The Love-Charm of Bombs (55 page)

But at the same time as Graham was comforting Vivien he was writing to Catherine, longing to push the rusty gate and see it swing, desperate for peace. At breakfast in Oxford on 20 November, Vivien opened a letter addressed to Catherine in New York which had been sent back to Graham marked ‘return to sender'. It was the day of the royal wedding of Princess Elizabeth, and Vivien had been looking forward to the celebrations for weeks. The engagement to Prince Philip of Greece had been announced in July, and although much of Britain was ambivalent about this union with a foreigner, people were generally grateful for a moment of glamour amid the continuing austerity. Londoners brought out their Blitz mattresses and spent the night on the pavements waiting for the procession the next day. In Oxford there were street parties and gatherings as people listened to the wedding on the radio. Vivien's son Francis watched while she opened the letter and asked her if anything was the matter. She took the letter to Campion Hall, where a year earlier she had celebrated Catherine's christening, and showed it to her friend Father Tom Corbishley, who was listening to the coverage of the wedding. The priest went against Catholic doctrine and told Vivien to divorce her husband. She returned home and telephoned Graham at Eyre and Spottiswoode. As always, he tried to defuse the situation, insisting that it was only a love letter. ‘I know what real feeling is and this is real,' Vivien informed him. Graham acquiesced. ‘I am going to leave you,' he replied. ‘We'll be going away together.'

The letter was particularly hurtful because it began with a description of a visit to Oxford, where Graham had been comforting Vivien. Her scenes were less violent than Dorothy's, but he felt tired afterwards, and wished he could escape somewhere, somehow. Vivien read Graham's declarations of love for Catherine in his familiar knotty handwriting. He wanted the first drink of the day with her; he was longing to wake beside her at 3am; and he was in love with her and wanted no one else.

Graham arrived in Oxford a few hours later and informed Vivien again that he was planning to leave her. She cried, prostrated on the floor, her head on Graham's knee. Graham assured her, in a moment of cruelty that Vivien would never forget, that he would still send her the proofs of his novels to read. After Graham had gone, Vivien went to mass at Blackfriars and donated her engagement ring to the collection.

There is no account of this day by Graham Greene himself, but it is clear from his subsequent letters to Catherine that he continued to feel guilty about Vivien. What was it, then, that prompted him to behave so callously when it came to the actual moment of separation? Since the first trip to Achill seven months earlier, Graham had become gradually more exhausted from the strain of being responsible for the happiness of three women, all of whom, in different ways, he loved. The letters where he assured Vivien of his continued affection do seem to have been ingenuous. He loved her as a partner and a family member; twenty years of shared history could not be easily forgotten. He would rather have her there, as a comforting presence in his life, than not there at all. He was used to her reading the drafts and proofs of his novels, and he liked to retreat occasionally from his volatile affairs and busy public life into the ordinary domesticity of life in Oxford. If Vivien could only feel the same way about him then he would rather stay married than separate. He was still enough of a Catholic to wish to avoid divorce if possible; it was apparent that it would be better for the children if their parents remained at least nominally together; and besides, he was not confident about his chances of persuading Catherine to leave Harry.

However, in his more honest moments Graham was also aware that Vivien did not share his feelings and that she wanted more love and more loyalty than he was prepared to give her. He was conscious, too, that she had a right to expect this. He had married her knowing that she was hesitant about sex; he had only gained her initially tentative love by overwhelming her with protestations of the intensity and constancy of his own. In assuring her of his continued affections he was attempting to fulfil his duty to her by convincing himself as well as her of his love. But the strain told, again and again, because there was no day or hour when he was not obsessively thinking about, desiring and needing Catherine.

Vivien's phone call on the day of the Royal Wedding came as a surprise, and Graham's first reaction was to attempt to pacify her and to tell her what she wished to hear. When she stopped him from doing this, Vivien offered him a way out which, in the relief of the moment, he accepted. By naming Graham's feelings for Catherine as love, Vivien suggested that she herself had the strength at least to acknowledge the failure of their own marriage. Graham accepted and therefore exacted this strength when he declared that the marriage was over. Because the decision to separate had been precipitated by Vivien's phone call, Graham did not have time to think about how to end the marriage lovingly. And if Vivien's account is accurate, he did not even attempt to be loving. Perhaps he felt that by behaving cruelly he was offering her clarity; that there was more cruelty in his continual, half-hearted attempts to retain her affection while offering her only the dilapidated remnants of a marriage.

By ignoring Vivien's protests, and by failing to clamber down onto the floor and comfort her, Graham perhaps believed that he was behaving honestly at last by no longer offering a love in which he could only periodically believe. By nonetheless promising her that she would still be given his proofs to read, Graham was offering her instead the continued partnership that he wanted and hoped that in time she would come to want too. Of course, it did not seem that way to Vivien. And with more time to think and to accrue guilt, Graham came to acknowledge his own callousness and to feel remorseful about the selfishness of his behaviour. However, although he could regret his own selfishness he could not regret his love for Catherine, which he saw as an unquestionable and unchosen given and as a force for good; for a unique happiness and peace which he felt had to be given a chance to exist.

Released from his immediate obligations to Vivien, Graham spent Christmas with the Walstons in Thriplow, fairly happily accepting his place within Catherine's extended family. On Boxing Day he left a note for Catherine thanking her for a joyful Christmas. He was surprised how little he had thought about his children. The following week he told her that he was feeling happy for ten reasons. The first, he proclaimed insistently, was their mutual love: he was in love with her, and she was in love with him, or would be when they were united again. The second, more contentiously, was his religion. Throughout their affair, both Graham and Catherine were trying to remain ‘in the church' where possible, which meant confessing to their adultery when they were apart. He now announced that he had decided to avoid leaving the church for anything or anybody less important to him than she was, even though this would deprive him of stories to tell her (from the start, Graham and Catherine had been unfaithful to each other partly for the sake of exciting and annoying each other through their subsequent accounts). Fourth in the list came Dorothy, whom he believed had become more independent. And last of all came an unexpected sense of indifference about Vivien.

From this point, Graham committed himself fully to Catherine, and found her absences harder to endure. Missing her viscerally and desolately, Graham now saw Vienna itself as bleakly miserable. Like Colonel Calloway, the narrator of the novel version of
The Third Man
, Graham Greene had never been to Vienna and so could not remember the Strauss music and charm of the city that was once the home of Hilde Spiel. For Calloway, Vienna is merely a city of icy ruins, presided over by the broken Prater and littered with smashed tanks that have not yet been cleared. He does not have enough imagination to visualise it as it once was, any more than he can picture the Sacher Hotel as anything other than a transit hotel for English officers, or see Kärtnerstrasse as a fashionable shopping arcade instead of a street which existed only at eye level, repaired up to the first storey. Now, this former boulevard of Old Vienna is inhabited by a Russian soldier in a fur cap with a rifle over his shoulder, a few prostitutes, clustered around the American Information Office, and men in overcoats, sipping ersatz coffee by the windows.

Greene was depressed by the rubble and did not like the complacency of being on the winning side. He complained to Catherine that he found it humiliating to be one of the victors because all the jokes were turned against the winner, never against the defeated. But the next day it started to snow and he found that everything looked suddenly lovely. He was driven to the enormous central cemetery which would provide the setting of the opening scene of
The Third Man
, and discovered that the monuments looked grotesque under the snow: white bonnets protruded over the eyes of naked stone women.

Greene found in the Vienna that he would immortalise in
The Third Man
a new manifestation of Greeneland. Here were the seedy, downtrodden faces, the smoke-filled rooms, the pasty naked dancers and the shabby gangsters of his 1930s novels. In this respect post-war Vienna provided a continuation of wartime London. Indeed, recaptured in the stark black and white of
The Third Man
's
film noir
cinematography, Vienna acquires many of the visual characteristics of London in the Blitz with its surreal juxtapositions, picturesque ruins and dark, torchlit streets where the surviving façades of grand buildings tower above messy piles of rubble.

 

   Night-time in Vienna in
The Third Man
(1948)

 

Shown round by a young film assistant called Elizabeth Montagu, Greene was swept into the Viennese social life that had enveloped Hilde Spiel two years earlier. He attended a run of social gatherings organised by the British and was introduced to Peter Smollett, who took him on a tour of the Russian zone across the canal. It was from Smollett that he learnt about the penicillin racketeering that he would use in the plot of
The Third Man
. At this point penicillin was only given to military hospitals, and hospital orderlies were stealing the medicine and selling it on the private and civilian market. The illegal penicillin was often diluted, which meant that children injected with it frequently died (both because it was too weak to have any effect and because they were infected by the polluted water).

Greene dragged Elizabeth Montagu to strip clubs where they were entertained by prostitutes who seemed as ruined as their city. ‘Hideous they were,' she reported later, wondering ‘where did such hags come from?' In the novel of
The Third Man
Greene described the Oriental as a sordid smoke-filled night club where visitors found the same risqué photographs on the stairs and the same half drunk Americans at the bar as they would find in any squalid bar in a shabby European city. This did not mean that he was not happy to frequent just these haunts himself. And the Casanova Revue bar provided the setting for several set-piece scenes in the film. Holly Martins talks to the shady Baron Kurtz while serenaded by a scruffy violinist; officials in military uniform seem out of place amid the faded decadence of the draped fabrics and dancing girls, and the small tables are watched over by the silhouetted figures of naked women on the wall.

While in Vienna, Greene spent an evening with Elizabeth Bowen, who was there on a British Council lecture tour. During the day, she was busy addressing the kinds of audiences that Greene would satirise in
The Third Man
. Here Martins is hijacked by a taxi which drives off abruptly and hurtles malevolently through the city. In any other thriller it would lead him to a macabre death but in Greene's hands it lands him in a lecture room. Martins (the author of racy thrillers) finds himself called upon to assume the role of an experimental novelist and address a collection of earnest readers on the subject of the contemporary novel. ‘Do you believe, Mr Martins, in the stream of consciousness?' he is asked.

Always a practical joker, Graham took Elizabeth to the Oriental and announced that the police would be raiding the club at midnight. ‘How do you know?' she asked. ‘I have my contacts,' he replied. On cue at the stroke of twelve, a British sergeant friend arrived, commissioned by Graham to stride across the cellar and demand to see Elizabeth's passport. He recounted in his autobiography that Elizabeth had looked at him with respect; the British Council had not laid on such dramatic entertainment.

Elizabeth, like Graham, was staying at the Sacher Hotel. Years later she recalled its atmosphere to Charles Ritchie.