Beryl Bainbridge

by Brendan King

  He kept repeating ‘Now I haven’t harmed you darling you came of your own free will.’ Finally he let me go, and when I ran downstairs the front door was locked, and I couldn’t find a key and he came behind me and opened it and threw my shoes out . . . and I ran down the street into the phone box . . .

  And now I can’t get clean and am afraid he had a disease. So in three days I’m going to have a check up just to make sure. I can’t go to the police, because I did go of my own free will, and they’d get in touch with home and they’d bring me back, and I don’t want that ever. I won’t post this till I hear from you, perhaps you wont write for some time.

  Everything seems to be so bad somehow, why dont you want me properly, why wont you come for me, and tell me you’ll look after me, because I can’t anymore, I can’t, I won’t. Why couldn’t I talk to you on the phone, because I wanted to, I wanted to so much. I don’t think I can ever talk to you again about that or me. Beryl23

  Although Austin’s initial reaction was one of sympathy – he wrote in his journal that while reading it he had been ‘reduced to agonising tears’ – his belief that as an artist he had to be independent of others and free of all emotional ties quickly reasserted itself. Indeed, he even saw the incident as a further validation of his decision to break with her:

  The whole of that day I walked in abject misery thinking of Beryl alone in London. Thinking of what she had described to me. Gradually it wore off, gradually I saw that it wasn’t a major tragedy, just a thing that happens to lots of girls. I nearly went to London but cancelled my bus reservation at the last minute. I know that I must be free and alone, this thing interferes with that freedom, or would if taken to its logical end. Therefore I must end it all, I must write to say that she must live her own life, and stand on her own feet, as other people do. But it is so terribly sad, I can control what I feel, I can be objective. Beryl won’t, and one day she must learn, and it’s usually the hard way that one learns such things.24

  He dashed off a short letter to her, but it could hardly have afforded Beryl much comfort. His tone was harsh and accusatory, even taking into account male attitudes to rape at the time, practically blaming her for what happened: ‘The letter which you said I was not to open I opened and was horrified! Ashamed that you should have gone through such an ordeal, ashamed to admit to being the same sex as ‘him’. I could not understand what you were doing to have gone back with him, you know men, you know what to expect, you know what “he” wanted – then why?? I suppose its simple really you were lonely, perhaps also hoping he might feed you, I know you are often lonely. I only wish you could make more genuine friends in London.’25

  As if the rape had been nothing more than a trivial incident, the rest of the letter went on to give details of two painting commissions he’d received and the news that Fritz Spiegl had just got married, before ending insensitively with the words, ‘things are not too bad’, and signing off with an impersonal ‘Austin’. He would not write to her again for over eight months.

  Beryl rarely alluded to the assault in later life, though it is clear it had a profound impact on her feelings about herself, about sex, and about men.26 Even fifty years later the memory of it was as fresh in her mind as if it had happened the day before, and in her final novel, The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress, Beryl’s alter ego, Rose, is attacked in an almost identical way:

  Once, a man had bought her drinks in a pub in South Kensington and then taken her to his room near the Brompton Oratory. It was a posh area, so she didn’t think anything could go wrong . . . The man had forced her onto his bed, knocking a tooth out in his struggle to hold her down. Bloody-mouthed, she said she’d do whatever he wanted if he’d just let her use the toilet first. As she fled down the stairs he’d emptied a cup of water over the landing bannisters, and she’d fancied he was weeing on her.27

  Although she probably played down her physical injuries in her letter to Austin, the violence with which the man had tried to subdue her was considerable. His blow had dislodged a tooth, and for the next year or so she would be plagued with toothache and a bleeding gum (‘Woke up with my mouth full of blood. My teeth are very painful’).28 She would eventually get a dental plate made, with a false tooth to replace the one that had been knocked out.

  But the scars left by the assault were not just physical. Traumatic experiences such as rape can result in a loss of emotional engagement, feelings of depression, guilt and low self-esteem. In Beryl’s case, she told Austin that in the wake of the attack she went through a period when she no longer cared who she got involved with and had ‘slept with many men, seven or eight perhaps . . . because it didn’t mean anything. I didn’t even know the names of some of them, I didn’t care whether I died.’29 In later life Beryl would claim that she had often given in to men’s sexual advances out of a perverse sense of politeness (‘I could never say “No”. First, I sort of felt they were doing me a favour; and second, it was impolite to refuse . . .’).30 Yet the lack of emotional engagement and low self-esteem this response betrays can be seen as part of the psychological fallout from the assault.

  In an interview conducted in the wake of her success as a novelist in the 1970s, when Beryl was more open about this aspect of her life than she would later become, she admitted this was the case:

  For years and years, though not perhaps recently, I despised myself . . . I’ve never yet had a relationship with a man where I thought anything a man did to me . . . was out of the ordinary. I thought whatever they did to me was pretty well justified . . . I used to be a terrible masochist. I used to make men treat me badly and then one of two things happened: either I was doing it to them before they could do it to me, or I actually enjoyed it.31

  Beryl didn’t tell Ken or her other close friends about the incident, but she did mention it to Lyn. Her response was as flippant as her reaction to the supposed pregnancy, though Beryl may have deliberately played down the incident or hidden from her how traumatic it really was: ‘Dearest Bash, Thank you for your letter. I shant comment on it, until I see you to get the proper picture, because, put as baldly as it was, the only comments are obvious, suffice to say you are a right bloodstained clown and would Miss Addison think you were being quite nice?’32

  At the end of March, Beryl wrote to Lyn, saying that she was thinking of spending the Easter weekend at Formby. If she had any lingering hopes that she might see Austin at Easter she was to be disappointed. Despite Lyn’s reassurance a month before that there was nothing going on between Austin and Anne Lindholm, nothing could have been further from the truth. Although Austin had initially seen Anne as little more than a friend, despite ‘a minor flirtation with her’ when she had first started college in the autumn of 1951, over the course of the first few months of the year – during the same period he had decided to break with Beryl – their relationship took a more complicated turn.

  Things began in January, when Anne came to his studio ostensibly to borrow some paints, according to his record of their encounter in his journal. Slightly annoyed by her lack of commitment, he took her to task for her indiscipline, telling her that she should ‘pull herself together’, accusing her of being more interested in films and parties than facing up to her inability to work: ‘You’re either just plain stupid or what is worse in love,’ he told her, which led to a surprising confession on her part:

  She looked blankly into the distance with her great cow-eyes ‘Yes, I am in love.’

  This surprised me for only two days before I had been round to her flat towards the evening, and had been amazed to find myself making love to her, for her charms are considerable, though I must admit without being allowed to take it to its ultimate conclusion – for she is very virtuous. So I asked her, ‘How can you sit there and say that you are in love when only the other day you were kissing me, who is it? Do I know him, perhaps I could do something to help.’

  Suddenly I thought, she can’t be in love with me, that’s not possible. I mean to say I’ve known her a
long time, we were always good friends but no more.

  ‘Just tell me one thing, it’s not me is it?’ She just looked sad but made no reply – I had had my answer! And this had existed for over a year without my knowing.

  ‘Oh don’t worry, I’m alright, I can control it. I’ve had plenty of practice, if you like I shall not see you, then perhaps it will go.’

  She was very sad, and cried a little against me, but it was not only for me that she cried, she was very unhappy about her life. No plan, nothing particular to look forward to, I feel I must help her but how? She doesn’t seem to have any particular interests. I can’t imagine how she came to study art.33

  Austin’s relatively sympathetic attitude to her problems didn’t last long. With Beryl in London, his feelings of sexual frustration were exacerbated by Anne’s principled resistance to his advances:

  That Anne, as Dorothy calls her, has been to see me here frequently and invited me to her flat. I have been several times, the last was at about 10.30 pm for a late meal. I spent from 11.30 to 4.30 bringing all my powers together in a storm upon her virginity. I made considerable progress, she returned the most intimate of caresses but would allow no entry. I am amazed at the girl’s fortitude, or perhaps it is not fortitude, perhaps it would be more apt to call it middle class conservativeness of the worst sort. I returned to my virgin couch much exhausted, but am all the more determined to achieve my goal, it has become to my mind a challenge to my manhood.34

  This account of his failure to progress sexually with Anne was written the same day as Austin’s letter to Beryl suggesting he come to see her in London. Two weeks later, however, he changed his mind as regards Anne, feeling that his physical attraction to her was getting in the way of his work and that it would be better not to take things any further:

  At present I hate women for they distract me from my work. Anne is not to be compared with Beryl, Anne is lazy, unstimulating, cowlike by nature, whereas Beryl is virile, full of energy, has an enquiring mind and a fine sensitive character. I have wasted too much time on Anne . . . I have allowed the physical to superimpose the aesthetic part of me . . . I feel that unclean animalism in me desires Anne, but there is nothing of the spirit or the soul about the relation and I begin to hate myself for thinking or writing as I have done . . . I make a vow now to finish any relation I have with her, better none than such a base sort.35

  But after his visit to London and his renewed decision to break with Beryl, Austin changed his mind yet again. Whether this failure in resolve was due to Anne’s persistence, or his inability to resist, isn’t clear. Either way, she ended up posing for a portrait in his studio, a large three-quarter-length nude study of her sitting in a chair.36

  While in Formby for Easter, Beryl learned the distressing news that, as if to add insult to injury, Austin had taken Anne to Wales for the weekend, just as he had taken her to Wales the preceding year. In her journal she wrote a bleak account of what she felt, her emotional anxiety bringing on another bout of illness: ‘This Easter I am not well and have a cough and I have not seen him for some months, and there is no snow. And to know that he is working in his studio and becoming intense with another girl and striding out over the fields still using the map, sets my face white and hard because I am so lost and betrayed.’37

  The choice of Wales as a destination was, in this instance, coincidental. Anne’s parents lived in Penmaenmawr, Conway, a few miles from Austin’s father’s house, where he and Beryl had stayed in 1951. The visit to Conway may have marked a new stage in Austin’s physical relationship with Anne, but as his brusque dismissal of this ‘success’ shows, it didn’t signify any change in his views about the essentially ephemeral nature of the affair:

  I lay with Anne during the afternoon in a secluded croft overlooking the sea, we became amorous and she made no objection to my pursuing such an activity to its ultimate end, indeed became an active participant despite her Catholic prejudices about the value of virginity and the evil of contraceptives. However this meant very little to me as my painting and drawing is at last beginning to progress again. I am beginning to feel a new surge of life, this I partly attribute to my new-found freedom from emotional ties . . .38

  Understandably, given the emotional trauma of the night in Brompton and the breakdown in relations with Austin, Beryl sought consolation elsewhere and found it in Robert Lawson’s company. Over the following weeks and months they developed a close friendship, so when Beryl’s landlady gave her a month’s notice to leave – ostensibly because of Austin’s stay in March – Robert suggested she move in with him. Beryl wrote to Dorothy for advice and her reply was cautious: ‘My love . . . do think very hard before you live with anybody – please don’t live with any man because you feel sorry for him – I think the only time to live with anybody at all is when you cannot help doing so, life so easily becomes far too complicated and worrying . . . you know you will have many many men falling in love with you, because you are so beautiful to look at and so beautiful mentally. I do want you to think of yourself, please darling girl try.’39

  The letter seemed to have an effect, but while Beryl didn’t actually move in with him, Robert was still instrumental in finding her a new flat – 65 Parliament Hill, where he himself had lived a couple of years previously and which was just a few minutes from his present flat in South Hill Park. If neither of them was working they would walk together on Hampstead Heath, and Beryl would frequently spend her evenings with him: ‘Shall I remember it poetically, the nights I mean in Robert’s room, the 22/- a week room with the picture on the wall that says underneath ‘Nothing to Fear’ . . . Incredible the memories that come from Robert’s mind, in his chair on the other side of the gas-fire. Very soon I tell myself I will get up with my thick sick head and creep down the hall, and run up to No. 65 and try to sleep . . . and I laugh to myself in the road in the early morning, and think how astonishing a life I am leading.’40

  Beryl had told Lyn about ‘Roberto the bird man’, as she referred to him, and by mid-May Lyn was enthusiastically jumping the gun, hoping that this time Beryl had found someone she cared for: ‘I’m glad Roberto loves you,’ she wrote, asking whether she had any intention of marrying him.41 But despite their easy companionability, feelings on Beryl’s side remained platonic, though this didn’t prevent Ken from feeling twinges of jealousy: ‘Does Robert provide you with his company?’ he asked her. ‘As long as he gives you a little happiness. I was going to say I don’t care, but I do and yet no matter . . . I am glad Robert has been able to cure you finally of A[ustin] – that was something I thought I could have done some time ago . . . Never mind. You say you are not in love with R[obert] & I still cherish the hope that in your peculiar way you are still in love with me.’42

  Beryl’s work prospects had also taken a turn for the better since her move to Hampstead. Hugh Goldie, who was now in London working as production manager for the Arts Theatre in Great Newport Street, told her that Roy Rich was looking to cast a production of Harold Brighouse’s Hobson’s Choice. Beryl went up for an audition in early May, choosing a scene from Jean Anouilh’s Point of Departure as one of her pieces, and was drafted in to play the part of Ada Figgins, alongside a cast that included Donald Pleasance as William Mossop and Patrick McGoohan as Albert Prosser.

  During the course of the production she began going out with Gareth Bogarde, Dirk Bogarde’s younger brother, who was working as an assistant electrician. He quickly fell for her, recognizing in Beryl a fellow spirit who, like him, had suffered from an emotional rejection ‘caused by someone that one loves very very much’.43 As the production neared its end, he wrote her a frank declaration of love and outlined his hopes that things might work out between them.

  But Gareth, like Ken and Robert, was another unfortunate whose heartfelt attraction to Beryl remained unrequited. Although a part of Beryl had put Austin behind her, there remained another part that continued to feel they were destined for each other, despite all that had happened. When Doro
thy wrote at the start of June to say that things between Austin and Anne weren’t working out, Beryl must have felt a tinge of satisfaction: ‘He has taken Anne Lindholm out from time to time,’ Dorothy confided, ‘really because there is no one else and because she runs after him, but he is now getting to the screaming stage about her. Of course he has never pretended to me, and I hope not to Anne, that he was the slightest bit attracted to her except as a friend . . .’44

  Beryl wrote to Lyn for confirmation and her reply assured her that Austin was ‘not going out with anyone’ and that ‘Annie L and he are definitely parted’.45

  This was technically true, but things were more complicated than that. If Austin had parted from Anne it was because he’d begun a relationship with another woman he had become obsessed with over the past few months, Fanchon Frohlich. Fanchon was in many ways Beryl’s complete opposite: cultured, self-assured and ferociously intelligent, her academic prowess threw Beryl’s educational failings into even sharper relief. Born Fanchon Aungst in 1928, she came from a wealthy German family who had emigrated to America in the late nineteenth century. A consistent winner in state-school debating competitions and editor of the school newspaper, at the age of seventeen Fanchon won four separate scholarships,46 and went on to major in theoretical physics at Chicago University. When she switched to art in the early 1950s, she brought the same intellectual rigour to the discipline, uniting theories of aesthetics with those of the philosophy of science. Her heavily theoretical approach was expressed in a range of both representational and abstract work, and she would write articles for the British Journal of Aesthetics with titles such as ‘The Function of Perceptual Asymmetry in Picture Space’, and ‘The Locations of Light in Art: From Rembrandt to Op Art and Light Environment’.