Beryl Bainbridge

by Brendan King

  In between rehearsals for Rookery Nook, in which she played Rhoda Marley, a part she had previously understudied at the Liverpool Playhouse, her life resumed its familiar round. On Sunday she went to Brompton Oratory, though arriving late meant she had to climb over the pews to sit next to Noel. She was too distracted about Austin to follow the service, and as the Host was being consecrated tears sprang to her eyes and she fantasized about seeing him: ‘I wander again up Mount Street, thinking everything will be the same if only I tap softly enough on the studio window.’25

  Freddie began calling again at all hours, and Beryl would meet up with Robert, spending her free time seeing films with him or walking on Hampstead Heath. Ken, now back from tour and looking ‘very tall and elegant in his new black suit, like a raven walking up the street’, also came to see her, though his jealousy of Robert sometimes led to awkward situations. The vacuum in her emotional life left by Austin was filled by anxiety, and she felt increasingly bleak about her prospects: ‘I wish I could believe that as I grow older everything will be happy for me. Sometimes I am inarticulate with a misery that rises in me and threatens always to engulf me.’26

  The days prior to the live performance were hectic: there were two full run-throughs of Rookery Nook in Paddington on Thursday, then long camera rehearsals on Friday. Beryl was intensely nervous, self-conscious that the green silk pyjamas she had to wear for the role were showing ‘the too full curve’ of her thighs. There were in fact two performances on Saturday, a matinee that effectively served as a full dress rehearsal, and the televised one in the evening. In the break between the two, Beryl went over to the Union Hotel to have a bath, expensive at five shillings but ‘worth it, I was so hot and tired’.27 The broadcast performance passed off well, despite her nerves and the heat of the lights, and looking out into the audience she saw some old Playhouse friends – Cyril Luckham, Maureen Quinney and Thomas St John Barry.

  The production wasn’t entirely a critical success: the Daily Sketch critic, Mark Johns, felt that some of the male actors ‘weren’t up to it’ and that ‘the whole thing creaked’, though he conceded that farce was difficult to do on television. He did, however, single out Beryl’s performance, swayed perhaps by her skimpy attire: ‘I liked the doe-eyed Beryl Bainbridge as a damsel in distress – and pyjamas – run out of her home in the middle of the night for eating worts.’28

  After Rookery Nook, Beryl returned to the seemingly endless round of signing on and looking for work that constitutes the life of a jobbing actor. She spent lazy days reading or sketching on Hampstead Heath with Robert, and to earn money she began working at Charles Robinson’s shop in South Woodford, ‘selling bars of chocolate to children and woodbines to men from lorries’,29 as she put it.

  Unsurprisingly, she was soon bored by her job at the confectionery shop. The initial charm of Charles’s idiosyncratic, somewhat cantankerous, personality was beginning to wear thin. Moreover, after Lyn had broken up with him, he had become more morose and would sit on his own in a back room drinking sherry. The late-night journeys from South Woodford to Hampstead were also tiring. Everything left Beryl feeling in a gloomy mood: ‘I feel rather depressed today. I have been tossing at night and thinking of A. Hopelessly,’30 she wrote at the start of June: ‘I feel very depressed and lonely. I hate myself too.’31

  The day after Winnie came down to see her in London, Beryl received a letter from Austin, or rather some invitations to his exhibition at the Galerie Apollinaire, due to start in a few days. There was no letter, only a short note reading: ‘Please send these to any wealthy people you might know.’ Its impersonality left her dejected, and the thought he would be in London and they wouldn’t meet made her feel even further away from him: ‘The streets become very empty, I seek him everywhere, I am torn with a sort of restless suffering, which my mother senses and cannot understand. Somewhere I knew A. was. I want to scream I am so nervous. If I was alone I would plunge into the crowd and try to find him.’32

  On Winnie’s last day, Beryl went to see her off at Euston station, her mind still fixated on Austin’s invisible presence somewhere in London: ‘A gulf of desolation begins to open in front of my eyes . . . I will be alone in London with him, only he will never know.’ Afterwards she went to Westminster Cathedral and sat in a pew and cried:

  There is a que outside the confessional but nobody behind me. I said ‘Father, I need help.’ He was very quick and cool with me, to make me cease crying. He said ‘Why haven’t you come before? You know don’t you what danger you have run. You could have been under a streetbus and gone to hell for all eternity.’ And like a child I said ‘Yes Father.’ And for 3 hail Mary’s I was absolved. ‘God,’ he said, ‘had forgiven and forgotten’. But I still cried.33

  Austin’s exhibition opened on 19 June, but Beryl, unable to face meeting him, went three days later, after he’d returned to Liverpool. The visit was a painful one. She was particularly upset by a painting entitled The Inevitability, which represented herself and Austin, with Anne Lindholm on a bed. Johannes Schmidt did his best to calm her, but made matters worse with his indiscreet remarks about Austin:

  Johannes Shmidt came down the stairs of the other room and I sat still, very hopeless. And I was crying and he was saying ‘Oh but yes, but he is not good enough for you. He will never be anything. You must now love someone fully and become loved fully yourself.’ And he was very gentle, real sadness in his eyes . . . And then because I was really hopeless, his mood changed . . . and he was impatient for me to go. But I could not go gracefully, I felt at a loss, crying over this white haired man who was a stranger and who understood how I felt, and I wished I was not so inarticulate and always so untidy.34

  But there was still the problem of what to do about Hugh: ‘I would like to contact Hugh, but feel it is stupid too, I ought to be quiet and await [what] happens.’35 Deep down she knew a relationship with him couldn’t work and that whatever had started between them had to be formally ended:

  Tonight I went to meet Hugh in Golders Green and we caught a trolly up the hill and went a walk over the heath into Kenwood. He made me feel very old and responsible. It seems as if now for oh so long I have been the wise one in all my relationships, doing the worrying and thinking too many times. So that Hugh in his corduroy jacket seems part of a familiar pattern, there is nothing new to be said or inacted, only the form of saying good-bye, as I must. How can one love with a wife and children at home? I wish I could be alone, yet happy.36

  She tried to convince herself of what she had to do (‘I realised it would be better to ring Hugh and tell him I could see him no longer’),37 but she was unable to take the initiative and do it. After dragging on for a further month and a half (‘I feel so strained and worried about the whole thing concerning Hugh’),38 the situation came to a head at the beginning of July. Hugh was directing his first London production, Love’s Labour’s Lost at the Regent’s Park theatre, and he arranged to meet Beryl for tea in her Parliament Hill flat, after which they walked on Hampstead Heath, watching the young couples kissing and cuddling in the hollows.

  The following day they went to the National Film Theatre to see Men Are Such Rascals, a film by the Italian actor and director Vittorio de Sica: ‘Later Hugh and I talked ineffectually by the pond in Hampstead and I wish I were alone, or dead . . . In the light Hugh’s face is strained. Why is it one has not the insight at the first to see why relationships begin? I do not see that Hugh longs and dreams at all possible times about desire and consumation. I interpretated it as love for me, but then one is always so full of pride.’39

  They met again the next day, at a coffee place in Charing Cross where they sat holding hands very indiscreetly. Seeing Johannes Schmidt standing nearby, smiling in amusement at her, she went up to him and asked whether any of Austin’s pictures had been sold, but this reminder of Austin just filled her with gloom: ‘Going back to Hugh my heart sinks, I love Aus so. Walking down Piccadilly we saw the ruined church and the garden and sat on the be
nch under the cool trees and became unbearably tender. “How sweet you are. Oh my little love. How tenderly I care for you.” And so on, and I think I am too unhappy to live.’40

  Resistant as she was to confronting Hugh, things couldn’t go on like this much longer and the next time she saw him she was more open about her doubts: ‘Hugh called soon after lunch and we looked and sighed at each other. But I no longer desire him, and told him so. He became strange and said. “The truth is you don’t love me.” At that I protested but I am not even thinking of him.’41

  A few days later it was Hugh’s turn to try and dampen the fire, realizing that his infatuation for Beryl risked destroying his family life. The last time he’d been at her flat the landlady, Mrs Hannah, had deadlocked the front door while they were both inside. As Beryl had mislaid her key, Hugh had to climb out of the bathroom window and down the drainpipe, snagging his trousers in the process. It wasn’t the sort of activity that became a theatre director of his standing, and not for the last time Beryl would have to listen as a married man tried to backtrack his way out of a relationship that had become too complicated for him: ‘Hugh came round about eleven and we went shopping . . . He talked at great length about his life with Janet. How much he loved her, but how full her life was with the children and work for him, so that at night she was too tired to turn to him. Listening to him I know he is worrying whether to tell her about us. That way I am glad there is nothing to tell, for how should it be justified?’42

  THIRTEEN

  Paris

  For a long while the Colonel and I had planned going to Bordeux, for companionship.

  ‘I am’ he said, under the rain filled hedge, 30 inches round the belly, no!’

  And how shall it be, I thought, loving a man in the french dusk who is keeping in his breath to hold his belly firm.1

  In July 1953, Beryl returned home to Formby for three weeks. At some point during her stay a meeting took place that effectively changed her life, in that it formed the inspiration for her first full-length novel, a book that would relaunch her stalled literary career and propel her to critical and popular success for the first time.

  The meeting was with George Greggs, a fifty-five-year-old married man whom Beryl and Lyn had nicknamed ‘the Colonel’. He was a well-known figure among the locals, and could frequently be seen strolling up the lane arm in arm with his wife Edith (née Tebay), or ‘Tibs’ as he called her. His distinctive house, with its Gothic-looking tower, was situated on the corner of Ravenmeols Lane and Anthony Lane, five minutes from Beryl’s and a minute or so from Lyn’s, and the two girls would pass it each time they went to the pine woods.2

  Consequently, ‘the Colonel’ became a minor character in their shared fantasy world, along with figures such as ‘Molotov’, ‘Lochinvar’ and ‘Old Mr Redman’. On one of their encounters George unwisely confided that his marriage to Edith was not entirely happy, and Beryl and Lyn began inventing ‘wicked stories’ about him and became quite ‘obsessed about him’,3 though this had gone no further than the kind of teasing many schoolgirls indulge in: testing boundaries with men their father’s age and making up private jokes about them.

  The meeting in July, however, seemed to mark an abrupt change in George’s relationship with Beryl, and in her diary she recorded a short cryptic account that at first reads like a fantasy sequence:

  The Colonel and I were married tonight in St Lukes. His gods in their thousands applauded but my God was silent, remembering other things. Gliding toward the isle end, hat in hand, not quite sober, 26 years ago, so he tells me, he married Tibs here . . . The Colonel’s friend The Rev Stephen Henry Philomel performed the ceremony. Mr Fernly and George’s mother were the only two in the church beside these three . . . Then they walked out . . . and began the nightmare journey of 30 years.4

  Despite its dreamlike quality, the diary entry faithfully records the actual events of George’s wedding day. The Greggs had indeed been married nearly thirty years previously in St Luke’s, by Reverend Stephen Henry Phillimore. Reverend Fearnley, the parish priest of St Luke’s at the time, had attended, but Phillimore conducted the service because he was George’s parish priest in Seaforth and had baptized him as an adult two years prior to his wedding. George’s mother was the only other witness because his father had died in 1917.

  But what was the significance of Beryl’s use of the word ‘married’ to describe her meeting with George? How had things come to the point where she could make even an ironic allusion to a marriage between them? The answer lies in a series of references to the Colonel in Lyn’s letters over the previous year.

  After Beryl left Formby for London in 1952, she and Lyn had renewed their fantasy scenario about Mr Greggs and began playing with the idea that they were rivals for his amorous attention. In one of her letters Lyn joked that the ‘one faintly shining compensation for the fact that you are away’ is ‘that I now have sole sway over Mr Greggs’,5 and in another she told Beryl that she had ‘just seduced Mr Greg (Gentleman Greg of the 49th)’.6 As with Beryl’s later ‘marriage’, this was not a literal seduction but simply an exaggeration, a wickedly funny joke that appealed to ‘the peculiarly distorted South-Bainbridge sense of humour’.7

  Over the next few months Lyn kept Beryl up to date about her meetings with the Colonel, some of which were no doubt real given the proximity of their houses, but which were recounted in a fantastical way that was meant to be taken with a pinch of salt. In another letter, after saying that she and the Colonel were ‘still having a great time’, she comically described how they had been ‘riding pillion on a black stallion at 50 mph through the village on a Saturday morning’.8 Beryl no doubt contributed to the joke in her letters to Lyn, unfortunately now lost.

  Beryl’s meeting with George in July 1953 and the subsequent ‘marriage’ was not, therefore, a singular event, but the culmination of the previous year’s sequence of chance encounters and the semi-playful fantasies that had been constructed around them. Lyn gave no indication that she thought of her meetings with the Colonel as anything other than an amusing diversion while she was separated from Charles. Indeed, the distinction in Lyn’s attitude to the two men is clear: while her references to the Colonel are tongue-in-cheek and ironically playful, her references to Charles are deadly serious, and on one occasion she earnestly begged Beryl not to steal him away from her: ‘Glad you like Char – he’s wonderful but please he’s mine. I’m terribly jealous for him. He’s mine.’9

  But while Lyn and Beryl may have seen the whole thing as a joke, George didn’t. By the time Beryl was at Salisbury things had developed to a dangerous point. In April 1953, Lyn told Beryl about meeting George down by the shore, and though her tone was one of ironic detachment, she noted his earnestness in telling her how beautiful her eyes were and how he’d held her hand in an affectionate way – as he would a few months later with Beryl. George’s impulse to take things further with Beryl seems almost certainly to have been provoked by these rendezvous with Lyn, her mock-flirtation holding out in his mind the real possibility of an extramarital affair.

  Beryl’s first meeting with George that July was accidental, at least it is described as such in an early novel, ‘The Summer of the Tsar’ (later Harriet Said), where they both happen to visit the grave of ‘old Mr Redman’,10 who had died the previous year. On the evening of 23 July they met up again, probably in the pine woods, as they subsequently went into St Luke’s nearby, and it was while inside the dark, deserted church that George told Beryl the story of his life, and the two re-enacted his wedding at the altar.

  It may have been a joke, but there was an undeniable symbolic element to it and afterwards they began to see each other in a different light. The day before she left Formby, Beryl met George again, while taking the new family dog, Laddie, out for a walk. The idea of some sort of relationship was now beginning to form in both their minds. It was still one on the borders of fantasy – they held hands and joked about Laddie being their ‘deformed child’11 –
but given Beryl’s emotional fragility after the break with Austin and George’s professed dissatisfaction with his wife, it was a dangerous game to be playing.

  After Beryl returned to London, George wrote suggesting he come down and see her, and she seemed at least to consider the possibility of an affair, though as with Hugh, his age and the fact that he was married made it more problematic: ‘It will never work out, of that I am sure.’12 Going through her mind were a whole series of contradictions and counter-arguments: she loved Austin, but he didn’t seem to love her; they were meant for each other, but they couldn’t get along; George was too old for her, but he was kind and affectionate. The dilemma was summed up in her diary: ‘He’s old, perhaps. But oh to salvage a little happiness for us both.’13

  As the summer advanced, Beryl’s feelings about Austin, George and Hugh remained unresolved, ebbing and flowing with events. The fact that Kevin Stoney, who she had fallen for in Dundee the previous year, was now in London after having married Rosalie a few weeks before, only added to her unsettled state of mind. The news from Dorothy Green that Austin was ‘going around’14 with Toni Butler again did little to put Beryl at her ease, pushing her closer to George, whose affection seemed simpler, more innocent by comparison.

  On 27 August, George came down to London and they arranged to meet at four o’clock, in the lounge of the Pastoria Hotel in St Martin’s Street: ‘He sat in a dark suit trembling, and we drank tea and smoked cigarrettes. Strangely enough almost at once we are at one with the situation, it is natural to hold hands in the crowded streets and walk together up Frith Street.’15

  Beryl had become adept at keeping the various parts of her emotional life in separate boxes: Ken had no idea that Beryl was flirting with the idea of an affair with Hugh or with George; George was in the dark about Hugh; Austin had been unaware of Beryl’s crush on Kevin Stoney in Dundee and didn’t know about her feelings for Robert or George. Inevitably, it became increasingly difficult to keep these compartments watertight, especially given the restricted social sphere that Beryl inhabited in London. As she sat with George having dinner at Fava’s, an Italian restaurant in Frith Street, drinking sweet wine and watching a cat through the window, Kevin Stoney and Rosalie walked in: ‘There was much confusion. Rosalie is guarded very friendly, I grow inchorent, Kevin stares hard, trying to visualise things, looking G. up and down.’16