Beryl Bainbridge

by Brendan King

  As Mick’s letter had questioned her on her ‘need for affection’, her ‘longing to be worthily loved’, and her ‘sexual needs’, she tried to answer him openly, telling him that she had changed in the two years since his departure and that she no longer confused physical desire with true love:

  My need for affection is not so pronounced. I receive it amply from my children and from the few real friends. My longing to be loved is no longer there at all. How shall I explain it to you . . . the longing to be loved was a great barrier to finding love that would last . . . Conditions before trapped me into believing that the only way to find release was through emotions . . . I presumably did this because of rejection in childhood. I suffered a very early rejection from Austin, the pattern was unbelievably repeated with you. As for me sexual needs, they are exactly as before. I think it is more difficult for me than you, my sexual needs are stronger . . . My parents’ misguided view that the whole thing was nasty created in me an artificial barrier, so that I could only believe I was in love with those I went to bed with. That is, that having gone to bed I covered my guilt by believing I was in love. The change in me is that I can no longer believe that it is real love, so I leave bed alone, till such time as love strikes me blind . . . amen. This probably sounds smug. I have more likely grown up, or like Pavlov’s dog in reverse, conditioned myself to run like hell when the bell rings.

  Regarding her feelings for Mick, or whether she still loved him, she tried to sound non-committal: ‘I did love you. I say I still do, but till we meet I do not know what I mean by it. Almost two years of being alone, and the divorce and your departure, and bringing up the kids and the trouble with Austin after the divorce, have at last made me realise how well I can fend for myself. Austin was right after all when he said I was practically indestructable.’

  Feeling relaxed after her holiday with the Taylors (‘I have come back so clearer for being away from house, children and people for the first time in almost nine years . . .’), Beryl’s confident mood was bolstered by the news of Austin’s latest plan. He had seen a house for sale in Earls Court for £11,000 and proposed to buy it for Beryl and the children. The picture he painted of her future was a rosy one: ‘He offers me permanent financial securitity and a fuller life than I have now,’ she told Mick a month later:

  So you see my darling you need never feel guilty about me or my possible future, because being divorced from Austin is more secure than being married to him. So I beg you not to get any guilt complexes in advance or fears, because I am fine and dandy and feel somewhat smugly I can deal with you and Austin without blinking. I hope for my own sake that when you return I will see you and feel nothing, except maybe astonishment. Though in other moments I would wish for both of us a moment of truth, a lifetime of happiness.12

  But this sense of security didn’t last long. In the first place Beryl was affected by the drama surrounding the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile crisis of October 1962. With America threatening to attack Russia if it didn’t withdraw its missiles, Beryl took to the streets to protest outside the American Embassy in Liverpool: ‘I marched around Liverpool in a 200-strong procession, chanting stop this madness.’13 The very real threat of global nuclear war unsettled her and she envisioned the possibility that Mick might never return – or that if he did there would be ‘nothing to get back to’. ‘This in a half serious way could be a farewell letter,’ she wrote to him at the height of the crisis, and she closed on an almost desperate note: ‘Oh I hope you will love me and me you.’

  In the event, fears of a nuclear conflagration subsided almost as quickly as they had risen, but they were replaced by other causes of anxiety closer to home. Austin was ‘busy being sued and summonsed’,14 she told Judith in October, his business dealings with Ronnie Armstrong having turned sour. Armstrong was now demanding the repayment of a loan, and Austin didn’t have the money to pay him back:15 ‘How Austin is going to buy property in Earls Court from gaol I don’t pretend to know.’16 Her update on the situation a month later was even more gloom-laden. Austin’s legal wrangle with Ronnie had ended badly, and there was now a possibility he might lose Huskisson Street as a result:

  Austin has finally landed himself in a real mess. He lost the case, got a lot of nasty publicity (‘The affectionate friendship between the 2 men cooled’) and has just had a bankruptcy suite slapped on him. He arrived some days ago, low with nervous asthma and whatnot . . . The unsettling thing is he had not put this house in my name, and was told it was too late to do so . . . Anyway it will be one way of moving me from here.17

  As the year drew to a close, Beryl was torn between contradictory emotions: hope that Mick’s love for her would blossom again, and fear of another rejection. ‘I am sitting dreading Mick’s return,’ she told Judith, ‘I wish it would not happen. He comes in about 11 weeks time.’18 Everything seemed uncertain, she didn’t know whether he would even come back. Mick had already put off his return once before, so when he wrote to say he was delaying it again her reply to him was – unsurprisingly – a fraught one:

  And this morning an unhappy letter from you, and one that sends me all bitter and twisted because you wrote home last week and said you would not return till March, two more months longer. And maybe if you persist in wanting to throw up your job, or gambling it or sending it here, you will postpone it till the Summer and then the next Christmas. If you do I shall stop writing, stop waiting, even though you have never asked me to, and cast you far back into the past, and to hell with you. You said some weeks ago you had bought your ticket for January 9th . . . please, please don’t put it off much beyond the original date. Either that or write and tell me you are not coming back, or do not know when, and I can make my plans. I don’t mean that I want to know what you feel about us, because I don’t know about you at all, and I prefer my life as it is, but conciously or not all these letters have attempted to keep alive something that truely ended when you bought your ticket to Sydney. It did end then, because there was no reason why you should not stay had you cared enough . . . Its not what I feel for you that makes me tend to wait for your return, its merely the sentimental belief that if there is any way of atoning for past mistakes it is through you. That and a kind of curiosity to know what it will be like meeting you again after a lifetime of disaster.

  What are you coming home for? What did you go for? . . . Am I being very harsh, very stupid, very ungrateful? I do love you, I care what happens . . . Oh dear dear love, try to reach me. Hold my hand we’re half way there . . . Always B.19

  Just before Christmas she wrote to him again. Anticipating his need for warmer clothes when he returned to England, she sent Mick a jumper, along with an incantatory note, the humorous tone of which only slightly masked the emotion she felt:

  Dear Michael Green,

  I hope you have a happy Xmas on your balconey, with the sun going down behind the ships, We will in our own humble ways here raise our glasses in homage to absent and seafaring friends. Long live the Empire, the Commonwealth and all our yesterdays.

  May this fit you, become you, adorn you and warm you in the coming hard times. May the ship cast off quickly, the homecoming be gentle. May the arms that stretch out to greet you be the ones you anticipate,

  With blessings and love and a kiss on your colonial mouth and more love and truth and sincerity

  Your ever own Mrs Davies (lately)20

  Mick’s homecoming in February 1963 was every bit as anxiety-inducing as Beryl had feared. Mick was very different both in appearance and in temperament to Austin, but there was one sense in which the two men resembled each other: their conventional notion that a woman be house-proud and know how to cook. Her carelessness in relation to these domestic virtues had long been a sticking point and a cause of friction with both of them. Before his departure, Beryl had described how an evening with Mick, during which there had been ‘much joy in the firelight’, had turned sour when he raised the question of ‘the importance of well-cooked meals and
made-up beds in marriage’. This immediately provoked feelings of self-doubt: ‘Know he is right but all the time feel he is thinking “No wonder Austin no longer loves her.” Feel the half-cooked food and the unmade bed a gigantic reproach. Want to say how I tried, how I truely tried, how I will try, how I can cook, but feel sad.’21

  Knowing how particular Mick – or ‘Billie’ as she sometimes referred to him – was about little home comforts, Beryl tried to make sure that ‘everything was just so for Mick coming home’. She tidied up the kitchen and bought some pork chops especially for him. Brenda recalled: ‘We all kept away from her because Mick was coming back.’ The night before his arrival she had sat up with Harry and talked about his impending visit. She could feel Harry’s unease, sensing that he wanted her to be happy but that he knew it was going to be a disappointment. An early draft of A Weekend with Claud, in which the whole episode is recounted, sets the scene: ‘I went to bed without washing properly and before I turned the light out I kissed the photograph face of Billie. And truely I did feel different, I did feel safe and happy and hopeful and clean and almost innocent, and I lay my head on the pillow and closed my eyes and was in no doubt that I loved and was loved.’22

  Not for the first time Beryl used the iconic image of the Romantic soldier, the Black Brunswicker (as she would later do with Napoleon), to contrast her idealized conception of the lover and the flesh-and-blood reality:

  On the 25th of February the Black Brunswick returned. At six the children went to bed, at six thirty I was washed, combed and perfumed; a fire burnt in the grate beneath the Syclian lions, the brass bed under white cover spun golden in the firelight. At the blue table in the kitchen I arched my brows and thought beautiful thoughts to make my face tender, and folded hands together on the lap of the dark plaid skirt, watching the shadow of the lampshade twist round and back again above the blue oil cloth . . .

  A knock on cue shatters the house, throws echoes down the hall, through the keyhole, the wild Colonial Boy, a blurred outline behind glass, raises an arm to smooth his hair. Cold air as the door opens, a voice the ear refuses to recognise, a face the eye fails to photograph, only a coat, a check coat, clean and beautiful, alien, comes into the house.23

  But after everything she’d done, all Mick noticed was the disorder. Beryl would later tell Brenda that in spite of the fact ‘she’d really made an effort’, his first words to her when he came in were, ‘Oh Beryl, you were always so messy.’24

  She had been half expecting him to propose to her: ‘I’d built up in my head . . . how we’d be a proper family.’25 In an unintentionally cruel parody of a proposal, he told her he had a present for her – and handed her an old-fashioned ring box, saying ‘Open it.’ When she lifted up the lid, she saw inside not a ring, but a sweet. Then, as if to add insult to injury, he told her he had to leave early to find somewhere to stay. She’d taken it for granted he would want to spend the night with her. His decision to leave felt to her like a humiliating rejection.

  Brenda remembers calling in to see her the next day. Beryl had been absolutely devastated and told her hopelessly, ‘He’s gone.’ With Aaron at school, she told Brenda to take Jo-Jo to the doctor because she had an ear infection. Alone, the thought of Mick’s rejection sent Beryl into a desperate state and she began drinking the bottle of gin he had brought the previous day. Everything culminated in a thought she had expressed many times before, a wish to die. As she had in her failed attempt two years before, she sealed up the window and doors with newspaper, placed a cushion in the oven as a headrest, then turned on the gas.

  By chance, Harry rang a moment or two later, and, automatically, she tried to answer, but almost unconscious from the fumes she couldn’t speak. Realizing something was wrong, he immediately rang Cyril to tell him he thought Beryl was ill. Shortly afterwards, Brenda came back with Jo-Jo:

  As soon as I opened the door . . . I could smell gas. So I put Jo-Jo in the nursery and I said: ‘You stay in the nursery and don’t you dare come out.’ I went in and Beryl – she was usually so disorganised – had turned the boiler off, she’d packed the window, the one that Austin had put in, all round with newspaper, and the back door and the kitchen door. I just went in and dragged her out into the yard. She was unconscious. Smacked her face to try and bring her round. Got the duvet, the eiderdown, and put it round her and opened all the windows.26

  By this time both Harry and Cyril had arrived. Harry sternly rebuked her, telling Beryl she had two children to think of. ‘I’m deeply ashamed of it,’ she would later recall, ‘deeply ashamed that I had two small children, and at the time it never occurred to me for a moment what would happen to my children . . . To have attempted to do that to them . . .’27 Cyril, realizing that attempted suicide was a crime, took her off to his house to recover. Brenda tried to reassure Bruce and Edna upstairs there was nothing wrong, that Beryl had been trying to light the gas but couldn’t find a match. Unaware of the events going on below, they were concerned that the smell of gas was making their baby sick.

  In the kitchen was an empty bottle of gin, the one that Mick had brought the night before. ‘It was a dreadful thing to do,’ Beryl would later say. ‘I have no idea whether I intended it, or whether I thought somebody would come in, I don’t know.’28 But whether this second suicide attempt was planned or a desperate act carried out under the influence of drink, it showed a dangerous emotional fault line running through her conception of herself.

  NINETEEN

  A Knight in Tarnished Armour

  I don’t have the guts to say it to you, to shout at you that you’re a brutal ugly boy, that you hurt me for no better reason than that you’re a little person, a phony, both emotionally and logically, that you are so insecure that you try to be God and don’t care about people or children or money or truth or beauty, nothing but the small piece somewhere thats called Alan. And what that is God alone knows. Don’t you know what you do? You take people as if they were nothing, pieces of dust, you distort them and use them and blow them anywhere you choose.1

  In the spring of 1963, Austin finally realized his plan of establishing Beryl and the children in London. It was something of a comedown from his initial scheme, the £11,000 property in Earls Court being abandoned in favour of a lease on a modest top-floor flat at 27 Arkwright Road, a short walk up from the Finchley Road.

  It was a big move for Beryl in all senses: physically, emotionally and symbolically. Coming so soon after the disastrous end to her relationship with Mick, it represented a chance to start again, to put that painful part of her past behind her, perhaps even to reinvent herself. After she had settled into the flat in April, she wrote to Judith breathless with excitement:

  Oh great guns. Wait till you see. A long low living room with deep wide casement windows looking over green lawns and huge trees . . . All sloping ceilings and alcoves and warmth and the moose up and the new friendly stuffed life-sized fox half way up the sofa. Then a white white kitchen, all with deep sills and more sloping ceilings, and no distraction by picture or ships clock . . . And a pink bedroom for me with my brass bed, and a white rug on the floor, and a lilac room for the children and their furniture all painted white. The house is big and clean and faintly posh with garlic overtones.2

  With one child at school and another at nursery during the day – Aaron at Hampstead Parochial School just behind the Everyman Cinema and Jo-Jo at a nursery nearby – and with little space to paint, Beryl began to think about writing again. She had decided to write a novel about her relationship with Mick, and was already finding Arkwright Road, devoid as it was of the numerous social distractions of her life in Liverpool, a conducive place to work: ‘In the morning I write my epic . . . This and the purity of my kitchen and the knives and forks and the utter stillness all through the day while I type away gives me a certain sense of unreality. No Edna or Leah or Bren or Stanley or Harry or the phone going or Mrs T or Sherpa or Billie or Val or Anna etc etc . . . I feel as if I am convelesing and am being given peace
in abundance.’3

  Occasionally, sitting in the deep casement window at night, she would think of Mick, now working for the Law Society in London, imagining him ‘somewhere out there among all the lights and the bustle . . . with his dam soft car and his loveliness’. As in the past, one way of getting over a failed relationship had been to start another, and she confided to Judith that she had met someone shortly before moving: ‘More to the point is the Young Man. A week before I left for London the young man rang me from London . . . So we went out and he was kind and so gentlemanly and then I said I was moving and now he is here constantly.’4

  The ‘Young Man’ was Kenneth Doggett, a former student in Urban Planning and Civic Design at the Liverpool School of Architecture, now working at James Cubitt’s architectural practice in London. On one of his trips to Liverpool, Ken had spotted Beryl walking across the floor of the Hope Hall Cinema and was immediately smitten. He started talking to her and to his surprise she agreed to go out with him. The following night he took her, somewhat ironically, to the 23 Club, which he considered ‘the fanciest restaurant in Liverpool’.5 He gave her his number in London, and after her arrival at Arkwright Road they met up again.

  Initially, with his disconcerting combination of attentiveness and reticence, she wasn’t sure how he felt: ‘I cannot make him out, he is so gentlemanly, and flowers and the theatre twice this week and supplies the babysitters, and goes straight home afterwards after a chaste kiss on the brow.’6 But Ken wanted a serious relationship, not a casual affair: ‘Do you remember when I first met you,’ he later reminded her, ‘I wouldn’t sleep with you. I wanted permanence. Not just sex. I wanted love.’7