw each other only a few times a year, they sometimes bickered, Charles was unfaithful, and they both knew that they had no real future. But in Elizabeth's imagination this was transformed into a great and consuming love affair, too beautiful to sacrifice simply because it made her unhappy. And she could overcome the unhappiness. For the five years of writing
The Heat of the Day
, Elizabeth's longing for Charles had been assuaged by her writing; in a sense he was with her all the time. After the novel was published, she could continue this process through writing letters to Charles and through her reading, inscribing Charles into the Rilke biography or the Flaubert letters.

However, once Alan died, this became harder. Charles is as central to
A World of Love
as to
The Heat of the Day
but he is present primarily as an absent figure. The world of love is an isolating one and the memory of Guy is not enough to protect the women who loved him from pain. Yet if the book is partly an exploration of whether Elizabeth would be happier without Charles, then the answer is that in fact life without Charles is inconceivable. Years after his death, Guy is just as present as if he were alive. For Elizabeth there could be no question of leaving Charles, because by this point her entire imaginative landscape was bound up with him. To give him up would be to give up not only seeing him but also writing to him, which would be to renounce a mode of being in which she was never completely alone because she was always living partly in the terms in which she would describe her experiences to him. To leave him and to begin again with someone else would be to relinquish her own inner world. The life that resulted would be far lonelier than a life in which she was merely physically absent from the man she loved much of the time.

And on Charles's side, every time that he rejoined Elizabeth in Ireland or London, he stepped back into her fairy tale. He could escape it in her absence but not in her presence, and he never stopped seeking her presence. He was aware that he was diminished without her; that she offered not only the vanity-pleasing affirmation of intense love, but a version of himself in which he was finer, larger and more imaginative than he could be without her. ‘E has a miraculous and terrifying capacity to bring one to life, to awaken other desires and inspire belief in other possibilities in oneself,' he would observe in his diary in November 1956. He was no longer sexually attracted to her, but he was attracted to himself, reflected in her eyes. And though desire had faded, he found her beautiful, and found the beauty all the more compelling because it was a blend of her physical appearance, her voice, her writing and her house, all converging into her luminous presence which allowed any moment in her company to be alive with possibility.

After reading the new novel, Charles felt himself being gradually lured once more ‘into her “World of Love” '. He and Elizabeth sat before the fire and drank whisky, sinking into that ‘unreal happiness' they shared. Looking back on the remote joy of his visit a week later, Charles was increasingly convinced that this ‘middle-aged paradise' was the only paradise which was now not a false one. Elizabeth, meanwhile, told him that she was still living in the happiness of their perfect week. ‘Your sweetness, and our hours, and your dear presence.' Yet for Charles, the crisis continued. In April he wrote in his diary the letter he would write Elizabeth if he still dared to tell her everything; ‘if your hatred did not frighten me (that hatred is eating into you, you said it was like a cancer)'. He felt possessed by her, worried that their love had ‘twined roots of good and evil' and that they would end by destroying each other. This, he wrote in August, was a ‘sad, disturbing, fearful love which I half hate and without which I am not alive'. Yet every day they spent together remained precious; ‘patches and tatters of complete life together'.

In the months that followed the publication of
A World of Love
, Elizabeth attempted to follow the advice she had given herself in the disappointment essay and to expect less of Charles. In a letter to him in January 1956 she asked how he could ever think that he could disappoint her. ‘You must really realise', she commanded him, ‘that loving you is like being absorbed in something that though it never changes always moves forward.' In other people's relationships, the first wild flame gave place to something steadier; for her there was always the flame. Yet ten days later, she was so lonely for him that she was ‘nearly off my head: it undermines my physical morale'. ‘The fact is Charles', she told him in February, ‘that saying goodbye to you this last time has made me feel as though my inside had been torn out.' She was walking from room to room by herself, crying out ‘Charles, Charles, Charles'. But her spirits were revived by another of his visits in May, and writing to him afterwards she invoked the continual present they had experienced in wartime to bind him to her once more:

 

These last ten days are not the past, they are a sort of eternity. Oh you beloved Charles, you beloved love. Let us neither of us forget, for a single moment, what reality feels like and eternity is.

 

 

See notes on Chapter 22

23

‘The world my wilderness, its caves my home'

Rose Macaulay

 

In July 1949 Rose Macaulay followed Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene and Henry Yorke in visiting post-war Ireland. Her trip, unlike theirs, was an act not of hopeful escape but of sorrowful pilgrimage. Accompanied by Marjorie Grant Cook, she was visiting the lost homeland of her dead lover. On 15 July Rose and Marjorie spent a night with Elizabeth Bowen at Bowen's Court. The next day they went to the sea at Glengariff, where Rose was delighted to find ‘a lovely little bay, with little islands scattered about it, and woody shores and rocks – lovely for bathing'. They were making their way around the coast towards Loughrea, where she would visit the cathedral where Gerald O'Donovan had begun his career, seeing for herself the stained-glass windows he had commissioned all those years ago.

This journey to Ireland was the first stage in a three-year exploration of the ruins of the world which comprised the research for Rose Macaulay's compendious
The Pleasure of Ruins
(1953). Since Gerald's death, Rose had taken on the desolate persona she had ascribed to herself in ‘Miss Anstruther's Letters'. Bereft of both her home and her lover, she was now ‘a ghost, without attachments or habitation'. Accepting her own ghostliness, she began to haunt ruins. At first, she scrambled around the ruins of her own flat and of the City of London. The younger novelist Penelope Fitzgerald later recollected alarming experiences of clambering after Rose when she joined her on these expeditions, keeping Rose's lean figure just in view as she ‘shinned down a crater, or leaned, waving, through the smashed glass of some perilous window'. At this stage Rose was seeking a physical manifestation for her own spiritual state, but there was already an element of intellectual quest in her explorations. In an article in
Time and Tide
in October 1940 she described wartime Londoners as ‘cave-fanciers and ruin-gogglers', morbidly fascinated by ruins. ‘ “There's a good one in my street,” we say, proud of our own monuments. “Makes you think, doesn't it,” we say. But just what it makes us think, I am not sure.' As a ruin-goggler, Rose Macaulay was attempting to answer this question, and was becoming fascinated by listing and cataloguing the flowers sprouting in the ruins, pressing, preserving and labelling the cuttings she collected during her expeditions. Then, in her 1947 trip to Spain and Portugal, she began to find in ruins a consolation for grief; a
reminder that everything eventually passed. The ruins also offered an aesthetic pleasure which gradually enabled Macaulay to move beyond the anguish that made her wish, in 1941, that she could have been bombed herself. ‘A seed can lodge and sprout in any crack or fissure,' Henry Yorke had told Rosamond Lehmann during the war. It took Macaulay longer to believe this, but when she did her consolation was more lasting than Yorke's.

 

Flowers growing in a bombsite in the City of London,
c
. 1943

 

Macaulay made her visit to Ireland straight after she had submitted the manuscript for her first post-war novel,
The World My Wilderness
(1950). This is a book built on the ruins of love and set in the ruins of post-war London. It ‘is about the ruins of the City', Macaulay wrote to Hamilton Johnson, the priest who became a friend at this time, ‘and the general wreckage of the world that they seem to stand for. And about a rather lost and strayed and derelict girl who made them her spiritual home.' Although she ascribed it to Anon, Macaulay wrote the epigraph to the novel herself:

 

The world my wilderness, its caves my home,

Its weedy wastes the garden where I roam,

Its chasm'd cliffs my castle and my tomb . . .

 

In 1949 she was still seeking a tomb in which to bury herself and she hoped to find it in the London wilderness, roaming its weedy wastes and chasm'd cliffs.

Typically, Macaulay splits herself between two heroines in this novel, an older and a younger woman, Helen and Barbary. Barbary is the lost and derelict girl, while Helen is her forty-four-year-old mother, an English woman living in post-war France. Here she mourns the death of her second husband, Maurice, who was drowned by the local Resistance for collaborating with the Germans.

Like Macaulay's, Helen's grief is private and unseen. Richie, her elder son, informed of the death in a brief and dry letter, does not know ‘if she greatly grieved or not'. In fact, Helen aches with unspoken want. When her small son, Roland, cries out for Barbary after her departure to England, Helen echoes his childish phrases in her mind – ‘Want Maurice. Maurice is coming never' – before turning from the sea that had swallowed him up. Hungering for Maurice, her senses engulfed in an aching void, Helen attempts to fill the void and to stupefy the ache with artistic endeavours, reading, translating, painting and gambling. But the darkness merely deepens about her, ‘as if she were in a cave alone'.

The image of the empty cave reflects Macaulay's own post-war mental state. In the novel, as in actuality, the cavernousness in her mind finds a physical reality in wartime London, where Barbary is sent to stay with her father after the war. The ostensible reason for Barbary's departure is that she has become uncivilised. Like so many Macaulay heroines, Barbary wanders scruffily around, failing to turn into a young lady. Her life on the outskirts of the Resistance during the war has trained her to steal, lie and catapult the police – habits which must be unlearned in London. But in fact Helen sends her daughter away partly because she believes that she has some responsibility for the drowning of Maurice. Helen finds Barbary's presence difficult to bear, and has transferred the full force of her maternal love to Roland, who is Maurice's child.