Beryl Bainbridge

by Brendan King

  TWELVE

  Break

  A few months in Salisbury alarmed me because I lost control of certain events . . .1

  In February 1953, Hugh Goldie, now at the Salisbury Arts Theatre, contacted Beryl to see whether she was free for a run of five productions, beginning in March and going through to the end of April. The schedule was intensive: Salisbury was a weekly Rep, and Beryl was due to work three weeks on, with a week off at Easter, followed by a further two plays in two weeks. The first production was Little Women, Marion de Forest’s adaptation of the novel by Louisa May Alcott, which opened on 16 March. Beryl began rehearsals on the 10th.

  Salisbury remains a relatively compact city dominated by its magnificent Gothic cathedral; in the 1950s it had the air of a small provincial town. This had its advantages: the theatre was just a short stroll from open countryside, and Beryl and the other members of the company would spend some of the little time they had off taking walks, or going to a country pub just outside the city borders.

  After Little Women (‘Beryl Bainbridge [plays] the invalid Bess, whose fond farewell to Jo is certainly memorable . . .’)2 the next production was Elmer Harris’s Johnny Belinda, about a neglected deaf and dumb girl rescued by a doctor who teaches her sign language. Goldie, who had championed Beryl since their early days in Liverpool, gave her the leading role – albeit technically a non-speaking one – of the mute Belinda. His confidence was amply rewarded and her ‘outstanding performance’3 was universally applauded: ‘It is a most difficult part for anyone to play, but Miss Bainbridge is wonderfully appealing, conveying her feelings of sadness and joy, of fear and trust, and above all of love, by her expressive eyes and clever facial expressions. It is a performance that tears at the heart-strings.’4

  While Beryl was riding high on the success of Johnny Belinda, Austin was suffering from a series of disappointing setbacks: an exhibition committee had turned down all three of the portraits he’d been working on, and his entry for the Topham Trophy didn’t even merit a mention (‘Not a bloody sausage not even a runner-up . . .’).5 This was doubly frustrating, both as a rejection of his work and for the loss of prize money it represented. All his hopes now rested on a meeting at the start of April with Johannes Schmidt, owner of the Galerie Apollinaire in London, to discuss the possibility of a one-man show. He planned to meet Schmidt first, and then come on to Salisbury to see Beryl, booking a double room at a hotel to avoid causing problems at her digs.

  They had been writing regularly to each other since the engagement, but the misunderstandings between them continued. After Austin had seen The Road to Hope, an Italian film about a group of miners forced to leave their village in Sicily to find work, he wrote enthusiastically about the film’s portrayal of women, describing their ‘great heavy eyes, high cheek bones and gorgeous mouths, smouldering, burning, with projected firm bosoms and long hair’.6 He had meant to express how moving the film was as an account of human experience, but insecure as she was about her looks Beryl took his comments as an implied criticism, and wrote back saying she was ugly and that he seemed to find Italian women more beautiful than her. His attempt to set her mind at rest hardly improved matters: ‘You are stupid saying you are not beautiful, you are! I have only to glance up at your large photograph hanging on the wall to reassure myself. I agree the photograph of you leaning over the garden gate is not particularly good, you look older and weary.’7

  Beryl was disappointed that Austin wouldn’t get time off work to see her in Johnny Belinda, and as the date of his visit approached he detected a further note of unease in her letters: ‘You sound unhappy,’ he told her, ‘what are the difficulties of which you speak?’8

  Beryl’s ‘difficulty’ was the usual one of trying to work out what she felt. The proximity of Hugh Goldie was beginning to unsettle her. Hugh had always enjoyed Beryl’s company, and though he had a happy home life, he was not immune to her attractions. At the Liverpool Playhouse and in subsequent encounters he had framed their friendship as that of brother and sister, mutually sympathetic and affectionate – but platonic. However, the experience of working so closely together had pushed things in a disturbing direction. Beryl’s Playhouse crush on Hugh briefly revived and she seems to have told him about her feelings – and about her doubts regarding Austin. Matters came to a head when Austin arrived, and Beryl’s diary charts the painful disintegration of their fragile bond:

  2 April Thursday: Austin came to stay at Salisbury. Rain everywhere and Hugh’s white face, and the empty theatre and the cool dampness of A’s cheek, and the immense distance between us from the awful begining.

  4 April Saturday: A dreadful scene with Austin . . . I realise he will not marry me. Once more it is over.

  5 April Sunday: Realise Austin and I are hopelessly out of sympathy with one another.

  6 April Monday: Went to Kate and Mortimers for a drink with Jim Paige Brown and Hugh and Austin. Looking up at the stars on the way home I suddenly turn to Austin but it is futile. He does not understand. It is better to let the tide go over us.

  7 April Tuesday: Said good-bye to Austin in more ways than one. Tore my lovely ring off when his train had departed and cried brokenly, but for what?9

  Austin was also painfully aware that things weren’t working out. Analysing the situation in his journal afterwards, he ruefully noted that at the start of the year he’d been optimistic, perfectly sure of his relationship with Beryl, but that his feelings had changed over the course of a few months: ‘Strange how things can mean so much and then so little.’ Although he enjoyed Beryl’s company and the ‘pleasure of complete knowledge’, he felt an ‘emotional and physical inadequacy’ when he was with her; he realized that ‘something more was required’ but couldn’t give it. At Salisbury he’d begun writing a long and affectionate letter, and when Beryl came across it and realized it was to Fanchon, not her, ‘the pain she felt was evident’ – she was horrified he could use such affectionate terms to another woman. His summing up of the Salisbury trip betrayed little hope of a joint future with Beryl: ‘We parted friendly, yet separated, and both sad. She knew then that it was impossible and always had been. Perhaps it was the romantic element which made me believe, want to believe, so much in our association. Perhaps because there was no fresh stimulation, no immediate surge of passionate interest, my feeling automatically died.’10

  How much Austin guessed about Hugh’s involvement in the breakdown of his relationship with Beryl is difficult to determine, as neither his letters nor his journal mention him by name. But Hugh himself was certainly feeling the strain from the off-stage drama. Tired and emotionally fraught, he returned home to Portsmouth on 7 April – the same day Austin went back to Liverpool – his work at Salisbury now done. That night Hugh wrote Beryl a long letter, a mixture of exhilaration at the thought she returned his feelings, anxiety at what the future might hold, and guilt about what he’d been responsible for:

  Beryl Darling . . . I feel as if a bomb had exploded in my life. What will happen when the dust blows away and what will be left I no longer feel capable of assessing, all I know is that something drastic has happened in the last few weeks . . . The truth is I don’t feel I have any right to offer words of wisdom to my little erstwhile ‘sister’, because I’m afraid I’m very largely responsible for the turmoil in your life at the moment . . . it seems awful to think that loving you as I do has been a destructive force, and not creative as love should be . . . but despite these feelings I can’t honestly say that I wish it hadn’t happened . . . Forgive me darling for loving you so much. God how I miss you, Hugh.11

  Beryl spent the next week in a state of emotional confusion, and the following Saturday, perhaps hoping to get some answers, she went down to see Hugh in Portsmouth. To talk privately together they went out for a walk, wandering around the fairground at Southsea, where they went on a roller-coaster, an appropriate enough metaphor for Beryl’s emotional life over the past few months.

  But the trip to Portsmouth resolved
nothing. Although she knew a relationship with Hugh had no future and risked breaking up his marriage, she couldn’t stop imagining some romantic connection between them. The following day, after spending the afternoon with him, Beryl returned to Salisbury for the last week of her scheduled engagement, playing Aisla Crane in Edgar Wallace’s classic whodunnit, The Case of the Frightened Lady. Back in her digs, she wrote a poem expressing her feeling of uncertain expectancy about a possible relationship:

  If I should come across you yet once more . . .

  Ernestly sweeping back the fair hair

  From your brow, and easing up your collars

  Sending soft arrows of unspoken energy

  From eye to eye, allowing here and there

  A slow message for the watching others.

  I shall not know how to conceal my worthless love . . .

  My inarticulate heart will suffer and dilate

  Watching my brothers, watching others

  Watching me wait, waiting to live.12

  As if Beryl didn’t have enough to cope with while she was at Salisbury, an obsessive fan had taken a fancy to her in her guise as Belinda. The man, Frank H. Gopsill,13 was in his early sixties – two years older than Beryl’s father – and had been a second lieutenant during the First World War. After being invalided out in 1918, probably as a result of shell shock, he subsequently became a patient at the Old Manor Mental Hospital on the outskirts of Salisbury and had been there ever since. He was considered harmless and allowed to go out, and having done this kind of thing before, no one at the theatre was particularly surprised when he fixed his attentions on Beryl.

  Beryl’s response was very different, however, from that of other actresses who had been stalked in this way. Rather than avoid him, she acquiesced in his fantasies and started going out for walks with him. Her openness to, and acceptance of, offbeat and eccentric people who others might have gone out of their way to avoid, would be a lifelong characteristic. It was partly a self-conscious act, designed, like her desire to be seen dancing in the street by her neighbours, to present a particular image to those around her, and throughout her life she would form friendships with individuals her other friends considered strange or even mad. As she put it at the time: ‘I find I draw to me all kinds of weak unbalanced people, mostly a good deal older than myself, [who] rely on me and trust me and burden me with their sorrows.’14 But it was also a consequence of her almost pathological inability to say no to anyone who asked something of her. In later life she would be plagued by visits from local drunks, social misfits and those with mental problems, who would knock at her door demanding money or attention. She might hide from them or pretend she was out when they called, but she found it almost impossible to tell them to go away.

  Gopsill wasn’t the first in this collection of exotic human specimens, and he wouldn’t be the last. Such encounters weren’t, however, without their pleasures, and they at least provided a distraction from Beryl’s emotional upheavals. Their first excursion together was to the Old Mill, a country pub a short walk from the theatre:

  Mr Gopsill would pause, lean on his stick and say far too loudly ‘My dear Miss B, breath deeply, relax, one two, three.’ And I would do as he said laughing. But I was too full of wonder at my ability to attract such an interesting person to realise what exactly I had done . . . I would laugh and look wildly around me, singing inapropiately to myself ‘Aye-O, here we go again Sister Anna.’ Sometimes I said this aloud. It could not have been thought strange amid the shouts and threats and stick waving.15

  But after a subsequent outing she gradually realized that it wasn’t so much a case of her taking pity on him, of living up to her moral ideal of loving all mankind, as it was Mr Gopsill pitying her – he considered her the lonely one in need of friendship and sympathy. ‘I decided not to see him again,’ she wrote in her diary:

  and went out by back entrances, or road out of the theatre in a strange hat on the electrican’s bicycle. Every morning Mr Gopsill took up his post outside the box office, way laying the company, asking them questions. Afternoons I lay in the fields about the town reading books beside the rushes, starting everytime a swan glided down the stream past me. When it came time for me to leave for London I relented and he came to say good-bye to me at the station, presenting me with a brown holdall containing a bowl of earth and cacti, a fountain pen and the book Rob Roy. Sedately we walked arm and arm, up and down the platform till it was time for my train to depart. He kissed my cruel hand and I bent from the window and touched his lips with my cheek.

  Despite her gloom over Austin’s visit and her anxieties about Hugh, Beryl managed to hide her feelings from the other members of the company. The final two days were a mix of high spirits and light relief, tinged with sad farewells. On the last day, she and fellow actress Prudence Clayton conspired to entice George Selway, another actor with a crush on Beryl, into the dressing room in order to kiss her. But in the middle of these antics she heard Hugh’s voice in the corridor and she froze, struck by how stupid it all was.

  When she arrived in London in late April, Robert Lawson met her off the train at Waterloo, and she struggled with her bags and her presents from Mr Gopsill, laughing uncontrollably whenever one or other of them fell out of her arms. At 5.20 she caught the train to Liverpool and was back in Formby that evening: ‘I do not know what to think of the whole seven weeks that has gone so quickly and so strangely.’16

  Before going home that night Beryl called in briefly to see Lyn, who told her she had now broken up with Charles (‘Have dropped me pillar of virility with a bang’,17 as she put it) and joined an anarchist group, after falling for one of its charismatic members, a red-haired art student called Rufus Segar. In September she was going to live in Upper Parliament Street with him and some other politically active students. Lyn suggested meeting the next day at Rufus’s flat, but Beryl didn’t want to risk bumping into Austin in the quiet streets around the cathedral, especially as he might be with Fanchon, who had taken up art and attended Austin’s composition classes.

  The following evening she met Lyn and they walked to the pine woods in the half-rain. The wind was blowing wildly on the dunes behind St Luke’s and they ran in and out among the trees, howling, the sand blowing into their eyes and ears. ‘Several times I lay flat down in the wet sand and buried my face in it,’ Beryl wrote, ‘because it was so good to be there.’18

  The next day she rang Austin and arranged to see him, and after dinner with Dorothy and Gordon Green she went round to his flat in Canning Street. It was clear that the relationship had reached an impasse: ‘He said how he was utterly without feeling, so we decided to finish everything.’ They tried to be mature about it, to talk about other things, but it didn’t work, and Beryl couldn’t restrain her emotion: ‘I cannot stop crying, so that he shouts at me angrily “It isn’t fair”.’19

  After a melancholy day spent painting, Beryl went round to see Dorothy and Gordon again, and the three of them sat and talked. They discussed Austin, and Dorothy said it was better the relationship between them had finished. When it was time to go, Austin, who had been working down in the studio, offered to accompany Beryl back to Lime Street, though it wasn’t a convivial journey: ‘On the bus to the station we do not talk, and on the platform he looked very hard at me. I am quite cold inside and impassive.’20

  The next few days were spent in similar fashion, picking up news here and there and trying not to be swamped by the aftershocks of past events: ‘Dorethey tells me that Anne Lindholme came to Liverpool about going into a convent, last week. She is going to be a nun, perhaps.’21 At lunch with the Greens she saw Austin again, and again the atmosphere was strained: ‘I could not speak to him. I looked out of the window and saw Fritz go by in tight black trousers. He smiled and said something like “Are you here for ever and ever?” And when I shouted back, “no, not for ever and ever”, I meant it so many ways.’22

  Even so, she still believed deep down that there was a connection betwee
n herself and Austin that went beyond the world of appearances. After attending a concert together one evening she tried to describe this somewhat paradoxical state of affairs: ‘We sat side by side, Austin and I, holding each other’s hand, but only a hopeless sense of something missing was between us. And yet it is as if we are already man and wife, all this withdrawing and the scenes seem make-believe, the invisible knot exists, no amount of pretending will untie it. So while Dorethey advises him, and Frau Freulïch feeds his mind, and Tonie Butler his body, it doesn’t really matter.’23

  At the start of May, Beryl’s lethargic mood was broken by news about a job. Lionel Harris, who was directing televised productions for the BBC’s Sunday Night Theatre, rang and asked her to come to London immediately to talk about a role in Rookery Nook, to be broadcast live later in the month. There followed a farcical rush to get to the station on time, involving attempts to contact her father for money, and Winnie throwing a fit of hysterics as she was going into hospital that afternoon to have her varicose veins removed. In the middle of it all, four letters, a telegram and a package containing a velvet duster and a book entitled The Art of Marriage arrived from Mr Gopsill, who had proposed to Beryl after her return and now sent her letters and presents on a regular basis. ‘At 3.5. I get on the London train, rather weak in the sunlight. Daddy waves to me at Lime street with more money and a packet of cigarrettes. He is a little merry. At 9 oclock I call at Lionels who says the job is mine. At 9.45 I see Freddie, at 10 oclock Robbie. At midnight I finally find a hotel in Belsize Park and ring home. I am very weary.’24