The Love-Charm of Bombs (51 page)

 

Waugh described Catherine as ‘barefooted and mostly squatting on the floor. Fine big eyes and mouth, unaffected to the verge of insanity, unvain, no ostentation – simple friendliness and generosity and childish curiosity.' Her sister Belinda later said that Catherine was someone who people always felt compelled to look at:

 

She had a marvellous carriage, for one thing. She held her head high. She was dark-haired, sort of an auburn colour – and wonderful eyes and – short hair – and cheekbones that were fine cheekbones, rather widely spaced eyes, dark eyebrows, and she wore her clothes with great flair. She never showed that she was frightened of anything.

 

Her style, according to the art historian and director of the Tate Gallery John Rothenstein, who was a mutual friend of Catherine and Graham's, was that of ‘a Marie-Antoinette in elegant jeans or (according to the season) jodhpurs'. And Rothenstein described Catherine at this time as an intelligent woman bent on self-improvement. During the war, after remarking on the narrowness of Catherine's reading, he was challenged to produce a reading list. Once he had done so, Catherine read and reread her way through it. At this point, she was not religious. Rothenstein took her to mass occasionally and had to explain to her the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism. There had been signs, though, that she was attracted to Catholicism. Her intellectual and religious education had been furthered by a reading of Greene's novels, and she was now ready to continue her education with Graham himself.

 

Catherine Walston

 

Initially, Graham was impressed by Catherine's glamour and wealth, but assumed that she was too beautiful to love. ‘I had no idea whatever of falling in love with her,' Bendrix states of Sarah in
The End of the Affair
. ‘For one thing, she was beautiful, and beautiful women, especially if they are intelligent also, stir some deep feeling of inferiority in me.' Love, when it came, was the result of a journey home in a low-flying plane. Lunch finished at three o'clock; it would be eight o'clock by the time that Graham arrived back in Oxford by train. ‘Why not fly?' Catherine suggested. ‘I'll come over with you and fly back.' They drove to the local aerodrome and boarded a tiny plane. After a 45 minute flight over snowy countryside they landed in Kidlington, just outside Oxford.

Since childhood, Graham had been thrilled by the idea of flying. Aged seven, when asked to state his greatest aim in life for the school magazine, he had responded that it was to go up in an aeroplane. Now, flying in a private plane with a beautiful woman beside him, he succumbed to the erotic charge of the adventure and of her hair, blown against her face. ‘The act of creation', he wrote to Catherine the following September, ‘is awfully odd and inexplicable like falling in love. A lock of hair touches one's eyes in a plane with East Anglia under snow and one is in love.' Again and again, he came back to the plane journey as a moment of discovery. In April 1949 he told Catherine that he was experiencing the same kind of in-love feeling as after the plane ride to Oxford, as though he had never made love to her and longed instead to hold hands at a movie. Revisiting it a year later, he could not believe that the plane trip was not designed. And in 1955, writing a book called
110 Airports
, he regretted that he would have to omit the most important: Cambridge, snow on the ground and Catherine's hair blown across his nose.

If the moment of falling in love occurred on the plane journey in December 1946, then love itself developed during the April 1947 trip to Achill. Looking back in 1949, he wondered if they would have done more than begin without their time in Ireland. Achill had set a seal of time and place on their love. He would always recall Achill as a place where, removed from the luxury of Thriplow and the paraphernalia of their daily lives, he and Catherine could see each other clearly. He came back repeatedly to the simplicity of the cottage itself as a setting that enabled a shared unmasking of two people who were habitually masked; he by his reticence and shyness, she by the effervescence of her public persona and by the cushioning luxury of her usual settings.

Returning home, Graham missed Catherine intensely and became exhausted by the strain of lying simultaneously to both Vivien and Dorothy. Since Graham's lunch at Thriplow in December, Vivien had been coldly polite to Catherine and possessive and suspicious of Graham. At Christmas, Catherine had sent the Greenes a turkey as a present. This was a great luxury in an age of rationing, but Vivien, unwilling to accept charity from her husband's beautiful goddaughter, gave it away to the nuns. Dorothy, meanwhile, was more self-righteously demanding than Vivien. Soon after his return Graham reported to Catherine that Dorothy was complaining that he had changed in Ireland, although she still believed it was merely that he had come under the influence of a pious convert. He was dreading taking Dorothy on the long-promised holiday to Ireland, of all places, in the middle of May. He had been dreaming about Catherine (‘woke up blissfully happy. You had been with me very vividly saying, “I like your sexy smell” – and of course I had a sexy smell! It had been one of those nights!') and hated the idea of seeing Dublin with someone else.

Greene's visit to Ireland with Dorothy in May coincided with the first of Henry Yorke's post-war trips to Ireland. Greene's mood was not dissimilar from Yorke's; this was a holiday dominated by drink and emotional detachment. Writing to Catherine, Graham complained that this was both a second-rate Ireland and a second-rate squalor. He and Dorothy had lunched at Jammet's and then escaped to the countryside. Before Graham's departure, Catherine had wished jealously that both he and Dorothy would be horribly ill while they were away and now her wish had come true: he had sweated all night with a bad fever and a splitting headache. Despite this, much sense had been talked between coughs; Graham was trying to persuade Dorothy to move on away from him. He asked Catherine if he could have a week at Thriplow on his return to recuperate from his so-called ‘holiday' and finish his novel.

Before he could retreat to Thriplow, Graham was hosting a party for the French writer François Mauriac, who was receiving an honorary degree in Oxford. It was a large literary party for which Graham provided the drinks and Vivien was expected to supply the food. For Graham, it was partly a chance to see Catherine, and to introduce her to literary friends such as Rosamond Lehmann. For Vivien, who found it impossible to supply snacks given the stringencies of rationing (they had only two ounces of butter a week), the task was unmanageable. And the difficulty of preparing for the party was compounded by the humiliation she suffered during the party itself, at which Graham was too focused on Catherine to introduce his wife to any of the guests. Vivien later described how Graham led Catherine into the garden where he sat talking to her in front of the French windows. Vivien, who did not know anyone at the party, went to ask him to come and help pouring drinks. ‘I'm not the butler,' he retorted.

The next day, Vivien obtained her revenge and forbade Graham from spending the following week at Thriplow. Graham persuaded her to let him go from Friday until Tuesday on condition that he spent all his future weekends in Oxford. He complained to Catherine that he felt like a cornered rat; he did not want to live permanently in handcuffs. Rather melodramatically, he was wondering about killing himself, and asked rhetorically if the ban on suicide only lasted for the first three years of an insurance policy.

On Catherine's side, there was no need for negotiation or subterfuge. Like Graham and Vivien, Catherine and Harry Walston had had no sex for many years. But unlike the Greenes, the Walstons had come to an ‘arrangement', allowing both of them (but more often Catherine) to have lovers. This left them happier than they had been to start off with. Initially, Catherine had married Harry without love. On the day of her wedding, Catherine admitted to her sister Bonte that she was only marrying Harry to escape their family and small-town America. In 1969 she told her sister Belinda that at the time she married Harry she had decided that ‘if I found anyone I liked better, I would leave Harry and marry X'. But she added that although their ‘sex life broke down before it hardly got started', this did not matter as they had become ‘very loving friends, almost twins – brother and sister' and she could now ‘not live without him, without his compassion, his fondness, justice, humour, willingness'. Certainly, Harry allowed Catherine a tremendous amount of freedom. Their friend Lady Melchett later reported to Greene's biographer that even with Harry in the house Catherine would say things like, ‘You know, Graham and I were in bed all day and all night – that's why I'm feeling a bit jaded.'

Graham Greene spent the spring of 1947 longing to return to Ireland and specifically to the peace it had brought him. He was infuriated with both Vivien and Dorothy. The exhaustion that can come of lying to two women who are no longer loved finds its way into
The Heart of the Matter
, which he finished on 11 June, convinced that only the final third, which he had written since the first trip to Achill, was good. Here he observes that it is better to avoid lying to two people if possible, but that it is tempting to lie out of pity. Scobie faces the pain that inevitably shadows any human relationship and is saddened as he sees himself coming to feel the same kind of intense pity for his mistress as he feels for his wife, knowing from experience how pity always remains after love and passion have died.

Scobie, like Greene, has spent his life dreaming of peace. Peace seems to him the most beautiful word there is. ‘My peace I give you, my peace I leave with you.' But with his wife and mistress, Scobie fails to find any sort of lasting peace. In the end he commits suicide, submitting himself to an eternity of restlessness in order to provide the women at least with the peace he lacks. Graham, unlike Scobie, had been given another chance. He had found with Catherine the peace that he had failed to find with Vivien or Dorothy. In August he told her that before she appeared he used to have strangely abstract dreams of peace (like Scobie's dream about the moon) but that now he dreamt about her instead. Two days later, he defined the difference between peacefulness (which he experienced with Dorothy) and peace (which he experienced with Catherine). The previous day with Dorothy had been peaceful, but this was simply a negative state, free from scenes and active unhappiness. Peace, by contrast, was positive, and experiences like being in love and making love which were not in themselves peaceful could still bring peace.

On 27 June, Catherine returned to Achill, and Graham wrote her a plangent letter while she was on her way there. ‘You are in the air, Caffrin, and I'm – very much – on the earth.' He reminded her that he loved her, missed her (‘your voice saying “good morning, Graham” at tea time') and wanted her, returning lovingly to his memories of shared domesticity in Achill by way of involving her in their love. He wanted to be in her cottage, filling the turf bucket, listening to the clank of her washing up as he worked, or helping her to make lunch. He was thirsty for orange juice at 3 in the morning and longed to see her nursing the fire in her pyjama top.

Two days later, after a weekend of being dragged around country houses by Vivien, he wrote despairingly to Catherine that he was missing her obsessively and was learning to hate beautiful houses and beautiful furniture. He was desperate for a few days of happiness and therefore was going to set about pursuing her to Ireland, where he could finish the film script that would become
The Fallen Idol
. He wanted to kiss her, touch her and make love to her; he was longing just to sit next to her in the car. Even mass felt dead and boring without the awareness of her shoulder half an inch from his. He was not a proper Catholic away from her.

The next day he was already making desperate attempts to find transport to Ireland but was finding it difficult. He had received a letter from Catherine, and was pleased that she was missing him and that Achill was filled with memories of him for her as well. Luckily, he was writing
The Fallen Idol
for Alexander Korda, the film mogul who would go on to produce
The Third Man
. Thanks to Korda's influence Graham managed to procure a seat in an American Overseas Airlines plane to Shannon Airport, arriving on 10 July. He wrote to announce the news to Catherine, bubbling with extravagant enthusiasm. Would he really see her there? And where would they spend the night? He would be happy in sleeping bags on a turf field. Graham spent the following week counting down the days and found that he was too excited to read anything except poetry. He wished that they could escape to Romania and live alone together for months or years until they were tired of each other.