Beryl Bainbridge

by Brendan King

  This state of heightened tension also affected relations between Beryl and Anna. Beryl found Anna’s attitude unsettling. She was unsure of the extent to which Anna knew about her affair with Colin or was colluding in it, and suspected she harboured lofty feelings of contempt for her. The fact that their friendship, underpinned as it was by a whole network of secrecy and lies, had to be conducted in public and was frequently the object of scrutiny by the media, only exacerbated the problem.

  Some of these tensions surfaced when Beryl and Anna were invited to lecture on a British Council tour of Poland in May 1991, organized by Stoddard Martin, a friend of the Haycrafts who had taken a post as a lecturer at Lodz University. As Beryl refused to fly, they went by train, a punishing journey that took them to Warsaw, via the Hook of Holland, Berlin and Frankfurt: ‘It was ghastly and it was my fault because I hate flying. Dehydrated, hungry and without matches, we travelled 30 hours by train and arrived looking worse than our passport photos.’49

  Despite this, things began well enough. Anna and Beryl seemed like two naughty girls, and at a British Council reception that evening they got very drunk, Beryl especially, and started telling indelicate stories that were somewhat more shocking than the assembled dignitaries were used to.50

  After Warsaw, they were driven to Gdansk, where they stayed at the Grand Hotel in Sopot, a huge building on the shore of the Baltic Sea that could count Adolf Hitler, Greta Garbo and Omar Sharif among its previous guests. Beryl and Anna were intrigued by the prostitutes who worked the hotel corridors and hoped – without much success – to be mistaken for one. When not involved in official lectures or functions they would spend time at the bohemian Actors’ Club not far from the hotel, after which they returned to Krakow for the final leg, where they met up with Peter Conradi, a British Council-sponsored professor at Jagiellonian University.

  Beryl and Anna spent their last evening in Conradi’s tiny flat downing a litre of whisky he had been given by a friend, and having an uninterruptible row. As the whisky kicked in, Beryl started a systematic attack on Anna, ostensibly about her not pulling her weight as a speaker, but becoming more personal as it went on. ‘I’ve never seen drinking on that scale, Homeric,’ Conradi recalled, ‘I had never witnessed an attack of that ferocity, or that went on so long. It felt like the harangue went on for an hour or longer . . . Anna bore the whole thing with an astonishing courage and stoicism.’51

  The following day, sensing that Conradi had found the evening deeply uncomfortable, Anna tried to play it down, suggesting it was just an aspect of Beryl’s rich and complex personality, or that it had been the result of the drink. But even at the time, Conradi sensed there was something deeper to it than that: ‘I was certainly aware there was a complicated three-way relationship, how much that played into the situation I don’t know. I’ve never quite witnessed this sort of sustained aggression between friends.’

  In the course of her researches on James Barrie and Peter Pan for An Awfully Big Adventure, Beryl had been struck by a curious piece of information she found in Andrew Birkin’s biography, J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys. When the bodies of Captain Scott and his men were found frozen to death in the Antarctic in 1913, one of the last letters Scott wrote had been to Barrie. She began to wonder what it was that could have drawn an adventurer like Scott to Barrie, and this led to the idea of writing a novel that would tell the real story of the man behind the myth. The South Pole may have seemed like a big leap from the Playhouse in Liverpool, but Scott and his men had been on her mind for a number of years and during the 1980s Beryl had written that her favourite book was The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard, ‘the man who went with Scott to the Pole and brought back the eggs of the Emperor Penguin’.52 After borrowing books on Captain Oates and Scott from the London Library, the new novel, which she initially called ‘Poor Tom’s Cold’, began to take shape.53

  There followed trips to the Royal Geographical Society and the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge (‘Full of hoary explorers with frost-bitten noses . . .’),54 though her research wasn’t always conducted along such conventional lines. For New Year 1991 she spent a few days by the sea at the house of a friend in Shingle Street, Suffolk, where, as she told Mervyn Horder, she indulged in a little imaginative role play:

  Last week I spent in a hut on a beach in Gt Yarmouth. The idea was to plod up and down the shore in me nightie clutching a digestive biscuit, but I gave up in thirty seconds flat. The cold was horrendous. The excursion was in the nature of research, as the new book is about me being Oates at the South Pole. My Dad (of course) is Captain Scott. Last night I dreamt the whole book, sort of, and woke thinking I need’nt do any more writing as it was already finished. What a disappointment.55

  In fact at a very early stage she had already visualized the book’s final scene. When Oates delivered his immortal line about ‘just going outside’, the others in the tent were surprised he could walk at all, as his feet were so badly frostbitten. Yet his body was never found, and to account for this Beryl imagined Oates had been led to his death by a vision of Queen Victoria and John Brown – she on her horse and he holding the bridle, as in the famous photograph – and that in his mind he had clung on to the tail of the horse and been dragged across the ice.56

  The novel would take over a year and a half to complete. The reason for this was partly the practical difficulty of writing it, the fact that the five narrators were all men from different classes and spheres of life, not to mention the large amount of technical and historical material that needed to be assimilated.

  Another reason was that Beryl had also begun working on a theatrical adaptation of An Awfully Big Adventure. After the book’s publication, Ian Kellgren of the Liverpool Playhouse had contacted Beryl about the possibility of turning the book into a play. The idea seemed a good one to both sides: the Playhouse, which was itself going through a difficult period financially, saw it as a means of capitalizing on the novel’s success, and Beryl had long wanted to write a stage play. During the early months of 1990 she went to Liverpool a number of times to discuss the changes that would be required to adapt the action of the novel to the stage, and by the autumn the script was finished.

  The play was originally scheduled to open in March 1991, but in January the Playhouse, now facing bankruptcy, was granted an Administration Order and the production was cancelled, pending some financial workaround. After the administrators negotiated a grant from the Arts Council, the play opened a year later than planned on 11 March 1992, with a cast that featured Rodney Bewes as Uncle Vernon, Tim Woodward as O’Hara, David Allister as Potter, and Rudi, now twenty-six, in the role of Stella.

  Beryl had immediately thought of Rudi for the role as she had been working as an actress for a number of years. However, the idea of playing her mother was not one that appealed to Rudi and initially she turned it down: ‘I think she did so on the grounds that she didn’t want to be linked to me,’ as Beryl put it. But she encouraged Rudi to read through the part again after the play’s deferment and eventually she agreed: ‘If it had not been my mother, I might well have gone on saying no,’ she explained at the time. ‘But now, the more I read it, the more layered and deep and sad and funny I think it is; this is Beryl writing about herself as she thought she was then. But she’s writing about it now, so it might not be her at all when she was that age, but the child inside her now.’57

  After finishing the play, Beryl’s work on the novel, now called The Birthday Boys, began again in earnest. When it was published in September 1991, it became one of Beryl’s most commercially successful novels to date, perhaps because it appealed to an audience already familiar with the Scott legend. To many, Beryl’s most impressive feat had been the way she had so convincingly managed to get inside the heads of the men on the expedition, or as the reviewer in The Tablet put it: ‘It is a man’s book written by a woman.’58 It was this aspect that particularly struck the former Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, Hugh Lloyd-Jones,
who wrote to Colin to tell him how much he enjoyed the book: ‘I really think she has a touch of genius. How can a woman have understood those chaps – and all the things they had to do – so perfectly?’59

  In hindsight, there was a certain inevitability about Colin’s death. He had been exhibiting signs of stress for quite some time, and he and those around him were worried about the effects on his health. His first stroke in 1992 was a clear warning sign. But it was one he seemed unable to heed and a short time later Beryl described his agitated state after an argument with Stephen Hill: ‘Last night he was in the sort of mood guaranteed to kill him (C, I mean) he was shouting his head off and going red in the face. I thought he’d have another stroke.’60

  In February 1993 Colin complained of having difficulty breathing and Beryl paid for him to see a private doctor, who gave him an ECG and a capnograph, a diagnostic test to detect certain respiratory problems. But with no solution in sight to his financial problems, things looked ominous. A few months later, in August 1993, a second, more serious stroke followed, which led to him being admitted to University College Hospital, and for a time he had difficulty speaking.

  For almost a year after Colin’s release from hospital the ceaseless round of negotiations to stave off bankruptcy continued, though without much success. In June 1994 Colin told Stephen he was ‘sinking fast’ and a month later he wrote to Beryl telling her that Carter-Ruck had rejected his accountant’s financial restructuring plan and that his debt over the libel action still stood.61 In the midst of all this, to mark his election as president of the Classical Association, he devoted the early months of 1994 to writing an address, which he successfully delivered on 6 April at the University of Exeter, though a slight hint of the previous year’s stroke was still detectable in his speech.

  Despite the furore over the house issue, Beryl had continued seeing him throughout 1993 and 1994. According to her diary, in which she recorded her rendezvous with Colin using a secret code – a large asterisk above the date – their final meeting was on Tuesday 20 September 1994. On the Friday she went to the King’s Lynn Festival, and it was there, the following day, that she received a telephone call to say Colin had just had another stroke and died. In a cruel piece of timing, a letter from him arrived on the Monday, which he had posted the day before he died, in which he sent her a copy of his speech to the Classical Association: ‘Darling Beryl, here is the printed version of that dread address – expanded to ridiculous proportions. What do you think? It may be mad, but I hope not silly. Love Colin xxx’62

  After the news of Colin’s death broke, a number of close friends who knew about the affair wrote to Beryl to express their shock and to offer their sympathy. For Beryl it was doubly hard having to grieve in secret, her connection to him being unrecognized by the outside world. She was contacted by the Independent to write an obituary, but what she initially sent in was too overly emotional to be used:

  Colin Haycraft . . . was abrasive, bloody minded, his own man, whatever that means. I find this extra-difficult to write, because I went to say goodbye to him this morning in the mortuary, and somehow he’s standing over me, less icy cold than he was in that horrible little room in the bowels of UCH and he’s telling me, get it right, that I can’t use that word, that my sentance is clumsy, that my whole syntax is wrong. How do you tell other people who didn’t know him, and for that matter, those who did, how important he was? He really was much loved, for his vunerability, heavily disguised, his formidable scholaship and his devastating wit.63

  Despite the tensions and disagreements that had marked the last years of their relationship, Colin’s death had a profound impact on Beryl’s sense of her self. She saw it as marking the end of her sexual life and any hope she might have of long-term romantic companionship. When the affair began she had been in her forties – young enough that love affairs seemed neither ridiculous nor undignified to her. But at sixty-two she felt she was too old to expect or even hope for a physical relationship of that kind. If anyone tried to broach the topic she would close down the discussion with a brusque ‘Oh I’m too old for all that now.’

  A year after Colin’s death Stoddard Martin put together a collection of reminiscences and recollections in his honour, including pieces by some of those who had known him best: George Weidenfeld, Francis King, Richard Brain, Brian McGuinness and Hugh Lloyd-Jones. Beryl’s own piece was entitled ‘Mr Chips’, an allusion to James Hilton’s 1934 sentimental novella Goodbye, Mr Chips, about a schoolteacher whose passion for Greek and Latin seems out of sync with his times, but who becomes a great educator after falling in love. In it, Beryl made the point that Colin was ‘first and foremost a teacher of considerable power’, not necessarily in the narrow formal sense of the Latin lessons, but through his example as a person, the fact that he ‘never spoke down to those less educated than himself’. She described her early days round at the Crescent, sitting cross-legged on the floor, almost literally at his feet, and how he had served as her mentor in matters of language and literature. Although she could not, of course, admit to the true nature of their relationship, she nevertheless expressed what she felt, and her short tribute ended with an unequivocal declaration, hidden in plain sight, as it were: ‘I loved him.’64

  THIRTY

  Celebrity

  Dear Judith, I think life is just another cock-up, heroic but unplanned, much like poor old Scott going off with such hopes, such bravery, such stupendous, awful stubbornness in search of a mythical pole. All sorts of things have come from writing about him – inside me and from outside. Something to do with unfinished buisness. Did I ever talk about J. W. Dunne in the old days – that chap who thought that time was always – life going on forever, and always the same, that that one particular night in your kitchen in Liverpool is still happening. We are still sitting there, and you are still meeting Bobby for the first time, and we are all still sitting in the Frolich’s sitting room eating that bloody awful german cake, and Aussie is still standing in the hall in Huskisson Street telling me he doesn’t love me anymore.1

  After Colin’s death there seemed to be no reason to stay at Duckworth any longer. Beryl owed no debt of allegiance to Stephen Hill and so she told her agent Andrew Hewson to sound out some other publishers and try to get the best deal he could. During the brief period when she had considered leaving Duckworth in order to get a large enough advance to help pay off Colin’s debts, she had come up with the idea of a series of three novels, one set during the Crimean War, one on the sinking of the Titanic, and another about Dr Johnson and Mrs Thrale, which she hoped would convince publishers to come up with some money.2 It was this ‘three-book deal’ that Andrew now began to offer round, albeit secretly, as Beryl didn’t want to attract publicity.

  Not long after this, at the beginning of November 1994, Beryl received a letter from Robin Baird-Smith at Constable. Robin told her he’d been in discussions with Colin before his death and that their conversation had ranged from the idea of a merger between Duckworth and Constable, to Robin taking over from Colin at some point in the future. Hinting that ‘various things are happening at Constable’ and that he was considering a move to Duckworth, Robin asked whether they could meet up to ‘talk about all this’.3

  Two weeks later, Robin confided in her that he was planning to leave Constable and take over Colin’s position at Duckworth, but he urged her to secrecy as negotiations were still ongoing. Having been Muriel Spark’s editor at Constable, Robin had a considerable track record and to his mind a major part of the attraction of coming to Duckworth was the chance to work with Beryl, a writer he had long admired. That Beryl also represented a significant commercial factor in Duckworth’s future survival was something Stephen Hill was only too aware of. His last words to Robin before giving him the job of managing director of Duckworth were ‘Now make damn sure you do not lose Beryl Bainbridge.’4

  When in due course Duckworth announced Robin’s appointment everything seemed to him to be going to plan. But unbeknow
n to Robin, Andrew Hewson was in the final stages of negotiating a lucrative deal for Beryl to move to Viking. It was something of a shock for Robin, therefore, when Andrew wrote to him at the end of February 1995 to say that Beryl was leaving Duckworth. Andrew explained that both he and Beryl felt ‘a clean break would be best for everyone’,5 and stressed that this was not a reflection on Robin’s appointment. He regretted that Duckworth’s announcement hadn’t been made earlier, but the decision had now been taken. Beryl, too, regretted the way things had turned out, and she hastily sent Robin an embarrassed letter to explain her apparently deceptive behaviour:

  Dearest Robin,

  I expect by now Andrew H. has written to you. I don’t have to tell you that our decision has nothing to do with you and everything to do with Stephen Hill.

  When Colin died and it looked as though Anna might loose her house, I asked Andrew to hold off until we knew which way Hill was going to jump. We then met, but I couldn’t tell you what Andrew was planning anymore than I could tell him about you, as I had promised both of you that I would not betray confidences. Now, however, it seems that the firm and Anna’s house are saved. With you in charge I don’t see how Duckworth can fail.

  It is sad that I won’t be with you at Duckworths, but Andrew has held off for years because of my affection for Colin and I trust absolutely in his judgement as to what is best for my future. I think he has also explained that my move will be very low-key. Noone needs to know for ages and even then it will be done without fuss.