The Love-Charm of Bombs (54 page)

Martin was in Berlin partly to observe the increasing tension between the Western Allies and the Russians. He spent much of his time in discussion with prominent German politicians and with leading representatives of the occupying forces. By this point, relations between the Eastern and Western occupiers were starting to sour as Cold War divisions became entrenched. Dialogue between the powers had been difficult and hostile from the start. When he was first posted to Berlin Peter wrote to Hilde that there were tensions between the Soviet propaganda ‘with its blunt slogans, its blatant and unashamed platitudes' and the language of the other Allies. Journalists, he said, were already drawing parallels between the censorship of the Russians and that of the Nazi regime. However, Peter and Hilde did their best to foster consensus. Hilde was particularly proud that Russians had attended that first party they hosted in Berlin in January 1947. ‘They hardly ever accept private invitations, and it made a great impression on everyone that they accepted ours,' she told her mother. ‘I am fascinated by them, as is Peter, and very pleased that they are not shy with us. They drank quite a lot and must have had a good time, or they would not have stayed the whole evening.'

Peter's British employers encouraged him in attempts to bring together the British and the Russians. They did not expect open conversation between the two sides, but felt that if the British and Russians could simply be present in the same places, hostility might be tempered. Personally, Hilde was loyal to her earlier ideals of Russia and the Russians and so was keen to promote understanding between the two camps. She had grown up on Russian novels and plays. Seeing a stage adaptation of
Crime
and
Punishment
in London just before moving to Berlin she wrote romantically to Peter that ‘nothing goes to one's heart so much, nothing moves one more in one's inner being than the Russians'.

The British had been encouraged to think favourably about the Russians during the later stages of the war. When Hitler invaded Russia in 1941, Churchill announced to Britain that ‘Russia's danger is our danger'. In Vienna in February 1946, hearing tales of Soviet atrocities, Hilde thought back to that moment when she heard in England that Hitler had marched into Russia and she knew that the Allies had a chance of winning the war. ‘The Red Army saved my life. How can I condemn it lock, stock and barrel, because it repays evil with evil in enemy country?' She had abandoned the youthful enthusiasm for Communism she had evinced in the 1920s, but although she had heard about the Moscow show trials she had not heard about the destruction of the kulaks. If fascism was the incarnation of evil, Hilde saw Communism as merely a fallen angel.

In March 1946 Winston Churchill had announced that an ‘iron curtain' had descended across Europe. But Hilde looked back on 1947 as the year before the entrenched nature of the Cold War became apparent. At least at the time, she and her circle still believed that conflict between the two opposing governments and ideologies could be avoided simply through human contact between representatives from each side. Nonetheless, this was becoming harder and harder by November 1947. ‘It is very difficult to keep up one's hopes of reaching an understanding with the Russians,' Hilde wrote to her mother in December. ‘Although war is to be avoided at all costs, we can see here that the Russians are really doing everything possible to forfeit the goodwill of their patrons. This is really very sad.'

It was looking possible that the Western Allies would have to withdraw from Berlin. Hilde and Peter carried on their daily lives, attempting to pretend that nothing had changed. She continued to attend first nights in the eastern sector. But in January 1948 the theatre itself was the setting for an outbreak of East–West tensions, when the French staged a production of Jean-Paul Sartre's 1943 play,
Les Mouches
(
The Flies
), an existentialist adaptation of the Electra myth. Sartre himself was expected to attend, and in the lead-up to the first night tickets went for extortionate prices on the black market. The Soviet-controlled press ran a hate campaign against the ‘anti-humanism' of the play, while the French-controlled press proclaimed Sartre a moralist and existentialism a new form of humanist ethics. In the theatre – which, after all, was according to Spiel the only reality that still remained – it was becoming evident that it was going to be hard to avoid open hostility.

 

 

Elsewhere in Europe, it was easier to escape both memories of the Second World War and the reality of post-war international conflict. Arriving in Spain to research a travel book in the summer of 1947, Rose Macaulay found the same light and ease that she had experienced in Portugal during the war. Spain was struggling economically and politically. Franco's authoritarian fascist government had been ostracised by the Western Allies following a UN resolution condemning the regime. As a result, the country faced severe food shortages and potential political unrest. Writing to her sister Jean, Rose was aware that the Spanish government was nervous about being attacked; there were coastal places where the British could pass through but not stay overnight. She was also disturbed by the outward reminders of fascism, visiting the police station in Barcelona where prisoners were beaten to extricate confessions. But, touring the Mediterranean coast, she generally remained happily oblivious of the country's contemporary politics, immersing herself in the more distant past.

It was during this trip to Spain and Portugal that Rose Macaulay began to find in ruins a form of possible consolation. She had been wandering obsessively through the bomb sites of London since her own flat was bombed in 1941, but so far she had found only confirmation of her own bleak state of mind. Cecil Beaton may have discovered aesthetic beauty in the still smouldering ashes of a frightful wasteland, but Macaulay would write in
The Pleasure of Ruins
that the debris left by the Second World War was too recent to be consolatory. Now in Spain she was soothed by older ruins and by the sense that cities and buildings were capable of recovering the beauty they had lost. She was learning to aestheticise ruins as Beaton, Greene and Yorke had aestheticised both fire and rubble during the war itself. Reporting on her Spanish trip to her cousin Jean that September, Rose lovingly described the profusion of age-old buildings, ‘unheralded and unordered', mouldering into faster ruin.

 

Of course this has drawbacks as well as charms – but to come on a deserted ruin of an abbey in the mountains, or some wonderful Cartuja [Carthusian monastery] with the grass and trees and weeds thrusting up through the broken arches, untended and luxuriant in hot sunshine . . gives one a breath-taking shock, as of magic, or of a sudden step back into other centuries.

 

In
Fabled Shore
, the published account of her trip,
she mentions the ruins of the town of Figueras, which was destroyed by Saracens and then burnt down in several later disasters and attacks. Each time, ‘with its indefatigable powers of recuperation, Figueras built itself and its church up again'. She then gives an account of Malaga, which has been troubled by ‘discontented Moriscos in the sixteenth century, discontented liberals in the nineteenth, angry nationalist rebels in 1937' but has still made a good recovery. Debris, she says – and she would know – is seldom:

 

so widespread as it appears immediately after a bombardment, and neither the destruction of the town by one side in that savage and pernicious dispute, nor of its churches by the other . . . is now very apparent, though valuable things perished in both.

 

Buildings clearly could and did survive. Witnessing the recovery of these Spanish towns seems to have restored Rose Macaulay's faith in her own equally indefatigable powers of revival.

Recovery also came through the warmth and light of southern Europe. Spain, like Portugal, was a land of colour. Rose Macaulay described the mountains above the Puerto de Selva as evoking the shifting colours on a dove's breast. The houses were painted white; their doors and shutters were vibrant blue and green. There were brightly coloured plants growing all around. It did not matter that parts of the village had been destroyed by both sides during the Civil War; the colours at least remained. Relaxing into the scenery, Rose started to enjoy a sense of irresponsible freedom. She was happy driving carelessly along the coast in her trusted Morris, expressing only mild alarm when the bumper, the exhaust and even the steering axle (‘rather startling!') fell off along the way. In
Fabled Shore
she reported that over the course of the 4,000 miles of road she covered in Spain and then Portugal, she learnt that cars were not as firmly held together as she had hoped. Parts of them were liable to fall off. ‘If these objects, which I detested, but which were, it seemed, essential to my car's structure, action, and well being, could be fastened on again with straps, I fastened them on with straps, until I reached the next garage'; otherwise she walked off in search of help.

Feisty and self-sufficient, Rose was settling into the persona of the redoubtable English eccentric that friends would remember her as in old age. Twice when inns listed in her out-of-date guide books turned out no longer to exist she inflated her wartime air mattress and bedded down under the open sky. She informed her cousin that she had passed a lovely night in the woods beneath a moon in the Porta Coeli Cartuja, despite getting badly bitten by mosquitoes.

Sleeping outside, diving off rocks into empty bays whenever possible, Rose was also recovering the sensual pleasure that she had lost with the death of Gerald O'Donovan. As always, she swam obsessively. She told a hitchhiker that she would happily drive to any destination but that her passenger would have to wait patiently while Rose stopped off to bathe along the way. One of the most joyful moments of the trip came in the village of Torremolinos near Malaga where Rose swam in the evening, underneath the moon, and then again the next morning, dropping into the green water amid cactuses, golden cucumbers, pumpkins and palms, and swimming out alongside a boat filled with fishermen who were hacking mussels off the rocks and singing. For Rose the beauty of the place and of the hour – the smooth opal morning sea, the spread of the bay, the colourful garden – was like ‘the returning memory of a dream long forgotten'. She was learning to experience alone the joy she had found on holidays with her lover.

Nonetheless, Rose remained lonely, especially after her return to London. It would be some time before she could find a more permanent mental equilibrium. She was as distressed by the political situation in Britain as Bowen and Yorke were, complaining to her sister about the Labour mismanagement of the economic crisis following the nationalisation of the coal industry and assuming that a Conservative government would have avoided making so many mistakes. During the winter of 1947 she wrote the account of Spain and Portugal that would be published in 1949 as
Fabled Shore
. This book is for the most part a joyful and eccentric montage of Spanish colour, but it ends with a scene whose bleakness betrays Rose's own.

The final pages take place in the Cape St Vincent in Portugal, which Rose Macaulay describes as ‘a desolation of ruins'. There are chapel-shaped, roofless buildings spread about the cliff; the silence and solitude are eerie. This is Rose's second night of bedding down on the ground and it is less peaceful and pleasant than her first. By this point she is fed up with inns that fail to materialise; distressed to find herself ‘stranded, supperless and roofless, at the world's end'. She makes her bed in the roofless apse of what was once a chapel and the night is spent among dark and ghost-trodden ruins. All night the wind moans coldly around her; ‘the long beams of the lighthouse . . . speared and shafted the desolate wastes of the sea which bounds the known world'.

 

 

See notes on Chapter 19

20

‘The place I really did lose my heart to was Vienna'

Graham Greene, Elizabeth Bowen and Hilde Spiel in Vienna, 1948–9

 

In February 1948 Graham Greene arrived in Vienna to research the story for
The Third Man
, a new film to be directed by Carol Reed. It was freezing cold. As they landed the plane glided across roofs covered with thick snow and then skidded on the sleet-clad tarmac. Greene was met at the airport by a press photographer, waiting to catch him unshaved, and transported to the famous Sacher Hotel, which had been commandeered as the British headquarters. The hotel itself would feature in
The Third Man
as a symbol of the lost world of old Vienna. Here the hero Holly Martins is caught in shadow against the white opulence of the gleaming marble pillars; enormous ornate vases loom into view as he climbs the stairs. Installed amid broken chandeliers and crumbling stucco flourishes, Greene felt desolate and alone; he was missing Catherine more than he had ever done before. Just after he arrived at the hotel he wrote a letter begging her to marry him, in a registry office if necessary. He had her photograph stuck in a letter rack and felt as though he were an undergraduate in love for the first time.

Graham was able to propose to Catherine with confidence because he was finally in the process of separating from Vivien. The previous November, Vivien had learnt about the full extent of Graham and Catherine's relationship after a series of gradual revelations. In June 1947 he had told Vivien formally about Dorothy. He wrote to her afterwards assuring her that he felt closer to her as a result of his confession and that he still loved her. He was now convinced that the marriage could survive and that their estrangement was the result of his own foolishness. That October after an afternoon in Oxford he left a note for Vivien promising her that he was not going back to anyone in London, as Dorothy had been dispatched to West Africa and would not be returning for some time.