Beryl Bainbridge

by Brendan King

  The rest of Austin’s grand tour passed without any further major rows, but it was clear there were considerable differences between them in temperament and outlook. In personal and intellectual terms Austin felt that the tour had been an immense success, and after his return at the end of October he would write in his journal that it had broadened his attitude to painting and provided a ‘terrific stimulus’20 to his art. It had also confirmed him in his desire to be an artist and not to let anything stand in the way of his art. When he finally arrived back in Liverpool he had more or less made up his mind that it would be a mistake to tie himself down or let himself be distracted from his true calling: his art had to come first.

  Beryl’s expectation that once Austin returned their relationship would continue as it had before was not an unreasonable one. Even if his letters seemed to spend more time than she would have liked on the fascinations of European life and its culture – not to mention its women – there were enough declaratory statements to give her confidence in his attachment to her: ‘It is essential that we should be together though, whether in Liverpool, with you working outside Liverpool somewhere in a rep, or whether in London, where we could work together,’21 he wrote to her from Venice. ‘Sweetie . . . don’t stop thinking about me,’ he urged a few days later from Florence, ‘this waiting till I see you aches all over when I think about it, which is very often, very often. The Italian women are absolutely beautiful, but none in the way you are. I just have to think of you and they don’t interest me in the least . . . everybody suffers when compared to you.’22

  But if she had feared all along that Austin’s desire for her, his love for her, was not enough, even she could not have anticipated the inflexibility with which Austin would pursue his goal once he had set his mind on it. After considering the situation, he saw no way in which to combine a romantic attachment with the discipline and dedication required of an artist, and shortly after his return he abruptly ended the relationship.

  Beryl was shattered, the news bringing on a kind of emotional breakdown that was marked by physical symptoms. She was ill for months afterwards, and as if her body was attempting to express the loss symbolically her periods stopped for three months – initially prompting fears she might be pregnant: ‘The psychological effect of our parting’, Austin explained in his diary, ‘has been very great, so great that this function has ceased.’23 She confided in Ken that she was ‘worried stiff’ about the possibility, and there followed a whole week of waiting, with Beryl bursting into tears and crying, ‘I’m late, I’m late.’24

  Beryl’s incomprehension at Austin’s decision to break with her was, ironically, matched by his own:

  What came upon me that I had to finish all relationships with her? And after we had planned our whole life together? Every movement of her mind and body became so familiar and harmonious that now she is gone I feel the lack, a great hollow emptiness which finds expression and relief only in my drawing and painting, so that I must work and work. That such a thing should happen is beyond my comprehension, we were very much in love for nearly two years, for two years we were part of each other mentally and physically, she gave me everything, understanding, encouragement and herself. Then one day she asked ‘Are you still in love with me?’ and I could not answer ‘yes’. Why! Why!25

  Austin’s intellectual theorizing about his role as an artist, his feeling that he needed to be free of responsibilities in order to pursue his painting, was undoubtedly a screen for other less lofty, less palatable reasons for their break-up, a way of shifting blame from his own failings and weaknesses. In truth, maintaining a relationship with Beryl demanded too much of his emotional energy. It was easier to put the temperamental differences between them down to her immaturity:

  She was such a child, eighteen just when I met her, with all the wisdom of the mature and all the mannerisms and idealisms of the immature. She would start and grasp my arm to point out a beautiful face or a running child, she would brood deeply on the problems of life, and would rapidly become confused, frightened, even desperate, when confronted by the horrors people make of their lives.26

  Austin undoubtedly felt a deep affection for her, loved her as a person even, but his upbringing had left him feeling insecure about emotional commitment and driven by an overriding need to prove himself, to succeed. Art took the place of a religion for him, and as such it mattered more than the feelings and the happiness of ordinary human beings – himself included.

  For Beryl it was a psychological blow, something she never got over emotionally. His rejection of her undoubtedly fed into her subconscious feeling of rejection by her father, and would establish a seemingly inevitable pattern of failure that would play out in her subsequent relationships. Even towards the end of her life the memory of it left her feeling depressed: ‘It’s rejection that gets one down. Being rejected always. I felt that happened an awful lot to me. By men anyway. Always rejected by men.’27

  Over the course of the 1951 season, tensions had been building up behind the scenes at the Playhouse. A number of the actors, including Ken, had become increasingly dissatisfied with Gerald Cross’s behaviour and what they saw as his unprofessionalism. Distracted as he was by events in his private life, they felt he’d lost focus on his work at the Playhouse and they complained that he wasn’t giving them sufficient direction, that rehearsals were lax. To make matters worse, he was going through one of his periodic bouts of heavy drinking. Hugh Goldie had been aware of the problem. After his departure from the Playhouse the previous year, he asked Beryl in an aside how Gerald was coping and whether he was ‘off the booze’.28 In October things came to a head. Gerald Cross resigned – ‘to resume his acting career’,29 as the Liverpool Daily Post euphemistically put it – and Willard Stoker was appointed as the new director.

  These changes at the Playhouse would, indirectly, lead to both Ken and Beryl leaving the company in the New Year. Although Ken regarded Stoker as a better director than Gerald Cross, he disliked working under him and was beginning to feel disillusioned with his roles at the Playhouse. One of the other actresses in the company, Sally Latimer, had recently joined Caryl Jenner’s Mobile Theatre, and her suggestion that if Ken joined too he would have a chance to play some bigger parts sounded tempting. It would mean moving down to London before the company embarked on a tour of Strindberg’s Easter.

  The decisive factor, though, was Beryl. Following her break with Austin, Ken’s feelings for her, held in abeyance for so long, had begun to resurface. Beryl, realizing he was falling in love with her, and not wanting him to raise his hopes or to get hurt, wrote Ken a long letter over the Christmas period, echoing what she had told him a number of times already – that though she loved him as a person she wasn’t in love with him, and that despite Austin’s rejection of her she was still attached to him.

  Seeing little to keep him in Liverpool any longer, Ken decided to take up Caryl Jenner’s offer and move to London. In the New Year he wrote to Beryl explaining his feelings for her as openly as she had hers about him:

  My darling girl, during the past month I have seen you every day, & at times virtually all the day, and it wasn’t until today that I began to feel that you felt we were seeing just a little too much of one another, & that I should take the opportunity to have the evening to myself. But two hours away from you was more than I could bear, my whole being longed for you until eventually I could stand it no longer & hared off to Exchange Station. The rest you know – or do you know? I do love you Beryl, please believe me, as far as I’m concerned there is no one else but you.30

  He understood that the ‘fire’ of her love for Austin hadn’t ‘quite gone out & continues to burn sometimes’, but he was willing to give it time: ‘I can do nothing except to wait with you for another season to pass. This will doubtless prove difficult since the future won’t find me perpetually by your side as it does now. Yet I feel if there is anything at all between us – & please God I don’t deceive myself in thinking there is –
we will weather this storm as we have weathered others, & even yet may find a place in the sun . . . With all my love, Ken.’

  Before he left for London at the end of the month, he met up with Beryl for a last concert together at the Philharmonic Hall. As chance would have it Austin was also there, and when she saw him it brought on an anxiety attack and she had to go and be sick in the Ladies. Her gloomy state of mind is reflected in her response to the music, which she scribbled on Ken’s programme while the music was playing: ‘The slow tinkling sound of the harpsichord, and the deep crucified chello, and the steady singing of the violins, and everyone here is listening with half their minds or all their minds, and outside it is very cold, oh so cold.’31

  At some point over the New Year period, Beryl decided that she too should leave Liverpool. She was still suffering emotionally and physically from Austin’s rejection, and being in such close proximity to him didn’t help matters, as the incident at the Philharmonic painfully demonstrated. Not only that, living at home was becoming increasingly stressful. Beryl’s fraught emotional state was hardly conducive to a harmonious domestic life. Confronted by her parents’ disapproval not just of Austin but of her conduct with him – they’d probably gathered from the pregnancy scare, if not before, that she’d been sleeping with him – things went from bad to worse.

  After talking with Ken about the possibility of coming down to London – an idea that he positively encouraged – Beryl decided to quit the Playhouse when the production she was currently working in, James Montgomery’s comic romp Nothing but the Truth, came to an end.

  In London, Ken fixed himself up in temporary accommodation with a fellow student from his days at Bristol theatre school, Peter Nichols. Nichols, who hadn’t yet become a fully fledged playwright, was still trying to find work as an actor, but with only sporadic success. As Nichols was already sharing the flat with two other actors, Ken had to make do sleeping on a camp bed in the living room, though the flat itself in Cranley Gardens, South Kensington, was conveniently placed and gave him a base from which to work.

  He wrote urging Beryl to come down as quickly as possible; he was longing to see her and he had already been making enquiries for possible flats. After asking about her work plans, he broached the subject that was really concerning him: ‘Have you seen Austin since I left? Please make your goodbye to him brief B. I don’t want you to come down here feeling unhappy & full of regrets.’32

  In fact Beryl had gone to see Austin and unsurprisingly, given his contradictory feelings about her, things had got out of control again, as his account of her visit makes clear:

  She came to say goodbye as a friend, she was not upset, she had got over that long before, but we were talking when I felt a trembling desire to hold her. I asked if I might kiss her goodbye, of course that was fatal, for as soon as we touched the memory of all those nights together, of how we suited each other, of how we had delighted in caressing each other’s body, came rushing back and we stood together overwhelmed by our desire, clutching each other with joyous panting breath.

  It was inevitable after that, it was arranged that she should come to me the following night, for it was too late then and besides we had not the ‘necessary’.

  It was a delightful, wonderful evening that we spent together . . . nobody I think will ever be so pleasant, so harmonious to talk to, to make love to as my Beryl. I often think, when I allow the subject to arise in my mind, that I am still in love with her and that I might one day marry her, but then I think of the responsibilities and obligations that marriage implies, and I rejoyce that I am free to walk alone, to think alone, to be alone. Perhaps when I have worked for another ten or fifteen years and produced the quantity of work that I must produce, then perhaps I shall marry, it might easily be Beryl if she is still there.33

  Needless to say, such fancies were completely unrealistic, and took little account of Beryl’s feelings. In many respects Austin was indulging in the stereotypical male fantasy, wanting all the sensual benefits of a relationship, but none of the emotional complications or responsibilities. But Beryl, as she would so often be, was her own worst enemy. She knew how damaging Austin’s indecisiveness was to her state of mind, but she couldn’t stop herself from returning to see him the following night.

  Answering Ken’s letter, she disingenuously told him only that Austin had taken her back to his studio and ‘tried to make love to her again’.34 She didn’t mention that Austin’s supposed seduction attempt had in fact been a voluntary, prearranged meeting, necessitated by the lack of a condom. Ken was understandably hurt by Beryl’s account, which ‘cut like a knife’, and he urged her not to delay her plans to come down to London: ‘Why did he do this Beryl? Why did he want to go & open a wound which had almost healed? Your brief note leaves all my questions unanswered & when you say you are very unhappy, but not because of him, I know that you are wrong. Your whole life is not in a mess, love – obviously a part of it is at the moment – pray God you’ll be happier when you come to London. Make speed down here. I want to see you more than ever now.’35

  In the meantime Ken’s flat-hunting had paid off. After hearing about a vacant bedsit a ten-minute walk from where he was staying in Cranley Gardens, he wrote to Beryl to tell her he’d found somewhere suitable.36 This sparsely furnished bedsit at 18 Redcliffe Road, SW3, would be her home for the next four months.

  NINE

  London

  During the last three years I have achieved almost nothing, I am inarticulate and intolerant and full of sin. I use sin because it is a catholic word, and my sins are catholic minded. I have been in several places living in a tiny room behind the Bolton studios, and working at a theatre in Leicester Square. I have been an usherette in a cinema in Tottenham Court Road, always waiting it seems, and very silently.1

  When she arrived in London at the beginning of February 1952, Beryl wrote an account of what it had been like to leave home,2 seen off at Lime Street station by her parents, her brother and his girlfriend, and Dorothy Green. Austin was conspicuous by his absence:

  In the station the whitefaced clock never falters. And I who stand in the shadow of the bookstall find calm to wonder at the fleetness of the time that goes. Dorothy stands talking clutching my arm with hasty fingers, and I watch her wet face with my eyes wide open. She tells me how I must be strong and not think too much and pushes me out to where my parents stand, sullen with waiting and unbelief.

  My brother holds onto the hand of his girl who has a handbag secure beneath her arm with a gold clasp, and my father walks bitterly away to look at the platform, leaving me isolated with my mother, whose mouth is set with suffering. And her voice is distressed as she looks at me. She tells me with her eyes so blind and brown that I am raindrenched. There is a quiver of fear and pain about all her words. Only later shall I realise this. Now I only think – How dare you spoil the last hour with criticism of my appearance? Austin does not love me anymore. As always and he will not ever, my heart cries as my mother stands desperately beside me in the ladies room.

  ‘Here comb your hair for goodness sake.’ Miraculously by straightening my brown hair and powdering my nose I find I can earn love that way. So stupid I tell myself, looking half smiling at my reflection in the mirror. It does not show in my face, I think, the utter desolation I feel, this power of suffering, layer upon layer of it, mounting up over the last ten years and hurting me. But I am not allowed to cry yet, at least for him and the end again of belonging . . . Janet and Ian precede us in silence, hushed, lost in the train sounds. My father is nowhere to be seen, he is somewhere beyond us all, feeling the futility of having had children no doubt.

  Then I get in a train carriage, very wet. I do not care how wet, or where my luggage goes, though my brother says I must. Then my father appears and cries out tenderly ‘Oh how you hurt us, you wicked girl.’ And I too cry out ‘But you never understood . . . I love . . .’ But mercifully I begin to cry because he is, and besides there is a deafening uprush of steam f
rom the front of the engine.

  Then my father gets out and I go to the window and say boldly, ‘Good-bye Ian.’ My mother and father are looking white faced at the rest of the train, until the train begins at last to move, then my mother turns and I cry out very brokenly ‘Good-bye, good-bye . . .’ and I cry deeply all the way in the empty carriage to Crewe, and the rain coming down the windows and nothing behind in the grey studio in Hope Street for me anymore. The wheels on the track say ‘No hope, no hope, never no more no hope.’

  Even at this stage I am not however without any hope.3

  Even at nineteen, leaving home to live in London was no small affair, still less so for Beryl in her fragile emotional state. Her prospective bedsit in Redcliffe Road was at the top of a four-storey terrace, its back window overlooking a row of gardens and the Bolton Studios in neighbouring Gilston Road. At the time it was a largely run-down part of South Kensington, and many of its elegant terraces had been converted into small flats and bedsits.

  On her arrival Beryl had a number of things to sort out, not the least of which was how to earn money. In the meantime she signed on, and her father agreed to give her £2.10s a week so she could buy food. Initially, she found living on her own difficult, but one of the benefits of unemployment and solitude was that it gave her time to write. One of her earliest pieces was a description of her surroundings:

  I can see many things from my window. There is a wall below me and beyond it the upright flat roofed studios. In the day-time an orange cat rolls heavily upon the blue slates and stares unresistingly all the way round. Now and then a thin young woman with very long tight green trousers will climb out of the fan light at the extreme end and stand perfectly still looking round . . .