The Birthday Boys
Page 17
It was later that night that I asked Bill if a man without feet could ride to hounds, and Scott ordered him to give me the brandy.
Birdie says we’ve walked, there and back, over 1500 miles, or will have done once we reach Cape Evans. We’re now two marches from One Ton Camp, wherever that is, where Cherry and the dogs will be waiting for us.
I no longer care about distances or arrivals. I’ve passed the point when I can visualise anyone waiting in the drive, not unless they’re carrying a bedstead. All I long for is sleep. Yesterday Birdie got it in the neck for saying we’d gone too far east. As navigator he’s supposed to know where we’re going. It must be a dreadful bind to be responsible for direction. If it was left to me I’d stagger into the moon. The only woman I’ve ever loved is my mother. This is in response to Bill blethering on last night about his Oriana, who is apparently in accord with his soul. We have only his word for it.
I think it’s my birthday tomorrow. Last night I showed Bill my left foot. He blenched. Scott saw it too.
‘It’s all up for me, isn’t it? I asked. ‘How will it finish? I shouldn’t want to end screaming.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Bill, ‘you’ll pull through.’
‘Stop it,’ Scott shouted, ‘tell him the truth.’
Poor old Bill pulled a face. One could tell he wanted death to come like a thief in the night.
‘I want the morphia,’ I said. I knew we had thirty tablets apiece.
‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s against my principles.’
‘I order you to hand them over, Bill,’ Scott said. ‘I order you to give every man the means to choose his own time to die.’
There was such a struggle over it that I lost heart. I lay in my bag, hands, feet, nose, hip, rotting to hell. Dozing, I plodded towards the Pole again, towards that blue dish atop the cairn. This time I saw dog prints in the snow.
Bill gave me the morphia, five tablets washed down with tea.
‘Pray God I won’t wake in the morning,’ I said, and sleepily shook hands with Birdie.
What dreams I had! I think the approach of death is possibly heralded by a firework display of days gone by. My mother came to me, bossy, competent, convinced she could nurse my dead feet into life. ‘No, Mother,’ I said, ‘they’ve gone beyond recall.’
And then she embraced me, and I thought it was her tears that rolled down my cheeks until the pain in my legs jerked me into consciousness, and I realised it was my own eyes that spilled with grief.
I could hear Birdie snoring. There was a little chink of daylight poking through the canvas above Bill’s head. In that moment before I struggled upright it came to me that my greatest sin had been that of idleness. I had wasted my days.
Birdie woke when I struggled out of my bag. I put my finger to my lips, enjoining silence. I wanted to kiss him good-bye, but I was too shy.
‘I’m just going outside,’ I said, ‘and may be some time.’
There was a blizzard blowing. I was in my stocking-feet, yet I didn’t feel the cold. I had only struggled a few yards, the snow driving against me, when I heard voices. I waved my hand in front of me, as though I was wiping a mirror, and then I saw Boy Charger, skittering backwards and forwards in the drift.
‘Be so good as to restrain him, Mr Brown,’ a voice said.
‘I’m holding back the dawn,’ said Mr Brown. ‘Captain Oates approaches.’
I only had to crawl a few yards; the pelting snow rained down like music.
‘Happy Birthday,’ sang the man holding the bridle. And oh, how warm it was.
A Biography of Dame Beryl Bainbridge
Dame Beryl Bainbridge is regarded as one of the greatest and most prolific British novelists of her generation. Consistently praised by critics, she was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize five times, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the W. H. Smith Literary Award, and twice won the Whitbread Award for Novel of the Year.
Bainbridge was born in Liverpool in 1932 to Richard Bainbridge and Winifred, née Baines. Her father acquired a respectable income as a salesman but went bankrupt as a result of the 1929 stock market crash. Later in life, she reflected on her turbulent childhood through her writing as a cathartic release. She often said she wrote to make sense of her own youth.
Despite financial pressures, the Bainbridges sent their children to fee-paying schools. Beryl attended the Merchant Taylors’ girls’ school, and had lessons in German, elocution, music, and tap-dancing. At the age of fourteen, she was expelled, cited as a “corrupting moral influence” after her mother found a dirty limerick among her school things. She then attended the Cone-Ripman School at Tring, Hertfordshire, but left at age sixteen, never earning any formal educational degrees.
She went on to work as an assistant stage manager at the Playhouse Theatre in Liverpool, which would become the basis for one of her Booker-nominated novels, An Awfully Big Adventure, a disturbing story about a teenage girl working on a production of Peter Pan. She successfully worked as an actress both before and after her time at the playhouse. As a child, she acted in BBC Radio’s Children’s Hour, and before the birth of her first child, she appeared on the soap opera Coronation Street on Granada Television.
While at the playhouse, Bainbridge met Austin Davies, an artist and set painter. They married in 1954 and had two children together, Aaron and Jojo. They divorced in 1959, and she then moved to London. There, she began a relationship with the writer Alan Sharp, with whom she had a daughter, Rudi. Sharp left Bainbridge at the time of Rudi’s birth.
In 1957, she submitted her novel, Harriet Said, then titled The Summer of the Tsar, to several publishers. They all rejected the manuscript, citing its controversial content—the story of two cruel and murderous teenage girls. She then published two other novels, A Weekend with Claude and Another Part of the Wood. Her real success, however, came when she befriended Anna Haycraft, an editor, writer, and the wife of Colin Haycraft, owner of the Gerald Duckworth publishing house. This friendship marked a major turning point in her writing career. Anna loved Harriet Said, and Gerald Duckworth published it in 1972 to critical acclaim, establishing Bainbridge as a fresh voice on the British literary scene.
After the success of Harriet Said, the Haycrafts put Bainbridge on retainer and found her a clerical job within the company. During her time working for the Haycrafts, Bainbridge wrote several novels, all positively received by critics, some of which were adapted into films—An Awfully Big Adventure, Sweet William, and The Dressmaker.
Bainbridge’s earlier novels were often influenced by her past. The characters from The Dressmaker were based on her aunts, and A Quiet Life drew from her relationship as teenager with a German prisoner of war. Her 1974 novel, The Bottle Factory Outing, was inspired by her real experience working part-time in a bottle-labeling factory.
In 1978, Bainbridge felt she had exhausted her own life as a source of material and turned to history for inspiration, beginning a new era in her career. She discovered a diary entry of Adolf Hitler’s sister-in-law and based her first historical novel, Young Adolf, on Hitler’s supposed vacation to Great Britain. She wrote other books in this genre—Watson’s Apology, Every Man for Himself, The Birthday Boys, Master Georgie, and According to Queeney. At the time of her death, she was writing The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress, about a young woman visiting the United States during Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, which was published posthumously.
In addition to her work as a novelist, Bainbridge was also a journalist, frequently contributing to the Evening Standard, and she was the regular theater critic at the Oldie.
Over the course of her career, Bainbridge became a literary celebrity, and was named a Dame of the British Empire in 2000. She remained in the same home on Albert Street in Camden until her death in 2010.
Beryl Bainbridge with her mother, Winifred, in Formby, Liverpool, circa 1938.
Bainbridge with her husband at the time, Austin Davies, on their wedding day in Liverpool, England, 1954.
Bainbridge with her friend Washington Harold in California, 1962.
Bainbridge at her home in Albert Street with Davies and their two daughters, Jojo and Rudi, in 1969.
Bainbridge in the back garden of her home in Camden Town in the 1980s.
Bainbridge speaking at a literary event in the early 1980s.
Bainbridge in a bath chair while spending time with her daughter and grandchildren outside her home in NW1, circa 1988.
Bainbridge in her home in NW1, smoking next to a mannequin of Neville Chamberlain, circa 1992.
Bainbridge in her home at NW1, circa 1992.
Bainbridge with Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace, where she was damed, in 2001.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1991 by Beryl Bainbridge
Cover design by Drew Padrutt
ISBN: 978-1-5040-3942-0
This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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