The Love-Charm of Bombs (27 page)

However, he did not quite leave wartime London behind. It was in Africa, missing the excitement of the Blitz, that Greene began work on the novel that would become
The Ministry of Fear
. On the journey there he had read a detective story by Michael Innes which inspired him to attempt his own detective fiction. Lying awake at night in the bunk in his ship, half hoping that a warning siren would herald a return to England, he decided to write a thriller, wanting it to be both fantastic and funny. The resulting novel is a faithful portrait of London in the Blitz. There are untidy gaps between the Bloomsbury houses, and fireplaces are left halfway up walls where the rest of the room has been blasted away. A summer fete on a Sunday afternoon is accompanied by the sound of broken glass being cleared as workers sweep up the debris from the previous night's bombing.

Wartime London was more enticing imagined in Africa than experienced in actuality. For Charles Ritchie, the winter of 1941 came as an anticlimax. ‘After being the centre of the world's stage London has become unexciting,' he observed in his diary. ‘We are not as heroic, desperate and gay as we were last winter. London seems drab. The tension is removed – the anxiety remains.' He was still in awe of Elizabeth. ‘I should hate to lose her friendship,' he reflected on 21 December. ‘It would be shattering to quarrel with her. I have so much more respect for her than I have for myself.' But it was becoming clear that her love went deeper than his, and neither of them was happy with this. On 11 January 1942, Japan declared war on Holland and Elizabeth brought Charles a cyclamen. ‘E is sad,' he reported, ‘because she loves me more than I love her. It is sad for me too in another way.' He was all the more troubled to recognise an unconditionality in her love. ‘She sees through me more and more and still loves me, which is a most painful situation for me.' As Elizabeth's love deepened, Charles wished that she could make it less obvious. ‘A little indifference goes such a long way with me – indeed my system requires it, like the need for salt'; ‘it is better for me to love more than I am loved.'

In her letters to her lover, Elizabeth always insisted that Charles was a better man than he himself was prepared to admit. But she was aware, too, that he was habitually unfaithful to her; aware that those years of promiscuous love-making had deadened his feelings. ‘I told her the other evening that I was a crook,' he recorded in his diary in April 1942, ‘which was a guarded way of saying that I had been and would continue to be unfaithful to her.' Two weeks later he described a ‘desolating' evening with Elizabeth, where he attempted to convey that he did not love her, only to take her ‘sadly to bed', which was a ‘fiasco'.

For her part, Elizabeth retained her faith in the relationship. In ‘Summer Night', the tale of disappointed love which Elizabeth had written before she met Charles, the heroine wonders if her lover has broken her heart and knows only that he has ‘broken her fairytale'. Elizabeth kept her own fairy tale intact because she was unassailable in both loving and dreaming; confident in believing in the myth of their love. And it is fairy tales and dreams that Charles continually associated with Elizabeth. ‘She holds me by the imagination,' he observed in September 1941. ‘My daylight feelings, solid affections and passions are on another plane.' ‘One of the luxuries of this love affair,' he wrote after a day trip to Kew in May 1942, ‘is the giddy feeling of being carried along on the tide of her imagination.' ‘I am in love with E imaginatively,' he wrote the next day, ‘she even has a strange beauty like a woman in a tapestry.' ‘Of what is her magic made?' he wondered the following week. ‘What is the spell she has cast over me?' Walking, once again, in Regent's Park, sitting on the bank by the canal watching the swans pass by, he was both fascinated and disturbed by her flashes of insight, like summer lightning. Charles was discovering ‘more and more of her generous nature, her wit and funniness, the stammering flow of her enthralling talk, the idiosyncrasies, vagaries of her temperament'. Bewitched, he observed with fateful prescience that ‘this attachment is nothing transient but will bind me as long as I live'.

 

 

In the spring of 1942 Rose Macaulay was acutely aware of the binding strength of love as she waited for her lover to die. That February Gerald O'Donovan was admitted to King's College Hospital where he was informed that his colorectal cancer was an inoperable malignant growth. The doctors decided to operate as a palliative to prevent future pain and told Rose that he was unlikely to get through the operation. In fact he survived, but the growth turned out to be more widespread than they had expected. His life expectancy was shortened from eighteen months to considerably less. Gerald had known that he was unlikely to survive the operation, but did not know that it was not a cure. ‘It's not too easy talking on that basis,' Rose told her cousin Jean on 25 February. She was finding it hard to concentrate on anything else.

 

It gives one a queer dazed feeling – a sudden precipice yawning across a road that has run for nearly 25 years. First Margaret, then he. No doubt life must be thus, when one reaches my age. Perhaps, for him (as for her) it may be better to slip out before worse befall us all.

 

Here, for the first time, she acknowledged Gerald's letters as the source of much of her anguish at the bombing of her flat the previous May. ‘I find it is minor things that stab deepest,' she wrote; ‘the destruction of all his letters at Luxborough, for instance. Why didn't I move them in time?'

Over the next few months Rose Macaulay wrote a short story called ‘Miss Anstruther's Letters' in which she made the role of the letters in her grief explicit. Commissioned by Storm Jameson, the story was published only in America, offering Macaulay the chance to publish with relative anonymity as she could assume that none of her London acquaintances would come across it. This is one of the most haunting and personal pieces that Macaulay ever wrote and is the only fiction that she published in the ten years between
And No Man's Wit
and
The World My Wilderness
.

‘Miss Anstruther's Letters' is an elegy for Rose's burned possessions and an anticipatory elegy for Gerald. It is an account of a woman whose life is ‘cut in two' when her flat is bombed, leaving her as ‘a ghost, without attachments or habitation'. Unlike Rose herself, Miss Anstruther is present during the bombing, and has a chance to save some of her possessions. Confused and rushed, she rescues her typewriter and portable wireless. It is only after a gas main has burst, feeding the fire, that she remembers her lover's letters, and by now it is too late. With ‘hell blazing and crashing all around her', she sits down helplessly in the road, ‘sick and shaking, wholly bereft'. Her lover, unlike Gerald, died a year earlier; she has not yet had the courage to reread his letters. Only fragments of phrases remain in her memory: ‘Light of my eyes'; ‘the sun flickering through the beeches on your hair'.

Like Rose, Miss Anstruther spends the succeeding days combing her ruins for relics of her past. She finds only a fragment of a letter, written during a quarrel: ‘leave it at that. I know now that you don't care twopence; if you did you would . . .' Twenty years ago, Miss Anstruther refused to commit to her lover; this was his remonstrance. ‘She had failed in caring once, twenty years ago, and failed again now, and the twenty years between were a drift of grey ashes that once were fire, and she a drifting ghost too.'

Macaulay's story is painful in its candid portrayal of loss. Gerald had inscribed a new copy of
The Holy Tree
for her, but most of the mementoes she had of the relationship had been destroyed in the bombing of her flat. It is only in ‘Miss Anstruther's Letters' that the letters become central to her sorrow at the destruction of her possessions, and that the scale of this sorrow is explained. The public mourning for her books had enabled Rose to express her private grief at the death she now felt to be imminent. It was Gerald whom she could not face life without; Gerald whose impending death made Rose wish that she had been killed too. By writing ‘Miss Anstruther's Letters', Rose Macaulay created one final relic of Gerald O'Donovan which, once published, could not be destroyed by bombs. At the same time, she assured Gerald that his death would not lessen her love. Like Miss Anstruther, she too would be left as a mere ghost of her former self.

In June Macaulay wrote an article about the war that blended anger with despair. Powerless in preventing Gerald's death or in preventing the bloodshed of war, she railed against the rhetoric of politicians. ‘Is there anything to be said,' she asked, ‘for the smug, pompous and tedious clichés which most of our public speakers drop about like worn coins whenever they speak? There are some phrases whose reiteration becomes nauseating: among them are “the freedom-loving nations”, “the common peoples of Britain” . . . “retribution”.' These phrases could not be uttered except in a smug voice and she wished that a concerted effort could be made to rid public speaking of platitude and sentimentality and allow it to resemble intelligent conversation. More angrily, Macaulay complained that they were being told again, as in the last war, that their enemies (and in particular the Italians) ‘don't like cold steel'. ‘Does any one,' she asked dismissively, ‘like steel, either cold or hot, when it is plunged into them without (or even with) anaesthetics? This kind of exultant taunt seems to add an edge of barbarity to the accounts of the assaults of painful weapons of war on agonised human flesh and blood.'

On 26 July 1942 Gerald O'Donovan died. Rose had spent the previous day with him, managing to communicate with him although he was only semi-conscious. He became unconscious after she left and died the next morning. In a letter to Rosamond Lehmann, Rose tried, as always, to be buoyant, grateful that ‘he didn't linger on in pain'. She was comparing him with her sister Margaret, whose final weeks of agony she had found hard to bear. ‘Isn't it odd,' she asked Rosamond helplessly, ‘with all this dying, so inevitable, we haven't yet learned to accept it. We are unadaptable about that. It still comes as a shock. It's all this loving we do. Worthwhile, but it doesn't fit us for losing each other.' She felt empty and dead and without purpose, and longed, as she had after her flat was bombed, to escape, perhaps to neutral Portugal, hoping that a change of scene would help her begin again. This is the new beginning Rose had found impossible to contemplate after the bombing of her flat. Once the death she had dreaded for so long had come at last, she began to see starting again as a possibility. ‘He was the dearest companion, you know,' she added, looking back. ‘And had such a fine, brilliant mind . . . Well, it's over if things are ever over.'

Rose was doubly bereft and exiled by Gerald's death. She was left without her partner and lover of twenty years, and she was denied the opportunity to grieve. Only a handful of close friends could know the scale of her loss, and very few of these had any intimate knowledge of Gerald himself. Two weeks later, Rose wrote an anonymous obituary for Gerald in
The Times
. Signed by ‘a friend', it was painfully detached and impersonal. She described his ‘in parts brilliant' novels and his ‘wide and versatile interests', listing his successive careers as sub-warden of Toynbee Hall, publisher, and head of the Italian section at the Ministry of Information. She let a note of affection intrude when she mentioned his recent work assisting Czech refugees, adding that ‘his sympathetic understanding of their problems was a characteristic example of the generous help he always gave to those in need'. She ended with a restrained but personal tribute to the man she loved: ‘As a friend he never failed; his wise judgment and unstinting interest were always on tap behind his reserve and behind the sometimes sardonic wit that was his Irish heritage. To know him was to love him.'

It is in her subsequent novels that Rose Macaulay's more effusive tributes are found. It is also in her fiction that she allowed the full force of her grief to surface. Rose did not write novels for some time after Gerald's death. Looking back on the period in a 1951 letter to her spiritual mentor and friend, a priest called Hamilton Johnson, she wrote that she was too unhappy to write fiction: ‘I always talked over my novels with my companion, who stimulated my invention; when he died my mind seemed to go blank and dead.' When she did return to novel-writing, her grief for Gerald remained central to her work. In Macaulay's 1950 novel
The World My Wilderness
,
Helen, a middle-aged English woman who lives in post-war France, mourns the death of her second husband, who was killed by the Resistance during the war: ‘Her want of Maurice grew no less; it hungered in her night and day, engulfing her senses and her reason in an aching void.' Six years later in Macaulay's final novel,
The Towers of Trebizond
, Laurie is shattered by the death of her married lover Vere: ‘And now the joy was killed, and there seemed no reason why my life too should not run down and stop now that its mainspring was broken.' For a companionship like theirs to end is ‘to lose a limb, or the faculty of sight; one is, quite simply, cut off from life and scattered adrift, lacking the coherence and the integration of love'. Life will, she supposes, proceed, ‘but the sentient, enjoying principle which had kept it all ticking, had been destroyed'.

Earlier in the novel, Laurie recalls an occasion when she and Vere fantasised about the life they might have shared. On holiday, wrapped in the bliss of togetherness, understanding each other, laughing at each other's jokes, allowing love to be their fortress and their peace, they wonder ‘how long we should live in this doped oblivion if we had been married'. Laurie supposes, sensibly, that ‘the every-day life which married people live together after a time blunts romance'. But neither she nor Vere thinks they should mind that, if they had all the other things to do together, and could plan their holidays and argue about the maps and the routes. She imagines that they would be very fair about equal turns of driving. They would like their children. And, crucially, ‘marriage would still be our fortress and our peace, just as love was now when we could be together but could be a sadness and a torment when apart'.