Beryl Bainbridge

by Brendan King

  One of the last literary events Beryl agreed to attend was in March 2009, when she went up to Leeds to take part in the Headingley LitFest. After the event she had been due to catch a train back to London at 6.10 p.m., but an hour or so beforehand she was taken out for a meal by the organizers and by the time she arrived at the station the train had left, leaving her with a wait of two and a half hours before the next one. Unfortunately the organizers had also given Beryl a bottle of whisky, which was opened as they sat waiting with her in the cafe: ‘All I can remember was . . . they’d each hold their tea and I’d pour some whisky in, and then I got on the train. I can remember the first stop after Leeds and that was about twenty-five past eight. The next thing I remember was sitting on the sofa in my kitchen in pyjamas of some sort, with two police.’45

  Beryl had been met off the train at King’s Cross by police officers and taken to A & E. Her admissions form included the abbreviation ETOH++, a hospital code for very drunk.46 Sometime during the journey a gang of drunken football supporters got on and invaded the first-class carriage. One of them suggested to Beryl they should ‘go into the bog for sex’, and her recollection of what happened next is somewhat hazy: ‘I thought to myself, they must have been terribly hard up, I mean good God what’s the matter with them? And I said to one of them, “Oh go away, you’re only a little boy”, or something like that.’

  A woman sitting nearby overheard the exchange and, worried that some sort of assault was going to take place, reported the incident to the conductor who called the police: ‘It was awful, awful,’ Beryl recalled two weeks afterwards. ‘They [the football supporters] got off at Milton Keynes and then I suppose the police met me at the other end, removed my clothes for forensic. I only got my clothes back two days ago. I was in these peculiar pyjamas from prisons . . . awful. But I can’t remember any of it . . . I remember nothing. My mind’s a complete blank.’47

  Beryl’s own view was that it was the mixture of alcohol and the pills she was taking that was to blame, though this was not the first time she had suffered from memory loss – or an acute sense of embarrassment and shame – as a result of her inability to stop drinking once she had started. The fact was that she was now so physically weak that drinking alcohol, especially in public, almost inevitably exposed her to situations that were potentially catastrophic.

  Shortly after this, Beryl began suffering a new symptom: acute abdominal pain. This would get progressively worse until, at the end of November, she had to spend a week in University College Hospital (UCH). She was diagnosed with ischemic colitis, in layman’s terms an inadequate blood supply to the intestines, exacerbated – like so many of Beryl’s health problems – by the build-up of plaque in her arteries as a result of smoking. This was the longest she had spent in hospital, and she was again advised to stop smoking. That Beryl was aware her life was now hanging precariously in the balance is clear from her blunt response to an interviewer who asked what the future held in store: ‘Death. Death and a full stop, that’s it.’48

  Clearing out the manuscripts in the ‘laboratory’ had one unexpectedly positive consequence: Beryl came across the journal she had kept during her trip across America in 1968 with Washington Harold. Not only that, she also found some thirty pages of a draft of ‘He’s the Captain of the Team’, initially begun in 1969 and sporadically worked on during the early 1970s. Together they constituted a firm base from which to start her novel afresh.

  The discovery brought on a renewed burst of energy, and the next few months were spent reworking and combining the draft of the abandoned novel with the already completed pages of ‘Dear Brutus’. The Lady Diana and Dodi timeslip theme was dropped altogether and, instead, the most dramatic political event of the American trip – the assassination of Robert Kennedy – became the central plot element around which the new novel would develop. After reading about the unidentified woman seen running away from the scene of the shooting, who was described by witnesses as wearing a polka-dot dress, she also gave the novel a new title: The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress.

  The original opening chapter of ‘He’s the Captain of the Team’, in which Heine Melman meets Alma Bickerton at Baltimore airport in his new VW campervan, was substantially reused and is still recognizable as the opening chapter of the published version of Polka Dot. Although a lot has been added and reworked, and the names have been updated to Harold and Rose, many phrases from 1969 were carried over to the new version.

  As for the opening chapter of ‘Dear Brutus’, the ‘flashforward’ section set in a Paris hotel between Mr Williamson and Rose now formed the basis of the scene between Harold and Rose in the Ambassador Hotel. Meanwhile the extended passage tracing the developing relationship between Mr Williamson and Rose was chopped up and incorporated as a series of flashback sequences in which Rose recalled her childhood meetings with the mysterious and vaguely menacing figure of Dr Wheeler.

  After Beryl had used up all this ‘new’ old material, the novel again stalled. Her self-imposed view that as a writer her only interest was herself when young began to reveal itself as the creative straitjacket it was. Although she had updated the book’s setting from Paris in the 1950s to America in 1968, she kept the character of Rose essentially unchanged, preferring to try and portray herself as single and childless – as she had been when she went to Paris with George Greggs – rather than as a divorcee with three children, as she had been in reality in 1968. But this presented enormous difficulties: ‘For the life of me, I can’t remember who I was in 1955, not really . . . I was married but hadn’t got any children and who the person was who didn’t have children I can’t imagine.’49

  Aside from finding it hard to imagine the person she’d been fifty years before, there were other factors that made writing the novel particularly difficult during this period. Recurrent bouts of illness and trying to give up smoking (or at least radically cut down) had disrupted Beryl’s routine and made it hard to concentrate, while feelings of loneliness and an acute awareness of her own mortality, provoked by the deaths of close friends and her own precarious state of health, left her feeling depressed.

  On 17 August 2005, two days after she was interviewed for a Radio 4 programme about creativity, she visited a hypnotist in Bayham Street to see whether there was anything he could do about her writer’s block. In an unsent letter to her agent Andrew Hewson around this time, she outlined her troubled state of mind:

  Dearest Andrew: I don’t want you to reply to this letter, or to refer to it on the telephone. I just think I ought to tell you that I’m going through some sort of depression. It began a year ago, but has got worse. I’ve been to a doctor and a hypnotist – the latter (though I think its rubbish) has had some effect – the doctor finds nothing wrong.

  My problem is, I don’t [know] who I am anymore. The me of 2 years ago seems to have evaporated. I write a page and find it’s rubbish. I’m not giving up, just wanting to confide in a dear friend what’s going on. I haven’t told the children, but they suspect something. Some of it has to do with age. I do keep thinking about the end, not in a bad way, or scary, just that it can’t be far off.

  So one wonders what the point is. The point used to be the plot, meaning writing, but I now find that so difficult to steer into – rather not the plot but the correct way to construct the sentance. I enclose some pages, some of which are not so bad, but it’s such a struggle.50

  For the next few years, her writing would ebb and flow with the state of her health, almost stopping completely during her diagnosis of and treatment for breast cancer. The doctor’s decision to take her off HRT had a particularly negative effect. She had been taking it for so long that she experienced the equivalent of withdrawal symptoms – she couldn’t concentrate, she felt lethargic, and she became tired very quickly. ‘To keep me alive,’ she later explained to Derwent May, ‘I was taken off HRT which I’d been on for 20 odd years. Six months on from then, my writing dried up.’51

  In June 2008 she went to her GP to ta
lk about the problems she was having, saying that she was frequently miserable and tearful, that she felt apathetic and had no urge to go out, preferring to stay at home rather than attend social engagements. Beryl was also having persistent sleeping problems, finding it difficult to fall asleep and then often waking up at four in the morning. She enquired about whether she could be prescribed beta-blockers to relieve her anxiety, but they weren’t recommended for patients with arterial problems and COPD. Instead, she was given advice about managing her depression and some sleeping tablets to help with her insomnia.

  She now found living on her own ‘more lonely than I thought it was’. She began to feel a sense of detachment from life, boredom even, her illness making it more difficult to distract herself, either through work or social interaction: ‘Before, when I wasn’t ill, I used to work and work and work. Well now I can’t. There’s long stretches of time when I’m not doing very much, so I listen to the flaming television . . . which annoys me . . . it’s so boring, just watching telly.’52

  For the first time Beryl also admitted to her doctor that she was having a problem with alcohol, and that she would sometimes drink a bottle of whisky in the space of a few days. Admittedly this was not exactly drinking on the scale of an Oliver Reed or a George Best, but Beryl was physically small and her tolerance was low, and it indicated an underlying sense of her unhappiness. The fact that she would even go to her doctor about the problem at all is an indication of how serious she felt it was. In his covering letter to her consultant Beryl’s GP described her as ‘a completely uncomplaining woman who only accesses help when she is very much in need’.53

  The following year, in 2009, after tests showed that her cancer had not metastasized, she requested to go back on HRT as she was still convinced she couldn’t write without it. Her doctors were not exactly keen, admitting that ‘the decision to re-introduce HRT may seem controversial to say the least’, but on balance it was considered that Beryl would probably feel a great deal better taking HRT and that it would help her to work. ‘A week ago I asked my cancer surgeon if I could go back on HRT,’ she told Derwent. ‘God Bless him, he said “Yes”. Hopefully, I will be more myself again in a couple of months.’54

  Over the next few months Beryl’s cancer specialist noted that the reintroduction of HRT had made ‘a really dramatic improvement to the quality of her life’ and that she was ‘now able to work with more concentration than before’.55 She began sending off regular, if sporadic, packages containing draft pages of the novel:

  Dearest Bren: Some more pages. Could you type them quite soon and send them to me? Seeing it typed properly spurs me on, that and the increasing page numbers. I’m doing it every day, but I don’t find it flows. The amount of crossed out pages is huge.56

  This was no exaggeration: my own copy of the working manuscript, including reworked, variant or abandoned passages, comprised at least 500 pages, of which the edited ‘clean’ version amounted to some 150 pages, tantalizingly close to the restrained page count of around 170–180 pages that Beryl normally considered a complete novel. More packages followed in September (‘These few pages are at last right – I think’),57 and by November she had got Harold and Rose as far as Santa Ana, less than an hour’s drive from the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard where the novel would reach its climax.

  At the start of 2010 Beryl wrote to Dr Sackville-West to say that she wasn’t feeling well: ‘I am still tired, lacking energy and unable to eat without forcing myself.’58 She mentioned that she knew a doctor – in fact Mike and Parvin Laurence’s son Ari, who had recently become a consultant haematologist at UCH – and she wondered whether it could be arranged for her to see him professionally.

  Dr Sackville-West’s letter to Ari Laurence mentioned the bout of ischemic colitis a few months before, and added that she was suffering from gastrointestinal bleeding, as a result of which she was showing signs of mild anaemia. Sackville-West expressed concern that Beryl was ‘very weak and easily exhausted’, and that although she looked well, she was ‘very frail’ and ‘slightly pale’.59

  Beryl’s list of medical complaints and diagnoses was now beginning to pile up – chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, breast cancer, bronchitis, ischemic heart disease, ischemic colitis, anaemia – and her medications on prescription ran to an impressive three pages: Ramipril, Simvastatin, Anastrozole, Premarin, Omeprazole and Aspirin (all to be taken once a day), Diltiazem capsules (twice a day), Cyclizine tablets (three times a day), and Tramadol and Paracetamol (four times a day). On top of this she also had three types of inhaler to help with her breathing: a Beclometasone aerosol inhaler (two puffs twice a day), a Serevent Accuhaler (one puff twice a day), and a Salbutamol aerosol inhaler (two puffs four times a day as required).

  Unsurprisingly, given how weak she was feeling, she was finding it difficult to get down to writing: ‘I am still having difficulty in finishing my new (and probably the last) novel,’ she wrote to Derwent and Yola May in February, ‘but I struggle most days in an attempt.’60 Nevertheless, she continued to work and would sporadically send off pages to be typed and edited: ‘I enclose 6 new or newish pages . . . I’m getting on – if slowly. Please return in folder, so that I can send you next lot – if there is a next lot. At least I’m trying.’61

  Worryingly, Beryl was now beginning to lose weight, not just from a loss of appetite, but because of her anxiety over the adverse physical reactions she experienced when she did eat. By April her weight had dropped to 46kg, from 51kg the previous year, and she would lose another 2kg over the next month. Friends couldn’t help but notice the effect that her problem with eating was starting to have. Mark Bostridge noted his concerns in his diary after an evening with Beryl and Robin Baird-Smith: ‘Beryl says she’s writing every day and hopes to finish in July . . . She looked terribly thin, and told Robin during dinner that she feared the cancer might have returned. I had to lend her a cardigan as she felt so cold in the dining room. She looked on, a bit pathetically, at the edge of the proceedings.’62

  Throughout March and April she suffered from intermittent abdominal pains, but as the gastrointestinal bleeding had stopped there seemed to be little doctors could do to remedy the problem. Essentially Beryl’s problem lay in the word that was affixed to the problems affecting her lungs, heart and intestines: ischemic, a medical term for a restriction in the blood supply to a part of the body. Beryl’s long years of smoking, coupled with her high-fat diet of fried foods, was reducing the ability of her body to deliver blood and oxygen where it was needed. As the specialist bluntly remarked in trying to sum up what could be done in her case, Beryl ‘would need to modify her risk factors to gain control over this problem. In particular she needs to stop smoking.’63

  Given the severity and frequency of her problems, it is difficult to believe that even had Beryl given up smoking completely at this stage it would have had much impact. Shortly afterwards, at the beginning of June, she had several recurrences of the abdominal pain she had been experiencing and was given an appointment to see a specialist on 18 June.

  But the pain continued to get worse. A few days before her consultation she went to see her local doctor, and by the following morning it was so severe she had to be taken by ambulance to the A & E department at University College London. An examination suggested there might be a partial obstruction of the intestine and after an X-ray and an intravenous blood test she was discharged. The abdominal pain persisted, however, and shortly afterwards Beryl was readmitted to hospital. Over the next few days it became increasingly clear that the compacted bowel was more problematic than had initially been thought, and she was put on a morphine drip to help ease the pain. Even so she continued to think about her novel: ‘I’ve got to finish the book. It’s worrying me,’ she told her children, adding that she wanted to be moved to a bed that would allow her to sit up and write. Even though the morphine made it difficult to concentrate, she would read pages through – or have them read to her – while Jo and Rudi took it
in turns to take notes.

  Worse news was soon to follow. Blood tests now showed that her cancer had metastasized and spread. Despite her worsening condition – at times the pain became so severe she had to have injections of morphine in addition to the intravenous drip – she was adamant that it was ‘utterly impossible’ for anyone else to finish the book and clung to the idea that, with help, she could still get it done. The fate of her characters now merged in her mind with that of her own: ‘I know that both the characters and myself are going to die.’64

  On 28 June, Rudi had phoned me to say that the latest prognosis wasn’t good: Beryl had hardly been able to speak that day and it was feared she would drift into a coma – she might have only a matter of days to live. The following morning, fearing the worst, I went to see her at the hospital, calling in at Albert Street beforehand to pick up the last few pages she had written before being admitted.

  When I got to the ward I happened to meet Rudi, who had been visiting her mother and was just leaving. She said that amazingly Beryl had revived, that she was the most alert she had been for days – even the doctors were taking it as a positive sign. It was still a shock to see her in bed, as it always is when you first see someone who is seriously ill, but after a few minutes talking with her it almost seemed possible that she would pull through again. She sat up in bed, and we talked about the effects the drugs were having and the hallucinatory dreams they inspired, one of which involved dancing with Colin.

  There was still the matter of the novel to consider, so we spread out the pages that had been printed so far. After the talk with Rudi the night before I had begun to think about what could be done to reduce the amount of writing Beryl might need to do in order to finish, and suggested she move an earlier flashback sequence to the end. This would continue the narrative on from the point it had now reached and bring it to the brink of completion, leaving only a handful of pages to write.