The Love-Charm of Bombs (25 page)

 

Charles Ritchie

 

Charles was six years younger than Elizabeth, and at once her junior in youthful irresponsibility and her senior in cynicism. A Canadian diplomat, he had been posted to London in January 1939 and was treating the commission as a holiday. A few months before war was declared he was yearning either for a new mistress or for the chance to risk his life in an aeroplane stunt. In fact his war would be pretty much risk-free, but it did bring a succession of mistresses. ‘Wartime London was a forcing ground for love and friendship,' he wrote in a subsequent introduction to his diaries; ‘for experiments and amusements snatched under pressure'. In January 1941, a month before he met Elizabeth at the christening, he listed his ‘symptoms of sexual happiness' in his diary: ‘I am temporarily cured of my mania for seeing things in a straight line'; ‘Time no longer seems to be slipping away from me'. The ballerina who was the object of this happiness was about to depart on tour and he was already looking forward to ‘early and varied infidelities' during her absence.

A month after meeting Elizabeth, Charles complained that he was sick of his ‘present hectic life – the work, the miscellaneous love affairs and the mixed drinks', yearning only for Victorian evenings in the company of a wife and adoring daughters in a small provincial town. A bald patch was appearing on his head, marriage was hovering on the horizon as the only dignified course, but still he squeezed the last drops of pleasure out of his final months of youth. In May 1941, looking back on the extraordinary feeling of happiness and completeness he had experienced during the Blitz, he had a premonition that it must mean that he had gone as far as he could go and that retribution must follow. A week later, emerging once again from the bed of his ballerina, he observed that when he died they would find ‘some woman's name written on my heart – I do not know myself whose it will be!' That summer, retribution came in the form of love; from now on, adolescent escapism would always be tinged with guilt. And it became increasingly clear that the name written on his heart would be that of Elizabeth Bowen.

For Elizabeth and Charles, the unreal climate of the summer of 1941 was the ideal climate for love. ‘We go,' Charles wrote, ‘from one cloudless, high-summer day to another in a kind of daze. The parks are full of soldiers and girls in summer dresses. It is difficult to get a table in a restaurant. My friends indulge their love affairs and their vendettas.' For Elizabeth at least, love was immediate and consuming. In a passage which she later excised from the first draft of
The Heat of the Day
, she described the dawning of love.

 

It was not that she had been taken by surprise. To find oneself fallen into love is, however surprisingly, not surprising: in this state culminates, with a commanding calm, some suspended expectation of the whole being. It was, more, that it seemed inconceivable to be in love now.

 

Love, once acknowledged, brought the recognition that it had been developing for months. Elizabeth accepted love's vulnerability fearlessly; Charles allowed himself to be entranced by a woman he frequently characterised as a witch; together they drifted, dazed and absorbed, from day to day.

In early September, on one of the last, borrowed days of summer, they visited the rose garden in Regent's Park. They had been talking about going to see the roses for days, but Charles found it hard to escape the office before nightfall and it began to seem as if they would not see them together. Then, spontaneously, Elizabeth telephoned to say that if they did not go it would be too late, as the blooms were almost over. So he put away the Foreign Office boxes in the safe, locked up the files and took a taxi to Regent's Park. This was a perfect moment outside time that both would later see as marking the blooming of their happiness. The rose, flowering delicately and luxuriously in the midst of war, came to be a leitmotif of their love. So much so that Charles later added an extended account of the scene to his diary when he edited it for publication after Elizabeth's death:

 

As we walked together I seemed to see the flowers through the lens of her sensibility. The whole scene, the misty river, the Regency villas with their walled gardens and damp lawns, and the late September afternoon weather blended into a dream – a dream in which these were all symbols soaked with a mysterious associative power – Regent's Park – a landscape of love. A black swan floating downstream in the evening light – the dark purplish-red roses whose petals already lay scattered – the deserted Nash house with its flaking stucco colonnade and overgrown gardens – all were symbols speaking a language which by some miracle we could understand together.

 

Queen Mary's rose garden, Regent's Park, 1938, photographed by H. F. Davis

 

Both Elizabeth and Charles later memorialised this lull in the war in London as an era of unbroken mutual love. The roses are recreated at the opening of
The Heat of the Day
where, on just such a perfect September evening, ‘great globular roses, today at the height of their second blooming, burned more as the sun descended, dazzling the lake'. In 1950 Elizabeth wrote to Charles regretting that they had not found the time to walk in the park together on his last visit to London.

 

A particular gentle tract of our happiness belongs to it – walks after lunch, walks when we were coming back here to this house for tea. So much so that the park has become you for me.

 

In 1961, lunching with Elizabeth off whisky and sardine sandwiches at her hotel in New York, Charles recalled that twenty years ago they used to lunch off sardine sandwiches at Clarence Terrace in the early days when she lay stretched on the hard narrow Regency sofa in her little upstairs drawing room.

Looking back, Elizabeth and Charles yearned wistfully for the early, unconscious days of their love affair. Elizabeth Bowen pays tribute to this gentle entwinement in an early chapter of
The Heat of the Day
. Here she describes the genesis of love as more than a dream:

 

More, it was a sort of growing, smiling regard, a happiness of which it seemed that the equilibrium became every day surer. The discovery together, for the first time, of life was serious, but very much more than serious, illuminating; there was an element of awe. Miraculously, unhindered, the plan of love had gone on unfolding itself.

 

Stella and Robert both start to feel that they are only fully alive in each other's presence. Though singly ‘each of them might, must, exist, decide, act; all things done alone came to be no more than simulacra of behaviour: they waited to live again till they were together, then took living up from where they had left it off.' Together, they acquire a doubled awareness, an interlocking feeling, which intensifies everything around them so that all they see, know or tell one another is ‘woven into the continuous narrative of love'. They do not tell one another everything, though: ‘Every love has a poetic relevance of its own; each love brings to light only what is to it relevant. Outside lies the junk-yard of what does not matter.'

Among the irrelevancies which Elizabeth Bowen left out were the details of her day-to-day life with her husband, Alan Cameron. Charles and Alan were acquainted. They crossed paths at parties and, from time to time, in Elizabeth's own drawing room. Later in the war Charles came to stay with Elizabeth and Alan while he recovered from flu; one December the three of them ate their Christmas lunch together at Clarence Terrace. Nonetheless, the poetic relevance of both the marriage and the affair each excluded the other, and both men tolerated the situation. The Cameron marriage was based on companionship rather than sexual attraction, and for ten years Alan had accepted the existence of Elizabeth's lovers. For his part, Charles was intent on marriage to a younger and more pliable woman than Elizabeth. ‘My fancy turns more and more to marrying and settling to a routine life of small pleasures,' he announced in May 1942, observing again the bald spot beginning on the back of his head.

 

Alan Cameron,
c
. 1940

 

Elizabeth had married Alan Cameron in 1923 after a brief courtship involving long country walks and literary discussions. She was twenty-four and eager to embark on adult life. ‘I and my friends all intended to marry early,' she stated in a short autobiography she wrote in 1972, ‘partly because this appeared an achievement or way of making one's mark, also from a feeling it would be difficult to settle to anything else until this was done. (Like passing School Certificate.)' Although Alan was only six years older than Elizabeth, he was a war veteran and a civil servant with a public role, and she looked up to him as a guiding adult. ‘Do you realise how – in the worst sense –
young
I am?' she wrote to him five months before they married. ‘You are a real person who has come in contact with real things, and I've lived altogether inside myself, all my experiences have been subjective.' She was aware of the part played by invention in her love of him. ‘My love of you seems very childish – I mean sexless and imaginative'; ‘I have only got to know you from a succession of glimpses, like a person walking parallel with one through a wood'.

Elizabeth's love for Alan remained sexless, though not childish. She was still a virgin when she began her affair with the literary critic Humphry House in 1933. ‘Why, Elizabeth,' he asked her a year later,

 

did you not tell me when we first slept together that you were a virgin? I thought, you had some malformation: for you said only: ‘I am as difficult as a virgin.' I could not know you were one: and had I known, with what more tender slowness I would have come to you, and how much less gloom would have sat across that breakfast tray!

 

But although Alan did not enable Elizabeth to mature sexually, he did help her to grow up. Through him, she became an adult herself. He equipped her with new clothes and shoes, grooming her and endowing her with confidence. She remained dependent on him to sustain her as both a woman and a writer. To many of Elizabeth's literary friends, Alan seemed an odd choice of husband. Peter Quennell described him as striking an unwittingly discordant note; his ‘temperament and tastes were those of a well-educated civil servant'. May Sarton initially found Alan not at all the man she might have imagined as Elizabeth's husband: ‘He was quite stout, had a rather Blimpish look, a red face and walrus mustache, and spoke in a high voice, near falsetto.'