Beryl Bainbridge

by Brendan King

  The next morning she met up with George again, but the day was ruined by another chance encounter. After going to the Labour Exchange so Beryl could sign on, they bumped into June Furlong, an artist’s model at the Slade who had known Beryl and Austin from her time as a model at the Liverpool Art School. As George stood admiring her form (‘How the Colonel dwells on her breasts’, Beryl jealously noted in her diary), the walls keeping the various parts of her life separate threatened to spring another leak:

  June says ‘Oh yes Austin was dancing about on one leg, saying “I’m engaged isn’t it lovely?”’ And then she mentioned a young girl called Jane who adores him. And at once on the bus between June the model and George I feel sick, my heart lurches, and I am very frightened. I belong, I groan inwardly to him, why has he forsaken me?17

  The following day Beryl was racked with indecision, a confused mix of guilt, jealousy, hope and anger: ‘I cannot help thinking of Austin. I keep hearing what June Furlong said. Somehow and most illogically Austin and I are bound, however we may strain and part. But I am so full of anger. I should like to hit him for being so cruel and foolish. I have gone down so much since him. Even I think I love George, he is so strange and thin and nervous.’18

  Since the beginning of August, George had been trying to persuade Beryl to fly to Paris for a weekend away together. Given recent experiences, he probably considered that an affair between them was as unlikely to start in London as it was in Formby. But Beryl, still two months short of her twenty-first birthday, didn’t have her own passport, so the trip had to wait until all the paperwork was sorted. She went to Somerset House to get a copy of her birth certificate and five weeks later, on 23 September 1953, her passport was issued.19

  Less than a week later, on 1 October, George and Beryl took the bus from Waterloo to Heathrow and flew to Le Bourget. Beryl was immediately enthralled by Paris, and she captured her impressions in lengthy diary entries:

  We were in Paris at lunch time. The city is breathtaking and beautiful. I know if my parents find out they will be upset for many reasons, but truthfully, truthfully I am not doing wrong, and it is worth it all. Perhaps not quite worth causing them unhappiness, nothing is worth that, but I would be wrong to myself not to go to Paris. We walk along the quay in the sun, with the Seine so clear, and the little book stalls . . . In the hotel Georges gets a room with a bidet. I sat on it at once and was very thrilled. We have to climb several flights to our room, at which the chamber maid calls to us . . . ‘Courage’ ‘Vie la sport,’ calls back Georgès.20

  Their room was dark, but with large luminous windows; there was a fire in the grate, and a brass bed with a blue eiderdown on top and a white chamberpot underneath. A reproduction of Paul Gauguin’s Yellow Christ hung over the door. The hotel was situated in the heart of the Left Bank, just off the Boulevard St Germain, so after Beryl had put away her clothes they took in the sights.

  Beryl’s image of Paris had been shaped by one of her favourite books, Elliot Paul’s picaresque novel of bohemian life, A Narrow Street. Now here she was in the Paris of the 1950s, a Paris that would become the stuff of legend: the Left Bank really was the haunt of students and bearded existentialists, Jean-Paul Sartre could still be seen in Les Deux Magots, and for Beryl the reality of Paris lived up to her impossibly romantic image of it. In 1948 she had written to her French pen-friend for information about Sartre; now she was sitting in the very café he wrote in. She noted down a mass of details that caught her eye: the little courtyards and alleys, the statues, the musicians in the street, the Haussmannian boulevards flanked by tall stone buildings, and the stalls of the bouquinistes down by the river:

  We wander along the Rue la Hachette of the Narrow Street, and gaze at the Hotel Normandie. Visit St Suplice, with pidgeons in the square. Also the museum of modern art . . . We sit in a park, among flowering trees watching the children in the sun, the little boys wearing pinyfores. A dusty little church near St Severin called St Julien le Pauvre. We see two more weddings, 1st and 2nd class. At each the guests wear mourning. Sat outside the Deux Maggots watching the students, the lovely women and the bearded men. Indescribably nostalgia everywhere. Later we went on the Metro to Montmartre which is so evil. Hundreds of drunk Americans lying about, and prostitutes and negroes, and great neon signs.21

  On their last evening they dined again outside Les Deux Magots, eating steak and drinking Cinzano, ‘I never want to leave’,22 she wrote later that night.

  But Beryl’s distinctive looks, and the incongruous discrepancy in age between herself and George, inevitably attracted attention, bringing to the fore the question of what exactly the relationship between them was. Although she found George kind and charming, and his obvious feelings of attraction to her were in stark contrast to Austin’s frustrating reticence, she began to see that George was too old for her, incapable of the sort of romantic gestures and spontaneity she craved: ‘I want suddenly for G to kiss me but he is not sure of him[self], and I become irritated. Firme t’a geule, I want to cry.’23

  The final straw came when a student, mistaking George for Beryl’s father, tried to pick her up in a café:

  It was not till we began drinking coffee that the party of students came in and sat by us. I could only see the men wore jerseys and shorts and some had little fluffy beards and no moustaches, and that the women were firm and dark clothed with hair tied up with ribbons. The Colonel did not even glance up, he was too weary all at once, holding his cup with a tired white hand. And when the man with the red beard leant forward and spoke to me, he did not look up.

  ‘You are very pretty’, said the man quite loudly in English, smiling round at his companions. And then ‘Won’t your father go home soon?’

  The Colonel looked at me while this was said, and I looked away at the door of the café, clothed in little spotted curtains. And all at once our friendship was like the dream you might have at a feast, of soft white bread, and looking down you find it crumbling greyly between your fingers.24

  Their last night in the hotel room was a bit of an ordeal, inducing in Beryl a kind of existential panic about what she was doing with a man old enough to be her father:

  There was nothing more to talk about once we sat facing each other across the bed, drinking the wine, and as long as I looked straight at him I was not lost. Look away however from the familiar thin face with the cold eyes and I was utterly alone in a strange country with a perfect stranger . . . And so I grimaced at him and waited to be brave. Of course we were old friends, who shall deny it. And he was too tired of an old old habit and I too sick of an old old wound to spoil things by clumsiness and disregard.25

  Back in London it didn’t take long for reality to start creeping in: ‘When I returned here a letter from Mummy sends me a cutting of one of A’s exhibitions. I want to cry, but go out and meet George for dinner.’26

  For the next few days, while George remained in London, they continued to see each other. He would either come to Parliament Hill or they would go out to the theatre or for dinner at Fava’s, and her feelings for him intensified once more: ‘I love him very much. Again I am unhappy.’27 When George left to go back to Formby – and his wife – she went to see him off at the station: ‘I felt so lost having to say good-bye and did not know what to do.’28

  But despite her indecision things were moving to a close. On his return to Formby, George seems to have had second thoughts. He wrote saying that he thought Edith suspected something, a hint that they might need to cool things off. Beryl noted in her diary that the idea that she might make them unhappy made her feel ‘a little sick’, though she still loved him ‘very much’.29 For a few days after his departure she was wracked by conflicting emotions (‘Oh my dear little George, where are you? Do you miss me? And Austin? Oh you too!’),30 but without George’s physical presence it was easier to separate herself from him. Coming so soon after her involvement with Hugh, the ease with which she had got herself mixed up with another married man, and the realization that
deep down her need to be loved outweighed any moral or ethical considerations, scared her: ‘A letter from George today, full of love, and I miss him. But I am such a bad bad girl, I frighten myself.’31

  Whether it was Beryl or George who initiated the final break isn’t clear: the entry in the diary about his letter is her last reference to George, and he effectively disappears from the scene. In any event she now had more immediate concerns to worry about: three days after her return from Paris, Robert Lawson had asked her to marry him – and the situation with Ronnie Harris was beginning to get out of hand.

  Ronnie Harris was an antiques dealer who lived with his wife, Cheryl, just down the road, at 8 Parliament Hill. In an almost literal sense Ronnie was a self-made man: born Ronald L. Harris in 1916, after his marriage in 1946 he simply added his middle name to give himself the more distinguished-sounding double-barrelled surname of Lowther Harris.

  In later life Ronnie would boast that Beryl had written a book about him and that they had a passionate affair, conducted ‘on and off’ over a number of years. According to Ronnie, after one night of passion Beryl had said to him ‘I’ve never given you anything’ and had written him a large cheque – only to send her accountant round the next day to retrieve it.32 Much of this is wishful thinking, though it’s true Ronnie figured as a character in her novel A Weekend with Claud, and on at least one occasion Beryl did lend him money.

  What is more certain is that, from the very first, Ronnie was violently attracted to Beryl. At the time of her trip to Paris with George, Beryl knew Ronnie only slightly, having met him in passing the way people who live on the same street occasionally do. Nevertheless, Beryl was aware of his feelings towards her – a few weeks previously, as she was going past Ronnie’s flat, he had invited her in to meet his wife, who was six months pregnant, and their three young children. As he showed Beryl out, he tried to kiss her in the hall. At the time, she had noted her sense of distrust about him (‘There is something fake somewhere . . .’),33 but despite this obvious warning sign and her own misgivings, she continued to see him in a series of cat-and-mouse meetings that were clearly intended, on his part at least, to offer the possibility of seduction: ‘At about 1 a.m. there was a rattle on my window and Ronnie was there, in a muffler. The car was parked in South Hill Road, and we went a drive up beyond the pond. He is so nice, but I cannot place him as yet. He is a little infatuated with me, but I do not know what to make of him . . . Got home at 3 a.m. With what excuse I wonder?’34

  Ronnie was a larger-than-life character,35 and nothing if not persistent. Although he presented a somewhat comical image, ‘clad in white trews and a sailor blazer and his beard in tiny tendrils’, Beryl wasn’t the only one to be seduced, metaphorically if not literally, by his patter and by his swaggering self-confidence. Even so, one can’t help feeling that Beryl’s passive acquiescence to his whims was as pathological as his need to constantly importune her. In one of those acts of rashness in relation to men that frequently exasperated her close friends, Beryl arranged to meet Ronnie, alone, in his shop in Chelsea: ‘In the little back room he lit three candles on a bracket on the wall and we had ham and tea and grapes. Finally he told me he was in love with me, and how he only made love to Cherry three times a year, how she was cold, and how it was a barrier between them. As I listened I got more and more desolate. What on earth, I told myself, am I doing here, in an antique shop with a man with a beard and four children?’36

  But there were limits even to Beryl’s passivity. Despite her reluctant fascination, deep down she distrusted him and preferred the company of Robert or Freddie. Even so, rather than confront Ronnie she preferred to hide whenever he called, or huddle close to the wall when she passed his house in case he saw her. After a few more random and seemingly unsuccessful seduction attempts, he disappeared back into his own hectic concerns – for a while at least, though he would reappear in Beryl’s life at sporadic intervals over the next twenty years.

  The complicated relationships with Hugh, George, Robert, Freddie and Ronnie weren’t the only ones that were drawing to an end in the autumn of 1953. Out of the blue, Lyn, for so long Beryl’s confidante, co-conspirator, teacher, muse and role model, experienced for the first time what she had perhaps been looking for all along: true love. Ever since their schooldays together Lyn’s letters to Beryl had included running commentaries on her passing fancies and passions, the boys and men who were drawn to her being cast off almost as soon as she had captivated them: Phil, Sandy, Geoff, Ralph, Rufus, Bill, Charles, all had their moment in the sun, but all had been found wanting. Then in August, while working as a bus conductress on the Isle of Wight, Lyn met Rik Medlik and fell completely and absolutely in love.

  Unlike Lyn’s previous passions this one didn’t fade, and embarrassed now by her past life she began to distance herself from it. She and Beryl went to see Charles in order to retrieve the letters she’d written to him and put a final end to that whole episode. Beryl looked on, by turn cringing with embarrassment at Charles’s humiliation and feeling elated at his final comeuppance.37

  Whether Lyn was simply too taken up with Rik or felt that Beryl was inextricably linked to a past she wanted to forget, the result was the same: they began to drift apart. In a letter to Beryl in August, Lyn complained that her friends had reacted to the news of her unbounded happiness with Rik in a decidedly lukewarm fashion, and her pointed criticism seems also to have been directed at Beryl. Although she wouldn’t have admitted it, least of all to Lyn, Beryl couldn’t help but feel envious of her friend’s new-found bliss, especially when she considered the current state of her own relationships.

  Lyn also disapproved of Beryl’s conduct with the Colonel. Flirting with him and constructing a joint fantasy about an affair was one thing – doing it in reality was another. There was a world of difference between Lyn’s comical evocations of galloping through Formby on horseback and Beryl actually spending a weekend in Paris with him. Although she was rarely at a loss for words and not shy in giving her opinion, Lyn could barely bring herself to mention the Paris trip: ‘I saw G[eorge] last night. I don’t know what to make of it’,38 was all she would say. Although on the surface they remained friends, they saw one another less and less, and things would never be the same between them.

  As autumn progressed Beryl’s situation looked bleak. On the work front things had dried up completely. Apart from a week at Maidstone in July, reprising the role of Hazel Nutt in King of the Castle, she had had no theatrical work since the live television performance in May and was beginning to get desperate. In lieu of proper work, she eked out small amounts of pocket money by babysitting for Ronnie and Cherry. Ronnie, still completely infatuated, would also take Beryl out and give her money from time to time.

  She was also unsettled by Robert’s proposal. Initially, she had wanted to laugh, but he was in deadly earnest and she had to spend the next few weeks trying to assuage his hurt feelings at her refusal. Inevitably talk of marriage prompted thoughts about Austin, and she would imagine him walking by her side, holding her hand: ‘Oh God! how unhappy I am. I really am.’39

  November started as desultorily as the previous month had ended. A seemingly endless round of overwrought meetings with Robert, strange encounters with Ronnie, and tearful regrets about her missed chance of happiness with Austin. Towards the end of the month, Beryl returned to Formby to spend her birthday with her parents. At some point she met Austin and there seems to have been another emotional scene between them – in any event two pages from her diary, covering her birthday and the following day, have been ripped out. Whatever it was that was recorded and subsequently destroyed, the next entry a week later said all that needed to be said: ‘Austin and I have made it up again.’40

  The following day, before Beryl returned to London, they talked about the future. Austin confessed he’d been unaware of the extent to which Beryl had misread his actions, and he now committed himself to break with his life in Liverpool and work towards creating a new li
fe for them in London. A few days later he wrote to her, going over all they had talked about, trying to be positive in the face of negative thoughts about the past and the practical difficulties that lay in the future. Inevitably, his disastrous affair with Anne hung over the letter like a black cloud:

  My dear Beryl, if only, seems to be all I can say to myself, and even that seems to be an excuse. What a waste of time and money there has been. I think of what life is and then what it could be, or what we could make of it. I think of all I have written and the promises I have made, and I am reduced to nothing.

  The mixed feelings, mostly of despair and depression, which I feel when I know the profound misery I have caused, overcome me so that I can see no solution to our problem, it seems too great for there to be any solution. Yet I know with my mind that things are not so bad . . . I can and will make enough money to afford a Chelsea studio and to afford to get married . . .

  It would be an insult to ask you to believe anything after what has passed – it is even impossible for me to believe myself now. I can only hope, as do you, that what seems eventually inevitable is not also just another delusion. I can only reassure you that what we discussed when you were here has not become, because of the passage of time, a fantasy. It is real, or as real as anything feels now. But I feel so continually guilty. I wish to expiate, but am unable.41