Diary of a Wartime Affair

by Doreen Bates

  I was hardly aware of him till we were in the lift at Strand. He said, ‘Are you walking over the bridge?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t think so, it’s so windy,’ but he went on down Villiers St and I followed him as if I were dreaming. The Embankment Gardens looked pleasantly green and were full of people. We climbed the steps and passed through the dark gallery on the bridge, smelly and a little sinister. Looking on to the Embankment we saw the trams held up by the new traffic lights – arrested as if by magic to allow pedestrians to cross. We walked slowly over the bridge, out into the middle over the slow dark river. The setting sun still illuminated the south bank and half the bridge and touched the higher buildings leaving the water and the lower buildings to the north in deep shadow. The air was unusually clear and the sky quite cloudless. I saw the whole scene to the east as a unified picture, beautiful even in its ugly details – the lead shot chimney (which E explained to me), the waste paper works, the skeletons of the piers of old Waterloo Bridge, the sluggish dirty ripples on the mud, the ponderous clumsy masses of the buildings jumbled against the sky. They all fused without losing their individual characters into a vision of beauty in which the ugliness was not less a part than the loveliness of Wren’s spires and the dome of St Paul’s resting against the sky. It was an experience of unusual poignancy and intensity which left me quite dazed. To myself I expressed it in words and thoughts which were quite inadequate. I felt it was a flash of insight into our civilization – the conglomeration of efforts which is London, so sure and safe and calm and clear and yet doomed to destruction soon or late, to be survived by an effortless river which has flowed for aeons and will still flow when all London is desolate. I was left dazed, to struggle against a crying which I couldn’t control. I could only say to E (who with his usual discrimination left me in peace), ‘It seems like the end of the world.’

  Nothing I have written here is truer to me or more vivid or more real than this vision from Hungerford Bridge. Explanations have occurred to me: I had eaten nothing from 2 to 8.30 except coffee and biscuits; I had been reading Gerald Heard’s book Source of Civilization which is broadening to the mind; I had sublimated my personal feeling into aesthetic sensibility; I was just posing to impress E. I don’t know, but I don’t believe any of these. I do believe in the reality of the beauty I caught a glimpse of and I felt I must note it, preferably in poetry, but anyway here.

  SUNDAY 21 JUNE

  I reached Waterloo yesterday after an uncomfortable steamy squash in the tube for 10 mins. E got my ticket while I had a cup of China tea to fortify me against the heat. We found the train to Horsley. We bought some fruit and set off in the shade down the woody lane by the railway. We had lunch in a cleared patch by the path. We did not walk far, just past Horsley church up the path to the hills. E chose a beech tree with a massive round grey trunk splitting into fantastic coils of branches over our heads, shaded from the sun but stirred by a breeze, which was blowing in our faces at the beginning but in our backs when we left two and a quarter hours later to return to the station. We loved for a while, distracted by mosquitoes which left me with 6 bites requiring constant douches of ammonia.

  Afterwards we talked for long about pacifism and war. We disagree about this and I wanted to know why he thought England’s only possible course was to re-arm. He thinks death is preferable to Nazism dominating the world and out of the destruction might rise a better race, and tho’ it might, and probably would, have to re-tread much of the ground covered would ultimately make a better society. Life and human life would survive even another war, tho’ we shouldn’t. He said, tho’, that he had too much fear to make a good judgement. His opinion would be either too much dominated by fear or over-compensated intellectually against it. He waved a hand to the land we were passing, quite an ordinary view – the heavy green trees of full summer, a field vivid green with growing corn, a brown field beyond reduced by perspective, setting off the green – the whole slightly dimmed by a heat mist and yet clear in the yellow evening sunshine. ‘It looks good,’ he said. It is the feeling for that kind of thing which you can see from one end to the other of England that is at the bottom of everyone’s feeling for England. This passionate disinterested love of the land about which the talk under the beech had made him unusually articulate never fails to move me since I first met it in Shakespeare and My Magazine. He is discriminating and uncapricious but he is too afraid of sounding sentimental to express it often or at any length.

  FRIDAY 26 JUNE

  Lunched with E – not very satisfactory. He is going to a wedding tomorrow so I don’t see him till Monday. I have been reading Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza – Tues, Wed and Thurs and finished it in the bus this morning. Consequently it has been dominating my mind. I was struck again and again by the resemblance of E to Anthony Beavis, who was the main character – neither so bad nor so good, but still a near resemblance. It depressed me. I have no right or power to judge him for I know my feelings sway my judgement but I find myself doing it, calling his prudence weakness, and at the same time taking advantage of it. The truth of Huxley’s analyses of motives fascinates me and the necessity of analysis seems overwhelming, but I find it exceedingly difficult to dissect myself, let alone him.

  TUESDAY 30 JUNE

  We went to the National Gallery last night and to dinner at the Oak and talked about Huxley’s new book which he had read from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon. He thought it was good and we discussed it all through dinner. What would Huxley say to my wish that one of us – K or I – might die? I suppose I am just seeking my own pleasure and that is an aim unworthy of consideration and should be inhibited. So easy to say but so hard to do.

  WEDNESDAY 1 JULY

  Felt better. Lunch with Reen who told me about the Birmingham women’s meeting. Apparently at least 2 AIT women are living with their lovers rather than marry and lose their jobs. Moreover, one has had a baby – worked till a week before and then had 3 weeks’ ordinary leave. Reen said it was an epic!

  TUESDAY 21 JULY

  11.30 after a bath but I must just make a note of my happiness today. I lunched with E today and he said he wanted to write a poem last night and tried to for half an hour. He had the inspiration but lacked the technique and craftsmanship. It would have been about snowflakes. I scolded him for not persevering and he told me what it would have been about – Waterloo last Saturday – swirls of people coming and going and then a look of recognition which, like a ‘silent explosion’, lit up the universe, and the last line was, ‘I said, “You are one minute late.”’ So small a thing, and yet since he said it I have felt it as a glow of happiness warming me, suffusing other ordinary things with its radiance. I suppose I like to be flattered but I do so passionately want to please him, not entirely for the satisfaction of my own vanity but also to touch him – to reach him, to give him pleasure and value.

  MONDAY 27 JULY

  No rain today tho’ it is still cool. Lunched with E. He went straight to the point: K’s mother seems to be better enough to enable her to have a holiday on the 9th and so they will probably both go to Malvern – so much for our hopes of a week in August. Still, we may have a week in Sept on the Roman wall, and a midnight walk this weekend and a walk tomorrow evening. He was rather sweet – so full of plans, necessarily tentative, but I don’t mind. I told him I hoped I wasn’t grasping – he had called me grasping. He said he hadn’t meant it. I am not sure. I try not to be and to have patience. Sometimes I think our love is finer for being confined, as it were – controlled and limited by circumstances, like a good sonnet confined within its form. This may be true if only I can succeed in accepting the limitations and working within them. A bad sonnet is still bad but not so widely bad as bad free verse; but you can make some sort of free verse when you can’t even begin to fashion a sonnet. If I could make our love a Shakespearean sonnet – every line taut with significance, every word shining in its place like a jewel, sound sense and rhythm combining to make a whole of truth and beauty.

&n
bsp; WEDNESDAY 5 AUGUST

  I have worked hard and fairly well and interestedly today. This morning Hyde was away. DJ is away all the week. Mac was away with a cold so I had everything to do. I have missed seeing E. He went home on Friday and yesterday morning there was a note from him waiting for me. Somehow I was not surprised. He said his mother was dying. It was a short, incoherent note, wild with grief and horror and my heart bled for him. I could tell by the extravagance and effort how he was suffering. Then, in the afternoon, a wire from him – ‘All over – better than expected’ – a queer way to announce her death. I was relieved to hear because all the morning I could not shut out from my imagination the lingering pain and helplessness of her illness. Afterwards I managed to work quite connectedly.

  FRIDAY 7 AUGUST

  No letter from E. I felt about as cheerful as the dark grey sky but I didn’t give him up till 12.0. At 12.10 he phoned – his long low clear ‘Hullo’ with its faintly north country intonation made my heart jump. I lunched with him. He told me all about his mother and how the family had reacted and what he had felt. He was suffering from the reaction after the physical and emotional strain and was limp and edgy. It was good to see him. I would have given much to be able to comfort him and soothe him and give him all my vitality but I felt helpless and useless. Still, he said he was glad to have seen me so perhaps I did a little.

  SATURDAY 8 AUGUST

  I want to say some more about meeting E yesterday. When I got to Chancery Lane he was waiting, wearing a new mackintosh which somehow made him look pathetic and childish, and his green Vantella shirt and dark green tie. I saw reflected in his face the rush of feeling when he saw me. I chattered foolishly about nothing because I felt ill at ease, cut off from him by the experience he had suffered, which seemed like an emotional wall between us – impenetrable, palpable. When we sat down he began to demolish the wall. I asked very few questions. He gave me a detailed account of what had happened and how it had affected him. Quite simply, tho’ he had at times to make an effort to control his feeling, he let me see into his mind. I don’t know whether it was an effort or a relief to him. I only know that I felt complete at-one-ment with him again. It was an extraordinarily strong feeling. I remember that my mind was so concentrated on him and on ‘constructing’ his experience that once or twice I perceived with a small ghost of surprise the ABC where we were sitting and the roll I had been eating. I felt almost happy when we said goodbye. Perhaps it was the unconscious fear of finding him a stranger whom my best effort would not quite reach that made me feel so desolate before he spoke to me again.

  MONDAY 17 AUGUST

  The heat wave continues. I set off in brown and white frock, white sandals and white gloves. Lunched with E and thereafter spent the afternoon in a state of dismal stupor. It is all very well to count my blessings, which I know extend to everything of importance with the sole exception that I happen to love a man who is about as tied as he possibly could be and yet loves me. There is, as it were, a nice calculation in my misfortune worthy of a celestial Louis XIVth. Had he been better or worse, or had K been better or worse, more or less intelligent, or were I better or worse – more or less scrupulous – the situation is fixed in a delicate but unbreakable balance. My eyes are heavy with the tears I can’t shed. All this tirade being due to K’s misfortune in falling off a bicycle last Friday and dislocating her collar bone. She is helpless for at least six weeks and E has to look after her. He is even enjoying it – tasting the satisfaction of a perverted sort of maternal instinct. Miserere me.

  THURSDAY 20 AUGUST

  I have felt happiness since lunch in spite of having a headache, all because E after complaining of feeling queer said on the way back to the tube, ‘I feel better. It’s always good to see you even if you’re not sympathetic.’ It would be worse – immeasurably worse – if he ceased to love me. I feel it, as well as just know it intellectually. Yesterday I felt that nothing could be worse.

  MONDAY 24 AUGUST

  Lunched with E in an ABC whose atmosphere was like a laundry’s – steaming heat. I gave back to him Dorothy Cheston Bennett’s book on Arnold Bennett including some of his letters to her. She does not write well but the interest of the subject kept my attention fixed and the letters are well written and fascinating for the portrait they conjure up. It is an oddly attractive, boyish, vulnerable Bennett – surprisingly attractive. On the whole he makes a better impression than Dorothy’s. He must have been maddening with his meticulousness, but this seems to have really been a defence mechanism (I am reading Freud now). His cable to her after she had announced that she was to have a baby was delicious ‘very sorry … very glad …’ Many small unexpected points – he suffered from insomnia, he had financial worries, he couldn’t undertake an expedition without planning every point, he had surprising gaps in his knowledge of history and classics, he played regularly with Virginia (the daughter).

  But the real reason for my gusto is not the fine weather, or my new knitting, or any of the books I am reading, or the growing up-to-date-ness of my work but the hope, which will keep growing, like a genie let out of a bottle, however much I stamp on it, that (I will write small in the hope that Heaven will overlook it and not punish my assurance) we may, after all, have a week in Sept. Ha! Ha! Haah.

  THURSDAY 24 SEPTEMBER

  Over 4 weeks since I wrote anything here, not because nothing has happened which I wanted to remember but because too much has accumulated. On 5th Sept (Sat) I met E at Paddington and we went to Chirk. We traced Offa’s Dyke from 3 miles south of Wrexham to 4 miles south of Knighton, about 87 miles.

  FRIDAY 25 SEPTEMBER

  We finished assessing yesterday, so today was an opportunity to pick up loose ends, such as getting instruction books up to date. E was due back at Finsbury. At 11.45 I was just wondering whether I would not go to Chancery Lane if he did not ring up when the phone went, and he asked me if I was going to the concert. My heart just jumped with surprise and pleasant anticipation. I felt quite affectionate to the telephone afterwards – it looked so kindly in its shiny black. We lunched and talked hard. He had the Offa’s Dyke photographs and the Jones book on the Welsh Marches. We met again at 6.10 and had a leisurely dinner at Flemings (too big), bickered and chattered and then went to the Prom. It was steamy. Overture to Fidelio, a fat soprano in some Weber, then the Concerto with Szigeti which was what we had come for. Beautiful! The better one knows it the lovelier it is. It is surprising how differently it affects one. I liked the first movement best tonight. The violin is lovely even where it seems just for effect and the orchestra re-enters so quietly yet inevitably dragging the music back to earth.

  It was sweet to see him again and he still likes me too. He would wonder, probably, at my writing that – he would repeat that he knows his love will last. But I still have a little shock of happy surprise when I find that he is pleased to see me again. It still seems like a dream from which I may awaken one day, that just me, my mind and body, just as they are, should have aroused his love.

  THURSDAY 1 OCTOBER

  Last night we had dinner at Slaters and went to the Bach Prom. On the whole I enjoyed the concert better than last Friday, perhaps because it was cooler. The 6th Brandenburg and two violin concerto and the Suite were the loveliest things. It is perhaps nicest to go with him to a concert. He is less critical or the standard is higher – I can’t judge which. I can enjoy it therefore unreservedly. He ‘specializes’ in the bassoon and jerks me into noticing it. A good evening, too soon over.

  FRIDAY 9 OCTOBER

  At lunchtime I went to Lyons for a hasty meal and then set off down Bond St with my cheque book in my bag. Having reached Asprey’s I found St Christopher in the corner. I walked in almost unconsciously and asked the price – £4/17/6d. Bought it, wrote a cheque and came out with the elegant purple box. A new experience – probably unique – to shop in Bond Street. It is a lovely thing and I knew Rosa would appreciate it. Having definitely rejected the Hellenic cruise next April i
t is not an extravagance. It was good value in itself and even more for the pleasure of seeing her open it and exclaim.

  MONDAY 12 OCTOBER

  Still cold but this evening it was definitely milder. The Sunday Times yesterday said it was the coldest first 10 days of October for 24 years. The weather makes such a difference to me. I am hypersensitive to it compared with other people, like the tactile sense of the person with a temperature. I always look at the forecast before anything else in a paper and read every word of the Sunday Times weekly review of the weather!

  I began my Budget letter this morning because I was so straight! This unusual state did not last long and I ended with an account (Isobel Ltd) unworked. Went to a meeting at 29 Marsham Street. The women inspectors had been invited to meet the committee of the Women Civil Servants Association. They were to give us tea and arranged to meet us at the door. I knew Reen had accepted and also Miss Plunkett, but I was the only person to turn up. It was a little wearing since I know next to nothing of Assocn politics and could hardly begin to answer their questions, nor could I tell them how we regarded them. It was quite informal and they were all most friendly.

  TUESDAY 20 OCTOBER