Beryl Bainbridge

by Brendan King

  Adding to these worries was the fact that Austin had just got married. The ‘new girlfriend’ whom Beryl had casually mentioned in her letter to Harold a few months before Christmas turned out to be a more serious prospect than any of Austin’s previous relationships. On his way back to Albert Street one evening in September, in the lift at Mornington Crescent tube, he had met Belinda Bond, a twenty-six-year-old New Zealander working as a schoolteacher in London. Struck by her looks, Austin had asked her if she fancied a drink. Although she declined the offer – and his follow-up suggestion that he accompany her to the party she was going to – she gave him her phone number. A few days later he invited her round for coffee in the Albert Street basement, and over the following months a close relationship developed. Belinda moved in with Austin in February, and on 3 March they were married in St Pancras registry office.

  Although Beryl was well past the stage where she imagined, or even wanted, a reconciliation with Austin, the news of his wedding, which she heard about only after the event, undoubtedly had a psychological effect. Not only did it throw the seriousness of her own relationship with Don into the spotlight, it had possible implications regarding Austin’s continuing financial support, not to mention the status of Albert Street, the mortgage of which was still in Austin’s name.

  With these anxieties coursing through her mind, it was little wonder Beryl started to doubt herself and her relationship with Don, and as so often before she began to see past events through a more nostalgic lens. After Harold sent her a copy of Emily Dickinson’s love poems (‘To Beryl, the flower of Albert Street, with much love . . .’), and feeling sorry for herself and guilty about her treatment of him, she wrote and tried to explain the situation she now found herself in:

  Dear Washington Harold, I have always expected too much, give too much [at the] start, and ended up by being given nothing. I am in a field now in the snow in a 16th centuary farm-house with this painter man whom I do not understand and four children and no money and only a wish to get near and no hope of it. The book of poems was beautiful. I loved it.

  You are kind and lost and hopeless like me too . . . I wish I could write poetry. I am a third way thru a book of you and me in the truck, for which the publisher rings weekly to try and get. I cannot do it because I need love, don’t we all, and love is not gotten by chance.

  To hell wuth all this.

  Even if I don’t wrote or have not written I think of you each day, chaque jour, the lost chances are the gardest to bear. Austin is married. I am not. Goodnight sweet prince. B.15

  With the melting of the snow and the arrival of spring, however, things improved. Eaves Farm was a beautiful, secluded space in which to conduct a love affair and it was hard not to be seduced by the simple way of life it imposed. The positive side of the long periods Beryl spent on her own included a burst of artistic activity. In April she had received a postcard from a mutual friend (addressed to ‘Mr & Mrs McKinlay’), which jokingly described the portrait on the front – an image of Napoleon in profile staring moodily into the distance, right hand stuffed into his waistcoat – as ‘Napoleon out of his element i.e. Ramsbottom’.16 Beryl picked up on this idea, and began to produce a series of pictures that played on the incongruous idea of the Romantic figure of Napoleon in the prosaic landscape of Ramsbottom. Napoleon viewing the field, for example, pictured Napoleon standing in military uniform by a living-room window, surveying the fields around Eaves Farm, while behind him a naked woman sits in an armchair, a hen perched on the backrest. The more explicit Napoleon’s campaign in Ramsbottom featured Napoleon sitting in an armchair in the backyard of the farm, surrounded by sheep and hens, and indulging in foreplay with a naked woman on his lap.

  What is striking about many of these drawings is their frankness – Rustic Pleasures shows a man taking a woman from behind on the flagstones of the Eaves Farm courtyard – though they were also characteristically witty. Down on the Farm features a thinly disguised Don and Beryl indulging in naked calisthenics in the farmyard, surrounded by chickens. Inspired by the intensity of her physical relationship with Don, this would be the first – and the last – time that she would produce such openly erotic drawings. The pages of the journal she was keeping at the time were also interspersed with sketches of herself and Don making love. Significantly, the only exception was a naked self-portrait in which, in a kind of artistic wish-fulfilment, Beryl portrayed herself as heavily pregnant.

  Art was not the only means of passing the time while Don was away. Since her return from America, Beryl had been toying with the idea of using her experiences as the basis for a novel, though she remained uncertain ‘what form to put the bloody thing in’.17 She had started the novel shortly before Christmas, but her assertion that she was a third of the way through was perhaps something of an exaggeration, though she had written at least twenty pages in first-draft form. Although she would ultimately abandon the book, these pages would find a new life when she came to write The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress over thirty years later.

  What the unfinished book would eventually have been called is less clear. On the inside page of her American journal Beryl wrote, ‘This was meant to be turned into a novel, “I Was Doctor Wheeler’s Intended”’, and indeed that line appears in one of the existing 1969 drafts. But the note was added sometime around 2004, when Beryl was preparing material to go to the British Library, and it’s unlikely this was the title she had in mind at the time.18 In the journal itself, written contemporaneously with her American trip, is the title ‘He’s the Captain of the Team’, with a list of the people whom characters would be based on underneath, including Washington Harold, Beryl and Austin. That this was the working title is confirmed by an interview she gave shortly after the publication of Harriet Said in 1972, in which she mentioned ‘He’s the Captain of the Team’ as the book she was currently working on.19

  Although there is a certain surface similarity in the prose and the setting of ‘He’s the Captain of the Team’, in which Heine Melman is waiting at Baltimore airport for the arrival of Alma Bickerton from England, who has come in search of her ex-lover Dr Wheeler, and that of The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress, the two novels would have been very different. In the first place, the relationship between Heine and Alma is unlike that of Harold and Rose, and more closely reflects Beryl’s ambivalent feelings towards the real-life Harold at the time.

  On the first night of her arrival in America, for example, Alma goes to bed in Heine’s apartment and wakes to find him beside her. Although this also happens to Rose in Polka Dot, the difference here is that unlike Rose, Alma is expecting Heine to make love to her, and takes his shy inability to instigate the first move as an insult, a proof of his lack of attraction to her:

  She turned to him and against her belly she could feel him and he wore nothing. Still he made no move. It was uncomfortable for them both. He was waiting for her to be generous, to fulfill all that Doc Wheeler had promised of her, she was quite a woman and he was in bed with her.

  And she was waiting for him to kiss her if that was what he wanted. He couldn’t be that shy, he could not expect her to make the advances. Why that would make her no better than a tart.20

  The fact that Alma wants Heine to make love to her is given further emphasis when, shortly afterwards, he starts to touch her: Alma tells him to stop and he takes his hand away. This irritates her in the same way as his inability to make the first move had, for Heine fails to realize that when Alma says ‘No’ she doesn’t mean ‘No’:

  ‘Why do you stop, go on, tell me?’

  ‘Stop what?’

  ‘Oh Christ.’ She flounced upright and crossed her legs and stared out at the trees. He dare not look at her face, only the stretched whiteness of her inner thighs.

  ‘I guess I’m just shy,’ he said muffled, but she was not listening to him anymore.

  Although in later life Beryl downplayed the extent of her emotional involvement with Harold, and indeed in The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress por
trayed their relationship as one in which she was the unwilling partner, forced into close proximity – and even sex – with him, this was not how she experienced it at the time. Beryl’s attitude to Harold both before and after the American trip was more complicated than the black-and-white picture she later presented. This is certainly reflected in the draft of ‘He’s the Captain of the Team’, where Alma actively encourages Heine to make love to her: when she rouses from an erotic dream of Dr Wheeler to feel ‘the heavy indenture of Heine’s fingers pressing into her’, she does not stop him but leads him on: ‘She takes hold of his wrist and feels the cold curve of his watch and kneels upright, guiding him, holding his middle finger like a teacher helping a child to write its alphabet, tracing the capital of her cunt with him until he finds trembling the clung looseness of her labia . . .’21

  One of the few people to read this early draft of the new novel was Beryl’s editor at Hutchinson, Michael Dempsey, who visited her while she was at Eaves Farm. Although her writing was still not quite as polished and economical as it would later become, and the sex scenes would have been something of a publishing challenge in 1969, he was encouraging, advising her to ‘try and work and then come back, organise it and then try for some grant to go abroad’.22

  Dempsey also suggested she might be able to make some money teaching, and that meeting other writers would be helpful for her career. But with memories of Alan still in her mind, this didn’t have quite the appeal Dempsey had intended: ‘I don’t want to meet any writers,’ she wrote in her journal. ‘They’re probably all like me or Alan or Alex Hamilton and who the hell wants that. I would like Don’s baby. I dream about that.’

  This went to the heart of the matter. Drawing and writing were all very well, but there were more important things in life. ‘I came to have a baby,’ she would write in the journal she kept at Eaves Farm and which was part extended love letter to Don, part De Profundis-style self-justification: ‘I came to have a baby, to love you, to be beside you every night, to grow fat on love and being loved.’23 As in the past, she turned to poetry in moments of high emotion as a means of expressing her deepest feelings:

  There are sheep in the field

  A hen in the yard

  Six plates on the table

  Yellow flowers in a jug

  Butter in the fridge

  Bread in the bin

  A big brass bed golden enough

  To make a baby in

  The problem was that such romantic fantasies always seemed to dissolve on contact with reality. In America, she had longed to return to Don and Albert Street, but once back in London the reality meant looking after four children, with Don visiting only on occasional weekends. The point of moving to Eaves Farm was ‘to be alone with Don’,24 but now she was here the reality was she was spending large parts of the day alone looking after Rudi, and when Don did return in the evening he would often want to paint. To Don, teaching was a necessary job but being an artist was what he was, and being an artist required time on your own, time to think and to work. Don, like Austin before him, had an overriding commitment to art, but was hamstrung by the practical need to earn money, meaning he had to combine his teaching schedule with the full-time vocation of being an artist. It was hardly surprising that this didn’t leave much time or emotional energy left over, and that Beryl felt short-changed.

  Beryl had always demanded a total emotional engagement, and her insecurities being what they were, she perceived any falling away from this as a failure of love, an implicit rejection. She may have been aware that this was unrealistic, that she was being too demanding, and even that this was at the root of the repeated failures of her relationships, but if she was conscious of it she appeared to be psychologically unable to do anything about it.

  By June 1969 she seemed to have reached an uneasy acceptance of the situation, and that rather than being ‘alone with Don’, she would have to make do with being ‘alone, with Don’. Given her emotional volatility, it was hard to believe that this state could last for long. Harold had recently sent her the photograph Judith Gleeson had taken while they were in Wanakena, and in her reply Beryl painted a gloomy picture of herself as someone leading a solitary life, alienated and detached from the world and the relationships around her. Significantly, she broached the idea of returning to Albert Street for the first time:

  Dearest Washington Harold,

  The photohraphs of you were beautiful. Surprisingly of late you are much clearer, so that looking at the photo, I saw you in the shadows of the sunlight and remembered your freckles and the way you droop your head. I think your last letter was sad. I am not in Albert Street but I may go back. I miss it and yet I need a good life, a so called one with another existance. Unlike you I am lost when alone.

  I think I have found something. I don’t go out, I read, lie in the rain, hitch hike for food, have got fatter, I don’t talk much anymore, I don’t know the man I am living with, he is inward and an artist and you trust noone, but in a fashion we have understanding and maybe that is the best we should hope for, and far more than most have anyway.25

  There was still a strong bond between herself and Don, and their passion for each other was undeniable. But on a practical level nothing had really been solved by the move to Eaves Farm, and indeed the problems seemed insurmountable. Don didn’t like London, and though he had been content to travel down for the occasional weekend to see her, he certainly wasn’t going to settle there full-time. But to Beryl, the alternative – uprooting herself and the children and leaving London for good – seemed equally unthinkable. In the first place it meant the loss of the independence and security she had with the house in Albert Street. It was fine for Don, who could drive and who had a job in Manchester, to live in the wild remoteness of Holcombe, but to Beryl, being stuck there everyday with no job and no means of escape, it would be like being in prison – a beautiful, open prison admittedly – but a prison nonetheless. Not only that, she had to deal with Austin’s annoyance at the children being taken away – and what about the children themselves? Was it fair on them to disrupt their education, their contact with their father, their friends, the life they had previously known in London?

  To these general anxieties were added the increasing tensions of day-to-day living. She began to brood on the unfairness of her situation, her solitary isolation during the day, and the fact that Don had a social life outside of his relationship with her and didn’t always feel the need to include her in it. As in the past, she became increasingly prone to bouts of suspicion and jealousy, seeing in Don’s actions and behaviour – even a visit to his family – a proof that he didn’t love her enough: ‘Don went to see his mother and Father today with Sheenagh. He is supposedly going to tell his mother about me. But when they came back later he did not mention it . . . All his friends who he never takes me to see. We could have all gone but he didn’t ask me.’

  She would focus on the smallest incident, magnifying it in her mind into a full-blown proof of his indifference to her. She began to see treachery where there was none. It was a recipe for disaster: not saying anything herself, not wanting to ask him what he felt, she instead interpreted events through the prism of her insecure paranoia, she saw signs of underhand behaviour and betrayal everywhere. When the annual Liverpool Academy exhibition came round, she wanted him to want her to come: ‘I would have loved to go, to go to a party, I would have wished him to want me with him. To hell with that too. At night he wanted to draw me. I snapped at that too. Only because I have no confidence left in myself, no belief that he gives a shit about me.’26

  To Don, such suspicions and paranoia seemed unreasonable, and inevitably they began to argue, which, like a vicious circle, fuelled the very insecurity she feared:

  I hate the feeling when we quarrel. It leaves me feeling bitter and Don feeling confused. He says I talk rubbish. All his eyes grow hard and he blinks a lot. I weep and feel unloved. I just want proof. I want the words.

  I’ve been told by
others, and look what happened. If he doesn’t say he loves me, does it mean he does not love me? It feels that way.

  I want more than anything to be beautiful for him. I spend ages combing my hair and changing my clothes, even though I freeze with the cold.

  Sometimes, he does not notice me.27

  The problem was that nothing would serve as sufficient proof for her insecurities – when the words were offered, she didn’t believe them. The sad thing was she knew that her fears were self-destructive, that they would end up destroying the very thing she desired. As the weeks passed, she became fixated on the fact that Don had stopped saying ‘I love you’, and her obsession, exacerbated by her insecurities and her loneliness, began to get out of control:

  He would think me fucking mad, all this. I used to be able to tell him, before he stopped saying it, before he stopped ringing me in the day. I used to say it in his ear. Now at night when he starts the clicking noise in his throat which means he is asleep, I lean over and say Don, Don I love you, beauty boy, dear lovely Don, over and over, very soft. It makes me relax and I curl into him and he turns over violently and says ‘Jesus, the folder’, and I say ‘alright alright’.

  I watch everything he does.

  I am obsessed, bloody mad.28

  Clearly things could not continue like this. The idea of returning to London gained in her mind, and Beryl would talk it over endlessly with Austin, though even this led to more tension, with Don ‘going on about the phone bill’ because she had been on the telephone for hours. She tried to explain it all, to reason it out with herself:

  If its all gone, why am I still here? The furniture, the kids, the money, where to go? Where did it all go? Endless fucking questions.