The Love-Charm of Bombs (48 page)

Despite her delight in Vienna as a city, Hilde had very little patience with the Viennese people. She found them more relaxed-looking than the people she had seen in Frankfurt. ‘Quite definitely not the same fury and darkness,' she told Peter, assuring him that she had a completely open mind and was ‘not balanced towards the Austrians rationally, only emotionally'. The Austrians, she wrote, simply could not take things so seriously and suffer so utterly from them as the Germans. She had seen smiles from the start, even in the most badly bombed areas. But because Austria had been categorised as a victim of Hitler's aggression, denazification had been less stringent than in Germany and the Austrians were now less guilt-ridden than the Germans. Hilde thought they were too self-satisfied and not apologetic enough, and she began to suspect that most of the people she saw in the streets were fascists. In her later account of Vienna she described how all the jackbooted women wandering through the city seemed to resemble concentration camp guards. ‘Hungry looks in defiant or lifeless faces. Derisive or obsequious smiles on facing an Allied uniform.' Now, Hilde denounced the opportunism of the Viennese in her
New Statesman
article. They were ‘as rude to each other and as rancorous to the Russians as they are sugary to the Western troops'. Their own language had become coarser, resembling a rural dialect. Their urbane graces had gone.

‘Everything is lovable here but the attitude of the Viennese,' she wrote to Peter on 7 February, less tolerant than in her initial letters. The people were

 

either Nazis (whose sting has been completely removed) or charmingly insane Volkspartei, or prosy, bourgeois Sozialdemokraten, or doctrinaire Communists, or charming, but insane Communists . . . They are either corrupt or fatigued or politically stupid or fanatical, but they've got one relieving factor, their great interest in the arts.

 

She was convinced that the only hope for the Austrians was to immerse themselves in the arts, making the most of their exquisite taste and artistic sensitivity. If they could learn to behave discreetly and leave politics to others then they could hope for a future in Europe.

Hilde was particularly irritated by those Viennese citizens who implied that she had undergone an easier war than they had. Visiting her old haunt, the Café Herrenhof, she was pleased to find the head waiter, Franz Hnatek, still there. But immediately he launched into a scene that her exiled friends had long predicted, congratulating her on escaping and saving herself a great deal of unpleasantness. ‘The Frau Doktor was right to leave. The air-raids alone – three times they set the city ablaze.' Disdainful, Hilde offered him cigarettes, which he accepted with a subservient bow. She was depressed by his lack of awareness of the plight of the exile. ‘Expropriation, humiliation, arrest and mortal danger, illegal flight across closed borders, years of exile, life as an enemy alien in a country shattered by war'; all was annihilated, waved away with a snap of his fingers.

Gradually, she found herself learning to compromise as Peter had done in Germany, accepting the equivocal nature of the situation of those who had stayed behind. Meeting an old friend, Stefan B, she was confronted with a man who had come to terms with the powers who took control of his country in 1938. Despite opposing their ideology, he edited a daily newspaper; while bemoaning the vulgarity of the regime and the likelihood of a victory by the Allies, he profited from the situation, living in freedom while others died in jail. But she now realised that everyone had been complicit in some way, except those few who had died as Resistance fighters.

 

In England, during the war, when we dreamed of seeing our homeland again, we resolved never to shake the hand of anyone who had been in any way linked with the regime. Now this decision seems ludicrous to me; all the borderlines are blurred. Stefan, I feel, cannot be blamed, except that he was not born to be either a hero or a victim.

 

Back in London, Peter was jealous of Hilde's expedition but was trying to be gracious about giving her a share of the fun. ‘Of course, I'm envious,' he wrote on 2 February, not having yet received any of her letters, ‘and should like to be with you but I tell myself that this is your own special province and privilege and I know how necessary it is for you to make this trip all by yourself. I do so hope you have a good and interesting time and rediscover in yourself all the things that you felt were buried these last few years and sometimes gave up for lost, even.' In her absence he was joining the community in Wimbledon, attending Labour party meetings and getting to know a new set of people. ‘England suits me down to the ground,' he told Hilde. ‘I should never dream of moving us to any country permanently again. It would be suicide.' If they could persevere for a while longer then all their immigrant troubles would be gone. A week later he had still not heard from her, and he was starting to begrudge spending time alone with the children and to sympathise with her resentment during his absences. ‘I can just see how it must be for you. Awful, awful, although the winter is rather worse than the summer.'

Hilde too was discovering and affirming her own Englishness. This return to her roots was not a straightforward homecoming. She repeatedly informed Peter that the Viennese were made bearable and enjoyable by the antidote of the English, whom she returned to each night. She was reassured by the comforting incongruity of the khaki army blankets in her Biedermeier Viennese room, which made her feel doubly at home. ‘I lead this curious double life you've known yourself, meeting all the important Viennese and then going back to the boys in the mess, drinking and playing darts in the bar at night.' The British were the most beloved of the occupying forces and she was pleased to be among them. Indeed, she could not imagine a return to Vienna being tolerable except under the auspices of the British – ‘belonging to them and sharing their company'. She was more enraptured by the English than she had been for years. ‘Those that are nice are really infinitely nice and charming, and I do so like to see and live with these clean, good-mannered, gay, witty English people.' On 4 February she described to Peter a drive round the ruins with a ‘sweet Major' with whom she had discussed Sitwell and Bowen, neutralising the scenery around them.

Hilde did not name this particular major to Peter, and she did not mention him again in her letters home. In her autobiography she refers to him as ‘Sam B' and describes him as ‘the pleasant, cultured Welshman who was to be my frequent escort during the next few weeks'. She was less discreet in her diary at the time, where she noted a couple of sentences a day about her activities. Here Sam is introduced as Major Beasley, a fellow press officer, and is then mentioned frequently, first as Beasley, and then, from 9 February, as Sam. ‘Cooked at Sam's flat,' she writes here; ‘dinner and a prolonged night in the bar until about 1.30 playing darts and drinking heavily. There is a certain danger of forgetting purpose.' The next morning, terribly hungover, she and Sam went to the Ice Rink and Heumarkt Café. The following day it was worthy of mention that ‘Sam didn't appear' and then the next evening she recorded retiring to Sam's room after drinking in the bar. ‘Quite delightful. Talked.'

Sam wanted to enter the art market when he returned to civilian life, and on 13 February Hilde accompanied him to galleries and introduced him to painters. She encouraged him to buy an Egon Schiele oil painting for only 2,000 schillings. The following day she and Sam got terribly drunk after a party at the Salmschlössl. Her diary cryptically notes ‘Sam: end', but the next day there was another picture-buying mission and theatre premiere, followed by supper in Sam's room. ‘What an absurd relation,' she now reported. The following morning she took him to the studio of her former friend Josef Dobrowsky, who had drawn her twice before the war, and Sam bought a portrait for 100 cigarettes. That evening at the end of another big party she noted an ‘extraordinary scene' with Sam.

In a novel set in this immediate post-war period called
Lisa's Room
, which would be published in 1965, Hilde Spiel gave the character Lisa (based on her own schoolfriend Hansi) a speech expounding the sexual moral codes of twentieth-century bohemian Vienna. ‘You don't think I have any morals?' Lisa asks.

 

Hilde Spiel, painted by Josef Dobrowsky, 1946

 

You'd be surprised! It is merely a different code altogether . . . I can't agree that one man or woman should be enough for one lifetime when there are hundreds of trees, flowers, mountains and cities to explore . . . It would seem unnatural to me, unholy even, to forgo any possible sensation. This happens to be my religion. But there are also taboos – don't you believe that I can do without them! The taboo of breaking off a mood violently. The taboo of talking off-key, too coyly, too earnestly, too dramatically for any given situation. The taboo of saying the wrong thing, or the right thing at the wrong moment, of play-acting when absolute candour is called for, or of waking someone who is fast asleep. These are deadly sins to me. And there is another one: that of deliberately hurting people – in cold blood.

 

Hilde Spiel is satirising Hansi's overblown whimsicality here, but there are elements of Lisa's moral code that resemble her own. Before the war, Hilde had experienced no compunction when she embarked on several simultaneous love affairs while gradually committing herself more seriously to Peter. Now that she was married with children her attitude had changed; she had been furiously jealous of Peter's affair with Juliet O'Hea. Nonetheless, she was still capable of a Viennese lightness of touch when it came to affairs of the heart. At this stage she had no intention of leaving Peter and no real desire to prolong this ‘absurd relation' with Sam beyond her stay in Vienna. But she was enjoying it as a chance to regain equality with Peter and as another component of the city's passionate intensity. The scenes were part of the drama; her feelings were alive.

Staying up late, pontificating about the future of Europe and feeling that her opinions mattered, Hilde continued to be elated by the experience. ‘I feel', she wrote to Peter on 10 February, ‘like someone who's been sober for seven years and then gulps down ten whiskies all at once, no wonder I'm quite drunk.' For his part Peter, in a letter of 14 February, was rather patronisingly pleased that she was having a good time – ‘precisely the kind of time I wanted you to have' – but convinced that in retrospect she would look on it differently. He was happy now to be in London, despite the fact that he and the children all had flu and that Anthony had a runny nose which Christine kept smearing over his face in a disgusting fashion. He promised that when she returned they would arrange their lives to their mutual satisfaction. ‘I don't want you to stand in a fish queue. But what shall we do with the children? Maybe we shouldn't have had any, perhaps? Well, that's too late to change.'

By 20 February Peter was beginning to lose patience. ‘Dearest Mummili,' he wrote; ‘the more drunk and hilarious your letters become the less informative they get. One doesn't learn an awful lot from them except that you're having a good time – and that's really all one wants to know . . . Now – about coming home. Mummi, for God's sake don't think I want to rush you home or deprive you of a single day of fun.' But their nanny Beate could not be left alone with the children and was starting to ask Peter when Hilde was expected to return. He was afraid to tell her the brutal truth, which was that he was beginning to suspect she was not going to come back at all. He himself had promised to go to Germany at the beginning of March, and besides, it was time for Hilde to see her children. In his first letter Peter had enclosed a card from Christine which began ‘Dear Mummy, when are you going to come back from Vienna? I would so like to know.'

Luckily for Peter and Christine, Hilde's stay in Vienna was curtailed by the arrival of Richard Crossman, a member of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry into the Problems of European Jewry and Palestine and assistant editor of the
New Statesman
.
He and Hilde met at a party at Smollett's on 17 February, where he impressed her with his brilliance and eccentricity and spent much of the evening praising Peter's Nuremberg reports. Hilde asked Crossman if he was planning to write about Vienna and later informed Peter that he had ‘most charmingly and unconcernedly' replied that he was not going to write a serious political article, just four or five good stories with a lot of background. ‘In fact, Pumpi, what I wanted to do,' Hilde complained. ‘I was crestfallen but didn't show it, and he proceeded to explain to me that what I should do for Kingsley was the story of the migration of the Jews.'