The Love-Charm of Bombs (15 page)

This seems to have been the day-to-day reality of the Yorkes' marriage. From the start, Henry had affairs, and even resumed the sexual relationship with Dig's sister. Dig was prepared to ignore these for the sake of propriety. She had been brought up as an upper-class hostess in a family where emotions were rarely discussed or prioritised and were secondary always to manners. ‘It seems so
gauche
,' Dig announced in 1939 when told that anti-aircraft gunners seemed unable to hit their targets. As a result the Yorkes were better equipped to stay together in the long term than the Greenes. It was easier to have mental and physical privacy in a large house with servants than in a rural cottage, and Dig was well prepared for a marriage in which her position as a wife was more important than the continual and complete adoration of her husband.

According to the daughter of one of Henry's mistresses, Dig pretended that any unpleasant events were not actually occurring and concealed any negative emotion behind a manner of ‘the most brilliant feyness'. For his part, Henry treated Dig with a respect that Graham Greene was increasingly failing to show to Vivien. It was clear to all but the most innocent of his mistresses that Henry had no intention of leaving Dig, and when Dig was with Henry in London the Yorkes entertained as a unit, inviting Henry's mistresses to the house as guests. This did not, however, prevent Henry from falling in love, sensuously, passionately and self-indulgently. And in wartime, there was no shortage of girls ready to die, night after night, in those arms that would soon perhaps be dead.

At the beginning of the Blitz, Henry Yorke was in the midst of an intense and sexually charged friendship with Rosamond Lehmann. Lehmann was a successful novelist herself and was a radiant presence on the London literary scene. Stephen Spender later described her as one of the most beautiful women of her generation: ‘tall, and holding herself with a sense of her presence, her warmth and vitality prevented her from seeming coldly statuesque'. Rosamond had been married to Wogan Philipps since 1928, and for the last four years had been involved in a fervent and painful love affair with Yorke's friend, the caddish and charming writer and academic Goronwy Rees. The affair had begun during a weekend with Elizabeth Bowen at Bowen's Court in Ireland, when Goronwy was ostensibly in love with Elizabeth herself. Elizabeth was deeply hurt by the behaviour of both guests, complaining to her friend the philosopher Isaiah Berlin that Goronwy had visited Rosamond's bedroom in the night and upset Elizabeth's innocent niece, who was forced to listen through the thin partition wall.

 

Rosamond Lehmann,
c
. 1943

 

Goronwy was generally believed to be fairly heartless. The poet Louis MacNeice once complained that Goronwy's famous charm ‘takes an ell if you give it a millimetre', stating that he ‘would have made a wonderful travelling salesman'. But, at least at the start, Goronwy seems to have been as infatuated with Rosamond as she was with him, and it was through Goronwy that Rosamond met Henry Yorke, whom Goronwy brought to stay with her in 1937. Now that her affair with Goronwy was losing momentum on his part if not on hers, Rosamond was finding consolation in this new friendship. She and Henry met frequently for evenings in London in 1939 and 1940, with Henry concealing the meetings from his wife. On 11 September 1940, a few days into the Blitz, Henry wrote to Rosamond that he looked on their two days spent together before the bombing began as ‘a goal to get back to again if chance allows because it was the best of life'. ‘Yes, it
was
the core of life,' Rosamond wrote in reply; ‘I'm so glad we had it.'

It is unclear whether this was actually a sexual relationship. Rosamond later claimed that she had never gone to bed with Henry, though she had a tendency subsequently to deny sexual encounters, also claiming that nothing had happened with Goronwy Rees at Bowen's Court. Either way, she was ultimately preoccupied with Goronwy throughout this period, and neither she nor Henry seems to have had any intention of falling in love. Rosamond told Henry gratefully at this time that he was ‘one of the few disinterested affection-givers (I don't know how to put it!) that I know'. For his part, Henry was more able to surrender himself in love affairs with younger women, perhaps because they were more easily impressed by the roles he assumed. He and Rosamond drifted apart in the autumn of 1940 and the following January he admitted to her that he had been avoiding her in the autumn because ‘war is entirely unnatural and I can't see anything but pain in meeting people one cares for'. Instead he had been busy writing ‘like a beaver' and seeing new friends, ‘most of them very young'.

There were two very young women on the scene during the autumn of 1940: Ann Glass and Rosemary Clifford. Henry's affair with Rosemary Clifford began in the summer of 1940, when she seems to have been engaged in war work that brought her to the Davies Street fire station. That August she was working in Whitehall, missing their proximity – ‘it's like swimming in a stagnant pond when you've been used to the sea' she wrote on 25 August – but dreaming happily about Henry in his absence. She had just tried to imagine him by climbing onto the roof in Park Street behind Park Lane, where she thought she could smell his hair on the wind. ‘Have I told you I miss you?' she asked him, ‘because I do – which is a nuisance. If we should meet again – I'm dark and rather grubby.'

Meanwhile Henry had begun his pursuit of Ann Glass, whom he had first come across at the beginning of the war as a teenage debutante and recently met again. ‘You are now old enough for me to ask you out,' he informed her, and out they went, to one bar, restaurant and nightclub after another. A few months into the affair Ann looked back on a typical evening together, wishing they were ‘back in the Lansdowne or the Conga or a sort of heavenly mixture of both, suspended above time in a golden dream of swing and brandy and enchanted conversation'. Ann was working for MI5 by day and that autumn her parents had taken a room for her at the Dorchester Hotel, where Henry visited her. Ann and Rosemary were probably not the only girls Henry was ‘dying with' at this time. In
Pack My Bag
he characterised himself as someone who had always enjoyed first experiences too much, adding that this applied to people as well.

 

How wonderful they seem the first few times, how clever, how beautiful, how right; how nice one seems to them because so interested, how well it all goes and then how dull it becomes and flat.

 

Having affairs with several girls at once was one way to assuage the flatness.

Ann and Rosemary themselves were both aware of each other's presence in Henry's affections and, too young and too impetuous to have mastered Dig's insouciance, they were periodically jealous. ‘Darling, This is very tiresome having to write because I can't put it beautifully like Miss Glass,' Rosemary declared, thanking Henry for her copy of
Pack My Bag
in November; ‘but you know if I tried to tell you I should have to put my head in a pillow and become embarrassed.' ‘Would you like to know how you look when you're asleep?' she asked, by way of summoning him back to bed; ‘your face loses all its creases and becomes very serene.'

The atmosphere of these affairs finds its way into Yorke's novel
Caught
, where the sheaved heads of pretty young girls collapse on the blue shoulders of pilots, drowsy with drink and sex, ‘gorged with love, sleep lovewalking'. When the servicemen depart to fight overseas, the firemen inherit the girls they leave behind ‘hunting for more farewells', seeking another man with whom they can spend their last hours, to whom they can murmur ‘darling, darling, darling it will be you always', the ‘I-have-given-all-before-we-die, their dying breath'.

Richard falls sensuously and easily for Hilly, a driver at his fire station, enticed by ‘the bloom, as he said to himself, of a thousand moist evenings in August on her soft skin and, on the inner side of her lips, where the rouge had worn off, opened figs wet on a wall'. He takes her to a half-dark nightclub filled with the ‘naked, fat round shoulders' of chalk-white girls, where jazz singers croon of the foreign land of the south which becomes ‘everyone's longing in this soft evening aching room'. When the lights go out, ‘to have what little he that minute had', he kisses her on the mouth and is answered by the feel of ‘opened figs, wet at dead of night in a hothouse'. ‘Oh darling,' he says, ‘low and false', ‘the months I've waited to do that.' He strokes the inside of her right arm, his lips still wet from hers, caught up in ‘this forced communion, this hyacinthine, grape dark fellowship of longing'. Hilly herself opens up, enfolding his fingers in her hand, her eyes filling with tears as she settles down ‘not, as she told herself, for long, to love Dickie'.

From this point, Richard and Hilly go to bed together on his days of leave. As their bodies meet, Richard experiences relief that is ‘like the crack, on a snow silent day, of a branch that breaks to fall under a weight of snow' as his hands move ‘like two owls in daylight over the hills, moors and wooded valleys, over the fat white winter of her body'. In bed, in love, he experiences what he has previously found only when drunk and comes to want nothing more.

 

The small warm movements of her were promises she made, and which she was about to fulfil. He had no further questions. He had the certainty of her body in his arms. He grew hot.

 

Writing to his publisher John Lehmann, Henry Yorke referred dismissively to this as Richard's ‘silly thing with Hilly'. But it is misleading to see this affair, any more than Henry's own, as merely a frivolous distraction from the real business of firefighting, parenting and writing. Some of the most evocative and beautiful descriptive language in
Caught
goes into these accounts of Richard and Hilly. Both Richard and Henry himself were self-indulgent and sentimental in their love affairs, and both were under no illusions about their own commitment to these women. However there is still a seriousness to the sensuality; a sense that it is at these moments, playing the role of the maudlin hero, that they are most vitally alive.

During this period Henry was seeing very little of his wife and son. In the phoney war he had been able sometimes to work four days and nights at a stretch and then to take forty-eight hours off, which gave him time to go back to the country to visit them. He was now too busy to be allowed to do this. Dig seems to have remained cheerful, or at least less needily lonely than Vivien Greene, in his absence. But Henry did not make the situation easier for her by sending her letters imploring ‘DON'T COME UP TO LONDON' or playing a practical joke involving telephoning her to say that he was in a burning building and unlikely to emerge alive.

Yorke
describes the predicament of wartime wives in
Caught
, where
the men who take girls out to nightclubs have come back to London from the countryside earlier in the day, leaving their wives dragging along the station platform, ‘hanging limp to door handles' from which they are snatched off by porters. In the published version of the novel, Richard's wife is dead, and his son Christopher is looked after by Richard's sister-in-law, Dy. However, this was a response to anxiety from the Hogarth Press, who thought that the censors would object to a fireman being portrayed as engaged in an adulterous affair. Initially Dy was the wife rather than the sister-in-law, and was evacuated rather than dead. This made the original version of the story in part a tribute to Dig, offering an assurance that Henry's love was unaltered, in spite of his adultery.

In the original typescript Richard, though still self-indulgently in love with Hilly, comes to miss his wife with equivalent sentimentality. Indeed, her absence leads to ‘a new year's turn of love' on his part, as well as a first love for his son. On leave, visiting Dy in the countryside, Richard is overcome by sensuous longing. ‘Now that he was back in this life only for a few days, he could not keep his hands off her'; the touch of her magnolia skin is a promise ‘of the love they had one for the other, and of the love they would yet hold one another in'.

 

He could not leave her alone, stroked her wrists, pinched, kissed her eyes, nibbled her lips while, as for her, she smiled, joked, and took him to bed at all hours of the day with her, and lay all night murmuring to him.