In the autumn of 1945 Janetta had written to me that she had taken a temporary job which sounded very much as though it was in the Baker Street SOE - not that one specified such things in letters. With a cruelly touching truth, she told me that her social life had greatly widened in scope. On my side I had been slow to realise that we had to get together quickly or things could go wrong. Places for Janetta and Nicolette on the Free-French Paris to Belgrade diplomatic-courier plane were holding good, so I got three weeks emergency leave to go home and fetch them.

I threw myself onto the air hitch-hiking circuit from Belgrade to London. All that I needed was a valid Movement Order plus know-how. I made one on UNRRA forms also covering the return to Belgrade of Janetta and Nicolette. The British Air Attaché added his RAF rubber stamp; with this I got to Vienna where I made friends with a French Pilot who was having language trouble in the RAF Control Tower. He thought the RAF were being nasty, but all they were trying to tell him was that there was a vast barrier of “Cunim” (horrible storm clouds) between Vienna and Paris. He could take-off on his own responsibility but was advised not to. The British were all grounded, but the RAF could not give orders to the Free French.

My Pilot said he had a date that night in Paris, "on-y-va?". I too had a date in London so my answer was "allons-y." I learnt later that this was incredibly rash; we did indeed have a very rough ride. Planes have been torn to pieces going through that sort of cloud. The other Paris passengers were a sad lot, all Frenchmen who had been found in Wehrmacht uniform. Some were Alsatian conscripts who had had no alternative; otherwise the Germans would have treated them as deserters. The others had more to explain. After a terrible buffetting we made it to Le Bourget where the French pilot fixed my next leg to Hendon before going on to his own date. I came to rely on the Free French, it all seemed a good augury for the way back en famille.

I knew that Janetta had moved the few hundred yards from our Park Road flat to the Sussex Place house we were planning to share with Cyril Connolly. It was in a Nash Terrace with its own gardens directly facing Regent's Park. It was an enchantment to see it because it was exactly the sort of London home of which I had always dreamed. Cyril was already installed on the piano nobile. Our daughter was very smiling and, no matter what she was doing, seemed consumed with pleasure. The whole place had a charm that made me realise what I had been missing. Janetta and I had corresponded about moving house and I had signed some papers to help buy the remainder of the Crown lease, but the real nature of the move had not yet sunk into my Balkan-oriented head.

There was certainly a welcome, but in it something was missing. Janetta said right away that she would come out to Belgrade to give it a try but that she did not think she should start by bringing our daughter. She was not at all convinced that our partnership could still work. She was courageously honest; suddenly we were both aghast at the ruin of it all. Somehow the house no longer seemed to be something that we had created together. The whole basis of our joint life lay in its free consent. Obligation had nothing to do with it. She said that only the value of the past had made her feel obliged to try to re-start with me; it became more and more obvious that her present life brought with it an impulsion in exactly the opposite sense. I knew that Janetta had never told me a lie, her honesty had always been total and it was one of my reasons for loving her.

It seems that only a few weeks before my getting back to London she had met someone who had become so important to her that only an act of self-blinding would allow me to count on her reactions continuing to be those which I had known so well. She was sad about this but there it was. He was no one I knew. He was an RAF ex-POW called Robert Kee.

The plain fact that my personal life at home had failed as rapidly, and as completely, as my working life overseas had succeeded was something that I had totally failed to anticipate - I had even been thinking that the one would enhance the other. In the past Janetta and I had never felt any need for self questioning, or for questioning each other. Our agreement had been automatic and natural. Which ever way we looked at things, and we were certainly very different, we had always ended up with a common accord until that one day when I, without consultation, had accepted Sir Victor Richardson's offer to send me overseas.

I have forgotten whether Sussex Place had three or four storeys, with the basement kitchen there were a lot of stairs to climb, but at least there was a phone on every floor. Later in that autumn day I picked up a phone and waited for dialing tone which did not always come quickly with the overworked war-time circuits. Silence, and then a voice asked "Are you still there?" The reply came "I won't ring-off." Then more silence followed by the gentle sound of breathing. I put the phone down. If these two people were communicating by their very silences, just as we ourselves had done at the beginning, I knew that my cause was lost. The value of our being together, the very essence of our happiness, was the total lack of constraint, the unity of purpose conceded in joy by two very different people. It was but the differences that remained. I was beaten by an overheard silence, by the loss of something infinitely precious, my part of which had gone. "Effectual whispers, whose still voice the soul itself more feels than hears." Since we had once been used to it only perfection would do. No word of mine could say as much as that silence. From that moment I knew that I had to go.

We had enjoyed the psychological equivalent of the perfect number: when you multiply one by two and then by three or when you add up one two and three together, you get the number six. This is an example of that relatively rare thing - the perfect number. Even fractional changes in two constituents of a perfect number may allow the numbers to add up right but when you start to multiply them the result is wrong. Perfection is easier to loose than is the merely good enough•; having had perfection one cannot make do with less. I had left but the need for one verification: I asked Janetta if I could meet Robert. I had two reasons: I did not want a faceless bogey as the explanation of the total breakdown of the most precious thing I had ever known•; nor would I have accepted this defeat, if, for some reason, she had fallen for a person whose inadequacy had conjured up in her a protective streak, a temporary obsession. I had to see him, to have a measure of his reality. When I went to see Robert Kee briefly the fault I found was in the fact of his existence. There was no consolation in doubting his strength as I had no fear for hers.

I did not want to be left, to come back and to find the note on the table, or just to come back knowing that Janetta and Nicolette had bolted that day for good. I learnt that Robert Kee was going to join them at Ham Spray so I told Janetta how hurting it would be to have something done to me, to be the subject of an imposed action. I asked if she would let me take her to Paddington; she understood exactly how I felt, so a day later, we all went to Paddington in a taxi and I took them to the Newbury platform. I had not reckoned on finding Robert Kee there; he certainly was upset on seeing me, reciprocally so was I. I did not stay to watch that train pull out from the platform. Back in Sussex Place I felt totally bereft; I was at the end of my resources. Long before the train could have arrived I phoned Ham Spray to speak to Frances but first I got Ralph Partridge. He made it aggressively clear that my call was unwelcome so I could but accept that to him I no longer qualified for any consideration - I had become a non-person. Frances Partridge sensibly took the phone from him. She spoke with sympathy and showed understanding of how I was placed. My own troubles apart I was agonised as I did not believe that Robert Kee had the necessary staying power. Frances said that she felt it really would work out for the best as we were so very different (which difference had been exactly one of the qualities that I had prized). She promised to send me photos of Nicolette and assured me that she and Ralph would always look after them both. Knowing this helped me, but there were to be many times in the future years when I would have dearly liked to have received even one of those promised photos. I had to conclude that any Ham Spray support for me as Janetta's partner had shrunk during my absence overseas, indeed it may never have been fully conceded. In the Bloomsbury background of Ralph and Frances there was this connoisseurship of the emotions, which approached vicarious participation; but one thing I did know was that Janetta and Nicolette would be safe at Ham Spray as their love for them both was real.

Years later, in one of her books, Frances confirmed that, on my leaving England for the Balkans I had indeed lost whatever support had previously been mine: "Both Ralph and I took enormously to Robert Kee and wondered whether he and Janetta would like each other. “That's the man for her,” Ralph said." Frances obviously shared this view, since she recorded her fear that Janetta might join me in Belgrade, by being "jockeyed into it by material things like the arrival of permits and passports." In terms of spectator-sports, this goes beyond watching the game. For them, naturally enough and in a way quite properly, the toleration of my existence must have been contingent on Janetta's pleasure. I had been both hurt and puzzled by the instant rejection and lack of sympathy shown by Ralph Partridge, by his total unhelpfulness and his sudden brutality on the phone. It was also profoundly disturbing to my vision of that couple that neither the fiercely pacifist Ralph Partridge, nor the wider minded Frances, showed any sympathy for my ambition to contribute to the making of a civilised peace under the authority of the UN. During my flying visit a few months earlier I had been confused when their former warm attitude towards me seemed to have given way to a more cautious tepidity. As time rolled on in silence I came to accept that, at its very best, I had little or no personal significance to either of them.

Today, in the perspective of elapsed time, I do see that I must have been absurdly sure of myself, far too pleased with the way I was going, in short insufferably self-confident. To those in Ham Spray, in that haven set in war-time rationed Britain, it had seemed stupidly presumptuous to propose taking a mother and a toddler daughter into the middle of the war-ravaged Balkans - "the horrors of a Belgrade winter" as Frances pictured it. In all logic so it may have seemed, but the good logic in which we had all been brought up was not that which applied in Jugoslavia. We, in UNRRA, lived within the magic circle of privilege conceded to those favoured by the regime in a Peoples’ Democracy. We lived in total bourgeois comfort. But the logic of those around Janetta suited their natural interest in keeping a person they loved close to them, rather than helping her to go far with someone to whom they no longer wished to concede their previous tolerance. On the very afternoon of her going, came an odd turn of the screw. The phone rang in Sussex Place and a male voice asked if it was Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit. I heard a brief laugh and, "Well, now you know what it feels like, I simply had to ring up to make sure that you really know what it is like to be left"•, I did not have time to ask the obvious question, the phone went on. "It's Humphry Slater, I've been waiting for this moment. I thought it would have come much sooner..." Then there was a moment's silence. I was astonished at the accuracy of his timing until I realised that my situation must have been obvious enough to everybody but myself.

Humphry and Janetta had been married briefly. He was a man of unrealised potential who had been at the Slade in the late 1920s. Later he wrote with more than promise. He too had been in the International Brigade and then had worked with Tom Wintringham, training the Home Guard. Our own decision not to marry had been very largely influenced by our separate experiences of the breakdown of our earlier marriages and of the horrid hurting formalities that had come with divorce. I was disinclined to give this caller whatever satisfaction he was looking for so I told him that he had been correctly informed, Janetta and I were no longer together but otherwise he was wrong. We had decided to separate in just the same spirit as that in which we had decided to come together. It was a not a bolting, but a decision which concerned the two us and no one else. He stopped jeering and spoke quietly. He gave me his phone number and address, suggesting that we meet like two civilized people when next I came to England which we did some years later. Once before in Spain I had seen Humphry Slater driving a liberated Rolls Royce, an aluminium bodied tourer firing only on some of its cylinders. This memory, even now, seems to me to constitute a paradigm; a splendid machine in poor repair giving but a fraction of its potential but still displaying the stamp of its earlier promise.

Cyril took me in hand; good claret is a great help but it is not a cure. He wrote into my copy of "Palinurus" the words of nine years before in Spain : "O passi graviora dabit deus huic quoque finem.” He said that if they were true in the cellars of that Madrid hotel they now applied with even more force to us both.

Hanka Poznanska, with whom I had worked in Paris at the start of the war, was by then well into her training analysis. She came round and reassured me that I had not been craven to have made Janetta's departure the easier, but had I tried to sabotage her going it would indeed have been unworthy. Giving vent to my frustration in destructive behaviour would have been a betrayal of the trust that we had always shared. Some fibres of the cord of understanding that bound Janetta and myself together have never broken and, years later, proved strong enough to bear weight as well as affection.

I am proud of the fact that we separated without a series of personal recriminations. The manner of the ending of our life together was worthy of the way it had been shared. It tells something of the goodness of those times and makes it easier to understand the values that we, in those touchingly different 1940s, held to be of fundamental importance.

Today owes those yesterdays a debt, without those yesterdays yuppydom might indeed have become the National face. In classing the events treated in these last pages as "a war-time affair" an author does put into question his powers of penetration. Cultural archaeology is notoriously difficult. Dredging through the years when Horizon was the lode star is harder for an author necessarily working from secondary and tertiary sources. We all know the epigrapher's problem: is that partially erased inscription an invocation proper to a Gnostic cult or is it a part of a domestic inventory? All this is what Nabakov has called "the probing of the aetiological secret of aleatory occurrences.”

When I arrived in London from Belgrade it was no longer possible to repair the breach and to restore the perfection of our joint life. So that partnership ended. I stood alone in the Sussex Place that we were to have shared with Cyril Connolly and in which I no longer had a place. I could see around me the basic material elements that in the past few years we had so happily drawn around us. Growing within me was an angst of implacable quality. Contemplating it brought no solution. To sit with it was to invite catastrophe. As I came to put myself on the road both Cyril and Hanka Poznanska, each in their separate way, gave me help that I shall never forget, she with her courageous Polish optimism laced with acute psychological insight, and he from his humane cynicism. Cyril, as I, was not convinced of Robert Kee's staying-power (rightly as it turned out), but we both knew this could bring no comfort to someone left behind by the side of the road. The warm support of these two utterly different friends, Hanka and Cyril, was especially precious; because of it I was able to come to terms with the loss and to accept it. Those others who sought me out were sympathetic in intent but all they had to say contributed to the same message: there was no way back.
I
lived "through the time when everything hurts.
When the space of the ripe loaded afternoon
Expands to a landscape of white heat frozen
And trees are weighted down with heads of stone
And green stares back where you stare alone
And walking eyes throw flinty comments
And the words which carry most knives are the blind
Phrases searching to be kind.

And they have fingers which accuse
You of the double way of shame.
At first you did not love enough
And afterwards you loved too much
And you lacked the confidence to choose
And you have only yourself to blame."

There was only one thing for it and that was to accept the totality of the loss and to face the future with the liberty of someone who has his bivouac on his back, whose base is where he stands. My previous existence was in bits so there was nothing to pick up. I went back to work as soon as possible. Once again I left with very little luggage; I might have tried to take a few possessions with me had I realised that I was never to live in England again.

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