by Brendan King
Being unmarried and pregnant would have been a traumatic state of affairs for any woman at that time. Inevitably it had a devastating psychological impact on Anne. Robin Riley, a fellow art student in the year below her, recalls that she became very depressed and left the art course without taking her exams. The practical side of the situation was complicated enough: abortion wasn’t legalized in the UK until 1967, so the decision to terminate involved finding a ‘backstreet’ abortionist, while the alternative meant having to face the social stigma of being a single mother and all the economic hardships that might entail. But on a personal level it put Anne in an impossible situation, one that challenged her religious beliefs and her sense of morality.
To Beryl, the news was shattering. ‘I want to die more than anything,’18 she wrote to Lyn at the time, feeling more solitary than ever because she couldn’t talk to Austin about it, fearing ‘he would not understand’ – or didn’t love her enough to try to understand – what she felt. She asked Lyn for more information, but Lyn had been ill in bed and had heard nothing. In any case there was no way she could have known quite how traumatic the sequence of events would turn out to be, events that Austin felt compelled to recount in painful detail in his journal:
Since I last wrote much has happened. Anne with whom I have been associated at intervals since I first mentioned her, conceived, and caused me to be considerably concerned about the consequences. In the beginning she tried quinine, but this made her sick for some days with no result. I went to a doctor who advised me about the use of a piece of wood called slippery elm, this I tried to obtain, but could not and gave up after a few sporadic attempts. Then June the model said she knew of someone in London. I told Anne this but she refused to have anything to do with the idea, she said ‘Its wicked, sinful, going against nature. I want my child, I must have it.’
‘But,’ I replied, ‘how do you propose to bring it up without a father, for whatever happens, I intend to remain single?’
‘Oh I could go away and get a job.’
‘Where do you propose to go, you who are so dependent upon your friends, you depend, in fact live, upon your friends, you are quite incapable of looking after yourself, never mind a child?’
‘I could go home.’
‘Yes and inflict your responsibilities upon your parents who are by no means in a position, financially, to support you and a child. Besides what do you think it would be like in such a small village as that when it “got about” that you were pregnant and unmarried?’
At this she broke down and cried hysterically. ‘You must marry me, you can’t leave me, what shall I do, what shall I do?’ And she rushed round the room holding her head between her hands sobbing dramatically. As usual making the most of the situation emotionally in the hope of making me change my mind. She was determined to make me marry her and refused any other solution.
I was desperate, what could I do? She might tell her parents as a last resort and they could make things very awkward for me. She threatened suicide, threatened to tell the Principal, Mr Stevenson, at the College of Art here where I am teaching, and make me lose my job.
I left her completely alone when she refused to go to London, saying in a considerable rage, ‘Well if you refuse to cooperate, if you refuse to see how impossible it would be for me to marry you, then you can damn-well stew in your own juice.’ I then slammed the door after me, and returned to the studio, realising that there was no point in dwelling upon the situation. I must not neglect my painting no matter what happens.
Anne returned to my studio a few days later saying that she would agree to an operation in London. This was good news and I prepared to accompany her immediately. We stayed at first in Windsor at a place that my mother recommended, while we tried to establish contact by devious and intricate means with the appropriate people.
We eventually, after being in London a week, managed to arrange a time and a day. I spent a good deal of money upon entertainment to take her mind off the object of her visit, and upon accommodation, and was looking forward to a successful conclusion of our visit. But when we arrived at the doctor’s surgery, she started a hysterical fit, weeping, sobbing, holding her head etc, as she had done so many times before when she was not getting her own way. So at the end of the second week we returned and there was still no solution.
It appeared to me that she was making a last determined bid for marriage. She did not think that I could possibly maintain my determined stand after having demonstrated how desperate she was, for while we had been in London and just before we were due to leave for the surgery she took 19 aspirin tablets, believing that I would presume she was attempting to kill herself. This of course is an almost harmless dose, nevertheless I called a doctor and she was taken in an ambulance to have her stomach syringed.
There is no doubt in my mind that this was to force me to change my mind, however it did not, for there are cases every week of people taking overdoses of aspirin and only when they take 40 or 50 do they ever prove fatal. Even then, if caught early enough a stomach wash is usually quite effective, and everybody knows this including Anne.
Now I was disgusted and sick of it all and when we returned to Liverpool, on the train and in the bus, I did not talk to her, for I was furious that I should have wasted 2 weeks and so much money and with no result.
More weeping, sobbing and platitudes about it being a mortal sin.19
Shortly before leaving, Austin had met Beryl briefly at Euston station. She was now back in London and preparing for her stint in Windsor. He told her that Anne had refused to have the operation and planned to keep the baby. The impact of this news was profound, leaving Beryl feeling confused and betrayed. In her ‘Fragments’ book she dashed off a poem expressing how she felt:
I cannot bear for you to make a child
Inside another when I am here
I feel as if I had been cruising round the world
Leaving you staying out too late at night
And now I cannot stop the womb from building
Or the body beautiful to swell
And they can talk for hours on worthlessness
And still I know I love thee far too well.20
The ‘they’ who talked about Austin’s ‘worthlessness’ no doubt included Beryl’s parents, though they were almost certainly unaware of Austin’s relationship with Anne and the present crisis. But it was also an allusion to Dorothy Green, who in her desire to protect Beryl from what she increasingly saw as Austin’s unreliable and cavalier attitude to women, spared no detail in her accounts of his misdeeds.
Dorothy had observed this painful drama unfolding in front of her very eyes, and even though she had no fondness for Anne, she couldn’t help but be distressed by what she was going through. In a letter written shortly after a fearful scene between Austin and Anne, she filled Beryl in on the latest news:
I hardly know what to say about this appalling tragedy and of course the person who is going to suffer most is Anne and she is so stupid – I don’t say that because she changed her mind at the last moment – but, she has changed it, well, perhaps twice since she came back to Liverpool. She has been to see Dr. Garvin, and told him of course, and says she wants to go away, and the last news is, he is writing to some Convent in Manchester where she can go till it is all over. I don’t know what to say about her reasons, I think of course they are mixed up with religion and I think, but of course don’t know, wanting to marry him, my goodness she doesn’t know how lucky she is in one way that they are not marrying, she would be so unhappy with him it hardly bears a thought.21
The drama was not, however, over. Austin’s unyielding stance achieved the desired result. A few days later Anne changed her mind again and went down to London, accompanied by her friend Margaret Evans, for the abortion. But as it turned out Margaret could only stay for two days and Anne would have to be in London for four, so Austin, feeling that he couldn’t leave her to face the operation alone, went down to look after her. He was wit
h her when she recovered from the anaesthetic and again recorded the traumatic experience in his journal:
How can I say whether what she said after coming round was really delirium, or was she still acting.
‘Oh Mary Mother of God forgive me for my mortal sin. Forgive – forgive – forgive – I know not what I do, Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name . . .’
‘Anne! Anne! wake up, it’s me, wake up.’
‘My baby’s gone, he’s taken him away – and he was so little, so little, he was safe there in the warmth, but I betrayed him, now he’s alone all by himself, alone with no one to look after him and he was so little – oh God give me my baby, where is he, where is he, so little and alone, so little by himself in the cold, God! Why? Why? I never did any wrong. Austin! Austin! he was your child, your child, give me another child, I want another, yours, yours. I want your child – I want your child – I want your child. I want, I want.’
I cried, I could not stop myself, this was real, she meant this, poor child, poor child. ‘Be quiet now, be quiet now,’ I said softly, stroking her hair and the tears rolled down my cheeks and I was sick that I should be the cause of all this, but there was no other way. She is very unhappy, and I think that I have not heard the last of her.22
Beryl learned at least part of what had happened through Dorothy, who wrote again four days after her previous letter:
Anne . . . came round last Sunday and had a tremendous hysterical fit and asked Austin if he would not marry her would he come and live with her, which he absolutely refused to do, and eventually she went home . . . Then on Monday she came around and said she was going to London Tuesday morning, she had apparently written to the Doctor, same one, asking him if he would see her, as she had changed her mind & wanted it ‘doing’. So Tuesday morning she went to London – more money for Austin to find. Tuesday night Austin had a telephone call to go to London on Wednesday to bring her home on Thursday, so he went and is now home again. Anne is going to the Lake District tomorrow to take a job looking after children! I think perhaps the whole time she was hoping he would marry her – I don’t know, anyway it is over, she is alright and the only thing we can do is to close the chapter, don’t you think?23
Dorothy’s assessment that Anne was ‘alright’ was some way short of the mark. She may have been trying to ease Beryl’s feelings, but it is clear that Anne was anything but alright. The decision to have an abortion had been a painful one, and her unresolved feelings of guilt about it provoked what she herself later admitted was ‘a nervous breakdown’,24 a total re-evaluation of her beliefs, her life and the kind of person she was. She gave up her art course and turned increasingly to religion, not necessarily for comfort, but for meaning, for absolution, and for a new way of structuring her life. Perhaps inevitably she came to feel that the emotional and moral trauma she had experienced was a logical consequence of the atheism and liberalism that Austin professed, his casual approach to human relationships. She felt she had been seduced down this path and didn’t like what she had become: ‘. . . the experience was of hell. It was unremitting light with no shadows; the absence of God.’
Although the forgiveness of sins is a key element of Catholic faith, Anne never forgave herself for what she had done. Had Austin married anyone but Beryl, it is possible that in later life she might have been able to face telling the truth about what had happened. As it was, the whole episode was doomed to remain a dark secret, and when she met up with Beryl again twenty years later it became a subject that could never be mentioned in public. The web of deceit, humiliation and lying this engendered played on Anne’s mind until the end of her life.
If the termination had brought the ‘chapter’ on Austin and Anne to a close, Dorothy still had a chapter to relate about Austin and another girl, Toni Butler, who he had met through the Frohlichs. Austin had started using her as a model, and rumours of some sort of romantic connection between them would periodically surface over the next year. In mid-November, Dorothy wrote to Beryl, giving her a lengthy account of Austin’s activities following the affair with Anne. She must have sensed that Beryl would find it upsetting, and tried to emphasize how distressing she herself found Austin’s behaviour: ‘I have told him so many times how appalling is his attitude towards women.’ She hinted that ‘when he came back from London after this awful thing’, she had done all she could to prevent more upsets by encouraging him to work and commissioning a picture from him.
But at the Greens’ bonfire night party, when Toni Butler didn’t appear, Austin had rushed off, telling Dorothy he’d forgotten to mention he was going to another party that night. Somewhat suspiciously, he stressed that he was going alone as he’d have a nicer time if he went by himself, and Dorothy agreed telling him it would be better not to ‘get involved with any girl just yet’. But he had in fact taken Toni Butler to the party and later on ‘he arrived home with his mouth covered in lipstick’. And this, Dorothy added in a scandalized tone, just ‘one day after Anne had left Liverpool, four days after the job had been done’.25
What Austin himself called ‘the female question’ brought things to a head with Dorothy, and for the sake of their friendship they decided it would be better if he moved out. As he put it in his journal, at least then ‘she wouldn’t know what went on and [would] thus be spared the torment of tears and the sight of what she calls my selfish, heartless attitude to my girl friends’.26
With all this going on, it was fortunate Beryl was distracted by work, playing Hazel Nutt in Mabel Constanduros’s domestic comedy King of the Castle, which opened on the 27 October. The play was well received and, given events, there was a certain unintended irony in the reviewer’s summing up: ‘Beryl Bainbridge, in a near-Cinderella role as the younger Nutt daughter, charmed us so that we were glad to see her get her reward in the “everybody’s-happy-now” ending.’27
The next production, another domestic comedy entitled For Better for Worse, featured a strong cast – including Leslie Philips, Patrick Cargill and nineteen-year-old Geraldine McEwan – and enjoyed good reviews. Despite her relatively minor role Beryl’s performance merited a mention: ‘Beryl Bainbridge, as the ubiquitous and affected Sheila, aptly portrays the type of young woman who can be as amusing on stage as she is maddening in life.’28
Beryl’s short season at Windsor was brought to a close in mid-December with R. F. Delderfield’s Worm’s Eye View. At the end of the two-week run Beryl returned to Hampstead before travelling up to Formby to spend Christmas with her parents. Her first year in London could hardly have been counted a happy one. Not only had the man she loved rejected her, he’d got one girl pregnant and by all accounts was now seeing another.
ELEVEN
Engagement
10 January 1953: Went to Liverpool with Austin to buy an engagement ring. Am I happy?1
Given the events of October and November 1952, Beryl could scarcely have been looking forward to her return to Formby. But if Anne’s pregnancy had cast a dark shadow over Beryl’s world, it had also had a profound effect on Austin. He was, and felt himself to be, essentially a morally minded man: he prided himself on his humanitarian view of the world and everything he did was infused with a moral determination to improve the lot of ordinary human beings. His students would later testify to his engagement in their intellectual and cultural development, and to his commitment to raise their political consciousness. To have been the cause of wrecking Anne’s life in such a thoughtless and banal fashion shook Austin’s sense of himself to the core, prompting a radical change in his assessment of his own life: ‘I have for some time, since the affair of Anne, been disgusted with myself. Was it that I had previously imagined the delights of a Don Juan to be an ideal goal, or was it just that I preferred to be independent, to be alone, to travel and to please only myself? Or was it that I shirked the responsibility of any binding union?’2
With one life already blighted, as he saw it, through his inconsiderate actions, he began to reconsider his behaviour
in relation to Beryl. After months, not to say years, of prevarication – his feeling that Beryl was too young, his uncertainty as to how suited they were, his belief that his work as an artist took precedence over purely personal romantic concerns irrespective of the pain it might cause – he came to admit the possibility that he’d been mistaken and that in Beryl he might find the one stable element in his emotional life. She had stuck with him despite all that had happened, she had proved she loved him whatever his faults, and surely that love would be able to sustain him, to restore his sense of himself as a worthwhile human being, to re-establish his lost sense of emotional integrity?
At the beginning of December, barely a month after returning with Anne from London, he decided to write to Beryl and bring matters to a head. He sent her a long, painstaking explanation of his change of attitude and concluded with a proposal of marriage. Then he sat back and waited for a reply. None came, and the doubts began again. Maybe things had gone too far: ‘Perhaps she is beyond my reach already,’ he speculated, ‘she has a poor opinion, I think, of my weakness and I have hurt her enough already.’
Once again his mind fractured into opposing choices: if he remained alone, he could work, he would be free to drop everything, to do what he wanted without having to consider anybody. But alone he had no external stimulus to drive him forward, and when overwhelmed by depression he felt sick, weak and empty, without support or consolation. And what was the point of working selfishly, egotistically for oneself alone: ‘Every joy to be complete must be shared. When I produce something good, there is nobody to talk to about it . . . It is so lonely, so wasted, so meaningless without the warmth of love.’