Beryl Bainbridge

by Brendan King

  It was while Fanchon was at Chicago University that she met and fell in love with her professor, Herbert Frohlich, twenty-three years her senior.47 When Herbert was appointed to the chair of theoretical physics at Liverpool University in 1948, Fanchon went with him. They were married in 1950.

  At Liverpool, Fanchon and Herbert made a distinctive and slightly curious couple, he with his shock of white hair and his intense gaze, she young, pretty, Germanic and aloof. Austin found Fanchon’s combination of personal beauty, intelligence and aesthetic sensibility captivating. Convinced there was an unspoken rapport between them, he went day after day to the same restaurant the Frohlichs frequented in the hope of seeing her. He discussed with Dorothy the possibility of an affair with Fanchon, but as she already disapproved of his treatment of Beryl and Anne this new example of what she saw as his selfishness in relation to women exasperated her and she didn’t hold back in giving her opinion: ‘You know I think you are a rotten sod,’ she told him. ‘Just for your own pleasure you are prepared to risk a happy marriage being broken . . . the fact that you can discuss it so coldly and tell me that you have decided between you that neither will get hurt, and that you have no intention of changing what you call the status quo, indicates that you are both being extremely self indulgent and selfish.’48

  Austin was taken aback, but it had little effect. Shortly after, with Herbert Frohlich away in Paris, he saw his chance and at last achieved his objective. But the affair left him unsatisfied, and he gradually came to a realization that his behaviour betrayed a psychological immaturity:

  I am aware, self-conscious as I am, of a great inconsistency in my emotional make-up. I enthuse about Beryl . . . but it is probably only sentimentalism. I extoll Anne one moment and dismiss her contemptuously another. Fanchon, the latest about whom I have written so much and with such apparent sincerity, has ceased suddenly to have any meaning for me. I respect her. I still see her and Frohlich often, and I enjoy their company. But it seems as though, having enjoyed her company, having enjoyed her love, having slept with her, there is no more to be gained, I hate to think that this is the process, but the evidence is irrefutable. I must be emotionally shallow, though I would prefer to believe that all my feeling, all my interest, all the force of my emotional life goes into my art, there is little doubt really but that I am a callow raw youth.49

  TEN

  Dundee

  My embracing of the church was to have given me an inner peace, a shield against temptation, but conditions were unfavourable to say the least . . .1

  Before his five-year stint at the Liverpool Playhouse, Gerald Cross had been an actor, then producer, at Dundee Repertory theatre. After a string of popular and critical successes in both capacities he had left Dundee in 1946, with a gift from the directors and an expressed hope that he would one day return.2

  So when, in June 1952, the then director of productions at Dundee, Geoffrey Edwards, dropped what the local paper termed ‘a bombshell’ and announced his resignation, the theatre wasted no time in inviting Cross to fill the vacant post. Cross immediately accepted, drafting in a number of people to rebuild the creative team at the theatre: Joan White, an actress who had ambitions to produce, was to assist him in production duties; Neville Usher, who had designed the set of Benjamin Britten’s opera The Rape of Lucretia took over as scenic designer; and Freddie Payne, a RADA-trained actor, was hired as Cross’s stage director, having already worked in that capacity for him in Liverpool. Payne’s wife, Myrtle Rowe, a prize-winning RADA graduate, also joined the company.

  Two more recruits were brought in from Cross’s Liverpool days. The first was Noel Davis,3 a camp, charismatic character actor, with a deserved reputation as a skilled raconteur: ‘Quite the funniest man I have ever met,’4 recalled Paul Bailey, who worked with him in the early 1950s. The second was Beryl. By chance, Cross had bumped into her in London shortly after hearing about the job offer at Dundee and asked her whether she wanted to join him. The work would not be too onerous: she could reprise her role as Adelheid in The Beaver Coat, and she was already familiar with Young Madame Conti, having understudied one of the parts.

  Cross’s offer sounded tempting and had the additional attraction of allowing her to escape the attentions of an actor connected to the Arts Theatre, André Belhomme.5 A character actor with a colourful background, Belhomme pursued Beryl – or Tarbula as he nicknamed her – with an enthusiastic persistence that was hard to shake off. Whether Beryl kept any of the rendezvous he tried to arrange is unclear, but his unruly passion demanded a constant psychological agility in her dealings with him that was tiresome to say the least.

  In late July she moved up to her digs in Dundee, ready to start rehearsals for the new production of The Beaver Coat: ‘It was a lovely flat I had in a tenament. All grey stone, and a tram running down the length of the street, and I had a fire lit in my room by the landlady when I came home late at night.’6

  When she arrived Beryl immediately bonded with the Liverpool contingent. She may have been in emotional turmoil over Austin, but Freddie and Noel – who Beryl nicknamed ‘Noel, Noel’ – were enlivening company and offered plenty of distraction. The only person Beryl didn’t seem to get on with was Joan White, who she described as emotionally unstable and dramatically incompetent, always forgetting her lines. According to Beryl, Joan had an unrequited crush on Gerald, despite the fact that he was outwardly and incontrovertibly gay, and consequently she spent much of her time in an emotional state in the dressing room.7

  The nucleus of the Liverpool set formed a potent and volatile mixture of temperaments: Noel was an outrageous and witty storyteller; Freddie was impulsive, neurotic and vaguely unstable; while Gerald was effusive, with a fondness for drink. The sudden arrival of this new group of actors, most of whom already knew each other from their Liverpool days, created a certain tension among the rest of the company. The assistant stage manger at Dundee, Maggie Dickie, remembered feeling initially piqued by the arrival of Beryl, who made more money than her even though she had less to do.

  But it wasn’t just the Liverpool group’s tendency to stick together that caused problems. Cross’s predilection for experimenting with European drama in translation – his season began with a version of Hauptmann’s The Beaver Coat in which German peasants spoke with Lancashire accents – ended up splitting audiences and critics alike, and undoubtedly contributed to his subsequent downfall.

  One of the leading lights of the Dundee Repertory company was a twenty-six-year-old actor, Kevin Stoney. With his jowelly face and hooded eyes, Stoney was distinctive looking, though not necessarily in a classically handsome way. Even when young his looks were more suited to playing the villain, and he would go on to be cast as the baddie in numerous television series in the 1960s and 1970s, most notably in The Avengers and Doctor Who.

  Even though he was engaged to another actress in the company, Rosalie Westwater, Beryl quickly began to develop a crush on him. After the run of The Beaver Coat had ended, Rosalie left for a short period to have an operation on her nose, and in her absence Stoney began to take Beryl out. Although they didn’t have an affair as such, they ‘meddled around a bit’ as Maggie Dickie put it.8 The relationship, such as it was, had little chance of success, but this didn’t stop Beryl becoming emotionally involved.

  In parallel with this semi-adulterous flirtation with Kevin, Beryl had started taking steps to become a Roman Catholic. She had long been fascinated by the aura of Catholicism – or rather she was captivated by the flamboyant behaviour of the charismatic Catholics she knew from the theatre, such as Noel and Tom St John Barry. No doubt there was also an element of rebellion in her attraction too – it was as good a way as any of distancing herself from her parents. This is not to say that she didn’t have a strong desire to believe, or that there wasn’t a genuine religious element to her impulse, just that she wasn’t interested in Catholic theology or dogma per se. When she later had children, not only did she not bring them up as Catholics, as all
Catholics are enjoined to do, she didn’t even have them baptized.

  There was one aspect of Catholic theology, however, that did appeal to her at this point: the notion of the forgiveness of sin. She had increasingly begun to see herself as a bad person – sinful, to use the vocabulary of Catholicism. Her desire to be loved had led her into affairs that were ‘immoral’, and which fed her feelings of guilt and unworthiness. She blamed herself, and saw herself as deserving, indeed as the cause of, her own misfortunes.9

  The brutal assault in Brompton had confirmed this corrosive sense of herself as a sinful and impure person. Reaching a crisis point, she felt the need of something larger than herself to intervene, to absolve her of the feelings of unworthiness and self-loathing that plagued her.10

  In order to become a Catholic in England you had to be of legal age. In Formby, Beryl had been too young, too much under her parents’ control; to be able to do anything about her religious impulses. But the laws were different in Scotland, where the age of majority was lower. With this in mind she decided that while in Dundee she would begin the process of conversion.

  In September, Beryl wrote to Father Vincent Wilkin SJ, the chaplain of Liverpool University, telling him about her decision and asking him what she should do. Father Wilkin put Beryl in touch with Father Campbell at St Joseph’s Catholic Church in Wilkie’s Lane, a short bus ride from the Dundee Rep. For her instruction proper, Father Campbell turned her over to Sister Mary Antony, one of the nuns at St Joseph’s Convent. Beryl’s instruction took the usual path: a course of study, followed by a formal baptism. Although by its very definition a conversion should be founded in the deepest openness with regard to matters of the heart and conscience, Beryl seems not to have talked with her confessor about Kevin or Austin, nor mentioned the traumatic assault earlier in the year.11

  Beryl’s conversion was scheduled for Friday, 10 October. On the Sunday before, she wrote in her notebook her impressions of attending Mass at the convent that morning:

  All the nuns stand like black-birds with wings folded as we begin the Novena. All my years go like a dancer beyond the kneeling birds to the tabernacle, and the autumn flowers fill me with yellow wonder. Oh I cannot write sufficiently what is in my heart. Sister Mary Anthoney is so good hailing Mary with her rosary, because she has no youth or womanhood spent, all her placcidity is for God, and behind the folded wings her eyes rest tiredly, murmuring comfort to herself, the steady outpouring of continual love. And I who am so unworthy sing between bruised lips ‘Ora pro nobis, Ora pro nobis’ wondering why Austin ceased to love me, why I am so unkind to my parents, and why I am so full of sin.12

  After this there follows a description of the evening’s events: first, a performance of Young Madame Conti, a courtroom melodrama in which Beryl played one of the witnesses; then an account of going back to her digs with Kevin (here referred to as K). Just as she is about to ‘sin’, she pulls back and experiences a brief moment where she feels she has been saved by God from the consequences of physical desire. Here the link between her desire to be a Catholic and her sense of unworthiness and guilt over her sexual relations with men is made explicit:

  Tonight I love K so greatly, and all my self goes melting in the theatre . . . And then I walk softly in the wind with K to here, and sit upon the bed and let my love unloose itself once more, quite gladly. And I tell him of my love and recieve the answer that I knew before the question, that he has never loved [me] or ever will. And I remember with clutched fists on Friday I will be a catholic, and move from his body, and the pain is great.

  And a short while goes and almost we have sinned, and then it is passed and he is left shaken with wonder, and me with a lightness behind my eyes, for God has made a miracle to save me. And I am so unworthy, so unworthy that I long to whip myself, to lie in pain never to move, because I love Him so.

  K walks with a grey head above his black overcoat, across the road in the wind and I stand at the window and wave to him. Oh that my heart could utter the thoughts that arise in me. Tonight I know that God would give me Austin if I prayed or K, but I do not pray. I want nothing more but to rest in this certainty of grace, but I want that my unworthiness shall go. What will be the words when I am received? All the angels in Heaven protect me to follow through the little that I feel. I can do good, but why . . . and where . . . and when. St Francis and St Bernadette, Blessed Gaberiel oh help me in my unbelief. Take away things like grey heads above black overcoats, and the lonely wanderings in railed church gardens. And the tooth-ache in my mouth, and the soul ache in K’s heart take away and fill with knowledge. For ever and for ever Amen.13

  As Beryl agonized over her feelings for Kevin and the preparations for her conversion, events at the theatre were spinning out of control. The audience response to Cross’s productions had not been as enthusiastic as the theatre had hoped, and the decline in ticket sales began to affect the theatre’s bottom line. The decision to follow up Robert Sherwood’s The Queen’s Husband, an obscure play that failed to convince either audiences or critics, with yet another translation, Young Madame Conti, sealed Cross’s fate: it was the last production the director would oversee at Dundee Rep. On 4 October 1952 the Dundee Courier reported:

  REP DIRECTOR RESIGNS

  It was announced from Dundee Repertory Theatre yesterday that ‘Mr Gerald Cross has, with great regret, resigned the position of director of productions, following on differences of opinion on matters of policy.’ Mr Cross, who has been producer since June 30, would not make any further comment . . . Others leaving the company now are Joan White, who has been acting and assistant producer; Myrtle Rowe, who came north a few weeks ago for The Hollow Crown; Beryl Bainbridge and Noel Davis.14

  The news of the resignation came as a shock and prompted something of a small backlash in the letters page of the local paper. In response, the directors were forced to justify the decision, claiming that the theatre had incurred losses of £1,716 since Cross took over, due to declining audiences and increasing expenses, and that the decision was necessary for the theatre to survive. The reasons for Cross’s resignation were, however, more complicated than those given in the Dundee Courier, and the issue of artistic quality or the negative response of the audience may have been simply a pretext for Cross’s removal. At the Liverpool Playhouse Cross’s turbulent emotional life, coupled with bouts of drinking, had affected his ability to focus on his work. Everyone at the Playhouse knew that Cross was gay, but this had only become an issue when his messy emotional life spilled over into his professional work. At Dundee, it happened again.

  The details are not exactly clear: Maggie Dickie believed that Cross’s predatory attempt to seduce some of the other male members of the cast caused the problem, and the factions within the Company didn’t help matters. Under a huge amount of emotional strain and reading Cross’s persistent efforts to console him as homosexual advances, Freddie Payne – who was in a distraught state because his wife Myrtle had just left him and taken their nine-month-old child with her – made a half-baked attempt at suicide by lying on the tramlines.15 Beryl claimed that he went temporarily insane and had to be restrained in a straightjacket.16 Once the directors had got hold of the story, there was no way back, and it seems that Cross was forced to resign to prevent a public scandal.

  Cross’s own view was different: as far as he was concerned he had only been trying to help Freddie, who he admitted was a neurotic character. ‘Nobody in this world, not even his own wife or family, has done more for him than I have. I gave him two quite handsome jobs, fought his battles for him . . . pleaded without cease with Myrtle for him . . . wept for him, guided & counselled him . . . devoted myself to his interests – all this I have done cheerfully & without complaint as if he were my own brother,’17 he told Beryl, shortly after his return to London.

  In any event, it was clear that the situation within the Company was untenable. Cross had initially attempted to bluff it out, telling the Liverpool contingent that if they were united th
e management would relent. Following his instructions, Beryl and Noel said that if Gerald went they would go too. Unsurprisingly, the directors didn’t appreciate this attempt at blackmail and took measures to deal with the remaining members of the Company that Gerald had brought in, who were now seen as troublemakers. Beryl, Noel, Myrtle and Joan were all forced to leave, while Laurena Dewar resigned from her post as the producer’s secretary.

  Pending an inquiry by Equity into the circumstances surrounding the resignations, the wages of those concerned had been withheld. Consequently Gerald, Noel, Joan and Beryl, now broke, had to hole up in a derelict bungalow near the mud flats below the Tay Bridge. Eventually money was sent, and by the middle of October Beryl was back with her parents in Formby. What their immediate reaction was to the news of her conversion isn’t known, though Beryl always maintained that her father detested Catholics.

  Hardly had she got back to Liverpool, however, when another offer of work came in: Windsor Rep wanted her to step in at short notice for a series of comic plays starting in less than two weeks’ time, in an engagement that would last until Christmas.

  Beryl would retell the story of her time at Dundee Rep and of her conversion to Catholicism many times in later life, either in relation to her work as a drama critic or in articles on the subject of religion. But the humorous tone of these memoirs is misleading. Intended to entertain rather than reveal, they pass over in silence what she was really feeling at the time.

  Shortly after she left Dundee an event occurred that she would not mention in public until the very end of her life, one that threw a black cloud over the whole period and which would have lasting repercussions on those involved for the rest of their lives. Despite Lyn’s reassurances back in June that Austin wasn’t going out with anyone and that his relationship with Anne Lindholm was over, Beryl’s worst fears were confirmed when she got back to Liverpool. Lyn may have been right that Austin wasn’t seriously committed to Anne, but she was wrong in thinking that their on-off relationship had run its course. In the early autumn of 1952 Anne discovered that she was pregnant.