Beryl Bainbridge

by Brendan King

  For her next novel, Beryl returned to a more contemporary setting, taking her part-time job at Belloni’s warehouse and her friendship with Pauline as the starting point. Although this was also the traumatic period of her break-up with Don, Beryl decided not to deal with that part of her life head-on. In the novel, the breakdown in Brenda’s marriage to Stanley, who lives on a farm in Ramsbottom, occurs before the action starts and is alluded to only incidentally: ‘She . . . had left him because she couldn’t stand him coming home drunk every night from the Little Legion and peeing on the front step.’12

  The shift to a more comic tone for The Bottle Factory Outing was deliberate: ‘After The Dressmaker I wanted to write – well, not a light book, but a lighter one. The true story could have been a much deeper book. Duckworth said I should do a black comedy.’13 That Beryl so readily adopted the suggestion shows how close the creative partnership with her publisher had become. Her earnings from Harriet Said and The Dressmaker now freed her from the stop-gap necessity of working as a clerk, but she asked to be able to keep her desk at the office, ‘a small, rough table that stands amidst pillars of cardboard rolls and stacked boxes of paper’,14 so she could come in and write during the day: ‘I love it at Duckworths’,15 as she told Molly Parkin.

  Beryl’s involvement with the production of her novels extended to the cover design. For Harriet Said she had used a photograph of herself and Ian as children and drawn pigtails on him so as to make him look like a girl, while the cover of The Dressmaker featured an old photograph she had ‘found in a barrow somewhere in London of a rather sinister lady standing in an allottment’.16 For Bottle Factory she went a step further, mocking up a shot of the wine warehouse and its workers. In the resulting photograph, taken on the steps of the Old Piano Factory, Colin and another Duckworth employee pose as pseudo-Italians in Mafioso-style sharp suits and hats, while Beryl and Pauline stand in the foreground, Pauline dwarfing Beryl both in height and girth.

  The success of her previous two books had already created an expectation, and as publication day approached Beryl felt increasingly anxious that she had made a mistake in opting for a more lightweight comedy than the serious themes of her previous two books. ‘The book comes out on Thursday,’ she told Edward Pearson, Penny Jones’s father, who was himself a novelist, ‘so there may be reviews on Sunday. This is the worst moment. The most depressing I find. I feel absolutely awful and down and wish I had never written the dam thing. I think its fairly trivial, but I did intend it to be lighter than the last one, but not so light as to be completely dismissed.’17

  She need not have worried. If anything the critical response was even more enthusiastic than before. The distinguished author Ronald Blythe made comparisons with Graham Greene18 and almost ran out of superlatives in his review:

  After turning the final page of The Bottle Factory Outing, one can only gasp and grope for the right phrase. What a talent, if that is not too mild a word. Such an atmosphere of impending doom has not been created since Brighton Rock – except that Beryl Bainbridge is mercilessly comic instead of being mercilessly vicious . . . she is so in control of her marvellous little story that one hangs on her words from first to last. What originality, what pleasure.19

  The news that The Bottle Factory Outing had also made the Booker shortlist marked another high point – the last writer to have achieved back-to-back Booker nominations having been Iris Murdoch – and the novel became Beryl’s most commercially successful to date. Although she would again be disappointed (the papers were already talking about her as a Booker ‘bridesmaid’), the book was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize, which provided some compensation in critical, if not in financial terms, the prize money being a relatively restrained 200 guineas.

  As Beryl’s star rose, Austin’s fell, and at the point where he could least afford to look after her and the children – as he done for so many years – she became financially independent.

  By the late 1960s Austin had become dissatisfied with his job at East Ham Technical College. Using his knowledge of interior design and his practical building skills, he began converting run-down terraced houses in Islington, near where he now lived, into modern flats. At first, he was so successful he felt confident enough to resign from his job in the art department and set up his own property-development company: Shrowcroft Properties Limited, which was incorporated in March 1972. Austin was not the only one to be attracted by the profits to be made in house conversions, and as the number of property developers active in London in the early 1970s expanded, so the market swiftly turned into an unsustainable bubble. The collapse in 1973 of the London and County Securities Bank, which was heavily committed to the property sector, marked the start of the crash. Banks called in loans to property companies, causing a domino effect of defaults. Many companies were forced to sell their properties for whatever they could get, often at a loss, and house prices plummeted.

  Austin lost almost everything; he had to sell his house in Islington and a property he was converting into flats in Arundel Square, and as the mortgage of Albert Street was still in his name, for a time Beryl feared he was ‘about to crash in pieces taking this house with him’.20 In order to deal with the situation, the plan was for Belinda and their children to go back to New Zealand, where Austin would join them after he’d sorted out his business affairs and finished work on the Albert Street basement conversion. He was determined to pay off his creditors rather than opt for what he considered the less honourable route of bankruptcy, and his plan was to sell the basement for £14,000, while Beryl would purchase the rest of the house for £12,000.

  In addition to this, Austin was also carrying out renovation work on an old stone cottage in the Brecon Beacons National Park in Wales. He had originally intended it as a holiday home – Beryl and the children had in fact spent some time there despite its lack of electricity and basic amenities – but now he had to finish the building work almost single-handedly so it could be sold. A family photograph shows him digging the septic tank with snow falling around him.

  Graham’s offer of assistance to work on both Albert Street and the cottage in Wales was a big help to Austin, but it didn’t go down so well with Beryl, as she and Graham had now split up. The previous year Graham had joined the family holiday to Corfu, but early on he and Beryl had a massive falling out, after Beryl had locked him out of their villa when he had gone to a bar on his own. On his return he couldn’t get in, and in trying to clamber up the walls he’d injured himself and bloodied his face. He had to sleep in the garden and spent the rest of the holiday sulking on the beach.

  Not surprisingly, this added tension didn’t help the situation – nor did the fact that Austin had now moved back into the basement at Albert Street, as Beryl complained to Belinda in New Zealand:

  Aussie. Things between him and I are very bad at the moment. This 6 months for him has been dreadful and he is all twisted up in consequence. I’m sure I don’t help, but I cannot understand why he is so bloody bossy all the time. Graham (who never speaks to me) in the house for months and Aus making the most terrible mess. Weekends as well. Never tells you when he is going to do a job so you end up with no loo one minit and no water the next. Gives his phone number to everyone, so constant phone calls. Has a front door key and is on the landing morning, noon and night. When I asked for my key back he refused: ‘My bloody house’ etc.21

  Austin saw things differently, and in his letters to Belinda he vented his frustration with Beryl: ‘She’s cutting up ruf ’bout her privacy – wont have anyone in house before 11 am and must be out by 4 pm. So we’ve stopped working on her part till she stops behaving like a vestal virgin.’22 From the basement he could hear her taking it out on Aaron, Jo and Rudi: ‘I have to suffer Beryl screeching at the children morning and night. Noon – and it seems most of the day – she sleeps.’23

  Despite the frayed tempers, the building work progressed: ‘The basement is dam near finished,’ Beryl wrote to Belinda just before Christmas, and
six months later, in June 1975, work on the cottage was also completed. Austin could now begin to make plans to emigrate: ‘If I leave for NZ within a month I’ll be lucky. But if I can, Beryl says like she’ll look after the house in Wales and show people round till it’s sold to some other capitalist pig.’24

  With the sale of both the Albert Street basement and the cottage Austin finally managed to pay off the company’s debts (though it would take until 1980 before Shrowcroft Properties was eventually released from the liquidator), and in October he left to start his new life in New Zealand. After all he’d been through, it was little wonder he should be so incensed by Beryl’s casual reference to him twenty years later, in a national newspaper, as a ‘bankrupt’.25

  With the prospect of Austin’s eventual departure for New Zealand, there were a number of legal matters that needed to be sorted out. Not only did Beryl have to take over the legal ownership of 42 Albert Street, which entailed applying for a mortgage for the first time, but a range of other issues had to be dealt with, at Austin’s prompting, such as getting a will drawn up so that the children would be looked after in the case of Beryl’s death, and changing Rudi’s name legally from Sharp to Davies. These issues would be dealt with by Clive de Pass, whom Beryl had got to know a year or so before during her period working at the Duckworth offices.

  Clive, like Colin, had been educated at Wellington College. He had spent the 1960s working at the staid and respectable firm of Gilbert Samuel & Co. in the City of London, and was now looking to join the Duckworth board as a way of engaging with something more fulfilling than his current legal work. A father of five with another child on the way, Clive had been married for over twenty years to the painter and printmaker Jenifer Green.

  Clive seemed to have a successful and comfortable life; he had a pied-à-terre in Hampstead, and had recently moved to a large country house in Suffolk that not only contained an artist’s studio which had belonged to the painter Josef Herman, but was also sufficiently spacious to keep a couple of ponies for his daughters.

  But despite all this he had become disillusioned, both at work and at home, where he felt he had become surplus to Jenifer’s needs, or as Beryl would put it, using the standard justification in these situations, ‘his wife doesn’t understand him’.26

  Meeting Beryl was like a breath of fresh air: she was spontaneous, funny, unconventional, unlike any woman he knew. But Clive, who described himself as a ‘cold blooded fish’,27 was not the sort of person to rush into an affair that could break up his family. However dissatisfied he may have been in his marriage, he would feel ‘a selfish horrible shit’28 if he deserted his children. For her part, although Beryl enjoyed his company and found him amusing, initially at least she couldn’t take him seriously and the idea of an affair seemed faintly ridiculous.

  Nevertheless Clive persisted in his hesitant fashion, urged on by desire but held back by thoughts of the serious repercussions an affair could cause. Unable to make up his mind whether to ‘take the plunge’, he spent months ‘teetering ludicrously on the brink’.29 To Beryl, the situation seemed irresistibly comic, and she kept Anna up to date on the latest developments:

  Saw Clive last night. I am still laffing. Pauline called him Cyril so I decided a stroll on Hampstead Heath. He kept protesting. So there we were at 1 in the morning with a bottle of scotch with Clive running after me – begging me to put me clothes on . . . he was terribly upset – said he was a respectable solicitor and an officer and a gentleman and I must come home and I fell over a bench and he bundled me into the car, only he did’nt know where we were. We kept driving up and down King Henry’s road with him getting crosser and crosser.

  Anyway that’s the last I remember. I woke at 5 with me clothes in the hall – I was in bed – and a bloody big bruise on me back – serve me right. And not deflowered. I must ring him to find out where he was – he may still be among the dust bins in Primrose Hill.

  I do wish you were [here] because I’ve left out all the funny bits – the exact desperation in his voice floating up Hampstead Heath – ‘Do please pull yourself together, I’m a respectable solicitor’.30

  Eventually, Clive overcame his scruples. He wrote to tell her that he hated the thought of not seeing her, that there wasn’t anyone he’d rather be with: ‘Can’t I see you on your terms?’31 And so, much to the surprise and vague amusement of her friends, who considered Clive too proper for such a carry-on, he and Beryl started seeing each other, as she confided to Belinda: ‘I am going out proper with Clive now, who is very sweet and a bit Father like and takes Aaron for driving lessons and hands Jo pocket money. Unfortunately he has a wife and SIX kids, but he is very rich and doing all the house manipulations for me.’32

  This wasn’t the first time Beryl had had an affair with a married man. There had been her short infatuation with George, though a long-term relationship with him had never really been a practical possibility. There had been Edward, but again the fact that he lived in America and was a temporary resident in the UK made any long-term commitment unlikely. There had been the one-night stand with Jim Cassels, though this didn’t really count, as she had been more or less pushed into it against her will. There had been Hugh, though Hugh was really a friend who sometimes let his emotions get the better of him; in any case his visits were so sporadic it hardly counted. There had been Alan, though to be fair, when she began her relationship with him she didn’t know he had only married his second wife the year before. And there had been Don, though he had made it clear, almost from the start, that his marriage was already over. With Clive, however, it was the first time she had embarked on a relationship conscious of the fact that it could result in the break-up of a marriage, with all the correspondingly messy consequences for his family this would entail.

  In order to keep Clive’s identity secret Beryl began referring to him, if ever she had to tell people she was seeing someone, as ‘Jimmy Boots’, a name derived from his being an old Wellingtonian. This air of secrecy gave the relationship a certain frisson of excitement, and for a short while at least Beryl recaptured with Clive the exhilarating feeling of being in love that she had experienced in the past:

  Writing this in an absolute sweat between pages of new epic about Alan Sharp. Helped by the fact that I am besotted about Clive . . . I have known him for four years and thought him a joke and silly etc. He persisted and has been so dam nice to me and now I am head over heels, which is nice but painful. I don’t know what will happen. He is public school, my solicitor, Duckworth director, big tummy, boyish forelock, Jewish, though he denies it . . . We play rummy and do crosswords and hide from the children.33

  But Clive’s situation, his unwillingness to take any decisive step in relation to their future, made conflict inevitable, and after this honeymoon period the relationship devolved into a fractious and argumentative game of emotional chess. Beryl tried to get Clive to commit and attacked him for his reluctance to make an open break with his wife. But at the same time she was herself defensive, unwilling to commit to him unconditionally in case things didn’t work out. As for Clive, he prevaricated. He tried to get Beryl to be more reasonable, to see that the emotional and financial disruptions a break with his wife involved could not to be taken lightly, while at the same time somewhat paradoxically attempting to convince her that he was committed to her.

  The result was a continual series of tactical advances and retreats, fuelled by frustrated emotions on both sides. Nevertheless, despite their seeming incompatibility, despite the endless irritations and the perpetual bickering, the relationship continued in this erratic way for several years, each feeling a peculiar blend of fondness for yet exasperation with the other.

  The ‘new epic’ Beryl was writing during this period was the novel that would become Sweet William. She had considered writing about Alan and her early years in London as far back as 1967, but had eventually decided against it: ‘I am too close to it,’ she told a journalist. ‘This is a much more ruthless place than the
North, I couldn’t be funny about it yet.’34 She tried again in late 1973, sketching out the opening of a novel based on her experiences with Alan, provisionally entitled ‘William at the Harvest Festival’. But again she had put it off, finding it easier to write about a subject with more comic potential, such as her time at the bottle factory.

  Now she took up the idea again. After working on it for a month and a half, and giving the novel a new title, ‘Just William’, she showed the opening pages to Anna, but this time the response was not so positive: ‘She criticised this, said that’s wrong, that’s weak, and I went home and reread them and found she was dead right . . . So I had to start again, thinking about who was telling this story.’35

  Although Beryl made light of the incident in the newspapers, at the time the criticism had stung and she wrote to tell Edward Pearson how much it had affected her: ‘I too have had an awful setback. I took my first quarter draft in and it was torn to shreds and thrown out as cliche ridden and like the last one and no good etc etc. I smarted for several days and now am laboriously starting again, but my pride is hurt and I feel foolish.’36

  Nevertheless, she took the criticisms on board and began to restructure the novel. But the pressure to match the novels that had gone before was undoubtedly beginning to tell. ‘I’m frightened now of embarking on my next novel. That’s what a reputation does for you,’37 she had told a Canadian journalist earlier in the year. Consequently, her writing process was now coming to resemble a kind of neurotic obsession: ‘I work in a very concentrated way: once I start writing I never go out, or very rarely indeed . . . I re-write and re-write endlessly, or re-type rather, since my handwriting is fairly awful . . . I do one page and don’t do the next page till I get the first one right: and that may take another eleven pages. That goes on and on. Every morning I re-read the final draft again and possibly change something yet again.’38