More Elizabeth Bowen: British literary conservatism and National Socialism

As far as I am concerned, The Heat of the Day poses a revealing interpretative challenge: what is its attitude to Robert's treachery. The novel tells a story of a woman (Stella) who is in love with an army officer (Robert) whom, as it turns out, is spying for Nazi Germany. The critics read the novel as rejecting this betrayal, almost as a knee-jerk reaction. But that's less clear to me, especially after having read Bridehead Revisted for class last week, which explicitly endorses the politics of appeasement and well into the war too. Robert's defense of his actions to Stella is not repudiated by her, and while there's no real question of actual endorsement of his giving secrets to the Germans, there is a question about whether his betrayal is actually repudiated.
In the end it may be that the novel points towards an argument that the social conditions for its own literary/ethical project (late Bloomsbury modernism with a Conservative twist) require a polity closer to National Socialism than to liberal democracy.
Of course, in France, Vichyism was regarded by many (including for a while people like Simone Weil) as necessary to protect Frenchness itself. And there were English versions of this.
I need to read Angus Calder on WW2.