by Brendan King
With nothing to do all day she would write long, anguished letters to Alan, full of recriminations, trying to find the right combination of words that would bring home the damage he was doing to her:
I’ve got our baby in me. Do you know what that means truely? Thats reality. You and I made a baby and you said you loved me . . . Make it real. Only you won’t. I know that. It will come. One day you’ll go up to London and I’ll pack and buy the ticket and turn the key and then I’ll go . . . The heart doesn’t break unless someone snaps it . . . I hate not sleeping, I hate not laughing. I’m half dead and I’ve got 2½ children to be alive for, and it means sweet fuck all . . . I wish I was dead. Truely so. I don’t want to go on living in this sort of world . . . I’m sick too at what I’m doing to Aaron and Jo . . . Its become that I don’t love them anymore, I only love you . . . but unlike Sal I want love back too, and I don’t believe you can give love . . . So go to hell and just don’t try to pretend about all this later. You did this deliberately. You almost enjoy it . . . And the awful thing is I do love you.58
Realizing now that she would have to cope with the baby on her own, her anxieties began to mount: ‘I feel so sad about the baby. You see I’m actually frightened of having it. Before it was sort of an offering, a this-is-me-and-you and it was all for you. I wanted to show you how beautiful the baby would be and how well I would look after your baby for you, and now there’s noone to show it to. It makes Austin sick, my mother hopes it will die before birth.’
As she had in the past, Beryl sought to express what she felt in a poem, one of the bleakest she would write:
Its only words isn’t it.
Its only words that make me remember
that you were going to say one day to our child that
he, she, was conceived in love, held in love,
grew in love. Which will not be true.
I won’t be with you. I’ll be alone and
crying and the baby will know only
me. Poor little baby. Poor little me.
Who is not poor, but a monster of
self-pity and self-deception.
Oh please God step in. Or
a miracle or a disease or a
holocaust or a bomb.
Just something to stop the pain.
I love you.59
TWENTY
Basher’s Progress
And now I feel so big, so full of something you cannot even begin to know about – My little love. And I think all the time how I shall tell him or her about you, and one day, one day that will mean little to you, he or she will come like you did, and say, ‘I’m your daughter, your son.’ Alan, why, what is it that stops all the love like a flower bursting right over you?1
As the birth approached – the estimated date of confinement had been calculated as 22 February 1965 – Beryl gave herself up to the inevitable flow of events. By now her relationship with Alan had effectively come apart at the seams, though it dragged on painfully through a kind of emotional inertia, her residual feelings of love for him persisting despite his infidelities and his frustratingly contradictory behaviour.
Having recently discovered who his birth mother was, Alan was spending Christmas with her in Dundee. Although Beryl was expecting him back in January, she was resigned to the fact that he wouldn’t show up, or that if he did the same round of excuses and disappearances would start all over again: ‘Soon you’ll ring and say you’re not after all coming back tomorrow. You’ll feel guilty and sad but you’ll have to do it. Because your Mother needs you and your wife needs you and you couldn’t say No.’
Away from Beryl, Alan’s letters, in which he would protest his love, his guilt, his willingness to change, took on an obsessive, almost masochistic quality that matched Beryl’s own: ‘What am I doing so far from you Beryl,’ he wrote from Dundee, ‘I love you so much, so much more than anyone else, how do I come to be here? . . . I know it is my fault and still I am amazed and sick at the thought of it. It hurts and wrenches so much inside me and I have to clench my teeth not to cry out . . . Being with you is agony, being away from you is worse . . .’2
Unsurprisingly, given the ambivalent messages Alan was sending her, not to mention the hormonal imbalances usually associated with pregnancy, Beryl was subject to extreme mood swings in the months before the birth. There were moments of black despair and she even hinted at thoughts again of suicide: ‘Each day it hurts so that but for Aaron and Jo-Jo I would do something. This is the dark night of the soul one reads about.’3
But despite these bouts of depression, and her unhealthy tendency to blame herself for Alan’s rejection (‘I suppose I’m not very loveable . . .’),4 Beryl nevertheless had moments where she felt the baby constituted some form of genuine connection between them and she began to feel more positive: ‘I’m even getting excited about the future. There comes a time when you have to settle for what you are, and then be more that than you were before. No regrets. Whats the sense of being inconsolable about anything. I had more love from you than I’ll ever have in my life, or ever had before. I’m glad.’5
By the start of March the baby still showed no sign of movement, and thinking she was two weeks late Beryl began to get worried. As it turned out, she was not overdue – the due-date calculation was a month out, no doubt as a consequence of her long-standing problem with erratic periods.6 Alan was due to go to America at the start of April to promote A Green Tree in Gedde, but in the meantime he was back in Arkwright Road:
Alan is his usual exhuberent self. Flying here there and moved in again to be near me when ‘our’ child is born and sharing his nights between Sal, me and Liz. Liz and he sail for the land of honey in 2 weeks time, and noone has any money. None at all. However all is not lost. My sense of humour is returning. I crawl around behind my far flung stomach and have long dreams each night that are terryfying and intense and I write them down and think ‘My God, this is life after all’ and through it all get all Formby and pink and tender at the thought of the new baby. Lovely baby.7
The baby, Ruth Emmanuella, or Rudi as she soon came to be called, was delivered on 24 March by the midwife, a district nurse called Johanna Bormann, a suitably inappropriate name given Beryl’s fascination with the Holocaust. Lacking a suitable bowl to bath the newborn baby in, a casserole dish8 was borrowed from the downstairs tenants, Philip and Psiche Hughes.
In the weeks that followed, Beryl wrote to Judith to say that she felt ‘very fit and very gutsy. Ready to face all that life offers’, and that the baby had put on nine ounces in a week (‘Its the whisky and the Woodies that do it . . .’).9 Beryl’s previous letter to her had flippantly mentioned not only that Alan was talking about taking her away to Malta, but that Ken had told her he was coming over in seven weeks’ time. Judith, irritated that Beryl seemed to be taking her situation too lightly and colluding in her own misfortune, was unable to refrain from lecturing her, prompting a sharp retort: ‘Please do not “go” at me anymore. I am too frail. Either you attack my financial immorality and suggest I actually work or you call me a sex maniac or say the children are unstable. Stop being my conciounce. One day I may redeem myself. No comments or criticisms please. Just like me a little. Love you. B.’10
A month after the birth Alan flew back from America, arriving at Arkwright Road with just a carrier bag. He had a new set of plans for the future, but after what Beryl described as ‘an idillic 3 days’, it all blew up again when she discovered he had really come back for Liz, who had returned without him due to illness, and that they were due to fly back to New York the following week. The result was a definitive parting – of sorts. If it wasn’t exactly the first and wouldn’t be the last, it did have a kind of symbolic quality to it, with both getting rid of the rings they’d exchanged, albeit in their own different ways:
So I said goodbye and he in a grand gesture tore up his passport and the air-tickets into fragments, and Austin told him to get out and he went and they are all grounded somewhere.
The roses
still come. I feel quite exhausted and a bit off centre, only not depressed. Also Ken says he is coming in 3 weeks, I suppose he won’t.
Alan said (he came back in the middle of the night for his bits of passport) that he was now free of me, that he was cutting from Sal, and was going to try to be a good man and reach god.
‘One day’, he said, picking up his passport pieces, ‘I will phone and say “Come to me”, and you must just say yes or no, and if its yes we’ll grow old together.’ And with a last convulsive sob he touched the baby’s cheek and went. He left his ring on her toe and I threw mine in the pond.11
In the period of limbo waiting for the baby to be born, Beryl had continued working on A Weekend with Claud, and by March it was all but finished. Alan’s influence on Beryl’s writing career went beyond his undoubted practical assistance – finding her an agent and suggesting publishers. He also actively encouraged her to write, and his example showed that it was possible to break into publishing by perseverance and self-belief.
There was one area, however, in which Alan’s influence turned out to be less positive: Beryl’s writing style. Having received so many rejections for ‘The Summer of the Tsar’, which was written in her distinctively spare and relatively unadorned style, Beryl couldn’t help comparing her literary style to his, which was linguistically self-conscious, full of complicated sentences and obscure words. If it worked for him, why not for her?
Consequently, during the writing of A Weekend with Claud she made a deliberate attempt to inject a more ‘literary’ element into her style. The pages of the manuscript are littered with lists of obscure words, together with their definitions, ready to be inserted wherever necessary: ‘hyaline, glassy transparent; imputrescible, not corruptable; banaustic, merely mechanical; avenous, without veins; atomy, a tiny being’.12 This, coupled with the radical formal device of recounting the action of the novel three times, each time through the eyes of a different narrator, made the book much denser, much closer to the kind of formal experimentation practised by contemporary novelists such as B. S. Johnson and John Fowles, both of whom used changes in authorial perspective as a way of achieving certain literary effects.13
After Nina Froud’s damning appraisal, Alan had counselled Beryl to try elsewhere and so she applied to John Smith at Christy & Moore’s. Smith, who had signed Muriel Spark in 1953, was a literary agent with a solid track record. He was impressed enough to submit the novel to Graham Nicol at New Authors, a Hutchinson imprint that was designed to showcase new talent and had already featured the work of first-time novelists such as Maureen Duffy, Alex Hamilton and J. G. Farrell. At the beginning of August, two months after submitting the completed manuscript, Nicol wrote asking Beryl to contact him, telling her that two of the three readers’ reports had been good, though he warned her not to take this as a form of commitment.14
In the midst of this exciting development, Beryl had to deal with more emotional dramas with Alan, as she explained to Judith:
Things here are much as usual, except I have begun painting again and my Mother has been yet again and gone and Alan arrived complete with baggage to start afresh forever with presents and money and I would’nt let him in. My choicest memory is of Mama at 3 in the morning vast in a blue nylon nightie on hands and knees crawling into the kids room where I lay sleeping on the floor (having got rid of Alan 2 hours previously) and her hissing into my ear ‘That devil is on the landing moaning.’
He lay out there all night moaning ‘Beryl, Beryl,’ and at 5 I let him in and he wept and I put him out again. Only thing was he hid in the basement all day and at one point added his suit to his baggage in the hall which sent my Mother into hysteric’s and me floating up and downstairs shouting bravely ‘Now be off Alan, pull yourself together or I’ll call the police.’ So about 11 the next night he goes and rings to say he has a room down the next street and the Americans are now giving him 50,000 dollars for the next two books etc. and could he take his child for a walk, and everyday, cap on and crew cut bristling, he wheels Ruth off and returns her with a fresh rose in her shawl, and at night he rings several times and mutters brokenly ‘I love you’. Only thing is he is undoubtedly raving mad and I am truely over him and sick sick sick of his twisted carryings on. Sal has also thrown him out, and Liz and he are just ‘friends’ and the 1st wife rings me now in tears and says he had been going to bed with her too and its all a terrible frantic mess.15
Perhaps thinking to get away, she had spent the August Bank Holiday in North Wales, along with Austin and the children, staying in some huts at Coed Nant Gain, a wooded piece of land near Mold owned by Iliff Simey, the conspicuously tall son of Tom and Margaret Simey, who Beryl had known from her Playhouse days. But while she was away, Alan broke into the flat at Arkwright Road and began sending her ‘a series of insane telegrams’ until she returned. Things resumed their former course, until his equally sudden and dramatic departure. As she told Judith:
Two weeks later in the middle of a supper party with the people downstairs he upped and went. Really violent this time. Me I mean. Shattered and 6stone in weight, and lost me voice. Two days later both I and the woman downstairs got letters from him [in] Scotland. Mine said he did not love me but could he have Ruth every Monday and take her to Scotland for the week. Hers said he passionately loved me but I was too strong and he would never see me again. A day after I came in from shopping and found him doing the dishes. He said he was going to kill himself and we had cheese on toast and off he went again. He climbed up the drain-pipe and came through the window.
Throughout all this madness I am unbearably sustained by the dreadful fact that New Authors to whom I sent the book about three months ago, wrote and asked to see me. He was very nice and enthusiastic and he thinks they will do it. I am just praying and praying that I will hear something deffinite soon.16
Nicol’s letter had also included extracts from the readers’ reports, which had many positive things to say about the novel:
It is the work of a brilliant talker (the book’s strength is its dialogue).
One of the most skilful things about the book, apart from its great intelligence, is the emergence of the rather sinister character of Claud through the thoughts of the others and the linking passages which are very well written indeed.
This is a wonderful book and I recommend it whole-heartedly for publication. Its chief value is the depth in which the author reveals her characters and makes them living people in spite of their coldness and eccentricity. Above all, she has a wonderfully fertile imagination for detail and incident.17
Even the most favourable of the reports, though, couldn’t overlook one glaring feature of Beryl’s manuscript: ‘The author writes beautifully, though her spelling is terrible . . .’ But the other criticisms were more pertinent if the real qualities of the novel were to be brought out:
Though intelligible, her narrative is not coherent . . . the novel is little more than a series of monologues; and these bore because they are related to very little action . . . it grows clear that the author has not the stamina either to be committed enough, or else detached enough, to see her world whole . . . Her talent appears too volatile and unstable to be capable of submission to the extended discipline which a novel needs.
I found parts of this book too chaotically overpowering and near-incoherent especially Maggie’s narration . . . new authors who want to be original, as this one does, should be wary of a once-experimental style which has now been played out and over-used.
Part of Nicol’s reasons for including such negative comments was as feedback for the revisions that he felt were necessary before the book could be published. Beryl was not unreceptive to constructive criticism and she took the suggestions on board, happy to agree with the changes Nicol wanted when she felt they were justified: ‘I rang Nicol last Friday and said I would gladly rewrite the Claud pieces to make the 3 bits more clear, but I couldn’t touch the 3 narritives at all. He told me he is putting it up this week anyway. By that
he means he wants to do it but Hutchinsons have to veto it. I bet you it all falls through.’18
A short while later Hutchinson agreed to take the book, and Nicol sent her a contract. The New Authors imprint was unique in a number of ways: not only did its list consist of first-time novelists, it also had a standard contract for all its authors. There was an initial advance of £150, and royalties of 10 per cent on the first 5,000 copies sold, rising to 15 per cent after 7,500. Technically the company was run on a profit-sharing basis, and after the costs of publication and a fee of 25 per cent to cover overheads, the profits would be ‘divided among the contributing authors in the proportion of their individual total sales in the relevant year’.19 This sounded very equitable in theory, though in practice few authors benefited financially from the deal: Beryl’s book did not sell enough for the profit-sharing arrangement to kick in.
Nevertheless this acceptance had a positive effect on her, giving Beryl some much-needed confidence. Alan’s behaviour, particularly over the past few months, had driven her to distraction, but as she had noted to Judith, the process of dealing with literary matters had taken her mind off things and helped sustain her through the madness. She might still be ‘bloody obcessed with emotional problems’20 but at least she was going to be a published writer.
She was aware of the novel’s failings, but had already started work on her next book, loosely based on the weekend at Coed Nant Gain, which would eventually be entitled Another Part of the Wood. The novel culminates in the accidental death by overdose of a young boy called Roland – modelled on Aaron, who was six at the time. Some writers might have had qualms about killing off a character based on their own son, but if Beryl was aware of the psychological implications she doesn’t seem to have mentioned it. The inspiration for this plot twist came from a typically generous act by Austin, who had recently taken a young student with emotional problems into his home in order to look after him. This was mirrored in the novel by Joseph’s decision to take care of a disturbed adolescent called Kidney, who is indirectly the cause of Roland’s death. Beryl’s would-be inamorato, Charles White, was concerned enough about the potential threat to Aaron and Jo-Jo’s safety to warn her: ‘Don’t quite understand Austin sharing his flat (his new flat) with a 17-year-old schizophrenic . . . Do you think it a proper risk to leave him to look after the children until you know him better??’21