by Brendan King
Just before Christmas, Ken wrote to tell her that the ‘down & up emotions’ of her letters over the past few weeks had not been doing much for his ‘peace of mind’,35 and in the New Year, seeing that his letters had clearly failed to clear up her doubts, he proposed coming back to London. It was this that finally induced her to tell him the truth, though she still didn’t mention Alan by name.
The news of the ‘new boyfriend’ came as a shock, but Ken continued to believe their relationship was strong enough to overcome even this hurdle. For the next year or so he would repeat his offer that she should come to America, and in proportion to how well – or badly – things were going with Alan, her determination to go ebbed and flowed in her mind.
In the first few months of her relationship with Alan, Beryl hadn’t been unduly worried about his wife and ex-wife. The fact that he was married was an inconvenience, but there was no reason why that should be the case once he was divorced from Sally. Beryl couldn’t doubt Alan’s passion for her, either in word or deed. The former was his speciality and his declarations of love approached the lyrical in their intensity: ‘You are all delights to me my dearest, all things and all parts, I want no woman and I want no man while I am yours, the pleasures of this life are bounty in excess of my needs if you are mine. I love you with all of me that has the wit to sit up and scratch. I approach you in awe, and in the nights, when furled in sleep you lie, I wake and praise, with all the passion of the godless, the simple fleshly fact of nearness, that most prosaic of raptures.’36
Alan’s actions were characterized by a spontaneity that could be intoxicating, but also unsettling. Just how chaotic life could be with Alan can be gauged by one of Beryl’s letters to Judith from this period, written with typical self-deprecating humour:
I am so exhausted I do not know if I am happy or no. A typical timetable. Alan arrives at 6.30. A hearty discussion on Anglo Saxon dictionerys. At eight a meal. Bed. Then chat on the novel in English life. Then Salvation Army Lore, then a whole two hours of Scottish singing. Then tea. Then Bed. Then a sermon on Oliver Cromwell and his approach to God. Then tea. Then Bed. Of course I am refering to it in its carnal sense. About dawn I fall exhausted onto the couch, whilst Alan sings the Greenoak tree to me. At eight he goes out and pinches a pint of milk from a few doors away and rings the bell so that the kids can let him in. The children go off to school. A few hectic rides in a taxi round London for some script writer or some agent or the tele man and then bed. Then community singing. Then I go for the children and he goes home for a few hours. Presumably to sleep, the lucky devil.37
Exhilarating as all this might be, Beryl gradually became aware that Alan’s unusual marital set-up – he rented a flat with Sally in Parliament Hill Fields, and his ex-wife and children lived literally around the corner – was more complicated than it first appeared. Rather than being the primary focus of Alan’s attention, she realized she was just one stop on his bewildering and ceaseless itinerary, and that there was ‘a daily running back and forth’ between herself, Margaret and Sally. ‘Will we always be shuttling like this: me, Margaret, Sal?’ she asked in her diary, ‘all with different bonds, all being held together by Alan, dispensing money and wisdom daily? But I want to be on our own, just together. Having been so ruthless as to cut free twice, two wives, then why cannot he let go?’38
The more time Beryl spent with Alan, the more his convoluted and emotionally messy involvement with his wives leaked into her life: ‘Now, another crisis . . . his first wife has stopped working because she says Alan should support her . . . and now Sal has just been and cried really broken-heartedly and said “I am begging you to let me have him back”. Alan arrived too and there was a lot of talk and if I could I would vanish. I don’t want to break up their marriage, but Alan does, and I do love him.’39
Quite how Beryl imagined she could continue her relationship with Alan and not break up his marriage isn’t clear, but what was clear was that the situation was having a destabilizing effect on her state of mind: ‘My inferiority complex remains as bad as ever,’ she concluded after yet another occasion when she returned home only to find he’d gone again. ‘More and more I just know its not going to be alright,’ she wrote, ‘it hurts so much, it does hurt so much, it so does hurt. We’re not even near each other. A hundred little actions and lies and compromises grow and push all the good things away and apart . . . I wish I was old and dead, and if that is wicked I’m not even sorry. I just feel frightened and there’s noone, noone anywhere to tell or to hope for help. Only me, and I’m hopeless.’40
Beryl’s insecurities had always left her prone to feelings of jealousy and suspicion, so to fall in love with a self-confessed philanderer amounted to an act of emotional self-sabotage. Although they both considered sex a vital component of the relationship, there was a fundamental difference in their conception of its function, as Alan would later point out: ‘Throughout, the bedrock was, well, bed. If you harboured the exalted notion I did of sexual congress being the essential metaphorical experience, when mind, emotion, body and imagination had some chance of making common cause, then Beryl was a dream come true. In my case though, the dream did not contain the concept of monogamy and so inevitably we disintegrated on the rock of that reality.’41
Increasingly suspicious that Alan’s ‘lies and double-talk’42 were attempts to cover some form of infidelity, Beryl had even begun to suspect his interest in one of her friends from Liverpool, Liz Thomas, who had recently come down to live in London. What made it worse was that she herself had introduced Liz to Alan and now he was showing a more than normal concern over her welfare. When Beryl discovered he’d paid one of Liz’s medical bills, her suspicions seemed to be confirmed.
The previous November, when Beryl thought she might be pregnant, Alan had conceived a plan for them both to go to Greece until his divorce came through. The idea was to rent a house big enough for Austin and his new girlfriend to come too. As Beryl told Judith, Alan had been working on some well-paid television commercials and could ‘well afford to keep us all’.43
This increasing reliance on Alan’s money led to its own tensions, especially when Austin began to get into financial difficulties: ‘Austin stopped my Alimoney 6 weeks ago . . . I have no income. I am entirely dependant on Alan. The arch-muddler finally mixed up with an equally strong arch-muddler. I should of course have gone to America.’44
When Winnie came down to stay with Beryl at Arkwright Road in the spring of 1964 she quickly picked up on the situation, and Beryl’s attempt to justify herself led to a row that marked the lowest ebb of their relationship. ‘She called me nothing but a prostitute,’ she told Judith, ‘I said he didn’t pay me and finally she said she was going home, and now the usual guilt feelings and where do we go from here? Anyway I said I was living with Alan and I loved him and we want a baby, so at last I am learning to tell the truth.’45
Initially, the plan to go to Greece had seemed like a confirmation of Alan’s desire to be with her; after all if he was going away with her, he was leaving the others behind. But in talking to Liz over the phone in May she discovered that Alan had bought a ticket for her too. When challenged about it, Alan’s solution was to pay for Liz to go to Spain instead, as if that made it alright. Beryl found it doubly distressing, not just because of what it implied about her relationship with Alan, but because it meant losing Liz as a friend: ‘I don’t think I‘ll ever see her again, both because she’s upset and so am I . . . I just feel I know I’m right, but I can’t articulate, I can only appear jelous and adolescent. But thats what love is. I don’t see how you can love and not be jelous. I am jelous . . . I didn’t want it like this. I just wanted to be with him. I just wanted to love and be loved in return.’46
In April 1964, Beryl’s writing suffered another setback. Through Alan’s influence she’d been taken on a few months before by Nina Froud at the Harvey Unna literary agency, and met a script editor for whom she’d written a radio drama for possible inclusion in the
BBC’s ‘First Night’ series.47 She had also made good progress on her novel: ‘The ideas keep tumbling out and Alan has a very good effect on me’,48 as she told Judith just after New Year.
But in the event these projects came to nothing: ‘The play’s series ended without doing mine,’ she complained to Judith a few months later, ‘and the agent sent me a long letter saying she could not touch the book as it was just bad. According to Alan she doesn’t count and all I do is re-type it and send it off to Heinmann, but I am througherly depressed, deflated, and utterly sad.’49
Nina Froud’s assessment of the novel, now called A Weekend with Claud, pulled no punches, and her criticisms were devastatingly brutal compared to the generally complimentary rejection letters Beryl had received in the past:
I honestly don’t think it is a publishable proposition . . . [it] doesn’t really begin to be a novel . . . I think publishers would also object to there being no chapter divisions, the multitude of mis-spellings, and the fact that a great many words can only exist in your own imagination. Thinking about it dispassionately, and forgetting that we are friends, I cannot help feeling that the book doesn’t have much to say at all. My greatest quarrel however is with the quality of the writing, which lacks the imagery and force necessary to lift it out of the rut.50
Alan’s seemingly unstoppable success only served to emphasize Beryl’s failure, and she couldn’t help but feel jealous: ‘Its a little depressing to be living with someone who is winning every prize in sight and commissions daily, and never really appearing to write a line. 5 countries and America have now bought his book and a man in the West End wants a West End Play. So I make cups of tea, and fight huge endless battles with myself on the Heath and weep when he’s out.’51
As the summer of 1964 approached, the arrangements for Greece continued. Tickets were booked and the flat in Arkwright Road was rented out to a Jewish couple: Cecil Todes, a South African-born psychoanalyst, and his German-born wife Lili, who was working as a journalist for Newsweek.
Prior to departure Beryl and the children had gone to stay with Austin in Richmond, but almost inevitably there were last-minute problems with Alan:
Things could not get much worse. Everything like a see-saw. Alan and his stories, and Sal his wife now maybe going into hospital. First she wrote and told me that 2 years ago in Ireland he stole £400 and that if she couldn’t have him, I could’nt either and that she was going to the police. He has just come back and said he has no money. And that he can’t go to Greece on Wednesday as planned because the doctor says Sal will break down completely, and even though I am definately pregnant, which I am, was, no am glad about, he is going to look after her.52
Shortly before she left, Beryl wrote to Ken to tell him that she was pregnant by Alan. He was taken aback, but held firm to his promise, reserving his blame for Alan:
When I said I loved you completely & for always, I meant it. You have been stupid – singularly stupid, but nothing harsher. If the Alan is a fair-haired man who hangs around the Cruel Sea & The Flask with a wife something like Margaret then you are unbelievably silly. You must get out of this sordid mess – for your own sake & for the children. The man is a complete phony – his actions are the most selfish that I’ve ever heard of. Do you really imagine this is love? My view is still unchanged. In short I want to marry you.53
With characteristic generosity, Ken sent her £200 to cover her holiday costs and so, on 15 July, Beryl, the children, Austin and his new girlfriend, set off for Skopelos, travelling via Paris, Yugoslavia and Idomeni, a marathon journey that took three days. Unsurprisingly, the atmosphere was occasionally strained. Austin, brooding over the news that Beryl was pregnant, seemed in a fraught mood: ‘His temper, which I never knew in our married salad days, is diabolic. A bit like my dear dead Father, as Jane Austin might say.’ Alan finally turned up a month later: ‘I met him on the harbour,’ she wrote to Judith:
He bought me a gingham bikini and shampoo’s and the typewriter and three boxes of pills for unmarried mother’s to be . . . So much has happened to him too in the absence that it is more like a year or an age than four weeks. There was the final break with Sal, the parting with his children, the almost nightmare search for money and then two days before he was due to come the American paper-back company paid £10,000 for the rights of the paper backed book. The publishers get £5,000 and it is the biggest amount ever paid for a Penguin type. Nabakov was paid £900 for Lolita . . . now he is a bit drained and I feel a bit detached, but then I am nuroctic as a devil. He is so delighted about the baby. I would hate however for him to feel he had to be with me. Though I’m sure he loves me. Why are we all so sure we are unlovable in the last resort? We sit here in the sun, married 20 years, all troubles past, and something like an electric current of hope and panic flickering through my putrid little brain. I do not dare mention being made an honest woman of . . . Its all too bohemian, but if I could first consume one plate of Walls’ sausages – life would be a bowl of cider and roses. If you ever had the energy or inclination could you send a bottle of H.P. sauce and a packet of tea.54
Alan’s opportunities for indulging in mysterious disappearing acts and rounds of bed-hopping on Skopelos were severely reduced. Consequently, there were elements of the holiday that were almost idyllic, a hint of how simple life might have been if Alan’s pathological promiscuity could have been curbed or restrained. This feeling was reinforced by the fact that in the pre-tourist-boom Greece of the 1960s they were living in an almost prelapsarian state of nature: ‘To go to the toilet we strip. It is lovely to see Alan run by purposefully in just his black leather cap to pee among the fig trees. From the rafters we hang our sodden and sordid clothes. On the straw matresses the children roll naked, and clouds of smoke from the charcole fire billow out into the room, so that we all look like Rhonda valley miners, red eyes and sooty mouths.’55
But Skopelos was not real life, and underneath the surface the old problems lay unresolved: ‘Nothing has been said about what happened in England and about Sal,’ Beryl explained to Judith:
so that for the last two weeks I have woken crying and wondering what on earth I am to do. [Alan] told Austin’s girlfriend that he would never leave his wife, that he could not ask for a divorce. He is so like me and lives in such a fantasey that I suppose I am recieiving what I deserve. But he tells me how he will never leave me, how he adores me, and then the letters from Sal come in answer to his and I read them guiltily in the bushes whilst he swims and it is a hot haze of horror, because he is telling her how he will return and how he loves her, and she is saying ‘O my darling break from her now.’ I asked him if she knew about the baby and he said no he could not tell her, and that he tells Sal he cannot return, and I know he is lying. And he knows I know he is, and what can I do? And I beg him to tell me now if he intends to leave me, and he says, ‘How can you think such a thing?’ etc.
Worn down by Alan’s duplicity, Beryl tried to resign herself to a future that, if it included Alan at all, would have to be on his terms:
So after weeks of misery and inward despair I am now going to try to accept it all, because I do want the baby and he won’t leave me I know that, its just he has to pretend to Sal that he will return. But he is so slippery. You see the book [A Green Tree in Gedde] is due out March with a hell of publicity. And the baby is due then, and I think he intends to pretend he is still with Sal, and maybe take her to America and I will stay in the country, which I suppose I won’t mind. I shall lick my wounds and maybe write something.
At the end of September, Alan and Beryl left Skopelos for Athens, and then on to Paris before arriving in the UK. As the flat in Arkwright Road was still being leased, Alan had rented a cottage at Crews Mess in Devon, but once there he soon resumed his ‘slippery’ behaviour and disappeared. Left on her own, feeling ‘yet again shattered’, Beryl wrote to Judith to explain what had happened:
We got back and got to a cottage in Devon. On the Sunday before he said he would go to Sa
l, ask for a divorce, tell about the baby etc etc. ‘How will I believe you?’ I said. ‘Well,’ says Alan, ‘you must see Sal after me and confirm it.’ . . . We were to leave here on the Friday. Thursday morning he vanishes. All night I waited, not wanting to admit it, but so sick with fright. In the night I rang Sal. She told me that Alan had been telling her for months that he would soon get rid of me, that the baby was a shock, how if he played his cards right I would go to the States . . . he even dictated the two letters she wrote to me. Letters pleading with me to give him up . . . All his friends he’s told I’m mad and evil and am ruining him. That I trapped him by getting pregnant. Well, he came back nine oclock the next morning with stuff all over his fly and still a bit drunk. I think he’de been with Liz. I rang Sal and she came and we tried to talk but he was so strange. He just sat, and I went numb and Sal just cried. Finally she said, ‘Do you want a divorce Alan, you can have one,’ and he said, ‘No, I don’t.’ Then she went and he said, ‘Give in Beryl, submitt, come with me. I won’t tell you any more lies.’ And we never mentioned anything again . . . Then we got here – the most beautiful cottage – truely – so lovely. A day later I got the kids into school and when I came back he had gone. He left a note saying he’de gone to a football match in Scotland. That was 3 days ago . . .
Last night Alan phoned. ‘Back Friday – I love you.’ And now what? I don’t have to say I feel sick. I feel broken. The whole thing is just too fantastic. Its too complicated, nuroctic and sick. Its quite beyond me. For Gods sake write to me. I think my mind is going.56
In the solitude of the cottage at Crews Mess, feeling unloved and abandoned, Beryl’s mind regressed to childhood, to the vanished past when she’d felt secure in her mother’s love. She wrote to Judith: ‘And in all this one thing keeps recurring. Not the baby, not the lies, not the mess, only why arn’t I loved? And beyond that the next thought process is Mummy, Mummy, Mummy . . . When it gets too painful and it hurts so much I just say Mummy over and over, without the slightest desire to see her, and appallingly concious I am past thirty, and Jo and Aaron call out the same word.’57