by Brendan King
Over the course of the next six months an opening chapter was written, worked on and refined. It traced the development of the relationship between a girl called Rose, a version of Beryl as she had been in 1953, and an older man, Mr Williamson, based on George Greggs. It also included a short ‘flashforward’ section at the beginning, a technique she had utilized before, most notably in Harriet Said, in which Rose and Mr Williamson sat and talked in the Paris Ritz, prior to leaving in a taxi; and the accident that would combine the two disparate time elements of the novel:
They had crossed the second bridge when the taxi hit an obstruction in the road and slewed sideways. Mr. Williamson bounced to the roof; his hat came off. The girl tumbled forwards and fell with her face against the door.
She didn’t cry out or make a fuss. Mr. Williamson pulled her upright and clumsily patted her back. ‘I do care for you,’ he said, ‘I really do,’ and added that in time she might believe him.
‘In time,’ she murmured. A star of blood, delicate as a snowflake, melted upon her upper lip . . .12
But if the idea of incorporating the deaths of Diana and Dodi, via some theory of parallel realities, into a tenuously autobiographical narrative sounded complicated, that’s because it was. Beryl herself had difficulty explaining the novel’s plot: ‘It’s something like – I’m 17, and having supper at the Ritz (which I never did) . . . and then I go back with a group of people in 1997 and dine at the Ritz the night it all happened. And it’s either my fault or that of the chap who’s driving me. I don’t know.’13
Despite being scheduled for publication in September 2004 and announced in Little, Brown’s catalogue,14 the novel’s progress stalled and Beryl asked her agent to break the news to Richard Beswick, her publisher. ‘I’m still doing it, but it’s slow. I would be grateful (relieved) if you could hint to Richard B that it won’t be ready this year. It may be – there’s another five months, but I’m just finding it so hard – my breathing, the hot weather, the deadening of words in my head. I will do it, but not on schedule.’15
Ironically, though the novel was based on the notion of eternal recurrence, when it came to it Beryl could no longer remember the person she had been. It was this as much as the sheer technical difficulty of combining the different elements of the plot that led to the abandonment of ‘Dear Brutus’ in its incarnation as a novel about time at the end of 2004.
The fact that Beryl had cited a difficulty breathing as one of the reasons she found it hard to write marked a worrying development as regards the state of her health. Although she had been afflicted with bouts of breathlessness during the past ten years, which had necessitated the periodic use of a salbutamol inhaler – a drug that helps to dilate the airways during asthma attacks and in cases of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) – this had not seriously affected her ability to work.
She had first been diagnosed with COPD in 1994,16 after complaining to her doctor of periods of breathlessness that sometimes lasted ‘up to six weeks’. Beryl described how she was often short of breath and coughed up phlegm, and on one occasion even had a spell of spitting up blood.17 Bad though these symptoms were, the doctor still considered her problems reversible and, not for the first time, counselled her to give up cigarettes.
But Beryl had had respiratory and bronchial problems since childhood, and she had become somewhat blasé about such warnings. Physically uncomfortable though her cough was, she almost considered it normal. Despite repeated warnings to give up, Beryl’s smoking actually increased during this period, going up from thirty a day in 1995 to thirty-five a day in 1999, and forty a day in 2002.18 The consequences were entirely predictable.
Anyone who witnessed Beryl’s cough in her later years will not forget it in a hurry. It seemed incredible that anyone as small as she was could produce a cough as loud and physically strenuous without doing themselves an injury. Her grandson Charlie captured one of her morning bouts of breathlessness while filming a documentary about her: ‘This is how I spend half my night,’ she explained to camera, doubled up in bed in between a fit of coughing and gasps for breath, ‘bent over my knees like this because it’s easier to breathe.’19
Breathlessness and coughing were one thing, but the progressive damage to her arteries that prolonged smoking and a high-fat diet were causing was something else altogether. While out shopping on Christmas Eve, 2003, she started to get a violent pain in her left leg that made it difficult to walk. She was taken to hospital and the doctor diagnosed ‘a superficial femoral artery occlusion’20 – in other words narrowing of the arteries. His blunt warning that if she didn’t give up smoking altogether she risked damaging the arteries in her leg so much it could lead to amputation, shocked her into taking the problem more seriously than the usual exhortations to cut down for the sake of her cough.
‘I’ve given up smoking’, she wrote to Mary Thorne, an old friend from Liverpool. ‘Not in order to live, just to avoid having one leg to stand on.’21 But having been a smoker for so long, Beryl found it more difficult to give up than she imagined. For a short period she succeeded in cutting down, and other techniques, such as holding a dummy cigarette, also had limited success. But as with drink, she never succeeded in giving up entirely and the habit would gradually reassert itself: two cigarettes a day in 2006, nine a day in 2007, and ten a day by the end of 2009.22 Like drinking, smoking became a bone of contention with her children. She instinctively balked at their appeals to give up for the sake of her health. ‘I’m not proud of my lack of willpower,’ she said of her relapse in 2007, ‘but feel it’s important to live one’s declining years in comfort.’23 Rather than risk open confrontation, she took to smoking in secret, though the results were about as successful – and as conducive to family harmony – as her attempts to hide her drinking.
Beryl’s difficulty in breathing brought home to her in a frighteningly literal way how fine the line was between life and death. But it wasn’t just illness that served as a reminder of her own mortality. In common with many people who reach their seventies she couldn’t but be aware that her contemporaries were beginning to die off around her.
As the decade progressed, names that had meant so much to her in the past began to disappear with what seemed like increasing regularity: her former doctor, Cyril Taylor, died in 2000, as did her one-time confidante, Judith Shackleton; Noel Davis died in 2002, the same year as Harry Hoff, with whom she’d toured Russia in 1979; Fritz Spiegl died in 2003, as did Pauline Mani, the model for Freda in The Bottle Factory Outing. Pauline’s death, which the local newspaper described as ‘tragic and squalid’,24 was particularly shocking to those who knew her. Suffering from depression, she had lapsed into alcoholism and died alone, her body only being discovered when neighbours called the emergency services to complain about a foul smell coming from her flat. ‘I saw her once or twice on the street and spoke and we were always going to meet,’ Beryl told a reporter, perhaps feeling slightly guilty that she had not done more to help, ‘but it was obvious by then that she was in a pretty bad way and not herself.’ Tellingly, she chose to recall Pauline as her own fictional creation, rather than a person in her own right: ‘I prefer to think of Freda, cloak billowing in the wind, forever galloping across Windsor Park.’
One death that affected Beryl especially deeply was that of Margaret Hewson. Since the late-1980s, Andrew Hewson’s wife had been working full-time at the John Johnson agency and had come to take a leading role in Beryl’s literary affairs. Beryl appreciated the ebullience and pugnacity with which Margaret fought her corner, but it was her sense of humour, her generosity and her unfailing positivity that cemented their friendship. In 1998, when the South Bank Show offered to take Beryl to the Crimea in the depths of winter, it was Margaret who had accompanied her for support – ‘holding my frozen hand’25 as Beryl put it. As Lynn Barber noted, Margaret was not only Beryl’s agent, but her ‘friend, confidante, travelling companion, research assistant and counsellor’.26
It was a shock, the
refore, when in early 2002 Margaret was diagnosed with liver cancer and given only a matter of months to live. The speed with which the disease took hold was disturbing enough, but the debilitating physical effects of chemotherapy seemed doubly distressing in someone as habitually elegant and as vivacious as Margaret. Beryl felt her own quality of life had been diminished by Margaret’s death – her wide range of cultural interests and enthusiasms helped keep Beryl’s engagement with contemporary culture alive – and in her obituary tribute she wrote of feeling ‘bereft that she has left this world before me’.27
The death of Bernice Rubens in October 2004 was another sad loss that touched Beryl particularly closely, though it was perhaps that of Anna Haycraft, six months later in March 2005, which more than any other symbolized the end of an era. Since their spat over the Daily Telegraph interview in 2001, Anna and Beryl had rarely seen each other. Anna now lived permanently in Wales.
In 2003 Anna had been diagnosed with lung cancer, and though an operation at the time had apparently been successful she suspected she might not have long to live: ‘Cancer is a strange disease and I am aware that it may be lurking around, biding its time.’28 In late 2004 Anna published an article that seemed designed to provoke, headlined ‘I didn’t miss Colin at all when he died’. This was not the sensationalizing misquotation of a sub-editor, but a deliberate attempt on Anna’s part to minimize Colin’s role in her life: ‘I forget now when it was that Colin died of a stroke. We had been married some 40 years but I didn’t miss him at all. The marriage was unimportant to me because the children were everything.’29
Anna had also retold her story about failing to become a nun, and once again she made no reference to Austin, the abortion, or Beryl. Beryl’s reaction to the article was predictable. It annoyed her that Anna was trying to belittle Colin the way she had when he was alive, and she couldn’t help but feel there was a hypocritical element in Anna’s claim that being a Catholic ‘is my most serious thing’, given her refusal to acknowledge the truth about her past.
In early 2005 Anna’s cancer returned and in March she was admitted to Meadow House Hospice in Ealing. But when Beryl enquired about coming to see her as she lay dying, Anna told those with her that she didn’t want her to visit: Anna may have refused to acknowledge publicly what had happened in the past, but in private she no longer felt the need to hide her feelings. It was perhaps understandable. Beryl had been the cause of two irreparable humiliations in Anna’s life: unintentionally in the case of Austin’s betrayal and rejection of her, and deliberately in the case of the affair with Colin. To have Beryl look down on her now, while she was on her deathbed, was too much to take. Understandable though her decision was, it was also a deliberate snub, a final renunciation of their friendship.
Of course when Beryl was inevitably asked to write a tribute to Anna for the newspapers, none of this could be talked about. The piece she did write, published under the heading ‘Kindred Spirits’ in the Guardian a few days after Anna’s funeral, must have seemed curiously bland and distant to anyone expecting to read about the painful loss of a close friend. Beryl’s article was more about Duckworth than Anna, and ended on Anna’s departure for Wales several years before: ‘Sometimes we wrote each other letters and sometimes we spoke on the telephone. We didn’t talk about writing, hers or mine, but then, we never had.’30 A curious summing up of someone who had nominally been her editor.
One of the results of this heightened sense of mortality was that Beryl began to make preparations for her own death. She wrote letters to those close to her, not to be sent but to be given after her death. Some of these were notes containing bequests of books or money, others a final message, almost as a kind of leave-taking, a summation of what the recipient’s friendship had meant to her.31
More practically she also decided to sort out her literary estate. Upstairs in the ‘laboratory’ was a large tin trunk in which were stored old manuscripts, folders stuffed full of letters, and various other documents relating to her literary career. The idea of selling these archives to a library or institution took hold after she’d seen the large sums that the sale of certain other writers’ archives had made.
With this in mind, her papers were now sorted roughly into those related to her work, which could be sold, and those that were more personal, which could be kept.32 In October 2004 a valuer from Bernard Quaritch, the firm acting as agents for the sale, came to inspect the material, returning a couple of weeks later to take away a large cache of documents so that they could be inventoried. The valuer considered it ‘a rich and fascinating archive’ and admitted to Beryl that she had ‘never come across anything to compare with your dealings with Duckworth!’ In 2005 this sizeable bulk of material was acquired by the British Library for a sum in the region of £70,000.33
Beryl’s persistent problems with breathlessness, and the threat that continued smoking might lead to the amputation of a leg, were serious enough, but there was another, potentially even more worrying, threat to her health. Towards the end of 2003, after an initial examination for abnormal bleeding during her periods, Beryl’s GP became concerned about the possible side effects of her prolonged use of hormone replacement therapy, and expressed her worries to a specialist at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson hospital: ‘This lady has been on HRT and does not wish to come off it. Incidentally, she doesn’t do breast examination [sic] and is aware of breast cancer risks.’34
Beryl had been on HRT since 1983, and despite the fact that its link to breast cancer had long been established, she repeatedly declined medical advice to undergo a regular breast examination because she was ‘not keen on mammograms’,35 as her doctor put it back in 1995. In the spring of 2006 Beryl noticed a lump in her left breast; initially, she did nothing about it: ‘I don’t think about such things,’36 she later explained to her doctor. However, after talking to Parvin Laurence, she was finally persuaded to have the lump checked. A mammogram in August revealed an irregular mass, tests on which came back positive for cancer.37 The doctor was in no doubt that Beryl’s prolonged use of HRT had been a contributory factor and was surprised that she had continued using it after having been told of the risks in 2003.38
The tumour was excised in September, but it was much larger than it had appeared on the ultrasound scan. Shortly afterwards, following tests that suggested the tumour had spread, a mastectomy was recommended and carried out in November. Beryl herself was remarkably serene about the whole procedure: ‘I can’t say I felt ill afterwards – I was home in 24 hours, and who needs two bosoms once the nurture of children and the excitement of sex has diminished?’39
As she was considered to be at high risk, Beryl was initially scheduled to have post-operative chemotherapy and radiotherapy, but on further inspection the consensus of opinion was that it was a late diagnosis of an indolent tumour, rather than an aggressive one, and she was fortunately spared chemotherapy. By the beginning of 2007 she had completed her course of radiotherapy, and her doctors were pleased with the response. Her tests came back clear and her specialist reported that ‘she feels extremely fit and is hard at work again on a new book’.40
In September 2008, during one of A. N. Wilson’s regular breakfasts with Beryl at a cafe on Parkway she referred to as ‘El Sordido’s’, he noticed a large purple bruise on her arm. As she tucked into her plate of sausage, bacon, egg and fried bread, he asked her what had caused it: ‘Oh, lamb,’ she replied, ‘I had a heart attack.’41
The week before their breakfast meeting, Beryl had suffered a bout of breathlessness and an ambulance was called to take her to A & E. There, after an examination, she had what doctors called a percutaneous coronary intervention, in other words a stent was non-surgically inserted into one of her arteries through a catheter in her arm (hence the bruising). This is a fairly common practice in cases of ischemic heart disease as a way of dilating clogged arteries and aiding blood flow.
Again, smoking was most likely a contributory factor in this deterioration in her condition.
The previous year Beryl admitted to her doctor that she’d been unable to give up smoking completely. She began having recurring fits of breathlessness, and one attack in May 2008 was so severe she was taken to A & E in an ambulance and spent the night in hospital. She was given a course of steroids to ease her breathing, but as the specialist noted, she had ‘a problem with breathlessness even on slightest exertion’.42 She was given a new inhaler, but still struggled for breath during the night,43 something that was not only worrying in itself, but left her feeling tired during the day.
These increasingly frequent, and increasingly serious, bouts of illness severely curtailed her ability to carry out the kind of physically intensive literary activities she had previously been able to manage, even a few years before. She now rarely attended literary festivals or gave book readings, agreeing only to those she felt obliged to support out of a sense of loyalty, such as the King’s Lynn Festival. Although she still went to the theatre and wrote her column for The Oldie (as well as articles for other newspapers), and attended the occasional lunch or book launch, for the most part her diary now contained more references to doctor’s appointments and evenings spent babysitting than to literary events.
There was yet another unsettling development at the end of the year. During an evening round at Mike and Parvin Laurence’s a week after Christmas, Beryl suffered an ‘episode’ in which she experienced a ‘loss of consciousness and seizure’. As a doctor, Mike must have been extremely disturbed by what he saw, reporting to her GP what he described as ‘a possible myoclonic jerk of one arm and left-sided facial droop’,44 symptoms of a lack of oxygen to the brain or a stroke.