The Love-Charm of Bombs (57 page)

 

love is a little peace as well as a little death:

In an hour our pulse shall cease,

Stopped like a breath.

 

Returning to London, Graham immediately began to miss both Catherine and peace and to feel guilty about both Vivien and Dorothy. In a later interview with his biographer, Norman Sherry, Graham Greene admitted that he had betrayed several people in his life and singled out Dorothy in particular as a victim of his betrayal. Now he told Catherine that if Dorothy could be happy then he would begin to be happy as well. He wanted Catherine and peace, with no more decisions to be made.

While Graham was in Italy, Dorothy had found out about Catherine. Her previous obliviousness was remarkable, given that most of Graham's friends now knew about his latest affair, and in a letter to Graham on 14 April Dorothy seems painfully aware of the scale of her own ignorance:

 

Everyone from Douglas to the packers it seems know you are behaving like a fool over an American blond as you have made no attempt to disguise it from anyone, everyone you know in London is talking about it too! . . . They also know that you are prepared to break up Oxford for this woman . . . The general idea is that you are going out of your mind as no man in his right senses would behave as you do over an American blond with a yearning for culture!

 

Graham and Dorothy had been planning to go on holiday together once he was back, but she now released him from this obligation, guessing that a week or two with her would ‘fall very flat' after three months with ‘a woman you are so madly in love with'. She was writing because she wanted to avoid any more ‘revolting utterances' in person; she commanded him not to mention Italy or
The Third Man
once he was back in London.

In fact Graham did decide to take Dorothy on holiday. He wanted to write her a letter explaining his decision to end the relationship and to give it to her while they were away. They went to Morocco, and Graham sent Catherine a daily commentary describing his progress. He delivered his letter on 7 May and Dorothy initially responded with predictable hostility. Eventually, though, they came up with a compromise, which involved Graham renting his own flat but still sleeping in Gordon Square some of the time. He was willing to try it out if Catherine agreed. Five days later there was no longer a chance of avoiding a complete split. By 19 May Catherine was allowed to write or to telephone him whenever she liked because all the deception was over for ever.

While Graham was in Morocco,
The Heart of the Matter
had been published. In April he had been hoping that he would be in Ireland or Thriplow with Catherine when it came out, so that they could drink to it in Irish. He came back to find that the book was an immediate success. There was hesitation from the Catholic press, but the non-Catholics were happy. The
Evening Standard
chose it as their Book of the Month and the first edition of 10,000 copies sold out in six days. Graham had a few days in London before heading back to Vienna, via New York. While he was away Catherine was furnishing his new flat, which was next door to the Walstons' own London residence on St James's Piccadilly. He wrote to her with instructions for the furniture and sending her copies of his reviews, including one by Elizabeth Bowen in
Tatler
which lauded the novel as the culmination of Greene's literary career so far, stating that he now towered above his contemporaries and set a high mark for younger writers to aspire to.

The Heart of the Matter
was dedicated to Vivien and the children. This was an ambivalent gesture, given the portrayal of Scobie's wife Louise in the novel, but Vivien wrote to congratulate her husband on his success. On 3 June he replied to her, wanting to clarify their situation. He assured her that he was fond of her and that he was aware of the responsibilities owed to her and the children. But fondness and responsibility were not going to be enough to see them through. For several years they had lived in an unreal world and they now needed to confront the fact that Graham was unsuited for ordinary domestic life. He would have been a bad husband to anyone because of his selfishness, restlessness and depression. And what was more, he had no inclination to change, because it was his melancholia and inner conflicts that sustained him as a writer. He reminded Vivien that for nine years he had also had a second domestic life in London, but that even that had not been a success; during the last four years he had made Dorothy miserable as well.

If Vivien retained any illusions, remaining with Graham would bring only unhappiness and disappointment. It was possible that they could still share a life in which Oxford remained Graham's headquarters, but there would have to be no conditions for either of them. This, he would be prepared to try. But if this arrangement would only make for more misery, he thought that an open separation would involve less strain for both of them than the disguised separation they were engaged in at present.

On 10 June 1948 Greene arrived in Vienna for a three-week trip, which coincided with a visit to the city by Hilde Spiel. Both were shocked by the changes that had taken place since they were last there. Currency reform had been introduced and the value of money was now stable, which meant that consumer goods were to be had in plenty. As a result there were a number of bankruptcies, including several small publishing firms and intellectual periodicals such as
Plan
, which Spiel was previously involved in. ‘Vienna has become a little Zurich,' Spiel noted disappointedly in her diary. Greene was accompanied this time by Carol Reed and the film crew, and he was embarrassed by how much the city had changed since he had written the film treatment. The black-market restaurants were now serving legal albeit scanty meals; many of the ruins had been cleared away. He had to keep assuring Reed that Vienna had once really been as he had described it in February.

Only the Russian sector was still as ruined as ever, and it was there that they were going to film the climactic scene in the ruined ferris wheel at the Prater, where Harry Lime contemplates pushing Holly Martins to his death. In her account of her 1946 trip to Vienna, Spiel recollected the Prater as it had been in her youth, when pairs of lovers strolled among pink and white chestnut blossom and large comfortable families enjoyed large comfortable meals in the coffee houses. Throughout the war she had looked forward to taking her daughter to try out the ferris wheel, with its multicoloured cars, lit by lanterns. Visiting it after the war she was shocked by the wilderness that had taken the place of that cheerful landscape.

 

Shellfire and a blaze that was allowed to rage unhindered through the wood and coloured lacquer of the booths have obliterated it from the earth as though it had never existed.

 

The wheel was now bent and twisted and lacking its wagons, towering in poignant solitude above the desert of charred timber. No effort was made to reconstruct the Prater in the immediate post-war period. In the novel version of
The Third Man
Greene describes the shattered Prater with its bones jutting through the snow. Now it was spring, but according to Elizabeth Montagu the wheel looked ‘like a sort of nightmare: something out of Hieronymus Bosch'. Montagu was still accompanying Greene on many of his missions, this time following him to the vast network of sewers in which Harry Lime is finally killed in the film. Greene portrays this in the film treatment as a strange unknown world which lies under our feet: an underground city of waterfalls and rivers. Here again was wartime Greeneland, transposed onto post-war Vienna. In the film the sewers are a blacked-out underground world lit by the torches of the trench-coated police, who resemble wardens in the London blackout.

Writing to Catherine, Graham complained about a general feeling of boredom. Apart from Carol Reed, who was getting more and more likable on closer acquaintance, the people were tedious. He was drinking too much and thinking too much and he was missing Catherine. Even the success of
The Heart of the Matter
meant little without her. Graham wondered if there would be more to look forward to if he was a failure instead of a success. There were plenty of other women available, but Catherine made everyone else seem unenticing. Elizabeth Montagu was nice and very friendly, but lacked sex appeal; he was taking the wife of a British Council official out to lunch while her husband was in England, but his heart was not in the game. A few days later he had dispelled a fit of blues with hard drinking and a night at Maxim's nightclub with an attractive dancer. But he had not gone to bed with her because she lived an hour and a half away and Graham wanted an early night.

Graham was longing to return to his flat in St James's and to find Catherine there with a bottle. Most of all he was yearning, as always, for Achill. He had now had enough of being successful and of spending his time in smart hotels and bars. He wished that they could spend a few days in Ireland in her old Ford, motoring from the cottage to the Sound and back. In fact Graham spent the summer and autumn of 1948 not in Achill but in London, New York and Los Angeles. Catherine went to Achill in October and Graham found it painful to think of her in the quiet candlelight of Achill while he was in Harlem. He was disappointed to fly back via Prestwick and not via Shannon, which meant they could not meet in Ireland. In August he wrote to her from New York where he was finding the glamour stultifying without her. He was tired of being rich and wondered if she would still like him if he was poor and unsuccessful but happy.

 

 

Meanwhile Hilde Spiel's June 1948 trip to Vienna had been abruptly curtailed on 23 June by news of the start of the Berlin blockade. That spring America had finalised plans to inject financial aid into the ailing European economies in an effort to combat the spread of Soviet-style Communism. Named after the American Secretary of State George Marshall, the Marshall Plan came as a great relief for Great Britain, enabling Attlee to put aside some of his most stringent plans for austerity cuts. Initially, Marshall Aid was also offered to the Soviet Union, which predictably rejected it; as a result, the plans put in place to enable American aid to be sent to West Germany escalated incipient Cold War tensions. At the beginning of June the Western Allies announced their intention to establish a separate West German state, which would receive the Marshall Aid. On 21 June they introduced a new currency, the
Deutsche Mark
, into their zones in an attempt to stabilise the German economy. Two days later the Russians responded by issuing a new East German mark and by blocking the railway and road access of the Western Allies to their sectors of Berlin, aiming to force the British and Americans to give the Russians total control over food and fuel provisions to the city.

Hilde Spiel immediately returned to Berlin from Vienna, wearing a parachute on the aeroplane in case of interference by Soviet fighter planes, and found herself in a city with rationing and limited electricity. The Western government in Berlin blocked Soviet efforts to extend their new currency to West Berlin and on 26 June they began an airlift, thwarting the Soviet attempts to force them into submission by cutting off supplies. A month later there were over 1,500 Western flights a day landing in West Berlin. There was now great anxiety throughout Europe that the crisis would lead to full-scale conflict, which seemed frighteningly possible to a generation still reeling from one of the most violent wars in history. Nonetheless, the British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin insisted that the British should stay in Berlin rather than abandoning it for fear of war.

Hilde wrote to her mother:

 

Our relationship with the Russians is over, on our part rather than theirs, for with their hypocrisy they would probably go on making conversation indefinitely. I am dreadfully sorry that they are behaving so badly, I really liked them as individuals. We held different views, but our contact with them was enormously interesting. We really live in idiotic times, and the twentieth century constantly jangles one's nerves.

 

The aeroplanes overhead reminded them uneasily of the war and Hilde began to have palpitations at night. Mimi was anxious about Hilde's safety and Hilde was irritated that she had to spend so much time reassuring Mimi when she was troubled enough herself. If it should come to war, Hilde insisted, there was no way of knowing where and on what scale it would take place.

 

I can only repeat that His Majesty's Government would take the necessary precautions if we had to be evacuated . . . if the entire population of Berlin is not losing control, I don't see why I should panic . . . As long as I keep my head, everything will be all right. I am doing so, but it would be a help, Mimi, if you could be a little bit grown-up now.

 

The tension was reflected in Hilde and Peter's marriage. Over the course of their time in Berlin they had strengthened as a couple. Now that she no longer felt downtrodden, Hilde had become gregarious and desirable; Peter, meanwhile, was energetically powerful and ambitious. They could recognise in each other the person they had initially married. Although they remained close to the children, they were both putting their careers and social lives before their roles as parents and this had given them a new space in which to get to know each other. Now, though, Hilde was anxious about the safety of her children. She was not naturally heroic and was fearful in the face of danger. As always the presence of her children made it difficult for her to lay aside her fear, and Peter began to find her needy and demanding. She later looked back on this as a time when they came close to breaking up. ‘You are the cause of all my misery,' Peter said at one point, ‘because you can't think straight.'