by Brendan King
When it was published in October 1980, the book received mixed reviews. A frequent criticism was that it was confusing and opaque. ‘Lots of people said they didn’t know what happened at the end,’ Beryl admitted. ‘My publisher didn’t understand what happened at the end.’49 Some of this was deliberate, the reader’s uncertainty about what is real or imagined reflecting the Kafkaesque convolutions of life in the USSR, but it was nevertheless demanding. As Frank Kermode put it: ‘Nothing is straight-forward . . . piecing this world together is a formidable, perhaps impossible task.’50
Having come off second best again in her encounter with a married man, one might have assumed that Beryl would be wary of entering into another relationship along the same lines. But that kind of prudence, that kind of emotional restraint, was not in Beryl’s nature. With a kind of fatalistic recklessness, shortly after her final break with Clive, she allowed herself to become emotionally entangled with Colin. It was an affair that would have a profound effect on her personal and professional life, not to mention its impact on her children and the Haycraft family. Untangling the complicated web of personal and emotional factors that led up to it is not easy – in such situations no one comes out entirely unscathed, sides are taken, judgements made, stones cast.
When a marriage breaks down it is a moot point whether an extramarital affair by one of the partners is a cause, or merely a symptom, of the problem. Which side of the argument one comes down on will often depend on whose perspective one takes. Beryl’s view was that Colin and Anna’s marriage had broken down well before the start of her affair: she had witnessed bitter arguments between them and it seemed to her that Anna had withdrawn herself emotionally and sexually from Colin.
That Colin and Anna had once loved each other – and there were those who believed they continued to do so even after the affair with Beryl had begun – is undoubtedly the case. But Anna’s own public pronouncements about love and marriage are hard to reconcile with that of a happy union, and if they represented a genuine expression of her feelings it is not difficult to see why Colin might have felt under-appreciated: ‘The marriage was unimportant to me because the children were everything’, Anna would write after Colin’s death. ‘I was very fond of him and I suppose as far as I was capable, I was in love with him. But I was never the sort who yearned to be in love. Some are the marrying kind, some are maternal. I know women who seem to love their husbands more than they love their children, which I find extraordinary.’51 In her ‘Home Life’ column for The Spectator during the mid-1980s, she would refer to Colin dismissively as ‘Someone’, and even though it was meant as a joke, it was also a symbolic act of depersonalization, one that effectively reduced his role as her husband to that of a cipher.
The public expression of such sentiments could, of course, be explained as a post-rationalization in the face of Colin’s infidelity, a way to strike back at him and assuage the pain and humiliation of his betrayal by diminishing his significance. Nevertheless, on the surface at least, they hint at a breakdown in empathy between them.
But there were other factors that may have contributed to Colin’s need to look outside of marriage for some kind of solace, whether emotional or physical. Anna was prone to bouts of depression and an earlier tragedy had undoubtedly left its mark on her. In the autumn of 1970, around the time of her renewed meeting with Beryl, Anna had been pregnant with her sixth child. This would have been her first daughter, but the baby was born two months premature at the start of November and died of an infection two days afterwards.
This painful event would be overshadowed a few years later when Colin and Anna’s second son, Joshua, fell through the roof of a railway shed and died in May 1978 after spending nine months in a coma. Anna found the fatal accident impossible to come to terms with: ‘The death of a child is like the end of your life.’52 In her own analysis, the effect on the family was profound and profoundly isolating: ‘The family fragmented, everyone retreating into their own bit; you can’t share grief.’ Anna’s rigorously insular view of personal trauma meant that there was no therapy, nor any kind of engagement with others, that could relieve the pain: ‘You either hang yourself or you live it, endure it, get through it alone.’
The psychological impact of these personal tragedies reverberated through Anna’s subsequent writing, both in her fiction and in her journalism, and death would become a dominant preoccupation: ‘The place on earth where I come closest to peace is in the graveyard amongst all the quiet dead’, she wrote in her autobiography. ‘I seem to have thought, all my life, of little but death’.53 Anna’s feelings of guilt about the events of November 1952, though they would remain unspoken,54 undoubtedly contributed to this obsession with death. In Colin’s view, Anna had never recovered emotionally from the abortion and he blamed Austin for the psychological damage it had done to her.55
On one level it is easy to see how Colin’s affair with Beryl started. Colin felt he had been spurned by Anna, a situation reflected in the fact that he now slept on a small bed in his own book-lined study. There were the quantities of drink that were consumed at Gloucester Crescent whenever Beryl was around, not to mention Anna’s retreat from the scene both figuratively and literally. She would spend much of her time in the small recessed kitchen and would frequently retire to bed before nine. And then there was the fact that Beryl’s house was only ten minutes away and it was natural that Colin should walk her home.
All these factors played their part, but the roots of the affair went back much further than the particular conditions affecting Colin and Anna’s marriage at the time. Beryl had been captivated by Colin’s wit and erudition from the moment she had met him. As early as 1973 she had confided to her next-door neighbour Penny that she had feelings for ‘himself’, as she would refer to Colin. It may be that she never considered it something that could actually happen, but it was a dangerous desire to entertain even in a semi-playful fashion, especially as with drink inside her the boundaries of what were or were not acceptable dissolved.
Beryl would often contact a friend after a particularly heavy bout of drinking to ask them what she had done the night before. On this occasion – an evening round at Gloucester Crescent – the subject of her suspected drunken faux pas was a little more serious than the usual embarrassment at having passed out or made a fool of herself in front of other people. She recalled having talked to someone about her feelings for Colin. The next morning she wrote a note to Penny to ask whether she remembered who it was or what had happened:
Pen-Pen: Please could you give me a brief ring at work and just tell me if I did. I mean I have a recollection of telling someone I was madly in love with him. You know who. Did I imagine it or did I tell you – worse still did I vanish anywhere with Anna and tell her? Did I tell him – himself? It is 5 oclock in the morning – I am going for a walk as I can’t stop laughing.
Thank you also for putting me to rest. There is a note here from Graham. Did he call or was he at Anna’s? I just hope I never said anything to him. I told someone I know, but who was it? Did you see me wrapped round him or anything awful. I shall have to leave my job.
On second thoughts I daren’t go into work without knowing.
Your friend, Ethel56
In the event it turned out to be a false alarm, and anyway her relationship with Clive, which began shortly afterwards, put an end to her thoughts about Colin, at least for a while. In the intervening period she came to know him more closely as a friend, on one level perhaps better than she knew Anna. This was partly a result of the dinner parties given by Derwent May, the literary editor of The Listener, and his wife Yolanta, at which both Colin and Beryl were regular guests. Derwent had invited Colin and Anna on numerous occasions, but Anna would invariably decline, as she didn’t like these semi-formal social occasions where she was obliged to meet and talk with people she didn’t know. Eventually Derwent would simply telephone Colin at the office and invite him on his own. As Derwent and Yola had both come to know Beryl a
t around the same time, it seemed natural to invite her, too. The Mays’ house in Albany Street provided a neutral space in which Colin and Beryl could meet and talk outside the confines of Gloucester Crescent, and as they both lived only five minutes away, it allowed Colin to leave with Beryl and walk her home without arousing undue suspicions among the other guests.
In order to prevent her children finding out, Beryl began renting a room on Parkway, next to the Regent Bookshop in Camden Town. Nominally it was a place where she could work, and she did indeed work there, having installed a desk and a typewriter. There was no toilet – ‘I have to pee in a bucket’57 – but there was a bed, allowing her to keep her assignations with Colin private. She would continue to rent the room for a number of years until Rudi, who as the youngest was the last to leave home, moved out of Albert Street in the mid-1980s.
In the early days the affair was kept secret from all but Beryl’s closest friends. Inevitably it divided opinion. There were those, like the Mays, who saw it in a positive light: ‘She adored Colin. He was the great love of her life’,58 as Yolanta put it. Others, such as Michael Holroyd, who had never warmed to Colin’s peremptory manner, felt it was an ‘unfortunate arrangement’59 and feared that the relationship would ultimately end up harming Beryl in some way.
The question is often asked, and Beryl herself would continue to ask it even into the late 1980s: did Anna know? Of course she knew. It was inconceivable she didn’t know. Yet she never alluded to it or hinted at it in public, nor did she seem to let it affect her attitude to Beryl – until much later when their friendship began to break down. Ironically, despite Anna’s obsession about keeping her private life out of the public sphere (she would later describe herself as ‘having spent a lifetime keeping private life private’),60 the affair, at least in symbolic or figurative terms, would resurface in her novels, in which infidelity seems to be a recurring motif.61
Obviously Beryl’s decision to begin an affair with Colin has to be seen at some level as an attack on Anna. This would be a truism even if there had been no history between them, but given the events of 1952, the affair represented – subconsciously at least – an act of revenge for Anna having ‘stolen’ Austin from her all those years ago. In any event, Beryl was certainly conscious of the emotional impact that what she was doing would have on Anna: ‘I think the only victim is the woman, either wife or friend,’ she wrote in an article about marital infidelity, ‘sexual betrayal doesn’t do a great deal for a woman’s sense of adequacy.’62
The affair with Colin was the last major relationship of Beryl’s life, and though it is the latest in date it is also, due to its necessarily secretive nature, the least well documented. There are no open declarations, no letters between them that hint at the relationship’s development, its ebbs and flows. Colin’s private communications with Beryl were brief. A telephone call or a jotted note on a postcard would prompt a meeting or confirm an arrangement.
What his feelings for her were cannot be truly known. That the relationship was something deeper than the purely physical affair more cynical observers took it to be seems clear given its duration and the number of trying circumstances it survived. It may not have been perfect, it may not even have been love, but at the very least it allowed two emotionally damaged people to find a degree of companionship and affection that was otherwise lacking in their lives.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Fact and Friction
As any kind of discussion on these matters seems to cause you extreme irritation, and as my letters to you, and yours to me are unintelligible (though mine are a little more consistant than yours, as yours go from me owing you over £4000 to you owing me £5000 in the space of a few days) I would prefer that you didn’t reply, even supposing you would actually find the time to do so.1
It was becoming clear that Beryl’s prodigious rate of working could not continue indefinitely. The toll of writing a book every year, not to mention the television plays and film scripts, was starting to have an effect. Before the publication of Winter Garden she was asked whether she could maintain her ‘rapid writing pace’ and her answer had been slightly guarded: ‘I think I can keep it up. I’m not afraid of producing a failure. If I try very hard I know it should be all right.’2
Suspicions that Beryl was finding it hard to ‘keep it up’ were borne out by the fact that two of her last three novels had been revised editions of those she had published with Hutchinson during the 1960s. This exercise in recycling, in paring down the older books to match the sparer style and format of her Duckworth novels, may have saved time and allowed her to maintain her schedule of a novel a year for ten consecutive years, but she would pay a price for the decision: neither of the revised editions, Another Part of the Wood in 1979 and A Weekend with Claude in 1981, were as critically or commercially successful as she or Colin had hoped, and the lack of critical momentum dragged down sales of Winter Garden.
It is always debatable whether revising a creative piece of work, even when carried out by the artist, can produce a better version than the original, whatever its faults were perceived to be. This doubt lingers over the Duckworth editions of Another Part of the Wood and A Weekend with Claude. Beryl had excised phrases she now deemed to be too flowery, cut out extraneous characters and simplified the plot lines, but though she expressed satisfaction with the results, the two books seemed to lack the vital spark that animated her other novels.
Reviewers of Another Part of the Wood were lukewarm about the changes, preferring the ‘more intense and lush early Bainbridge’.3 Julian Symons, himself a Duckworth author who had praised Beryl’s earlier books, called it the least successful of her novels and wrote that it had ‘an air of contrivance uncharacteristic of her best work’.4 The critical response to A Weekend with Claude was even worse. Gloria Valverde, in her exhaustive study of the textual differences between the original and the revised editions, noted that critics almost unanimously agreed that the narrative ‘lacked the crispness and clarity of Bainbridge’s other Duckworth novels’.5
It wasn’t just reviewers who felt that she needed to find a new direction ‘and risk the drastic re-think that all creative writers should undergo at some time in their careers’.6 Even while she was working on the revised edition of A Weekend with Claude, Beryl was planning a departure from the slim, semi-autobiographical novels on which she’d made her name. In an interview with her local newspaper, she revealed that she had started work on a novel that would tell the story of the nineteenth-century headmaster and classical scholar, the Reverend John Selby Watson, who had murdered his wife in 1871: ‘It won’t be what they call “faction”, it will be more historical than that. I’ve done a lot of research into the case and the period.’7 The result, Watson’s Apology, was clearly a forerunner of her later work, a novel in which an intimate personal drama was set against the backdrop of a larger historical event or period, but it was also a novel that sparked off a personal drama of its own, one that almost saw Beryl breaking with Colin and Duckworth for good.
Beryl’s affair with Colin had inevitably had consequences for her personal and social life, but it would also have a considerable impact on her work as a writer. In the first instance the secrecy that necessarily surrounded the relationship meant that a whole area of her emotional life which she had previously mined for her fiction, and which she would frequently assert was the wellspring of the creative impulse, was now practically out of bounds, or at the very least had to be treated in an oblique and opaque manner. However much the real-life Alan differed from his fictional representation in Sweet William, or however many liberties Beryl might have taken with Clive’s personality in her depiction of him as Edward in Injury Time, they remained distinctly recognizable to those who knew them. Such an act of literary representation could not be considered in a relationship with as potentially explosive consequences as her affair with Colin. In the short term, Beryl’s decision to revise A Weekend with Claude obviated the difficulty of trying to write a contempo
rary novel along the lines of Injury Time or Winter Garden that might allude to her personal life, but over the longer term this form of self-censorship would present a problem that somehow had to be overcome.
In the meantime she found another solution. When writing Young Adolf she had used her recollections of her father and the things he had told her about the Liverpool of his youth as a framework for her depiction of the proto-Führer. She realized that the same technique might apply when it came to writing about John Selby Watson: ‘The interesting thing I’ve found is that the more you think about history, the more you realise that things are not so different after all. In this kind of book I’ll still use people I know as bases for the characters, but I’ll just move them back in time a bit. It’s interesting to see how well they fit into another time.’8
The idea of writing about Watson had not originally been Beryl’s. In the April/May issue of the London Magazine for 1979, Mervyn Horder had published an article about the Watson case, covering his conviction for murder, his sentence to be hanged, the subsequent press campaign for clemency, and his eventual death in prison in 1884. Colin was so taken with the story,9 which seemed to provide ample scope for an ironic treatment of the battle of the sexes, that he not only encouraged Beryl to write a novel about it, he also assisted her in her research, enquiring in libraries or archives for relevant material.
Although Beryl never saw things from an academic perspective, her enthusiasm for the subject allowed her to share Colin’s literary passions in a way that Anna clearly didn’t. Beryl even persuaded him to accompany her in some hands-on research: