Beryl Bainbridge

by Brendan King

  Even so, Ken found certain aspects of Beryl’s life difficult to deal with. There was Austin’s continuing involvement – and then there was Ronnie. Beryl had told Ken about his ongoing obsession with her, but even forewarned Ken could hardly have expected what would happen when she took him down to Tring to meet Ronnie in person. ‘He was a jolly sort of guy,’ Ken recalled:

  had this tall, reasonably attractive woman who obviously idolised him. We were in the house, with the antiques and everything, and we stayed the night. Ronnie must have been insanely jealous of us being in bed; at two in the morning he began shouting and singing outside the door . . . The next morning we were sitting in the garden on the bench, when I suddenly heard this noise, like heavy flies hitting a window. I said to Beryl, ‘What’s that?’ and she said, ‘It’s Ronnie, he’s shooting at you. He doesn’t like you.’ It was probably an air rifle; it could have blinded me. It was a couple of feet above my head.8

  But despite these occasional bumpy moments, the relationship grew more serious. Hampstead Heath was an appropriately romantic setting, and it was there, under the trees, that Ken told Beryl he loved her and she said she felt the same. Over the summer, after being offered a job in America, he proposed to her and she accepted.

  Ken, like Austin before him, was not someone who found it easy to commit to marriage without a certain level of financial security. He needed to establish himself in a reputable job first. When he was offered a post at Virginia Tech, teaching graduate students in Urban Planning, he saw it as a step towards marriage with Beryl, something that would bring them together not force them apart. In September 1963 he moved out to Virginia for the start of the Fall semester, telling Beryl he would let her know when he’d found somewhere to live. She and the children could then fly out in the New Year.

  It was inevitable that spending time apart would affect them both: Ken went through bouts of feeling ‘lonely & depressed’,9 but the separation unsettled Beryl in a more complex way, going well beyond mere loneliness. Even though Ken’s letters left little doubt as to his feelings, she couldn’t accept what he said, not because she felt he was untrustworthy – if anything the opposite was true – but because her fear of rejection was stronger than any reassurance he could give. A hint of things to come can be seen in a letter to Judith written shortly after Ken’s departure, in which her anxieties begin to distort her perception of the situation:

  What to say? Ken is gone. Owing to a terrible quirk of personality or perversity or something god knows what, the mere fact that he is gone, has gone, has catapulted me into deep darkest african despair. Why? Please why? Am I really mad? . . . I don’t know if I love him or not. It doesn’t really matter . . . Some half promise, some vague future. I cannot stand it. He went to New York two weeks ago. I presumably join him after Xmas. I say presumably because I only half believe it . . . The letters that say I want to marry you, I love you, but do not say when, how, where. It’s the uncertainty . . . My Mother (ill in hospital) Austin (looking like death) his various friends, all say when are you going? And the awful truth is, he never told me, I don’t know.10

  The break with Mick was still on Beryl’s mind and the possibility of another rejection threatened to overwhelm her:

  I wish I could just evaporate, Judith, don’t think me daft, but if you do love me, please pray, not God, just hope this time it will be alright. Maybe I don’t love him, maybe I’m incapable of love, but its like the golden thread that leads to paradise – if this snaps I’m through, god almighty that’s it . . . Since last February I’ve felt nothing, nothing, and now a little I feel something, and its like believing in something. Its self preservation. If this too proves to be an illusion, if he writes and says no, what then? I feel sick. Basically sick that is. As if I need real help. I’m too subtle, too clever somehow to go the whole hog, but I do know I am ill mentally. I’m not normal.11

  Although Ken sensed the confusion in Beryl’s mind, he still felt it could be dealt with on a rational level. He simply needed to reassure her. But he could have had little idea just how deeply ingrained, or how extreme, Beryl’s anxieties were. In a long letter to Judith she blamed herself for the emotional mess she was in:

  My worry is not that I love him, or whether I’m doing the right thing, but whether he loves me. The stupidity is that after the last little upheaval, a mere 5 months ago, I should have avoided any emotional involvements for a good year or so . . . I’m just not fit to be involved. I have for some reason twisted all this to be like Mick and Austin etc. He went (Ken) quite sure, I think, that everything was settled, that . . . he would send for me. He told my Mother this, he told Austin this, he told his parents and his friends. Its my lunacy that says he’s telling lies, doesn’t mean it. OK he might have married me, but he didn’t. His reasons were quite logical. They were wrong reasons in that it was me he was dealing with. Wrong only because of me. After all why can’t I wait 3 months? The fact that Ken didn’t marry me . . . is felt by me as a great injustice . . . But its my fault not his . . . I am constantly obcessed with thoughts. The kids, this flat, Ken, are all like shadows. Nothing is real at all, only these fantasies of am I loved? There is no reason to doubt Ken, or his motives (unless he is as twisted as I am). There is every reason to suspect me.12

  Confused about whether Ken loved her, about whether she should or shouldn’t go to America, Beryl’s state of mind seemed fraught enough as it was. It was about to get worse.

  In October 1963, Hampstead Parochial School held its annual Harvest Festival. It was there that Beryl met Alan Sharp, a Scottish writer living in London, whose two daughters, like Aaron, attended the school. She had arrived slightly late and as she entered the school hall she took in the scene, the stage ‘piled with apples and oranges and packets of cornflakes, and rows of children sitting cross-legged’. It reminded her of her childhood: ‘Whilst I was smiling nostalgically at the stage I became aware out of the corner of my eye that someone was beckoning to me. I have always been very obedient. I went, still smiling, towards a vacant chair on the second row. I said thank you to the young man and sat down beside him.’13

  After the service was over, the two went for coffee. Beryl was struck by Alan’s appearance: his torn jumper, his ‘wide mongolian face’14 (likened by one journalist to that of ‘an anxious boxer’),15 and his hair, ‘a shag of dull blond curls’ that gave him ‘the look of a slightly underfed lion’.16 Beryl’s account of their conversation, hinting at the sexual tension between them, appears in an early draft of a novel called ‘William at the Harvest Festival’:

  ‘You’ve a very erotic face,’ he said. He was looking at me searching.

  I really did feel ill. I was hot and my hands were shaking and I went feeling very cold and then very warm. Under the tablecloth my feet trembled on the carpet. He didn’t smoke, but he lit my cigarettes.

  ‘This fella of yours,’ he said. ‘Its really love is it?’ He was crumbling half a bun between his broad fingers.

  I looked at the disintegrating pastry. ‘He’s my fiance.’

  ‘Quite apart from that,’ he said, ‘is he love divine, all love excelling.’

  Outside in the high street there were people going shopping. I wish he hadn’t said it. Put like that I felt disloyal. I felt very jelous suddenly of his wife, the mother of those flaxon-haired children sat behind the apples and tins of soup.17

  This first meeting was followed by an invitation to Arkwright Road and from there ‘straight down the primrose path to intimacy, passion and the chaos that was to follow’, as Alan would later put it. ‘There does not seem to me looking back that there was any place along that very short arc when things might have been different, no crossroad where either of us pondered which road to take.’18

  Alan’s confidence, his verbal exuberance and inventiveness, his spontaneity and his unmistakable desire for her made him irresistible to Beryl. One of his letters, written in the first flush of their affair, gives a glimpse of his seductive and romantic intensity, induced
through a self-consciously literary swirl of words:

  My dearest love, I know nothing I might say that would hone my meaning keen enough to cut through all the swaddle of amazed believing disbelief in you and my love for you and your precious, homecoming, dawn falling love for me. To say I never expected is to say no more than the blatant; no sane man could expect, such would be a most monstrous conceit. That ‘I hoped’ is also un-necessary, had I not always hoped for it then I would not have known it when it came.

  No, what I did before, if I did anything before, does not concern, it is the now which matters, the enormous molten seminal aching now . . . You are my present, my gifted now, my cherish, my wish, my tender true treasure. My Beryl. And of you and now, nothing can I say that does not crumble gritty, into the merest articles of speech. Save perhaps the monotonous chaunt ‘I love you. I love you, I love you,’ that indestructible mantra, ‘I’ linked to ‘you’ by love, evol, our bridge across the abyss, making adjacency closest togetherness . . . I know nothing I say will match the calm murmur of my blood as you turn in my arms. Give hush its heed, we are alive and beautiful. I love you my dearest Beryl and in doing so am the more completely, your Alan.19

  But there was a catch. The messy complexity of Alan’s emotional life matched, even outdid, Beryl’s own. Alan had fallen in love at first sight, but for him that fact overrode any other consideration, personal, practical or ethical:

  I saw this hauntingly beautiful face with its hollowed cheeks, the mouth like a wound that could only be healed by kissing and a mind through which the light came at a distinct, inimitable angle and I wanted to know her. That I was presently married, for a second time, had no bearing on this, that I was, and remained for some very considerable time, pathologically promiscuous, did not deter me from falling in love, obviously in love, and acting out the implications of that condition. Beryl, I have to assume, also disregarded the sanity of getting so involved . . . I mean when you fall in love with a married man who had a recently divorced wife in the frame you are disregarding some fairly well-known warning signs.20

  With hindsight it is easy to feel that Beryl could have or should have heeded those signs, but at the time she was too preoccupied with her own drama over Ken to worry whether Alan was sincere in his expressions of love, or what a relationship with him would actually entail. She had no way of knowing the depth or extent of Alan’s duplicity, she was unaware that women drawn into his orbit risked being dragged down into an emotionally destructive black hole. As Beryl would shortly discover, his first wife’s summing up of him as ‘an accomplished liar and a great womaniser’21 wasn’t abuse, just a simple description.

  Born Alan Foote on 12 January 1934 in Alyth, a small village twenty miles north of Dundee, Alan Sharp was the unintended consequence of a brief encounter between Ethel Foote22 – an unmarried grocer’s daughter from a Presbyterian background – and Peter Craig, a working-class labourer and Communist Party activist. Craig was born in conditions of dire social and economic deprivation and had negotiated an uncomfortable path to adulthood via drink and petty crime. Like his father, Craig was no stranger to the police cell.23

  Six weeks after Alan was born, his mother gave him up for adoption. He was taken in by Joseph and Margaret Sharp, a working-class couple living in Greenock, twenty-five miles west of Glasgow. A joiner on the shipyards, Joe Sharp was ‘a profoundly religious man’,24 and both he and Meg were active members of the Salvation Army church. It was these two, often conflicting, influences – the strictures of Protestantism and the harsh realities of working-class life – that shaped Alan’s personality as he grew up.

  In 1952 he entered the army for a two-year spell of National Service, and on leaving found himself back in Greenock, working as a plater’s helper at the shipyards. Shortly afterwards Alan met Margaret Donachie, nine years his senior, and married her in 1955; their first daughter, Louise, was born in 1956 and their second, Nola, two years later. In 1959 he applied for a teacher-training scheme and received a £500 grant from Glasgow University. But if ‘yooni’ gave him ideas about literature and ‘a realisation of his own talents as a writer’, it was also a reminder that there was a whole world of experience out there that wasn’t to be got from reading books. He wanted to travel, to go to Spain like Hemingway. He gave Margaret his grant money and left, ending up in Germany. She filed for divorce.

  By October 1961 his divorce had come through and Alan was living in Belsize Park, where he met Sally Travers, a character actress thirteen years his senior. Less than a year later they were married, though it wasn’t long before he realized he’d made a mistake with Sally too.

  On his return from Germany, Alan had started writing seriously and found he had a natural talent for it. His early successes were in drama, first on radio in 1962 with The Long Distance Piano Player,25 and subsequently on television with Funny Noises with their Mouths in October 1963, which formed part of the BBC’s ‘First Night’ series and starred Michael Caine. In a typical act of generosity that wasn’t without a self-consciously theatrical element, Alan bought Beryl a television set so that she could watch it.

  Around the time he met Beryl, Alan finished the novel he’d been working on for nearly four years. Even before publication its exotic, vibrant mix of Scottish vernacular and sexual explicitness had created a buzz in the literary world. By the time Michael Joseph finally brought out A Green Tree in Gedde in 1965, Alan was already being compared to Joyce and Lawrence. No small part in the book’s success was the frank way it dealt with sex: ‘It’s been called pornographic and excessively sexual,’ he admitted. ‘I’m an obsessive writer about sex. It concerns me the way damnation concerned Kafka. The only real thing to me today is relationships. Sex is something you have to get over with, or integrate, to get on with the relationship.’26

  In October 1963, Beryl wrote to Ken and mentioned in passing that she’d met a ‘playwright’. Although Ken had no idea who she was referring to, he sensed in her tone that she wasn’t telling him the whole story, and in his reply he asked her why she’d used the word ‘guiltily’ in relation to her meeting with him.

  His next letter expressed a growing anxiety: ‘Darling Beryl, Five full days without a letter from you. What are you doing & what is up with you?’ Unconsciously picking up on the cause of the problem, in addition to the usual questions about the well-being of Beryl’s children and her mother, he asked her ‘How is Mr Playwright?’27

  Beryl responded with what she later described to Judith as ‘a candid letter about having doubts’.28 She didn’t mention her ongoing affair with Alan, but instead tried to blame Ken, telling him that his decision to go to America was an unconscious expression of his lack of commitment to her. This provoked an anguished reply justifying his actions: ‘Darling there was or rather is one difference in our decision-making attitude. I never queried marrying you, I merely wanted a firm base for our marriage . . . I left with you & me as the end product in mind. I felt then as I feel now – I don’t mind Austin (not too much anyway) supporting the children, but I must be in the position of doing so if the occasion presented itself. I can’t understand that you can’t understand this. I love you & want to marry you in a complete sense. Are you being completely open? Have you told me all – have you made up your mind already?’29

  In one sense she had. As she’d done with Ken a few months before, Beryl took Alan to meet Ronnie, almost as a kind of litmus test. There was no repeat of the shooting episode this time and in the face-off between the two men it was Alan who came out on top: ‘We went to Tring in a taxi the other day for an hour,’ she told Judith. ‘Ron was a bit subdued I thought. He tried to be himself but Alan won hands down. “Cleave to the great glory man,” said Alan, taking Ron’s thunder. Ron rang last night and said very very seriously he was coming up to have a serious chat with me. Austin seems quite cheerful in all this. Apparently Alan has had a word with him. Maybe Alan’s agreed to buy me. I do love him, O I do.’30

  Letters from Ken now began arrivin
g almost every day, and Beryl kept Judith up to date with a running commentary: ‘He says he was wrong not to marry me before, that he’s been mean, he should have given me money for food, he should have taken me home etc, that he didn’t realise but he does now, and that I must come etc etc. He is trying to get a loan and wants me to fly out.’31

  Torn between Ken’s pragmatism and Alan’s impulsiveness, Beryl constantly wavered between the two. A sudden panic that she might be pregnant served to put things in perspective and she told Judith, ‘I must go to America. I won’t say that my mind is as firm as all that, but I think I must be sensible.’ A few days later, however, the panic subsided and with it her conviction: ‘I feel so very cheery because I got a period two days ago, 10 days early, so I can afford to laff as they say. Strangely enough once that worry went the resolve to go to Ken diminished in proportion.’32 But so indecisive was she that by the end of the letter her mind had changed again: ‘I will go to Ken . . . I may even do it, though I love, love Alan.’33

  By now the easy confident tone of Ken’s earlier letters had disappeared: ‘I thought there was no risk with you because I love you,’ he wrote, ‘can’t you believe in me? I don’t want a half-loving wife . . . Please Darling say you want to marry me . . . Please answer directly & without any ambiguity . . . Have I failed you? Answer honestly.’34

  But honesty was out of the question. In fact it would be another two and a half months before she would admit that she had met someone else. In the meantime she told Ken, somewhat disingenuously, only that she was having ‘doubts’, which just prompted more protestations of love on his part.