The Love-Charm of Bombs (32 page)

In
The Fruits of Prosperity
Milan, having fathered a second child with Stephanie, tries to persuade her to leave the lax morals and sullied air of the city and to move back with him to rural Croatia. Stephanie knows that it would be the right thing to do. Despite their new-found happiness, they are becoming corrupted by the city. At masked dances they flirt dangerously with other partners; after one such dance their sleep is filled with visions of enticing danger and iniquitous love. In the countryside, Milan would be happier, the children would be healthier, and even Stephanie's mother would be more contented. But what joy would there be? She likes going to balls, to opera houses, to dances where handsome men take her in their arms. She likes sitting in front of the mirror preparing for a glamorous evening, placing a flower in her hair. They decide to compromise, and live in a garden suburb of Vienna not unlike Wimbledon. Stephanie is happy but she wonders if she has betrayed something important to her, which had been the goal and true purpose of her life. Meanwhile Milan is fearful; he worries that his happiness rests on too fragile a basis. And their anxieties prove prescient. They go to a crowded concert where a fire breaks out. The smoke causes Stephanie to faint, but Milan manages to revive her by carrying her onto the balcony. He urges her to jump; she is too frightened; they make their way to the stairs, where they end up suffocating. As Milan dies he dreams of the clear streams and lakes of Croatia. The novel ends with a vision of Milan engulfed in his native river.

Stephanie has to decide between the health of her children and her own mental survival. In the end it is clear that she should have agreed to move to Croatia. The Manichean fire that ends their lives is symbolic of excess; of a city doomed to consume itself in fire. But Hilde Spiel, writing the novel from the fresh air and boredom of Wimbledon and Cambridge, was not wholly convinced. She, like Stephanie, longed to sit in front of a mirror and put a flower in her hair; she longed for attention, for glamour and for emotional intensity. Surely it was time to allow a little bit of the excitement they had lost to seep back into their new life in England.

 

 

In February 1943 Henry Yorke went with his new lover Mary Keene to stay with the painter Matthew Smith at Stratford St Mary in Suffolk, where Matthew had rented a house called Weavers. Writing to thank Matthew at the end of the month, Henry said that he had gone home ‘refreshed (not quite as a lion, those halcyon days are past, or is it an eagle, but rather as a donkey that has been allowed to drop its burden) back home to the endless round of war, scrubbing floors one moment and directing the production of cordite plants the next'.

He was refreshed by the countryside, by the break from both office and fire station, by the escape from upper-class life into bohemia, by Matthew, whose work he would increasingly admire, and, most of all, by Mary. ‘To Mary To Mary To Mary' Henry wrote in a copy of
Party Going
which he had inscribed to her at the end of January. Mary was twenty-one years old, at once impetuous, confident and vulnerable, with enormous grey eyes, creamy skin, long blonde hair and a metal lower leg. She was branded by the poet Ruthven Todd as ‘the most beautiful English girl I ever saw' and later claimed to be commonly known as one of the two most beautiful women in London. In 1939, aged seventeen, she had embarked on an affair with Louis MacNeice, who a few years later described her in his poem ‘The Kingdom':

 

Too large in feature for a world of cuties,

Too sculptured for a cocktail lounge flirtation,

This girl is almost awkward, carrying off

The lintel of convention on her shoulders,

A Doric river-goddess with a pitcher

Of ice-cold wild emotions. Pour them where she will

The pitcher will not empty . . .

. . . Vitality and fear

Are marbled in her eyes, from hour to hour

She changes like the sky – one moment is so gay

That all her words are laughter but the next

Moment she is puzzled, her own Sphinx,

Made granite by her destiny . . .

 

Mary Keene,
c
. 1943

 

Bewitched, MacNeice wrote to Mary during the affair that ‘in the centre of the most haunting chaos . . . it is still possible to think of you, the star, in the heart of the whirling nebulae. I do.' Now, just when he had begun to be engulfed by the dreariness of the war, it was Henry Yorke's turn to think of her, and he did too, as he began the novel that would be called
Loving
.

Set in an Anglo-Irish Big House in wartime neutral Ireland,
Loving
tells the story of the day-to-day life of a group of servants and their employers, working, dancing, stealing, worrying and, of course, loving. Although the war presses in on the house, with the servants wondering if they should go back to England and enlist, the Irish setting allowed Yorke and his characters to escape to the same heady fairy-tale world that had greeted Bowen when she arrived in Ireland the previous summer. Yorke later said that he was given the idea for the book by a manservant in the fire service who told him that he had once asked an elderly butler what he liked most in the world. For Yorke the reply evoked a whole setting. ‘Lying in bed on a summer morning, with the window open, listening to the church bells, eating buttered toast with cunty fingers.' The anecdote captures the tone of the novel, which is both carelessly sexual and extravagantly sensuous. Written in a spare prose style that can whirl lyrically into passages of thick, languorous beauty, it is certainly the most loving of Yorke's novels, and at the heart of it is Edith, a young English serving-girl with creamy skin and huge eyes. Edith is universally adored: by the butler, Charlie Raunce, whom she eventually marries; by his young assistant, Albert, who gazes at her from a love-struck distance; by the children of the house, who will do anything for her; by Kate, her friend and fellow-servant, who at one stage undresses her and massages her back; and most of all by the narrator himself, who follows her around with the same amazed infatuation as his characters.

At the opening of the book Edith sticks a peacock feather ‘above her lovely head'; a few pages later Raunce appraises ‘the dark eyes she sported which were warm and yet caught the light like plums dipped in cold water'. Naked to the waist in the bedroom she shares with Kate, Edith's skin shines ‘like the flower of white lilac under leaves'. When she opens the window and gazes out into the morning, the soft bright light strikes her ‘dazzled dazzling eyes'.

Watching Edith watching the fire, Raunce is mesmerised as ‘her great eyes become invested with rose incandescence that was soft and soft and soft'. ‘I never seen anything like your eyes they're so 'uge not in all my experience' he says later, falling for her, gradually and then more precipitously, as the novel progresses. Early on, Edith and Kate are cleaning the house's old ballroom when they decide to turn on the gramophone and dance, ‘wheeling wheeling in each other's arms' around the mirrored room. Raunce comes in and sees ‘two girls, minute in purple, dancing multiplied to eternity in these trembling pears of glass'. He tells them off but is unable to take his eyes off Edith; from this point he becomes more and more enraptured. ‘I could fall for you in a big way,' he finally says, adding as he sees her back stiffen with attention, ‘for the matter of that I have.' ‘I didn't realise I could love anyone the way I love you,' he declares once they have begun to talk of marriage. ‘I thought I'd lived too long.'

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.