Beryl Bainbridge

by Brendan King

  In the evening, they went to Hertz Hall on the Berkeley campus for a concert by Danny Rey, known as ‘Big Black’, whose sextet were playing as part of the university’s extension programme: ‘Africa: Its Music and Related Arts’. Rey was an exceptional conga player and percussionist, and Beryl thought the sextet’s blend of Afro-Cuban jazz was ‘sensational’.

  It was an exhilarating end to a fraught three weeks. Had it been undertaken at any other time it would have been an unforgettable trip, but driven by her insecurities over her relationship with Don, and goaded by her guilty conscience about how she had treated Harold, Beryl exhibited a rare lack of generosity in her summing up of the experience, one that was distinctly unfair to the person who had made it possible: ‘If I see him again in 1000 years it will be once too often.’

  To get back to London from San Francisco meant taking two flights, as Beryl had explained to the children: ‘It takes 5 hours to fly from S. Frisco to New York and then 7 to London. So I loose a day.’30 At the airport, petrified by the thought of flying, she asked Harold for a dollar and bought a fifty-cent miniature of gin to take the edge off her nerves. It had the desired effect. Once on board her head began to spin, and she scribbled a long note for Don to read when she got back:

  At high altitudes one gin for 50 cents should by authority send one higher than the clouds we fly thru. The truth of this I have not yet wholly proved as the thought of seeing you has made my head already light . . . How does love grow? It is embarrassing at this age and this time to use the word . . . I should prefix it by if thats what its called, well sort of, kind of, something like it, but I cannot truthfully do so, being fully hung up, overboard, delirious, foxy, beyond myself, thru and under and over you with the emotion labelled by that word.

  Its a lovely feeling, being made free by happiness, wanting to shout, though it may not last long or at best be painful at termination. But having for 2 hours watched the hippies in Haight Ashbury, and read their poetry for perhaps 30 minutes, I am fully in accord with the notion of love fucking love fucking forever, joy, light, and warm pink glow fuck, and it does not matter about the past or the future, only the now.

  Of course it is the altitude and the 50 cents gin.

  The dollar I asked Harold for at the last moment. Give it me, I said and he gave. I spent ½ of it so as to verbalise the sweetness of thinking of you. Thus we use other people, and are used by others, a rose is a rose, is a rose etc. But a fuck has to be the fuck, the fuck, the fuck. Nothing else will do. This is for you Don-Don, if by chance without booze or extreme tiredness I cannot show or tell you my feelings when I see you. But this is what I feel. Amen . . .

  When I see you I will be thinking I love you but maybe I won’t say it. When I see you I will want to embrace you but I won’t because of the children. When I see you I will want to cry and I may, but you will think its because of the children. Dear golden boy, if I don’t have the courage to tell you when we lie down at night, I you love. Amen. Amen. Amen.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Eaves Farm

  I remember at Maggie’s and in the pub and in our room and in the bath. How I loved you, how you loved me.1

  Beryl’s sudden realization that she loved Don may have felt spontaneous and natural, but in practical terms things were not so simple. She was tied emotionally and financially to London and Albert Street, whereas Don was obliged to live over 200 miles away, within commuting distance of his job at Manchester Art College. He also had his wife and their twelve-year-old daughter, Sheenagh, to consider.

  Don’s marriage with Helen had clearly been going through a difficult patch. He had been away for almost a year in India, during which time he had sublet his farmhouse near Ramsbottom, and Helen and Sheenagh had been living in Spain.2 Whatever Don and Helen’s respective plans and intentions for the future were, Sheenagh at least was anticipating that on her father’s return they would all go back to living at Eaves Farm as before. Don falling in love with Beryl just before she left for America had changed all that.

  Once Beryl was back in London at the end of June events moved fast, and she dashed off a hurried note to Judith informing her of the latest developments: ‘Don and I are living together in happy ever after, he sent for Helen told her, and left. Austin is pleased and the children. So am I. Are you? It was all very sudden but then the best things always are. Feel this time its alright. We are very alike I think.’3

  The next few months were lived in an ad hoc fashion: over the summer Beryl took the children up to Eaves Farm but, much to her annoyance, Austin seized the opportunity to rent her part of the house in her absence. In any case, there was the children’s schooling to think about, so by September Beryl was back in Albert Street. The situation was far from ideal: Don’s work commitments in Manchester kept him at Eaves Farm during the week, and although he would come down to London on free weekends it wasn’t enough.

  A new plan was decided: schooling was arranged in Holcombe, and Beryl and the children would join Don at Eaves Farm after Christmas. In the short term the children now included Sheenagh. While her parents decided whether she was ultimately going to live with Don and Beryl at Eaves Farm or with her mother in Spain, Sheenagh was installed at Albert Street.

  There was, perhaps, no completely satisfactory solution, but inevitably this rapidly evolving situation was difficult for a young girl to deal with. It wasn’t that Sheenagh was entering an entirely strange household. She remembered Beryl, Austin, Aaron and Jo from her childhood in Liverpool, and had gone to the same nursery as Aaron. Even so, the day Don first took her to Albert Street, after her parents told her they were separating and that she was going to live with Beryl, she found it difficult to understand ‘why I was there rather than with my mum’.4

  An only child, Sheenagh was now thrust into a communal life with three other children, sharing a bedroom with ten-year-old Jo-Jo and three-year-old Ru. And there were all sorts of other peculiarities to get used to in the new house: ‘We weren’t allowed to go into Beryl’s sitting room, she would put the television on the landing and we sat on the stairs to watch it.’ There was also the cooking: ‘My first coherent memory is of how absolutely awful the food was. Beryl had made a special meal to greet us, a roast, and it was dreadful.’

  Nevertheless, despite the potential conflicts or emotional problems that a situation like this might engender, Beryl’s children and Sheenagh adapted relatively well: it was the adults who found this new life and living arrangements more problematic. As if things weren’t stressful enough with the uncertainty over Don and an expanded family, she kept bumping into Alan. He and Liz were now married and lived in Belsize Park with their year-old son. Alan persisted in calling round to see Rudi, or contrived to meet Beryl when she was out with her. On the back of one of the manuscript pages of Another Part of the Wood, she sketched out a letter to him, addressed to ‘Poor Sharp’, in an attempt to sever contact with him entirely: ‘You can’t see Ru, ever. I don’t want her to know you. It angers me that I should have to give reasons. I am living with someone and she regards Austin as her Father. It is not possible for you to call. You will only cause trouble if you persist. Her name has been changed by deed pole and there is no point now or ever in her knowing you. Take that as final. If we meet in the street again please keep away.’5

  In spite of the decision she had made and the drastic turn her life had taken since her return from America, Beryl still couldn’t face telling Harold about Don. The whole trip had been an act of generosity on his part, but so emotionally fraught had she been during the course of it that she was too embarrassed even to write a courtesy thank-you note. The silence struck Harold as odd, and two weeks after her departure he had dropped her a short, semi-playful postcard that had a hint of anxious reproach to it: ‘You owe me a letter!’6

  She felt she had to respond, but not wanting or daring to admit what had happened, she wrote a brief reply in which she tried to explain why the American trip hadn’t been quite what he might have wished, t
hough without mentioning anything about Don: ‘I don’t know what you mean about the trip not being so good. I will never never forget it, all my life. You were most generous and most patient with me and I worry about all that money and I don’t know how to thank you or how to write to you properly. I think for now I will just send this so that you will know I am alive and well and then write you when I feel real and tell you all my impressions. Take care, forgive the silence. My love, B.’7

  This carefully worded dissimulation forms a stark contrast to the blunt version of events she gave to Judith: ‘Dearest Ju. America was a nightmare of misunderstandings. I would have to tell you not write. I had no money so could neither escape or write for the stamps cost money. Washington Harold was a madman.’8 But this, in its own way, was as much a piece of dissembling as her letter to Harold. She knew Judith saw her frequently chaotic, not to say disastrous, relationships with men as dramas of her own making, and she knew too that Judith disapproved. Consequently, in her account of her affair with Harold she had confided neither the extent to which she’d been emotionally involved, nor the degree to which she’d encouraged him to believe her feelings for him were so strong. Beryl may have found the situation in America difficult, but she didn’t want Judith to think she was responsible for yet another drama, so she tried to shift the blame solely onto Harold.

  Judith, however, had known Beryl too long to be taken in so easily. Shortly afterwards, during a visit to Albert Street, she had confronted Beryl when they were talking about the subject and told her bluntly: ‘Oh you never tell the truth, you’re dreadfully dishonest.’9 It would be six years before Beryl wrote to her again.

  Even taking this into account, Beryl’s attitude towards Harold is still difficult to fathom. While she could be scathing about him in her letters to others – and she obviously felt frustrated and irritated by him on occasion – this was clearly not the whole picture. If her intimate and effusive letters to Harold were simply attempts to string him along, or to take the path of least resistance, then she spent an inordinate amount of time and ink in maintaining the subterfuge. Between August 1967 and June 1969 she wrote him nearly twenty letters, amounting to almost 10,000 words, full of details about her ideas, her reading, what she was doing and her thoughts on life. If the expressions of affection they contain weren’t genuine, they can only be seen as shockingly manipulative.

  The truth is she wasn’t sure how she felt; she found Harold engaging and stimulating, but she couldn’t understand him on an emotional level, seeing his hesitations and his lack of confidence towards her as a form of rejection. Although she felt embarrassed – and guilty – at how she had treated him in America, she genuinely wanted to clear the air and be friends. Accordingly, a month or two after her initial non-committal letter to him, she braced herself to break things to him in as kindly a fashion as she could:

  Harold: I ought to tell you all the truth and then I will feel better though I fear you will be angry. I met someone 2 weeks before I came to America. I wasn’t involved, at least not badly and he was going off to join his wife, from whom he’d been parted for a year, and his child, aged 13. When I got back he was at the airport with Aussie and he said he and Aussie had talked it over and he could live upstairs with me, and he would go off and tell his wife. You know me. I honestly didn’t know how to say no – I wanted to, I wanted to paint America, and write it all down and be me. And I thought its all talk, he can’t do it, tell the wife I mean – but he did, the same week and she went off to a love in Spain and the daughter stayed with us. Only she was hostile naturally and gradually so was Aussie, and he went to Spain and we went off to this man’s farm in the frozen North, and Aus came back and rented off my lovely rooms without telling me . . . But I came back . . . I’ve got the choice of loosing the man or leaving here, uprooting the 3 kids and taking on another one. This man works at the Art College in Manchester and comes at weekends and I am miserable, and its all my own fault . . . You really are to be envied in one way, finding it difficult to become involved. I do effortlessly and endlessly and always with such complications. Its not sex and its not true deep love, its just not wanting to be alone anymore.10

  Amid all this emotional upheaval, Hutchinson had finally published Another Part of the Wood on 14 October. As the manuscript had actually been finished in December 1966, it was hard for Beryl to avoid the feeling that the delay reflected a lack of confidence on Hutchinson’s part. By the start of 1968 she had already hinted to Harold that she might be changing her publisher and that this would be her last book for Hutchinson.11

  The considerable time lag also made it difficult to feel as enthusiastic as she might otherwise have done. Even so, the critical reaction to the novel, or rather the almost complete lack of it, was still disappointing: ‘I am a bit depressed over the book,’ she complained to Harold. ‘It came out 2 weeks ago and not one review.’12

  When a review finally appeared, it was perhaps all the more damning for the careful and considered manner in which it picked the book apart. Under the headline ‘Cold Comfort’, the reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement criticized not just the novel’s structural weaknesses but the leading character’s unpleasant air of self-absorption, a charge that had also been levelled at her first novel. This latter barb must have especially stung, given that in both books Beryl had been trying to depict herself and her emotional dilemmas seriously:

  Miss Bainbridge’s formula for her second novel is almost exactly the same as for her first . . . namely, to collect together for a few traumatic days a handful of very odd, lost and lonely people, each of whom is obsessed by his own problems, and see how much damage they do to each other . . . Her often intelligent search for the private motives and inadequacies of each character blinds her, perhaps, to the need to relate them to a more normal, less dismally self-engrossed and occasionally entertaining world, and the tragic end of their weekend would appear less abrupt and more significant if it had not been so obvious and gloomily predictable.13

  Coming on top of the relatively poor commercial performance of A Weekend with Claud, the lack of any real critical coverage and lacklustre sales of Another Part of the Wood did not bode well for Beryl’s future at Hutchinson. Michael Dempsey still kept an eye on her work, but even so she must have suspected that her literary career was all but over. Beryl’s relationship with her agent was also coming under strain. Continually pressed for money, she had written him a complaining letter asking where her cheque for the second part of the advance was. She got a tactful but clearly irritated reply from John Smith, who set about explaining that it had been sent to her, first class, the day after he received it from Hutchinson, and that she was being a trifle unreasonable: ‘I really don’t think anyone could be expected to do things quicker than this. After all the cheque has not yet even cleared our own bank, and we are paying it out before paying it in.’14

  Three weeks into January 1969, Beryl and the children arrived at Eaves Farm, Austin driving them up in a hired van loaded with various plants and bits of furniture.

  Eaves Farm was a stone-built Pennine long house, tucked against a hillside and surrounded by fields and a meadow. If it wasn’t the only house on the back road between Holcombe and Helmshore, it nevertheless felt remote, and the nearest village, Ramsbottom, was a thirty-minute walk away. The house was reached via a track that ran down from the road, where milk and the post were left in a box by the cattle grid. Aside from the house, there was a barn, a stone-built pig-pen, a stable and some outbuildings that housed chickens. In the bottom right-hand corner of the yard there was a tall mountain ash with a swing on it, and a gate that led out into a field that sloped down the valley and to the reservoir beyond.

  When Don bought the farm in 1963 it had been practically derelict, lacking basic amenities such as electricity. He had done much of the conversion and restoration work himself, and the living space was now effectively composed of two parts: the main farmhouse and a converted cattle-shed, or shippon, attached to it. T
he shippon was on two levels: the upper floor was Don and Beryl’s bedroom, while the lower floor served as his studio. The farmhouse was similarly divided: the upper floor comprised the children’s bedrooms and a bathroom, while the lower floor included the kitchen, complete with Aga, a living area with a wood-burning stove, and a central dining room with an enormous tabletop made out of old oak beams. It was, to say the least, a change from life in Albert Street.

  February 1969 was not perhaps the ideal moment to introduce oneself into this rural environment: a cold snap plunged temperatures down to -13C, and by the end of the first week there were three-foot drifts of snow that didn’t clear until March. Although Don had recently installed central heating especially for Beryl, there weren’t any radiators upstairs, so the bedrooms remained as cold as they always had been. When the wind was in the wrong direction the heating would blow out and the house would fill with fumes billowing up from the cellar.

  Despite the potential of Eaves Farm to serve as a romantic rural retreat in which Don and Beryl could build a new life together, initially at least, reality fell short of the ideal. With Don at the Art College in Manchester, and Jo, Aaron and Sheenagh at school, Beryl was stuck inside on her own for the greater part of the day with Rudi. Although Jo had quickly settled in – Holcombe village primary was a good school run by an inventive and kindly headmaster – Aaron and Sheenagh, both at Haslingdon Grammar, didn’t have it quite so easy. As newcomers, they were picked on and had to deal with bullying. Coming from the South with his London fashion and attitude, Aaron particularly stood out and there were fights. Concerned about the bullying, Beryl would let him stay at home if he wanted to, perhaps not the most tactful solution since Sheenagh still had to go to school.