The Love-Charm of Bombs (60 page)

At the end of March, Graham wrote to Catherine from Germany wondering why he had been so cruel to her on the only two nights they were alone together. He was now missing her desperately and praying every night for either her presence or death. But over the course of his trip to Germany, Graham continued his assault, convinced that Catherine would be happier with him than with anyone else. He had never imagined he could love anyone so completely before. He wanted to die with her at the same moment and for the same reason. And though it was crazy and childish, he loved her more than work, and more than his family; even God could now only be loved through her. At the beginning of April he told her that he was praying to St Thérèse, whom they had now adopted as a joint patron saint. Where some people had a vocation to love God, he had a vocation to love a human being and he was imploring St Thérèse not to let this vocation to be wasted. By marrying Graham, Catherine would be helping God by enabling Graham to fulfil his own vocation.

Nonetheless, the arguments continued once they were reunited in London. In April Catherine recorded that she and Graham had had ‘a miserable day with both of us making scenes of equal magnitude at separate times' and that she had gone to bed exhausted and distressed. Graham wrote apologetically that he was sorry he had failed her again, and that he caused such pain to someone he loved so much.

That evening, Graham met his brother Raymond and heard from him about a conversation Raymond had initiated with Catherine, in which Raymond had been trying to mediate in his brother's relationship. This time, Graham made no attempt to be conciliatory. Writing to Catherine the next day, he announced that he felt strongly for both their sakes that the time had come for truth. Raymond had told Graham that Catherine had made up her mind never to leave Harry, that she was sure she would have a more peaceful and happy life without Graham, but that she felt too responsible for him to leave him. Graham's presence at Thriplow apparently caused anxiety and moroseness and she was bothered by his sexual energy. Now Graham needed to know the truth and was no longer going to put up with half measures. But two days later he was apologising once again, and assuring her that they would never part unless she wanted to. Meanwhile Catherine reflected sadly in her diary that ‘almost all was repeated correctly but didn't mean what I meant it to mean'.

Catherine's diaries from this period also reveal the importance and reality of her everyday family life. There is no suggestion that she was actually contemplating abandoning her husband and children to be with Graham. Taking the children to school with Harry in February 1950, Catherine observed that Harry had been ‘particularly nice'. Over the course of the spring there were frequent entries about her daily life at Thriplow, weeding her son's garden and tidying the children's rooms. On 13 April, the day that Graham called to berate her about her conversation with Raymond, Catherine visited her new home at Newton Hall where she measured the carpets and allocated some of the twenty-eight bedrooms to family members. There seems to have been no possibility in her mind that she might not end up moving in at all.

This was partly a question of the obvious allure of Harry's wealth. It would have been hard to give up the prospect of Newton Hall. In August 1948 Graham had asked Catherine if she would still like him if he was poor and unsuccessful but happy. The answer seems to have been that she would not, and that in fact he was not rich enough as it was. Catherine had acquired a lifestyle and set of tastes that were dependent on Harry's fortune. It is also evident, though, that Catherine was still easily distracted by other lovers. In April 1950 Graham was writing Catherine angrily jealous letters, unnerved by the presence of her old flame, Lowell Weicker, in London. But Graham continued to believe in the possibility of marriage, sending Catherine a colour advertisement for Cartier engagement rings at the beginning of May. Later that month Graham and Catherine went to Anacapri together. Before they left, Graham had assured Catherine that they would be contented together once they were hidden away in Italy, but in fact the arguments continued. On 16 May, Catherine wrote in her diary that Graham was ‘not at all happy' but was pretending to be.

 

I am certain he no longer likes me, and feels I am always lying and cheating – also colossally selfish and do nothing ever for anyone except myself. And maybe he is right. This possibility is very depressing.

 

Their Italian holiday continued to be disheartening. She noted an ‘unhappy evening' on 19 May, and the worst evening they had ever had on 25 May: ‘Graham really hates me but is only partially aware of this: “I hate your friends; I hate you; I hate what you stand for”.' The next day they were reconciled and by the end of the holiday Graham was reading parts of
The End of the Affair
(then called
The Point of Departure
) aloud to Catherine on the roof terrace, although he remained cautious and depressed about it.

Both Catherine and Graham were aware that his mood swings and depressions were not necessarily a result of their relationship. But this did not make life with Graham any more enticing as a prospect, and Catherine was not strong enough emotionally to bear the weight of someone else's depression. ‘Caught disease of depression from Graham' she recorded in her diary in Capri in 1949. In June 1950, she wrote in despair to her sister Bonte, convinced that it would be better for Graham as well as her if they could separate:

 

I am a coward and cannot bear to watch him suffer because of things that I do . . . Were I really nice and good and brave, I would walk out, as I am convinced for HIM that's the best thing. But then, how seldom do I ever behave in the way that I know is best? He is very sweet to me and tries very hard, and occasionally when he fails he is overcome with remorse. But anyway, it's hard to know, and when you know, it's hard to act.

 

From Catherine's surviving letters to confidantes such as her sisters and to her priest friend, Father Caraman, it seems that she continued to love Graham but that she had no belief in the future of their relationship and, knowing this, wondered if she should leave him for his own sake. In July 1950 she thanked Caraman for visiting Thriplow, where he had brought solace to both her and Graham. ‘Graham seemed very happy during those days,' she told him, ‘and I have a special feeling, quite apart from my own, for anyone who helps Graham and causes him to be more hopeful and happy.' Her letters to Caraman throughout 1950 reported anxiously on Graham's moods, writing and religious commitment. In August she informed Caraman that Graham seemed ‘more peaceful' though it was hard to know whether to trust ‘one's own personal judgements'. In October she wrote from Anacapri to tell Caraman that Graham was hard at work in his room and that she was about to read through the first draft of
The Point of Departure
, although she was ‘no judge on novels or articles written by Graham as to me they all seem so very good'. This time, Graham and Catherine do not seem to have spent their holiday arguing. There are no quarrels referred to either in Catherine's diary or in her letters to Caraman. Catherine herself was ill, and told Caraman that Graham had been ‘so good and patient and cheerful while I cough and splutter and am dreary'.

 

Graham Greene and Catherine Walston in Anacapri,
c
. 1950, photographed by Islay Lyons

 

This trip to Anacapri was dominated by the novel that would become
The End of the Affair
.
Catherine was reading the typescript; Graham was editing it; on 12 October Catherine's diary records ‘a long talk about the virtues and vices of Sarah, Henry and Bendrix'. Given the explicitly autobiographical content of the book, which was Greene's only novel written as a first-person narrative, this would have been a proxy conversation about themselves. The book had been written during the charged period between 1948 and 1950 when Graham was trying to persuade Catherine to marry him. He later stated that the story had germinated in December 1948 in a bedroom of the Hotel Palma in Capri. At this stage he referred to it in letters to Catherine as ‘the Great Sex Novel'. It is a book frequently assumed to describe Greene's relationship with Catherine, although if it is autobiographical then it is often autobiography as wish-fulfilment (or punishment) rather than reportage.

The events in the novel correspond with Greene's own life in numerous, often trivial ways. Bendrix, like Greene, is a writer who works methodically, producing a daily number of words and keeping a running tally of the total word count. Like Greene, he is an ARP warden, and here Greene conflates different periods of his life by making the affair with Catherine (in the persona of Sarah) take place during the war, when in fact he was with Dorothy at that time. He also moves both himself and Catherine to Clapham, the location of his own marital home which was bombed in 1940. By fusing the two time periods, Greene juxtaposes his love for Catherine (arguably the most intense of his life) with the time when he was most easily contented and alive. He was less often depressed during the war than he was during the years with Catherine. Indeed, it is possible that if he had met Catherine in 1939 instead of in 1946 the relationship might have been more successful; the novel explores this alternative reality.

Like Graham and Catherine, Bendrix and Sarah bond over onions. In real life, Graham and Catherine ate garlic at Thriplow because Harry was repelled by it and so would avoid Catherine during the night. They used ‘onions' as a code for garlic and ultimately for sex, with Graham sending Catherine a telegram saying ‘I love onion sandwiches' in the early part of their affair. In the novel, Bendrix and Sarah fall in love because Sarah mentions that Henry dislikes onions and then proceeds to eat them with Bendrix. ‘Is it possible to fall in love over a dish of onions?' Bendrix asks. ‘It seems improbable and yet I could swear it was just then that I fell in love.' The lovers then spend the evening in one of the cheap Bayswater hotels to which Graham took Dorothy for their first night together and continue, like Graham and Catherine, to use onions as a code word for sex.

Sarah shares Catherine's language; she describes Bendrix as being ‘sweet' to her, as Catherine described Graham in her diaries. She also shares Catherine's beauty, her ‘close knotty hair' and her gift for happiness. Bendrix notices her because she is happy in a period when ‘the sense of happiness had been a long while dying under the common storm'. Bendrix, like Greene, does not expect to fall in love with Sarah. Traditionally, he is wary of beautiful women. And love comes, as for Greene, suddenly and irrevocably – though here it is over the dish of onions and not in a low-flying plane. Love brings for Bendrix the sense of peace that it brought Greene: a peace explicitly compared to the saints' vision of God. ‘The act of love itself', Bendrix writes, ‘has been described as the little death, and lovers sometimes experience too the little peace.' And, as in actual life, love and peace are ecstatically embodied. ‘There was never any question in those days of who wanted whom – we were together in desire.'

Like Catherine, Sarah can dispel doubt and unhappiness simply by being present.

 

I have never known a woman before or since so able to alter a whole mood by simply speaking on the telephone, and when she came into a room or put her hand on my side she created at once the absolute trust I lost with every separation.

 

Like Greene, Bendrix dreams of Sarah most nights, waking sometimes ‘with a sense of pain, sometimes with pleasure', and believing that ‘if a woman is in one's thoughts all day, one should not have to dream of her at night'. And like Catherine, Sarah makes the possibility of sexual substitutes impossible. Toying with the idea of picking up a prostitute, Bendrix realises that his passion for Sarah has ‘killed simple lust for ever. Never again would I be able to enjoy a woman without love.'

Henry, Sarah's husband, is also drawn fairly accurately from life, although he is made into a more pathetic figure. Where Harry Walston was tolerant but cognisant of Catherine's affairs (and did have occasional affairs himself), Henry is not so much tolerant as wilfully blind; so easy to deceive that he seems to Bendrix ‘almost a conniver at his wife's unfaithfulness'. Henry shares Harry's simple delight in his wife. Whenever Sarah walks into a room, Henry's face falls into ‘absurd lines of gentleness and affection' which irritate Bendrix by their blandness. And like Harry, Henry has long ceased to feel any physical desire for Sarah, but still comes to feel jealousy at the point when he becomes ‘worried and despairing' about his future, anxious that he will lose her companionship.