Beryl Bainbridge

by Brendan King

  The very first contrived meeting . . . baby girl in her pram, a pink outfit, a wooley hat on the bald pale head . . . ‘Hallow,’ the bowler is lifted not quite comfortably, the black shoes splay out as they walk. ‘She’s very white,’ looking down at the sleeping infanta . . . ‘I think you’re wonderful . . .’ boyishness oozes from him.11

  Mick was not handsome by conventional standards. One photograph shows him looking pasty-faced, slightly overweight and prematurely balding. Most of those who knew Beryl were surprised, even slightly shocked, that she should have fallen for him, though this may have been partly because, as a bowler-hatted and be-suited solicitor in the Town Clerk’s office, he didn’t seem to belong to the same bohemian world of artists, students and university types. But to Beryl, feeling neglected by Austin, Mick had something of the charm of the overgrown schoolboy; he was her ‘little boy lost’ with his ‘spoilt beauty boy face’, and she was captivated by ‘his kindness and his generosity and his emotion and his wide wide mind’.12 She had never known, or liked, a man before ‘who went in pubs, who smelt of beer, who smoked tobacco, who went to football matches, who drove fast cars and had men friends’.13

  Born in Hull in 1932, Mick didn’t come from a privileged background like Austin. His working-class father had worked his way up from office boy to a partner in a firm of solicitors, and both were Yorkshiremen through and through. Generous and open, Mick had a lively sense of humour, and Beryl enjoyed his company. His one fatal flaw was his inability to settle, to commit. ‘He was absolutely terrified of commitment,’ his wife would later recall, ‘there was this wild streak in him, he was absolutely terrified by it.’14

  Beryl fell in love with him almost immediately. The turning point came one evening when she returned home after visiting the Shackletons. Mick and Austin had been discussing, amicably, what to do about the ongoing situation. Hearing her come in, both ran downstairs, Mick telling her ‘It’s alright, we’ll be together now’, before rushing off, bowler hat in hand, saying he’d be back once Austin had talked to her. Austin reassured her he was fine about Mick: ‘I understand sweetie, it will be alright.’ When Mick came back an hour later there were further discussions, Beryl sitting in the big brass bed with Mick on one side, Austin on the other. A couple of years later she would tell Mick: ‘When I think of it I must have been on the fringe of lunacy, the whole thing, and all of us involved. Looking back from this distance it was too civilized and improbable to be true. Had Austin socked you on the jaw, or I pocessed any normal feelings at all, or you any experience of such ridiculous people, how different life might have been. Austin would have gone, I would have altered, but the damage and the destruction might have been less.’15

  Despite the surface harmony, by August Beryl was already writing to Judith, anxious that Mick seemed to be hesitant about their relationship: ‘I am now so mis[erable] over M. who fluctuates so alarmingly between doubts and certainties. I am torn between the lovely tolerant acceptance of A, whom I no longer love as I did, but whom I increasingly admire, and the soaring normalness of M. whom I don’t admire but whom I love. An awful lot of whomes . . . Nothing is any different but nothing is said, because it is all so complicated.’16

  The word ‘complicated’ aptly described Beryl’s personal life, even if the complications were at least partly self-generated. One complication was Ronnie Lowther Harris. Even from her earliest dealings with him, she’d felt uncomfortable in his presence, sensing there was something vaguely dislikeable or untrustworthy about him. But her vague feeling of distrust was matched by fascination, and however annoyingly, or even appallingly, he behaved, she couldn’t quite bring herself to shake him off.

  Despite now having six children, Ronnie was still obsessed with Beryl, and his desire to consummate their relationship was only whetted when he learned of the way things stood with Austin. Now based in Tring, where he had opened a huge antiques emporium called Corner Cupboards, Ronnie decided to take advantage of Austin’s temporary absence and pay her a visit. But his badly timed arrival clashed with one of Mick’s departures, leading to frantic efforts on Beryl’s part to keep the two men from meeting. In a letter to Judith, Beryl recounted the events of the evening, during which Ronnie’s attempts to seduce her after a meal at the Adelphi Hotel were thwarted by Brenda Powell:

  At the risk of seemingly being inexhaustably dramatic as always, there have been great doings on here. The antique dealer with the six children arrived last week for five days. M. was going home for the weekend and brought me a street lamp for the back yard. As he went for it Ronnie arrived and I told him to go away for an hour. Mrs Taylor was terrifically valliant and stood in Aaron’s room fiercly waving his car on and on round the block . . . Anyway one went and the other came and was so monstrous and terrible and this all I wanted to flat him with the street lamp. We had a huge chicken effort at the Adelphi, me lady-like in me verulant blue that you despise, and all a glitter with jewels and those extra trimmings that appear to draw men, and so fasinating I was and lilting . . .

  Once home the scene began. Great rememberances of ruby days in Hampstead and the old old magic like a magnet drawing us together. (This I hope you understand are his original phrases, not mine) ‘Oh the clap clap of the hearts, the only true ones in Europe who understand love, who KNOW. Maybe we have eight children between us, does it count when tomorrow we die and our eyes close as the world stops spinning . . . Little Brenda returns and stays on my bed till four. At intevals the radiogram stops and Beau Geste clatters down from the attic, only to find all lights on and Pompeii Bren on the old golden bed. Finally Bren discovers a lock and practically nails me inside, and nothing remembered till the morning when I am let out. He came down at four . . . and battered at my door, went into the studio, pawed the walls, tore upstairs, packed, and went back to London at 4.30.17

  Austin returned from Paris in the first week of September, and Beryl now had to negotiate a path between living with him during their ongoing period of separation and carrying on her relationship with Mick. It was not exactly a conventional situation, but some days there was even an illusion of normality: ‘It is Thursday and the children have moaned and snivelled all day. At five A. came in and went to bed with flue. I bought cough sweets and paper nose wipers and things and had Bren carry up a tray of gentle eggs and Tizer the Appetizer and chocolate. And very comfortable and beneficial too, in the cool studio with the huge global lamp hanging by his John the Baptiste head . . . I left at seven feeling I had been kind and wifely.’18 Except that after her ‘wifely’ ministrations to Austin, she went down the road to be with Mick.

  For Mick, as for Austin, the way Beryl expressed her love came to feel like a test he was destined to lose. There were moments, certainly, of pleasant, almost homely, relaxation: ‘Mike and I sat by a large fire and listened to the radio. He was very buisness man and hard day at the office and so darling in his big black suit, and the guitar clutched to him. I was very happy just to be with him in the firelight.’ But Beryl was so acutely sensitive to perceived slights, to apparent differences in their appreciation of the moment, that evenings together would run a complicated gamut of emotions in which they passed from a state of blissful content to frustrated irritation to sheer depression faster than the blink of an eye. When a tune caught his fancy and he got up to play his guitar, she felt it as a rejection, and when he returned, assuming she’d be waiting for him, she in her turn pushed him away:

  And then he said: ‘Its no use, I must face facts, I can never live up to what you want,’ and all the fear and panic came back and I thought, Oh for once a man, a real man to say I am strong, damn hell the world and take me in sure arms and straddle everything. And because he couldn’t do it I got up and ran. And Mike, so weak in resolve became so fierce in action and twisted my arm and called me spoilt and sat me down again . . . I sat in his lap and he kissed me and I could feel all my bones and desolation everywhere. Something he said about perhaps I ran too hard or chased him too much. And I thought o
f the love poured out sickeningly over Austin, how many years of it, and dreams like flowers opening, and poppy-coated gaurdsmen keeping watch over my dreams and everything growing darker all the time and a funny swooping feeling as the earth dropped away and no heart left.19

  She knew her love for him ‘was oppressive and possessive and too swift and overwhelming’, but she couldn’t help herself: ‘Either I love and can show it till I’m blown king-sized heavenfull, or I don’t love. Its no good pretending.’ Giving herself up so spontaneously to her feelings was what made love so exhilarating: ‘The glory in the love one feels, the nearness and dearness and closeness one feels. The transformation of me, one individual, into a superbeing, a thing of beauty and wonder, a being to cherish and to be truthful with.’

  But Mick’s blunt admission that her effusive affection struck him as neediness, his cautious insistence that he had to feel free to be able to love, seemed to Beryl like a lack of commitment – or worse still a rejection: ‘By hurting my stupid pride and making me feel so unloved he’s shrunken my love for him. Its so sad. You can’t be truthful or you lose the love. And I’ve lost mine, not altogether, but the miracle tip of it, made of pure joy and softest leaves . . . Austin made me lose it and now Mike. Such a waste. I could have made Mike so much younger and gayer and more happy. And he would have made me so much better. So much more cared for and blossoming and worthwhile.’

  It was a paradoxical situation: she needed Mick to sustain her feelings of self-worth, but the more she tried to express her love for him, the more it drove him away. She was overwhelmed by feelings of insecurity and abandonment, foreseeing that she would end up losing everything: ‘Austin is talking about moving. If it was not so tragic it would be funny. He is moving out when he can, and I will be here alone, so that me and Mike can eventually be together. Only thing is, Mike won’t want me when it happens.’20

  Such a fraught state of affairs could not go on. During previous periods of extreme emotional agitation and depression, she had expressed the desire to die or to be dead. This latest crisis differed from those of the past only in that this time, after what she felt was another rejection (‘Tried to tell Mike, but he could not or would not comfort me . . .’), she decided to act on her self-destructive urge:

  Came home and pushed newspapers under the kitchen doors and put on gas in the oven. Waves of overwhelming self pity. Huddled near the oven, head on knees breathing it in. Colour blue. Kept hearing my Mother. Your fault, your fault. Did not make the best of yourself. Tried to tell her it was only the arrogance of my love, the belief I had in me and Austin. Mike saying I was stubborn, chased him too much, ran too much. Felt weak and shabby. Thought I heard Austin and tried to get up, dreading the failure, of him coming too soon. Fell over and began to laugh. Lit the gas. Fat sizzling in the oven, because had left the roasting tin in. Half hoped the oven would blow up. Turned off the gas feeling shabbier than ever. Quite stupid, ludicrous and unwholesome, like everything I attempt.21

  The noise she had heard was indeed Austin and a few moments later he walked in, along with Don and Helen McKinlay and David Blond, son of the Liverpool entrepreneur, Leslie Blond. Although Austin remarked on the smell of gas, no one seemed to suspect anything. Beryl caught a smell of turpentine on Austin’s jumper and immediately had a flashback of past times together, ‘memories of unbearable tenderness in the basement in Hope Street’. She remembered, too, Dorothy’s advice against getting involved with Austin, and thinking of her two babies downstairs, ‘Why, oh why . . . did I not listen?’

  After the aborted suicide attempt life returned to normal, or at least what constituted normal life at Huskisson Street. Although the intense feelings of insecurity, doubt and anguish that Beryl recorded in her diary during this period were real enough, the atmosphere of the house was not one of depressive gloom. She was adept at presenting an upbeat face to the world. There was an almost daily influx of visitors and many of those who called round for coffee, gossip, or to pass the time, would have been staggered to learn that Beryl could even have contemplated putting her head in a gas oven. Depressed as she was in private, in company she could still have what she called ‘a laff’.

  The day after the oven incident she was amused enough by Ronnie Armstrong’s ‘helpful advice’ about her domestic situation to record it verbatim in her journal. Ronnie, an architect who lived nearby in Mount Street, had come round to see Austin as the two were planning to go into business. While he was there, he outlined a solution to their problems that he thought would be acceptable to them both. Austin could continue to have his affairs, but be more discreet about it. He’d have his studio and the ‘odd girl elsewhere’. He’d come home once or twice a week, but otherwise be free to do as he pleased. As for Beryl, she would teach the children to be polite, prepare beautiful meals, and keep the house spotless in the hope of his eventual return, but she and Austin need never sleep together again. After Ronnie finished they were both stunned:

  I say: ‘But what do I do Ronnie?’

  ‘Sublimate yourself in the children.’

  ‘But what about sex?’ Awful silence. Aussie giggled. Ronnie said I didn’t need it. Said I did with some heat. Ronnie so moved as to get up from his chair and say in shocked tones: ‘I’ve knocked around a bit and in 32 years I’ve never heard a woman say that.’

  Felt like a nyphomaniac and told him that probably when he seduced a girl she had thought of it first. Horrified Ronnie. Drove home in his car going over the last seduction no doubt.22

  Beryl still hadn’t told her parents about their decision to separate. Now, however, with Austin looking for a house so he could move out, she sensed that the situation was irreversible and arranged to see her father to break the news: ‘Had coffee in town with Daddy. Cried when I told him about Austin and me. Told him to look at me and see I wasn’t unhappy.’23

  That Beryl could tell her father she ‘wasn’t unhappy’ less than a week after she’d tried to kill herself shows how confused she was about what she felt. Her moods veered wildly between extremes. After seeing Mick, she would feel happy and ‘wanted to beg him not to go away’.24 A few days later she would feel ‘abandoned’25 by him, knowing deep down that they wouldn’t be together and almost wishing it was already ‘finished’.26 Her life, as she put it in her diary, was ‘unbearable in its contradictions’.27

  In October events forced matters to a head. The catalyst was a party at Huskisson Street, which coincided with Brenda Powell’s twenty-first birthday on 3 October28 and would become part of Beryl’s public myth – as well as a minor footnote in the history of The Beatles. One of Brenda’s fellow students at the art school was Stuart Sutcliffe and they often used to hang around together. They would occasionally babysit for Beryl, taking Jo-Jo out in the pram, pretending she was their baby. Aside from art, Stuart’s other main interest was music and, drawn by a mutual love of Elvis Presley, he’d become friends with John Lennon, one of Austin’s pupils in the year below Brenda. John, Stu, Paul McCartney and a young George Harrison had recently started playing together under the name Johnny and the Moondogs. As Stu shared a flat with Rod Murray just round the corner in Percy Street, Brenda asked him whether he wanted to come to the party and bring the rest of the boys.

  The party seemed to split naturally into two factions: Austin had invited Fritz Spiegl and a number of musicians from the Philharmonic, and they gravitated upstairs, while the younger students and art school crowd colonized the downstairs rooms. Tony Carricker remembers playing both sides of Ray Charles’s recent single, ‘What’d I Say’, in a seemingly endless loop. A lot of alcohol was drunk, and an inebriated sixteen-year-old George Harrison raised tensions when – without realizing he was talking to the principal flautist of the Philharmonic – he asked Fritz, ‘Hey Geraldo, got any Elvis?’29 By 11 o’clock the party was in full swing, and guitars were being played very loudly. With all the noise Aaron and Jo were unable to sleep, so Beryl took them down the road to Mick’s.

  According to her d
ivorce petition, the next morning when she tried to get into her bedroom to collect some things, she found the door locked and was told that Austin was inside, in bed with a woman who had been at the party. It was after this that Beryl formally asked for separation, with a view to an eventual divorce. It is possible that elements of this account were fabricated for the purposes of the divorce – in the 1960s adultery had to be proved rather than simply asserted – and that Brenda Turner,30 the woman cited in the petition, simply agreed to be named. But the fact that Beryl also claimed Austin was the father of one of Brenda Turner’s children – an accusation he vigorously denied and demanded be struck out – shows that she believed they were having an affair at the time.

  However closely the official version matched actual events, the party marked a symbolic end to their relationship. Up to this point Beryl still went through periodic fits of believing that she and Austin had a future together (‘Feel perhaps I must stay with Austin . . .’),31 even though she knew he was seeing other women and she herself was contemplating the possibility of marrying Mick.

  But after the party in October, Austin, who had bought the freehold of a house in Prince’s Avenue, left for good. Beryl’s next-door neighbour Maggie Gilby recalled: ‘I’d been out and when I came back Beryl was in the yard, screaming, “Maggie, Maggie, come round, he’s gone, he’s left.” And I went down, and he’d gone. She was distraught, absolutely distraught.’32

  Beryl had imagined that when Austin moved out, ‘me and Mike can eventually be together’,33 but in this she was to be disappointed. At the beginning of 1960 Mick told her he had a new job and was moving to London. He said he would drive up to Liverpool on weekends to see her, but the move inevitably unsettled her, something made worse by the fact that her period was late.

  In the New Year she wrote to Austin to discuss the possibility of marrying Mick, but her necessarily vague letter struck him as hopelessly impractical. He told her the more he thought about her plans, ‘the more I am convinced that I should prevent this unrealistic alliance, which of course I could . . . Before I will free you to re-marry you must convince me that you are not just clutching wildly at a straw and in the end going down with both children.’34