Beryl Bainbridge

by Brendan King

  But even with the engagement back on, their relationship seemed ominously precarious, each prone to doubts about themselves and about each other. Rumours about Austin’s past girlfriends still played on Beryl’s mind and she couldn’t stop herself from asking him about them, provoking a peeved response: ‘I have no engagement with Toni or any other girls! How could you even think that I could prefer another girl to you?’42 He tried to convince her, and himself too, that he had changed, that she could trust her feelings with him: ‘Beryl, I too am afraid of myself, afraid that again the separation will come, but believe me I will not change towards you, it is almost something over which I have no control this wandering of mine. Really I think I am ready now. I am sick, as you are, of playing at being in love, the word love has almost no meaning for me, I am sick of wandering about aimlessly, of living in the present.’43

  They spent the weekend before Christmas in a charming cottage in North Wales, walking each day for miles and returning for meals. They listened to the wireless, read from Osbert Sitwell’s autobiography Left Hand Right Hand, and went to bed. As Austin put it in his journal, it was ‘uneventful but most pleasant’.44 This was hardly a fulsome expression of passion.

  Beryl returned to London in the New Year, but she had not been back long before she contracted an infection on her lungs.45 A day or so later the young assistant stage manager she had met at Dundee Rep the previous year, Maggie Dickie, now working in London at the Prince of Wales Theatre, came round and noticed that Beryl was coughing up blood into her handkerchief. She consulted Mrs Hannah, the landlady, and they decided it was serious enough to call Winnie, who immediately took her back to Formby. Beryl was taken to hospital, where she lay racked by fits of coughing and groaning ‘Christ!’ over and over again during the night, until the woman in the next bed told her to shut up.46 After repeated X-rays the chest specialist concluded that her symptoms – a chronic cough, shortness of breath, chest pain and coughing up blood – were suggestive of bronchiectasis, a condition in which the airways become damaged, probably caused by her bout of pneumonia in 1940.47

  As the wedding approached, Austin continued to have serious doubts and seemed unable to convince himself he was making the right decision. His barely subconscious desire for flight was reflected in an impractical idea that he needed to live abroad to further his work as an artist. Fed up with what he saw as the provincialism of Liverpool, he applied for a travelling scholarship, though how Beryl fitted into these plans wasn’t entirely clear in his mind: ‘The fact that I am re-engaged to Beryl makes no difference to my desire to travel, could make no difference. I am bored by now with my vacillations with regard to Beryl. Now I regret – and only a month has passed since I last saw her – my re-engagement. I know very well I cannot marry her, nor I think anyone, but perhaps next year or even next week I shall feel and think differently. I am beginning to be rather weary of my indecisive nature.’48

  FOURTEEN

  Married Life

  I who have reached my destination and struggled with all my strength now have resigned myself. Now begins the dawning of placidity, the mature bloom on my mind. I am like an apple that has fallen heavy from the bough and is warm and yellow in the sunlight. But my husband is green and hard with the rain and his core is unformed and bitter to the taste, because he will not submitt.1

  Beryl and Austin were married on 24 April 1954, in the Catholic church of Our Lady of Victories, Hightown, a small village on the coast a few miles south of Formby. Bill Bateman, Austin’s colleague at the College of Art who specialized in furniture design, served as best man, and Lyn acted as bridesmaid.2 Photographs show a beaming Beryl, wearing an elegantly modern ballet-length dress of cream Chantilly lace with bead embroidery and a coronet of lilies of the valley. By contrast, Austin looks stiff and uncomfortable in his three-piece suit, his jacket bunching up at the waist as if incorrectly buttoned.

  The wedding attracted more than usual attention in the press. Beryl’s connection to the Liverpool Playhouse and her appearance on television meant she was considered something of a minor celebrity, while Austin was a local figure in his own right, not just as a lecturer and artist but as the son of the city’s most famous living architect. Significantly Harold did not attend, though Nora did – the first time Beryl had met Austin’s errant mother.

  After a reception for about seventy guests at the Hightown Hotel, the newlyweds did not go on honeymoon as might have been expected. Instead, they drove to New Brighton and took in a European film, though whether the decision stemmed from Austin’s refusal to spend money he did not have on something as indulgent and ephemeral as a honeymoon, or an equally determined refusal to bow to convention, isn’t clear.

  In many respects the wedding, supposedly the symbolic union of two individuals, served to highlight the differences between them. Austin, out of sympathy with what he saw as Beryl’s overly sentimental and romantic streak, and unhappy at the idea of marrying in a Catholic church against his convictions as a committed atheist, looked back on it as a humiliating experience. The very recollection of it made him cringe with mortification. He had always hated formal occasions, and in any case he could never quite believe in Beryl’s new-found Catholicism and all the theatricality that went with it.3

  But there were other differences of opinion. Beryl wanted to have children immediately; Austin was adamant they should get themselves sorted out financially first – they simply didn’t have enough money to start a family. He was trying to do the right thing, to be a responsible husband and provide a home and security for his wife and eventual family. Besides, in order for the relationship to work he felt they both needed to develop themselves as individuals, and that Beryl should continue to work as an actress for her own sake. While a lot of men of the period might have tried to prevent their wives from working, seeing a woman’s economic independence as a challenge to their own power and authority, Austin insisted that Beryl should go out and work. As one of the local papers put it: ‘She does not intend to leave the stage on her marriage.’ A week before the wedding, on Good Friday, Beryl had even had an audition at the Liverpool Old Vic. But nothing came of it and here, as elsewhere, Austin’s plans were frustrated. Beryl would only work twice in the theatre during the course of their marriage.

  In common with the majority of newlyweds, the couple’s first concern after the wedding was to find a place to live. As luck would have it one of Austin’s fellow lecturers at the College of Art, Arthur Ballard, was moving out of his top-floor flat at 45 Catharine Street, a small but elegant Georgian terraced house with a decorative Ionic-pillared portico. At the time such architectural flourishes were deemed old-fashioned, and when the house had been converted into flats the original period features inside, even the elegant banister rail, were cased in behind tongue-and-groove and plasterboard.

  The next few months were taken up with the practical issues of settling in and decorating: Austin’s taste was for more contemporary interior design, Bauhaus-style fittings that were simple and functional. One of the rooms was painted black – Beryl later wrote that her father wouldn’t go in, saying it was nothing more than a funeral parlour4 – and, as he had done in his studio in Hope Street, Austin covered over the old cast-iron fireplace with a piece of hardboard, drilled with little air holes and painted yellow. On the door at the top of the stairs leading to the flat he mounted a proprietorial brass plaque reading ‘Mr and Mrs Austin Davies’.

  The flat, situated conveniently close to the Art School in Hope Street, and a five-minute walk from the Greens’ house and Austin’s old studio, was a spacious one: kitchen with dining area, bathroom, bedroom, living room (the tiled fireplace surround of which Beryl decorated with painted flowers), studio, and a room that served as a store for Austin’s paintings. A flea-infested cat, which they called Tolly – short for Ptolemy – and which featured in one of Austin’s early portraits of Beryl, lived in the cupboard under the stairs. On a fine day you could see the Welsh mountains from the skylight i
n the attic, which was filled with paintings, an etching press, and other bits they didn’t know what to do with.5

  From the three sash windows on the top floor Beryl could look out over St Bride’s church opposite and up to the magnificent, if slightly foreboding, central tower of Giles Gilbert Scott’s Anglican cathedral, a monumental building even by cathedral standards. Beryl’s church of choice, however, was the small Catholic church of St Philip Neri, three minutes down the road. Although it wasn’t particularly old, having been designed around 1920, it had an ornate and pretty Byzantine-style brick exterior, and was decorated inside with mosaics, giving it something of a bright Mediterranean feel.

  In 1954 Catharine Street and the area around Liverpool 8 was not what it is today, an enclave of re-gentrified and high-priced properties.6 Although many of the houses had been built in the nineteenth century, at the height of Liverpool’s economic power, since the turn of the century the city had been in a progressive decline: the wealthy had moved out from the centre to the more spacious suburbs, and the once-elegant terraces of Huskisson Street, Canning Street and Upper Parliament Street, together with the network of streets surrounding them, had been divided up into flats and bedsits. They had been taken over by Irish, Chinese and African immigrants, and by ‘a colony of native artists, musicians, poets and layabouts’, as George Melly put it, who were drawn to the area by cheap rents. ‘Liverpool 8 had a seedy but decided style; its own pubs and meeting places; it was small enough to provide an enclosed stage for the cultivation of its own legend.’7 In short, this was Liverpool’s bohemia.

  At the Greens’ dinner parties Austin and Beryl would mix with university types, artists and musicians. A flavour of these evenings, with the talk at table constantly revolving around artistic matters and which seemed to Beryl like a cultural sparring match, is fleetingly captured in a passage from A Weekend with Claud:

  And then the dinners for six or seven, wine with each course . . . ‘Well, you see painting doesn’t purely represent the visual aspect . . .’ and . . . ‘I thought Bernard played a little too fast . . .’ and ‘Maybe I should take up philosophy.’8

  They would go to concerts at the Liverpool Philharmonic, where they heard Holst’s The Planets and Andrés Segovia playing a guitar concerto conducted by Hugo Rignold (who sat for one of Austin’s portraits, described by the Manchester Guardian as being ‘of great refinement and sensibility’).9 But such evenings always had the potential for conflict: Austin took music seriously, appreciating it as an intellectual experience, whereas Beryl’s more emotional, physical response, her habit of whistling and tapping to music that moved her, and fidgeting during any that didn’t, distracted and annoyed him. Going to the cinema was no better. Austin preferred realistic dramas that dealt with serious issues, whereas Beryl’s taste ran to a different order. When she and Austin went to see A Song to Remember, a romanticized biopic about Chopin, he dismissed it as rubbish and the subsequent argument ended with Beryl bursting into tears.

  Although there don’t seem to have been many public squabbles, the temperamental differences between them remained a source of potential irritation. Bubbling away under the surface, these tensions would crystallize around certain issues and suddenly erupt: religion was one (‘Last night in bed Austin stubbed his foot against the metal hot water bottle and screamed out “Christ”. Why should this be so hurtful to me?’);10 personal grooming was another. Austin admired Beryl for her beauty and he couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t take more care over her appearance or became so defensive and prickly whenever he suggested she comb her hair before they went out.11 To Beryl his attitude seemed just like her mother’s, worrying too much about what other people might think. She didn’t want to be told what she should wear or how she should look: she no longer took it from her mother and she wasn’t going to take it from her husband either.

  Housekeeping was another issue that generated conflict. Much as Austin wanted to focus on the significant things in life – his art, philosophical ideas, social engagement – he couldn’t help regretting the little home comforts that, as a man, he’d come to expect. But Beryl had not been trained by her mother in the traditionally feminine domestic accomplishments of cleaning, washing and cooking. Austin was in some ways more advanced in his attitudes than many men of his generation, but he still saw the division of labour within the household in conventional terms: if he was out working all day earning money, surely the least Beryl could do was cook a decent meal and keep the house tidy?

  Life in Catharine Street marked a sharp contrast with Beryl’s previous existence in London. Although the constant to-ing and fro-ing of life in Hampstead and the fraught emotional dramas involving Freddie and Noel, Ken and Robert, Ronnie and Hugh had been detrimental to her emotional stability, they had at least provided a distraction. Now she was married and out of the capital, this network of male friendships dissolved overnight. With Austin either at the Art School or closeted in his studio doggedly pursuing his work as an artist, Beryl had to find new friends, new amusements and new activities to fill the void.

  In London, Beryl’s circle of friends had mostly been actors or those involved in the theatrical world. Now that she was back in Liverpool not only did her correspondence with Ken, Hugh, Noel and Gerald cease, she seems to have deliberately avoided socializing with her former Playhouse colleagues, despite the expectation that she would return to the theatre.

  Instead, in the early years of her marriage, Beryl’s social world revolved around Austin and his close friends. Aside from the gatherings and dinner parties at the Greens’, there were parties at the Frohlichs’ huge house on Greenheys Road. There were also evenings down at the pub. They would usually either be at The Philharmonic on Hope Street, an ornate wood-panelled dining room-cum-saloon with art deco fittings, which, as its name suggests, was practically opposite the Philharmonic Hall and was the haunt of musicians and university types; or at Ye Cracke, a more intimate, less grandiose pub in Rice Street, which had been colonized by artists, art college lecturers and students.

  There were numerous exhibition openings to attend, shows in which Austin or his colleagues had paintings, including private views for the annual Liverpool Academy show at the Walker Art Gallery, or smaller shows at the Bluecoat Chambers and the Sandon Studios Society. Through Austin, Beryl met many of the pivotal figures in the post-war Liverpool art scene over the next few years. They included Arthur Ballard, Nicholas Horsfield, Bill Stevenson, and the Hungarian-born emigré Georg Mayer-Marton, who had trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in the 1920s.12

  Another of Austin’s close friends was the painter Don McKinlay, who had been a student with him in 1949. Don, described as ‘direct, occasionally abusive, naturally talented in the basics of his chosen craft and uncompromising’,13 had studied under Arthur Ballard, and like Austin before him, was working as a scenery painter at the Liverpool Playhouse. He and his wife Helen would be regular visitors to Catharine Street over the next few years.

  Beryl gradually began to form new friendships of her own. At one of the Frohlichs’ parties she met Robert Shackleton, a geology professor at Liverpool University and a nephew of the Polar explorer. Shackleton was a highly respected geologist with the ability to illuminate his subject in conversation with others, but he was also unconventional in both dress and manner. His habit of quizzically raising both eyebrows as he listened to his interlocutors could be off-putting. One of his colleagues recalled that during a field trip to Connemara he would ‘progressively strip off layers of clothing’ while driving back to the hotel, and that when he pulled into the forecourt he ran in naked so as to be the first in the bath.14

  It was Robert’s second wife, Judith, who would become one of Beryl’s closest friends during this period. Judith was an artist and equally unconventional in matters of clothing, wearing floaty dresses and no bra.15 Born in 1915, Judith was, if not exactly a mother figure to Beryl (‘Judith was never maternal towards anybody, including her children’,16 as her da
ughter put it), at least more sympathetic to her problems than Winnie. Their friendship served many of the same functions as that with Lyn had done, and over the next twenty-five years Beryl would write long letters to Judith, keeping her up to date on the vicissitudes of her fraught and complex emotional life.

  The Shackletons hosted a number of parties at their home: they lived in a converted stables at the back of a massive Victorian house about a mile and a half from Austin and Beryl’s flat in Catharine Street. Less intimate and formal than evenings at the Greens’, which tended to focus on conversation about political and artistic matters, and less intellectually high-powered than gatherings at the Frohlichs’ (Robin Riley recalled meeting the quantum physicist and Nobel prize winner Erwin Shrödinger there one evening),17 the Shackletons’ parties were frequently described as ‘wild’ affairs. They provided an opportunity for students, lecturers and professors from a whole range of disciplines – geology, philosophy, medicine, art, music and physics – to mix with one another.

  Another significant acquaintance was Dr Cyril Taylor, who became Beryl’s doctor shortly after her marriage. Born to Orthodox Jewish parents in 1921, Taylor trained as a medical student during the war, but it was as much for his political activism as for his talents as a doctor that he became such a respected figure in Liverpool 8.18 Taylor’s house in Sefton Drive, where he lived with his wife Pat and their two children, was an important locus of activity for those on the political left, as well as for actors with the Unity Theatre, who would rehearse in the garden.19

  Over the next decade Beryl would come to rely on Cyril for emotional support, as well as for medical advice, and always looked on him with affection: ‘Cyril nice in his black moustache,’ she wrote during one particularly traumatic period, ‘if I won a fortune would give him and Pat some.’20