The Love-Charm of Bombs

by Lara Feigel

  For her part Edith often thwarts easy adoration with her matter-of-factness. She is sometimes hard, and often surprisingly careless about ordinary morals. Her moment of triumph comes when she spots her mistress in bed with her lover and spreads the gossip, proprietorially and triumphantly. She plunders peahen eggs from her employers and then even briefly steals one of her mistress’s rings, wondering about never returning it. ‘I’d sell it an’ save the money for a rainy day,’ she claims. She often greets Raunce’s devotion with impatient humour. ‘You tell that to them all Charley’ is all she says to his first declaration of love. But at this point her words are belied by ‘the excitement and scorn which seemed to blaze from her’. And throughout she has moments of loving sensuality that shift the whole register of the novel into a passionate seriousness not often found in Yorke’s work. ‘I love Charley Raunce I love ’im I love ’im so there,’ she tells Kate. ‘I could open the veins of my right arm for that man.’ Gradually she becomes more open with Raunce, looking ‘full at him seriously with her raving beauty’. She assures him that the twenty-year age gap is unimportant. ‘I like a man that’s a man and not a lad.’ And when he kisses her she kisses him back with such passion, ‘all of her hard as a board’, that he flops back flabbergasted, ‘having caught a glimpse of what was in her waiting for him’.

  By the time she met Henry Yorke, Mary Keene was not in fact a cockney like Edith, though she had been born in extreme poverty in east London and raised partly in an orphanage and partly by her violent mother. Aged eleven she was sent out to buy paraffin and was knocked down by a lorry, losing her right foot. She was given a metal lower leg and sent to a school for the disabled, where most of the other children were mentally handicapped and Mary was barely educated. As a teenager she ran away from home, working in sewing sweatshops and frequently going hungry. Then, aged sixteen, she began modelling for art students including Lucian Freud at Cedric Morris’s art school in Dedham. From this point she moved into a bohemian world of artists and writers. She lost her East End accent when she decided it sounded ugly and searched for a grander and freer world. This seemed to be offered by Ralph (‘Bunny’) Keene, whom she met in a nightclub during a wartime police raid and married in January 1941. He had been an art dealer and had now started a film company. The marriage was initially passionate but both Mary and Bunny had other lovers from the start.

  Through Bunny, Mary met Matthew Smith, who had been represented by the art gallery Bunny worked at in the 1930s. Matthew began a series of drawings and paintings of Mary that he would continue for the rest of his life. Matthew Smith was an instinctive and tactile painter and painting Mary was a sensual act. These paintings, in which he coated the body of the woman he desired in thick swathes of bright, unexpected colours, show Mary as angry and vulnerable, conscious of her own beauty but diffident in its display. The Mary of Matthew’s pictures is the sphinx of MacNeice’s poem, with vitality and fear marbled in her eyes, endowed with the huge glistening eyes of Henry Yorke’s heroine. By this point Matthew was an extremely successful painter whose own marriage had been broken up by a series of affairs with young female muses. He was in his sixties and initially intended Mary for his son Dermot. But after he had taken Mary and Dermot out for an introductory tea he caught hold of Mary’s hair as it blew out behind her and uttered a snarl of desire. In fact Mary was more interested in father than son; her proclivities, like Edith’s, were for men and not lads. But her attention was distracted from Matthew when Augustus John’s daughter introduced her to Dig Yorke, who then introduced Mary to her husband.

  If Mary was not actually a cockney, she was certainly not from the Yorkes’ own set, and she would have had no more qualms than Edith about stealing a ring. During the weekend with Henry and Matthew at Stratford St Mary, she stole nightdresses from Ida Hughes Stanton, the owner of the house Matthew was renting. Returning and finding them gone, Stanton summoned the police, who sent Mary for trial; she was put on probation. ‘You know of course that I do not approve of what Mary did and I feel bruised in every direction,’ Matthew assured his hostess, pleading with her to drop the charges. Meanwhile Henry sent Mary an amused telegram suggesting that she might like to read Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe’s tale of a loveable, thieving harlot. ‘I have been guessing all this time especially since your telegram, how you have taken the latest news of me,’ Mary replied. She had asked Matthew to tell her the story of Moll Flanders and the tale had made her blood boil. ‘I can see no reason for reading it at the moment. It seems curious to me that you should have taken it in such a literary way. I am very upset, but not because I stole. Do come and see me as soon as you come back.’

  The relationship between Henry and Mary was no less difficult than the relationship between Raunce and Edith, and was considerably more tempestuous. ‘I have a great hangover, and a huge grazed bruise on my forehead and a little black eye all because of a great dramatic meeting with beloved Henry,’ Mary wrote to Matthew at this time. ‘It was so madly gay, and we talked a great deal about you.’ But it was serious, on both sides. For his part Henry seems to have lost interest both in drink and in other women. He wrote to Rosamond Lehmann later that spring that he was busy working on producing the goods ordered by Russia – hard work which he found was slowly killing him. ‘Believe it or not I don’t drink at all now, practically. Though I still make a feeble pass at the youngest girls, like an old fool of 80.’ This is of course typically disingenuous. For one girl at least, the passes were not feeble. ‘Darling, darling, darling’, Henry began his letters to that ‘river-goddess with a pitcher / Of ice-cold wild emotions’. ‘Pour them where she will’, MacNeice had written, ‘The pitcher will not empty’; Henry Yorke had begun to drink from the pitcher and he was finding it compulsive.

  See notes on Chapter 11

  12

  ‘Alas, what hate everywhere’

  Graham Greene, Rose Macaulay, Henry Yorke and Hilde Spiel, March 1943–May 1944

  On 1 March 1943 Graham Greene was pleased to arrive in London after over a year away. Africa had been an exciting experience, but he had quickly become infuriated with the English abroad. Two months earlier he had written to his brother Raymond suggesting that Churchill’s reference to the ‘majestic’ services of West Africa in the war had been ironic.

  As far as I can see their contribution has been confined to cowardice, complacency, inefficiency, illiteracy and thirst . . . Of course one is referring only to the Europeans. The Africans at least contribute grace.

  He was also still not sure that he was actively taking part in the war. The previous July he had admitted to envying Raymond’s sense of doing a useful job. Graham himself was beginning to suspect that he would be more valuable in a munitions factory, and was sure he would prefer ‘any factory town to this colonial slum’. In fact, Sierra Leone was crucially positioned, but Greene’s doubts about his own strategic importance were realistic. Later Kim Philby, then Greene’s boss and already (though not to Greene’s knowledge) a Russian counterspy, recalled Greene’s doubts about the relevance of his work in Freetown to the war against Hitler and was inclined to agree. Certainly, Montgomery’s success in North Africa had made West Africa less critical.

  When his father died in November 1942, Greene felt guilty about being away from England at the time when his mother needed him most. ‘I feel it was rather a selfish act taking on a job abroad at this time, and I ought to have been home,’ he wrote to her. Later, he recalled how, learning about his father’s death in two telegrams delivered in the wrong order (the first about his death, the second about his illness), he felt unexpected misery and remorse. He arranged for mass to be said for the dead man every day by an Irish priest in a West African church, although he thought that if his father knew he would regard the gesture with the same kindly amusement that he regarded the whole of Graham’s Catholicism. Greene paid for the mass by giving the priest a sack of rice to distribute amongst his poorer parishioners.

  In January 1943, hearing that L
ondon was being bombed again, Greene decided that it was time to come home. ‘I felt sick in the stomach when I heard the Germans had started on London again,’ he told his mother; ‘I feel I’d be of much more use back wardening. One feels out of it in this colony of escapists with their huge drinking parties and their complete unconsciousness of what war is like.’ He had been hoping that they might be bombed in Africa too, but the hope had faded. His desire to return was partly a wish to be of use, but it was primarily his usual longing to experience the war. Writing to Raymond after their father’s death, Graham admitted that the prospect of immediate peace would fill him with gloom. War had ‘not yet touched enough people of ours to alter the world’. Luckily, Kim Philby considered that Greene could be more usefully employed in London than in Freetown. He later recalled that ‘after the North African landings, SIS interest in West Africa waned, and we left MI5 in possession of the field’.

  Returning to London, Greene was delighted to be reunited with Dorothy Glover. He had missed her while in Africa, where he was uneasily jealous of his brother Hugh, who took Dorothy into his own bed in Graham’s absence. In the summer of 1942 Hugh wrote to Graham about an illustrated guide to the sights of London he was planning to write with Dorothy. ‘Doll wrote to me about the bawdy book she’s planning with you,’ Graham replied. Wistfully, he asked his brother for details about his lover – ‘I wish you’d told me how she was looking, whether she seemed well, could down her pint of Irish as readily, etc’ – and asked him to send her his love. Hugh tried to placate Graham by sending a girl of his own in his brother’s direction. Graham promised to look out for her but said that he did not ‘feel inclined really for a playmate’, adding that ‘life is quite complicated enough as it is, and I’m still in love!’ Normally he would be grateful for his brother’s ‘tasteful and reliable pimping’, but he had become terribly ‘one-idea’d’. In fact, being ‘one idea’d’ did not preclude him asking colleagues for directions to the nearest brothel or for help in procuring ‘French letters’ (one intelligence officer collected eleven condoms for Graham from passengers on the boat to Freetown). But emotionally, two women were enough. That October, writing to console his sister Elisabeth about her own relationship difficulties, he told her that

  things can be hell, I know. The peculiar form it’s taken with me the last four years has been in loving two people as equally as makes no difference, the awful struggle to have your cake and eat it, the inability to throw over one for the sake of the other.

  Vivien was now aware of the relationship with Dorothy but had hoped that the passion would have cooled during Graham’s extended absence. In fact, the affair was now flourishing and it was the marriage that was cooling. While Graham was in Africa, Vivien wrote to him declaring and demanding love but trying not to overwhelm him. ‘Won’t it be nice when we don’t have to look forward to weekends again but all live together,’ she wrote in March 1942, wondering if after so much time alone ‘family life is a bit claustrophobic’ and urging him to ‘think of the nice home made bread and the cubs thirsting for information’. That April she was disturbed by a letter from Graham in which he mentioned missing his wife’s intelligence. ‘I don’t altogether fancy that,’ she responded, informing him that she felt ‘suspicious and prick eared’, as she would rather be attractive than intelligent. A week later, she told him despondently that she was ‘so VERY tired of being on my own and having no companion and being basketless’, wondering if he missed his cat and thinking sadly that when he was in tropical latitudes a cat must sound rather hot and furry.

  Graham meant it when he told Vivien that he respected her intellectually. He relied on her to make literary decisions for him in his absence, instructing his agent to run past Vivien the final draft of the script for a projected play of Brighton Rock. Earlier in the war, he had taken Vivien’s advice in entitling his novel The Power and the Glory. But increasingly, Vivien was losing her hold over him, and his letters to his wife after his return were more apologetic than impassioned. In April 1943, arriving for the night at the King’s Arms during a visit to Oxford, Graham wrote to Vivien assuring her that, contrary to appearances, he loved her and wanted to make her happy. ‘You are the best, the most dear person I’ve ever known,’ he wrote; ‘Life is sometimes so beastly that one wishes one were dead, and I go to places like Mexico and Freetown in a half hope that everything will be finished,’ but each time he came back and asked her ‘to like me and go on liking me’. He had never wanted to be old, but with Vivien he could be old and happy. Indeed, sometimes he wished he could twist a ring and skip twenty years and be old with her, ‘with all this ragged business over’.

  The ragged business in question was sexual desire, and it was far from over. Throughout his life, Greene was pulled between the competing forces of pity and desire. He was unusually susceptible to pity. In The Heart of the Matter Scobie finds that it is when his wife is least attractive that he loves her most, and that at these times ‘pity and responsibility reached the intensity of a passion’. For Greene himself, pity incited the kind of love that made him write letters like this one to his wife. He could declare love with a certainty that he did not habitually feel because, like Scobie, he believed that ‘in human relations kindness and ties are worth a thousand truths’, and because at that moment, touched by the passion of pity, he genuinely believed in the force of his own desire to make Vivien happy.

  Ultimately, in The Heart of the Matter, pity is enough to motivate Scobie to kill himself in the hope that his death will leave his wife and mistress happier than he is able to make them by being alive. ‘One forgets the dead quickly; one doesn’t wonder about the dead – what is he doing now, who is he with?’ Graham ended the letter written in the King’s Arms by assuring Vivien that, although he had told a lot of lies in the last thirty-eight years, one thing was true: ‘I hate life and I hate myself and I love you.’ The self-hatred and the love were strong enough to make him declare the following month that life would have been better for Vivien if he had ‘been torpedoed or plane crashed because a novel sort of vitality would have been handed over to you after the first shock’. But unlike Scobie, Graham was not about to commit suicide for the sake of his wife. There was still the thrill of being alive when the glass broke in the morning and as pity for Vivien gave way to desire for Dorothy.

  Since his return to London, Greene had been working at the SIS headquarters in St Albans, where he was the second in command in the department responsible for overseeing the agents in neutral Portugal. After his boss Charles de Salis was moved to Lisbon in August, Greene took over as the head of the London desk. Here he was partially responsible for Malcolm Muggeridge, who was the SIS man in Mozambique and had been sent to Lisbon in 1942. Like Ireland, Portugal had been neutral since the start of the war. At this point it was a hub for both Allied and Axis intelligence. British and American agents used Lisbon as a departure point for Africa and the Germans went to Lisbon to collect information about Allied Atlantic convoys.

  In the early years of the war, Portuguese officials had tended to collaborate with the Axis powers, turning a blind eye to the clandestine German radio stations operating out of Lisbon. But by the time that Greene began working in London the Portuguese government was starting to recognise the need to collaborate with the Allies, given that they were looking increasingly likely to win the war. Under Greene’s leadership, SIS succeeded in convincing Portugal’s leader, Antonio de Oliviera Salazar, of the extent of Portuguese collaboration and persuaded him to close down the German radio stations and informer networks. The chief tasks for Greene’s staff were to gather enemy information and to disseminate false information back. Material came in from agents in Portugal and from the decodings of cryptographers. Since 1940 the British intelligence services had been breaking the codes produced by the German Enigma machine, one of their most secret systems of communications, gaining information which would prove extremely valuable in several areas of the war.

  Greene did not visit
Portugal during the war, but Malcolm Muggeridge had found on his 1942 visit that it seemed more like going to another world than simply going abroad: ‘Lisbon, with all its lights, seemed after two years of blackout like a celestial vision when we landed there by night.’ He wandered around the streets, marvelling at the shops and at the extensive menus in the restaurants, wondering if this was how the British would live again one day.

  This was the sight that met Rose Macaulay’s eyes in March 1943, when she embarked on the trip to Portugal that she had longed to make immediately after Gerald O’Donovan’s death. She had endured a miserable winter. She was consumed by all the desperate ‘aching want’ of Gerald that she had attributed to Kitty in What Not, but this time without the knowledge that he still existed elsewhere. She had now given up ambulance driving and, like other Londoners during the lull, was demoralised by the disjunction between her own comparative safety and the savagery of the war news coming in from Europe, North Africa and the Far East. Hearing about the battles and bombing taking place offstage, Macaulay oscillated between incomprehending indifference and visceral horror. James Lees-Milne, meeting Macaulay for the first time in January, noted in his diary that his first impression was of ‘a very thin, desiccated figure in a masculine tam-o-shanter, briskly entering the room’.

  Now Macaulay spent two months in Lisbon, relishing the vibrant colours and smells after the mutedness of wartime London, appreciating the freedom from war, and distracting herself from sadness with work. The result was a compendious account of travellers who had visited Portugal throughout the ages. Like many of Rose Macaulay’s non-fiction books, it was longer than anticipated – so much so that They Went to Portugal (1946) would eventually be followed, after her death, by the posthumously edited collection They Went to Portugal Too (1990). Looking back on her Portuguese labours, Macaulay told Hamilton Johnson that the book ‘entailed a good deal of hard work and research’; part of an attempt to ‘deaden’ her unhappiness.