Beryl Bainbridge

by Brendan King

  It seemed impossible to know what was the right direction to take. He couldn’t even be sure that the qualities he saw and admired in Beryl weren’t simply a reflection of the qualities he wanted to find in himself: ‘Beryl is deep, introspective, enjoys the greater things in life, music, literature, painting, sculpture. Just like me. Oh, what conceit! I only love this reflection, the great flattering reflection of myself in her deep brown eyes. How can one even love sincerely when aware that it is this reflection that one loves?’

  Amid all this doubt and self-questioning, he would come back to one secure position, his faith in art: ‘I do not question the sincerity in my desire to paint, this gives greater joy, greater misery and dejection than anything.’

  In London, Beryl too was waiting. Dorothy had warned her that Austin was going to write to her, but the days, and then the weeks, passed and still nothing arrived. She was plunged back into a state of anxiety, wondering what he had intended to say and why the letter had not arrived.

  The answer was almost farcical in its banality: it had got lost in the post. After weeks of anxious waiting on both sides, Austin finally discovered what had happened by a chance telephone call to Dorothy, when she mentioned that Beryl had rung her:

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘Not, I believe, so well.’

  ‘And the letter?’

  ‘She did not receive it.’

  And back came all this anxiety, this torment. What now? Ring her, tell her? But can I be sure, yes, yes, as sure as ever.

  We had lunch New Year’s day, a little embarrassed I feared reproaches, but how shall it be, will we, can we; to live together always is a long time and my wanderings, my empty heart, shall these cease to be? Logically it is perhaps unwise, but must all things be subject to logic. I do love as much as I ever can, and if this were all settled I could work and work and not succumb to all the smallest temptations.

  ‘What did you put in your letter to me?’

  ‘I wrote asking you to marry me.’

  What reaction had I been expecting? She said nothing and looked at me in the half light of my basement studio.

  ‘But you can’t just say that, it doesn’t mean anything.’

  How could I explain?

  ‘I have always felt it to be inevitable. Remember when we met in Euston and I told you Anne had refused categorically to go through with it? I felt then like almost an erring child returning to the fold to relate his relapses. I felt close then, almost as though I had not been away, that I had been out and got drunk, nothing more and was returning to where I belong, a little ashamed and so sorry.’

  ‘Yes, yes it was like that. I felt it was inevitable that you should come back.’

  ‘And now I feel I have the courage to face it and be with you always. I ran away from it, avoiding the responsibility of maturity. Now I can’t run any more. I don’t want to be alone, to work alone.’

  But such a volte-face was not easy to take in. Beryl’s mind was still full of the traumas of the past year, Austin’s rejection of her, the rape, the succession of messy involvements with other men – with Robert, Gareth, André and Kevin. Would a relationship with Austin even be possible now, after all that had happened? ‘How can I believe you or trust you?’ she asked him. ‘You said before once in London that you were as sure of this as you were of your work. Yet you wrote later that awful letter . . . and you made it so I didn’t care and slept with many men, seven or eight perhaps, I don’t know, because it didn’t mean anything. I didn’t even know the names of some of them, I didn’t care whether I died, and you did this. Now you say you have courage. Oh Aus, you don’t know, you don’t realise.’3

  Beryl accepted his proposal. What else could she do? This was, after all, what she had been hoping for, and fantasized about, for so long. But coming so soon after the disastrous affair with Anne, it was like a bolt out of the blue. There were also some conditions. This wasn’t going to be a spontaneous, romantic sort of wedding, its date set by the calendar of love or desire. If Austin was going to marry her, it would be on his terms: they had to have separate working lives as well as a shared personal one. They needed to fulfil themselves as individuals in order to be fulfilled as a couple. For Austin this meant having the time and space to paint, for Beryl the freedom to further her career as an actress. They also had to have money. Before he and Beryl could afford to marry and live together, Austin wanted a secure job that would enable him to pay off his debts. Although he had started lecturing at the Liverpool College of Art in September, he still owed the Greens some £150, over half of which had been loaned to cover the cost of Anne’s operation. This was a considerable sum given that the average salary at the time was around £600 a year. So Beryl would need to work too: there could be no question of having children right away, dragging them down into a pit of domesticity and debt.

  It should have been a happy time and yet Beryl still felt ill at ease, suspecting that there was something other than love that was at the root of his decision. Her diary shows she was still troubled by doubts: ‘Went to Liverpool to talk to Austin. Find it difficult sitting in the studio to connect what he says now, with what he said in the past.’4

  Austin, too, was equally uncertain whether he was making the right decision. He was torn between contradictory feelings: his guilt about his past behaviour, his attraction to Beryl, and his fear of facing up to his responsibilities: ‘I am ashamed of this last year, but I am sure there could be no-one like her, who so completely satisfies the loneliness, the wanting of someone . . . This year has just begun. Now it is not I singular, alone, but we, plural, together. But the knowledge of my weakness, my impressionability makes me a little afraid. What has 1953 to show?’5

  Beryl returned to London on 14 January, and again set about trying to find work. That same evening Austin went round to see Richard and Winnie, to formally ask for Beryl’s hand. Winnie especially had never taken to him: his appearance was too much that of the bohemian artist and she held him responsible for making Beryl ill the previous year through his callous treatment of her. Austin, aware that he was persona non grata in the house, was not looking forward to the visit, and his letter to Beryl describing the evening is strewn with military metaphors. His plan was to ‘go into the field of battle’, and ‘creep upon the enemy quietly’, using ‘all the tactics of a cat stalking a mouse’, delaying the pounce ‘till the victim is assured’.6

  But in the event, ‘the supposed enemy’ extended a hand of greeting with the disarming words: ‘We have been expecting you, but we are surprised you took so long to arrive.’ Richard then took Austin aside and confided his feelings about the whole situation, man to man, in a monologue that Austin later regaled to Beryl in comic fashion:

  Well Austin! I mean to say, as I said to Beryl before she left, I’m quite sure that if I did have any objection to make, it would make absolutely no difference to your decision . . . if you take my advice, and it’s the advice of an older man with more experience . . . you’ll wait till you have got something behind you . . . She is very fond of you, desperately fond of you and if you feel that way about her all well and good, I am the last person to stand in your way, but Beryl’s not domesticated you know . . . All I can say is don’t take on any responsibility till you are in a position to do so, it’s not worth it, you’re young yet, 27 is it? Well I didn’t marry till I was 37.

  Much to Austin’s surprise the evening passed off agreeably, and her parents ‘seemed most affable about the whole thing . . . even faintly approving’. Nevertheless it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that Austin overplayed Richard’s business-like caution, using it to bolster his own view of the need to take things slowly. ‘They would prefer to wait at least till you are 21,’ he told Beryl pointedly: ‘From our point of view this would probably be better. I will have paid off my debt to the Greens . . . and for both of us our future prospects will surely be clearer.’

  But while delaying the personal and financial responsibilities of marriage seemed a
ttractive, deferring its more physical pleasures was not. Austin’s argument that ‘we both have so much to do that we will not notice the days, the weeks, the months, as they fly past’ seemed to be more an attempt to convince himself than Beryl. A week later he was already feeling the tedium of inertia, and in his next letter he fantasized about the physical intimacy of their joint life together: ‘I am so impatient to get to London to be with you all the time. How wonderful after a full day to come back late in the evening just before you and to have something all warm and savory for you to eat after the evening show, and then to talk (in bed) about all the happenings of that great long separated day.’7

  Having started his new term at the College of Art, Austin’s days were now fully occupied teaching and he would have no time off to see Beryl until Easter, in the first week of April. But he found the prospect of physical separation difficult, especially when he lay in bed at night opposite the photograph of Beryl he had hung on the wall and heard the couple in the house next door making love:

  It is terrible to feel such tension and realize that I must read or write or do something for I cannot reach you. I cannot take you by the shoulders, look deep down into you, and see the pupils of your eyes go black and large.

  Please dear Beryl don’t be cross if I write like this. I fear you may think, as you have thought, that these things are becoming too dominant, it is not so, only tonight circumstances precipitate my feelings and I feel violent almost.

  It seems awful to me that I cannot see you till Easter . . . Now that I have succumbed to, and admitted, my love for you, it burns like a great fire, there are no waters now to dampen it and it spreads wide and deep. I am yours now, it will not be long before we are together every night and every morning.

  All my love, Austin8

  The same day that Austin posted this outpouring of sexual frustration, doubt and insecurity, Beryl was confiding a very different set of emotions in her diary:

  Most nights I go to Roberts room and sit in the crowded messiness behind cheap curtains, always with my coat on and Roberts off. And the cigarrettes we smoke, till two in the morning. Without him I think perhaps I would go quite mad. I am so lost in a coma, no work, nothing and never any money. I eat potatoes, two a day, and six sausages last 3 days, and coffee, coffee, coffee. And of course the All-Bran. I am constantly disatisfied with myself, my size, my face, my body, I would like to eface myself. Of Aus I think but little. How can I? He had it all for so long, I do not need him anymore, though I believe I love him.9

  It was not just these disturbing undercurrents that hinted at a breakdown in communication between them. Wanting to share Austin’s enthusiasm for art, Beryl sent him some of her drawings. But Austin saw himself as a serious artist and took art seriously. He was incapable of making sentimental allowances in his critical judgement, and simply measured her work against an unbending standard of artistic competence, as he would with any other student. His comments about a self-portrait of Beryl’s were hardly tactful: ‘When I looked at your drawing of yourself thinking of me, I thought well?? If she finds it so painful she should think of something a little more cheerful – you look so agonised!!’10

  Beryl’s attempt at a more modern, more abstract style fared even less well. ‘I didn’t mention your drawings cause quite frankly I didn’t understand them,’ Austin told her in a condescending tone. ‘I mean ter say, are they meant to be figures or are they not? If not, then they seem to have a vague resemblance to figures, no doubt this is accidental. It’s all very well doing this modern futuristic stuff, what you want to do is to get down and learn to draw.’11

  The distance between them is perhaps summed up by the single entry in Beryl’s diary for February. Although it was written on Valentine’s Day, it wasn’t about Austin she was thinking: ‘Birthday of mein liebchen Harry Franz. So long ago.’12 Beryl was barely twenty and already she saw her past life with the bitter-sweet nostalgia of someone looking back over a lifetime of experience. As if to bring the point home, two weeks later there was another melancholy entry in the diary noting the death of Pedro. It seemed to sum up the passing of an era: ‘And now the days of Harry and the sea are finally over.’13

  In London, Beryl met up again with her Dundee confidants: Freddie Payne, still separated from Myrtle, was now renting a room in Camden – ‘tiny and sordid and smelling of unwashed stockings’14 – and Noel Davis was living just around the corner from her in Belsize Park. As in the past, their respective emotional entanglements and ongoing dramas became the subject of conversation.

  On top of everything else Freddie was constantly short of money, and he would borrow from her even though she had little enough herself. Taking pity on him after she had collected her dole, she would treat him to coffee or egg and chips in a cafe in Camden. Noel was not much better; borrowing from her and then spending it rashly. One Sunday – Noel and Beryl would go to Brompton Oratory together – she lent him a pound, a considerable sum given that £2 10s was enough to cover food and rent for a week, and by Tuesday he had spent it all.

  Aside from being a drain on Beryl’s finances, Noel and Freddie were also a drain on her emotional energy, what with Freddie’s worries about Myrtle and his sexual orientation, Noel’s convoluted relationships, and Gerald’s agitation over his split with his long-term partner. The constantly shifting allegiances and petty misunderstandings between the three of them were exhausting. But she felt a bond with them, and they were enlivening and entertaining company.

  Beryl made the mistake of confiding some of this to Austin and revealing that she was short of money. To Austin’s way of thinking he was doing the right and honourable thing: he was enduring the pain of separation in order to earn enough money to marry her. Out of the little he earned he would send Beryl money when he could. And now he found out she was giving it away! He was incensed, his righteous anger fuelled by a kind of moral outrage at the dissolute lifestyles he imagined Freddie, Noel and Gerald were living. After a long anecdote about how he had once been duped and taken advantage of himself when younger, he launched into a blistering attack:

  I burn with an inner anger at the thought of you wasting your soft heart upon an unworthy, disgusting subject. I am angry with you for the weakness which allows this . . . Don’t sweetie, don’t!! the idea of your being used in such a manner makes me indignant. You do him, Freddie, more harm than good anyway, you encourage this weakness of character. When he is aware of the possibility of tears of lamentations, of recriminations, do you think for one minute he will hesitate when he finds this a good method of gaining his own ends? Do you suppose you are the only one at whose feet he cries – No! it is despicable you must not allow it!!! . . . I feel sick at your being associated with dregs like Freddie and Noel, at your being associated with them in any way, for people may judge you by the company you keep . . . I find it impossible even to talk to such people, perhaps I am intolerant. Oh! How I was revolted by Noel when I saw him with you, when you brought him here, I felt ashamed for you, even of you. What is it that so attracts you to people like this? They have a horrible veneer of sophistication which I am quite unable to counter, this too easy flow of mellifluous words.15

  Almost immediately Austin repented of what he’d said, and attempted to forestall criticism in a letter of apology:

  I am overcome with remorse on recollection of my last letter to you. That I should presume to criticise you, to censure as it were your friends, to interfere to such an extent into your private relationships, seems to be exceedingly presumptious, for have we not agreed that we must possess a separate life as well as a mutual one? What was the word I used – dregs? – sweetie please forgive me, I don’t understand why I should be critical like this . . . but please understand that I become so indignant when I think you are being imposed upon, when I think people are taking advantage of your soft heart.16

  But this row over money, over her friendship with Freddie and Noel, was only a symptom of broader differences between them, in temperament, in e
xpectation, even in religion. Beryl had written to Gerald telling him about Austin, hinting at the trouble that might arise from the fact that he wasn’t a Catholic, and even suggesting that if they had children she could bring them up as Catholics without him knowing. Gerald, who had occasionally written for the Catholic Herald on theological issues, immediately put an end to that line of thinking:

  Now as to your marriage. You cannot bring these children up as secret Catholics & hope Austin won’t notice. If you marry in the Church A[ustin] will have to sign a promise that they will be brought up as Catholics – if you marry outside the church you excommunicate yourself & cease to be a Catholic yourself. If you will take my advice you will speak to your confessor at once about all these possibilities & get the matter straight in your own mind. I know it’s difficult for women to be clear & factual, but the difficulties are infinitely worse later on if you don’t.17

  Austin sensed Beryl’s underlying unease but was unable to offer any consolation: ‘Your letters are so full of a deadly despair now and I wish continually that I could do something to make you happy . . . Sweetie why do you say I am so cruel, I do not mean to be, I want you to be happy and at peace, but you are torn to pieces with your desperation, your frustration and I feel, at this moment, powerless to help in any way.’18

  The one bright spot in the situation for Austin was the thought of the Easter break, when he could come up to London and see Beryl: ‘Oh Sweetie! time passes slowly till Easter, and I ache for you continually. If only we could, by an effort of will, transpose our minds from one place to another we could lie in bed talking for hours each night about the day’s happenings . . . Letters, mine especially, are so inadequate, how can one express in words the significance of a deep glance or the extreme gentleness of feeling that floods up like a tidal wave, without any reason? How can one put into words, what is far best expressed by a silent embrace?’