Beryl Bainbridge

by Brendan King

  you may not be so frightened of the future and would be less likely to clutch impetuously at the nearest straw, which in the present case from my point of view is more likely to produce an intolerable situation in the future . . . I’m sorry now we ever started this divorce business, since it also implies (amongst all those other problems specific only to Mick Green) it will inevitably lead sometime to your living out of touch, so that I can no longer see Aaron & Jo-Jo when I would wish. I suppose I can’t persuade you to just accept a separation (although I can see how intolerably lonely you must perpetually feel)?26

  Loneliness was certainly an issue, and it is a word that recurs in Beryl’s diaries and letters. She was still an attractive woman in her late twenties. Her uncertain status – separated but not divorced – and the fact that she was practically housebound with two young children to look after, made her if anything more of a tempting proposition for predatory men looking for a casual relationship. As Brenda put it, she became ‘a sitting duck’.27

  On one level, there was no reason why she should not get involved with any man she chose, but her tendency to indulge in casual relationships, as she later admitted, to ‘give myself a game to play, a delicious will-he-won’t-he, does-he-doesn’t-he obsession to take care of my life’,28 made things more complicated. The anomalous situation between herself and Mick didn’t help: she loved him, was even committed to him in a way, but he’d moved to the other end of the world and she had no idea when or if he would return. In the meantime she needed affection, and she took it whenever the occasion arose.

  In the year or so that followed Mick’s departure she became involved in a string of relationships that, with one exception, were generally short-lived. Although they provided a distraction, and were less fraught than her messily complicated involvements with Austin and Mick, they did little to resolve her conflicted feelings about herself. Even at the time, a number of close friends found it distressing that she allowed herself to get entangled in relationships with men who seemed to be patently unsuitable. Brenda disapproved and Judith found it difficult to restrain her exasperation at the succession of calamitous romantic adventures that Beryl got herself into.

  But one must be careful not to take Beryl’s fictionalized portrait of herself too literally. Maggie’s affairs in A Weekend with Claud may have come ‘thick and fast’, but in real life things moved at a slower pace. There were enough men to give the impression that Beryl was involved in a succession of affairs, but a number of these were in fact partial flirtations or attempted seductions, one-sided relationships in which men projected a romantic connection where little or none existed. These mini ‘affairs’ may have provoked temporary dramas that were dissected in late-night talks with Harry, Leah and Stanley, or with Brenda, or in letters to Judith, but deep down Beryl wasn’t really affected by them, her emotions not having been fully engaged.

  One such ‘affair’ was with the actor Derek Waring, who would go on to marry Dorothy Tutin a few years later. Beryl met him on the set of the television series Biggles, and he was captivated by her, nicknaming her ‘Aztec’, probably because the episode was set on a strange island in the Pacific and she was playing one of the natives. Beryl ended the relationship, such as it was, shortly afterwards, and he reluctantly acceded to her wishes: ‘I would like to have had more than your body,’ he told her, but ‘I can and will withhold my bodily demands since you wish it.’29

  Another would-be suitor was Gerhard Voll, a German-born lecturer in the Geology Department at Liverpool University.30 He had first met Beryl at a social event organized by the Shackletons, and on the pretext of wanting to talk to her about her ‘unpublishable’ novel, ‘The Summer of the Tsar’, asked Judith for her address. Gerhard wanted a serious relationship, but he was another of those earnest and well-intentioned men Beryl enjoyed talking to but was not physically attracted by. Nevertheless she seemed to be giving him mixed messages – she counselled him to ‘grab’ girls he fancied, but when he took her at her word she turned him down: ‘You say, you are fed up with being grabbed,’ he complained in a long letter trying to explain how he felt, ‘and yet I feel it is largely your own fault. To encourage it seems to have become a sort of habit for you, even if at the same time it leaves you empty and bitter.’31

  Already annoyed at Beryl’s indiscretion – she had sent Judith copies of his private letters – Gerhard’s suspicion that they both treated men in a cavalier fashion would have been amply confirmed if he had known about Judith’s decision to set Beryl up with Jim Cassels, a professor in experimental physics at Liverpool University. Judith felt it would be good for Cassels to have a fling to spice up his marriage, and although Beryl was not attracted to him – she would later depict him in a novel as ‘that professor all fourteen stone of chasmy fat’32 – she agreed to do it. Unsurprisingly, when his wife Jane found out it caused a lot of bad feeling: ‘The Cassels and I are all to pot. I won’t even write what has happened but I am way out of my depth and hope to God it all blows over, as of course it will. Jim is behaving oddly and making statements that I presume are not serious and I cannot get at Jane because he won’t let me and because I am working.’33

  This doomed liaison resulted in a lingering feeling of resentment, and over a decade later Beryl would still reproach Judith for her role in it: ‘That awful buisness with Jim Cassels that you and Bobby encouraged me into, saying he needed more experience. I loathed him physically but I pretended because I thought it was expected of me.’34

  There were others who temporarily shared the ‘solace of her bed’, their names listed in the back of her diary, such as Charles White (who she would later portray as Lionel in her novel Another Part of the Wood), Stanley Haddon and an architectural student she nicknamed ‘Oscar’. But none of these affairs had a lasting impact. It was while a frustrated Gerhard was trying to convince Beryl that his feelings for her were genuine, however, that she met Edward L. Lohman35 and began the most serious relationship she’d had since Mick’s departure. Lohman, a third-year medical student from New York, had come to Liverpool on a study-abroad scheme during the summer of 1961, in order to research pulmonary disease in the city.

  It is likely that Beryl and ‘Prince Edward, the prince of Light’, as she referred to him, initially met at one of the Shackletons’ parties, which always attracted students and teachers from various disciplines within the university. Beryl was immediately smitten, and hastily wrote to tell Judith: ‘Of course the most important thing is Edward and either I am bewitched or rather round the twist, or it is real, and I am 16 again, before Austin (you see what I mean) and all like a flower with dew on, all hushed and fragile and on the brink of something beautiful and not at all to be explained, because it is all motiveless. And I dread what will happen when I am left again for the 3rd time in two years (ghastly thought).’36

  Three years younger than Beryl, Edward looked unmistakeably American. He had closely cropped hair and a slightly jowly face, and his dark eyes gave him a curiously intense expression. The mugshot-like photograph he gave her is recognizable in the thinly veiled description of him in A Weekend with Claud, where he appears as ‘the American with his stony face’37 and ‘the American statue of liberty, who gazed coldly at us out of sloe-shaped eyes, dry as prunes’.38

  Given the three-month limit to Edward’s study period, the relationship was necessarily brief. Even so, it had serious implications. Having married in 1955, Edward had a wife waiting for him in New York. He told Beryl his marriage was unhappy, and assured her that he loved her, that he wanted to have children with her, and they began to make plans for the future. He talked about coming back to Liverpool after his divorce, or alternatively that she and the children should join him in America.

  Beryl considered the idea and, after some of the Manchester actors she’d met while working on Family Solicitor invited her to join their new company, asked Judith for advice about what to do: ‘Shall I go to New York or play the panio in Manchester. Which will lead to happiness?�
��39

  After Edward’s return to America in September 1961, an intense correspondence began. Beryl sent an initial letter accompanied by a number of items: a book, a record they used to listen to, a tie, a scrap of torn envelope with the words ‘I love you’ on it, which she had once left on his bed, some drawings by the children, a photograph of herself and a brief note:

  The record so you won’t ever forget,

  The tie for an English gentleman’s suit

  The book for pleasure

  All with love from me.40

  She had also given Edward some letters on the train when he was leaving. These were more fraught, full of fears that he wouldn’t come back, that he looked down on her, that he didn’t treat her seriously. After reading them on the flight, he had rung her on his return, but finding her out he began to panic, sensing the depths of her emotional volatility: ‘I was afraid you had done something foolish to yourself, either because I left or because you may be pregnant. Please don’t ever do anything like that, it would kill me.’

  Towards the end of September she wrote again, telling him that she had been ‘hurt’ by his departure, that he had ‘betrayed’ her, that her relationships were a repetitive ‘circle’ of men leaving her. She also said she thought she might be pregnant,41 and that if either of them felt they were no longer in love they should tell the other. Edward interpreted this mixture of desire for reassurance and avowals that she would understand if he left her as an expression of her own reservations and simply renewed his protestations of devotion: ‘I can come back, I will come back, I will come back because I love Beryl. I will take Beryl and her two or maybe three children to the US . . . with some luck and perseverance this may be accomplished in about two years.’42

  In the New Year, Edward sent the letter Beryl had been expecting all along, the classic married man’s attempt at self-justification in the face of his broken promises. After asking for forgiveness at the long delay, he went on to say that it had become increasingly obvious to him over the months that he could never leave his wife. He hoped she would believe that all the errors, the difficulties and the problems lay solely with him, that she was not to blame for his failure to return. He ended by thanking her for all the ‘love, kindness and understanding’43 she had given him and told her he loved her and always would.

  Edward’s final rejection didn’t provoke the uncontrollable wave of despair that others had in the past. Deep down she realized that it would never work out, that she would come out second best, that the wife would always win: ‘The only thing I knew that he did’nt, was that he would not return. He had a wife whom he thought would divorce him. And when he rang from New York and said she had tried to kill herself and that he loved me but would never see me or contact me again, I blessedly accepted and believed both statements.’44

  EIGHTEEN

  The Return of the Wild Colonial Boy

  My own Darling,

  So many things I would like to say, so little I will say, except the physical love we knew is such a rare, such a thing to be treasured, that it hurts to think about it.1

  All I can say, albeit friskily, [is] that I can think of nothing more lovely than a woodern bungalow and you in the middle of the desert. And think how our ping-pong would improve.2

  In July 1962 Cyril and Pat Taylor, feeling that Beryl needed a break, suggested she leave the children and join them on holiday in San Bartolomeo, a coastal resort on the Italian Riviera fifty miles east of Genoa. Harry encouraged her to go, but there were some small matters to sort out first, such as who would look after the children and where she’d get the money from. Her mother, Mrs Taylor and Maggie Gilby agreed to take care of the children, and a hasty note to Ronnie Harris – ‘Forgive me . . . I need £24’ – was replied to by return of post with a cheque and the words, ‘I understand, Nothing to forgive.’3

  A fortnight later, ‘clutching me bathing drawers, me underarm deoderant, and little else’, she set off. The Channel crossing was an adventure in itself (‘On the boat I ended up in the waiters cabin drinking whiskey . . .’), but was as nothing compared to the rest of the journey, which Beryl recounted to Mick in typically dramatic fashion on her return:

  I went to Paris first, then I missed my train and a gentleman with a monacle who had served my country for thirty years picked up my case and took me to another train and I clung, stella marino wise to the outside of it. Then I became involved with 6 Belgian railway workers bound for Nice. We drank all night and sang songs and vowed eternal friendship. Of course the one who like me most had a dead wife and a daughter Bernadetto in a chair with polio. At Monte Carlo or somewhere they half carried me onto another train. By the time I reached the Italian frontier I was almost but not quite sober. I sang to an old lady and she left the carriage abruptly. Then another train and yet another, and then the Taylor family with car and warm greetings. They were so kind to me.4

  The place itself, the Villa Laura, was idyllic: ‘A yellow room with a big black bed, a religous picture on the wall, a balconey overlooking blue blue water . . . A lovely flat with a bidet. Oh the cold swoosh of perfection in the warm still nights.’ Nearby was the beautiful ancient hill town of Cervo, ‘built on the rocks, the sea beneath, olive groves clinging to the slopes’, and the weather was perfect: ‘It was so hot and the oranges grew in the gardens and I swam underwater, with water wings on of course, and I drank wine, and I was really happy.’

  The holiday was a welcome break from the day-to-day anxieties of real life: ‘On the verander some Germans played guitars, we lay all day in the sun and I leant to swim, well almost. We went to two Communist rallies and were cheered, and I danced to a funeral march with the Presidente of the party . . . I am a new woman.’5 The final night was suitably nostalgic and emotional: ‘It was all luvely. We laffed most of the time, unless I was crying, which happened at a farewell party given by the germans. Oh the strains of “Lili Marlene”, the heart rendereng essence of the pines at Formby all those light years ago, the stout Bainbridge that is so more, the vain egotistical goosegirl that will forever be.’

  Back at Huskisson Street (‘I have a tan like a golden doughnut, and am if anything even more irristable’),6 there was a belated note from Mick, offering her some holiday money: ‘Darling Mike thank you for your legal note about the money. I will frame it. It was a lovely thought.’

  Despite the various short-term affairs Beryl had indulged in since Mick’s departure for Australia, she still felt an emotional attachment to him and hoped in a vague way they would get back together. They continued to write to each other during his prolonged absence – ‘A million words written on paper [that] tangled us together, and flung us apart as if we had never met in the flesh’7 – though a brief postcard is all that remains of Mick’s side of the correspondence. Whether the letters were destroyed or simply lost isn’t clear, but if the snatches of them contained in various drafts of A Weekend with Claud are anything to go by, they encouraged Beryl to believe that she and Mick still had a future together: ‘I think of you constantly, if I said come out here to me with the children, would you? I sit on my balconey over the harbour, the Sydney harbour and watch the lights and think of you. I drove in the bush last night, the gum trees sprawl in the dust, we shot a kangeroo later, when it was skinned there was a naked baby in the pouch, glistening, not quite breathing. I thought of you. How you would revel in this heat, how it would suit your unconventional ideas of summer dress.’8

  A handful of Beryl’s letters written during this period do still exist, however, the earliest dating from September 1961, a year after Mick left for Australia. On the surface, it seems to be a simple love letter, giving him news of what was happening at Huskisson Street and expressing a heartfelt longing for him to come back: ‘Sweetie why are’nt you here? Forget your dreams of independance and self fullfillment. Swallow your dreams and fly home next week and let us for gods sweet sake be happy. Resign yourself to a life of uneatable meals, and hot arguments, and so very much real love in and
out of bed, summer and winter till death or indigestion us do part. Is it unnesscessary to repeat I love you. Always Beryl Bainbridge.’9

  But Beryl’s emotional life was rarely so straightforward, and a quick comparison of dates shows that her letter to Mick coincided with the end of her affair with Edward Lohman and his return to New York. Edward, too, received a love letter from Beryl in September, similarly urging his return, though he sensed an ambivalence in her tone and suspected that her apparent concern about him falling out of love with her was disingenuous: ‘Are you fishing for unneeded reassurance,’ he asked pointedly, ‘[or] do you already contemplate not loving me, or slipping sexually on an impulse, or finding someone else?’10

  The five remaining letters to Mick date from the following year, and cover the period from Beryl’s Italian trip to his return. Mick had written to her in the summer of 1962 to say that he was planning to come back in a few months’ time, as he was growing bored with his job and getting itchy feet. His intention seems to have been to sound Beryl out, to find out what he could expect on his return, as his friend, Geoff Minshull, had told him she’d been seeing various men since his absence. As Beryl’s previous letters had given little indication of any change in her feelings for him, he accused her of not being entirely straight with him, and, as if to emphasize his commitment to her, told her he’d remained chaste.

  Beryl responded with a long letter in which she tried to justify herself, saying she had no intention of misleading him (‘If you feel there have been hints or half truths it was unintentional . . .’), and that if it seemed like she had a lot of suitors it sprang from her compulsion to be liked: ‘I still find it difficult not to make people feel they are the most interesting people in the world. I still find a half hour talk with either male or female will make them feel we are soul mates for ever. I still charm almost all of them to distraction.’11 She did admit to certain ‘associations’ with men during his absence (‘I have had four proposals of marriage since you left . . . ’), but they were ephemeral and didn’t concern him. She exempted Edward Lohman from this, saying that she had genuinely felt something for him, though ‘it was so short that I do not know if it were love’.