A Quiet Life

Book 36: Virago Modern Classics

by Beryl Bainbridge

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

'The underrated A Quiet Life is one of the funniest books I have ever read' HILARY MANTEL

'One of the best novelists of her generation' GUARDIAN

Seventeen-year-old Alan can't stand rows. But, though the Second World War has ended, peace hangs by a fine thread at home: his troublesome sister Madge creeps off for night-time liaisons with a German POW; their ineffectual father - broken by the hardships of war and an unhappy marriage can't put food on the table despite the family's middle-class manners.

Meanwhile, his mother pursues her escapist fantasies in romantic novels and love affairs. Obedient, faithful Alan is trapped among them all, the focus of their jibes and resentment, as inexorably the family heads towards disaster.

Beryl Bainbridge's classic early novel is a vintage story of English domestic life, laced with sadness, irony and wicked black humour.

Release date: November 13, 1986

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 224

Sample

Beryl Bainbridge did not find it necessary to conceal the fact that her early work was inspired and informed by the early years of her life; nor, indeed, to put a gloss on that life. She began the introduction to her Collected Stories, published in 1994, in typically direct fashion: ‘My father and mother bickered a lot, which is why, there being no such thing as television to distract one, or any other room in which to escape from the raised voices, my mother encouraged my natural inclination to scribble in notebooks.’ She went on to describe how she started a novel when she was ten, pasting loose sheets into a book about Livingstone’s travels in Africa using a flour-and-water concoction; when the flour swelled and the book wouldn’t shut, she threw it away, frightened that its ‘in-depth account’ of her parents’ life together would prove a painful discovery for her otherwise encouraging mother.

Decades later, when interviewers came to squeeze past the stuffed bison in the hallway of her higgledy-piggledy house in Camden Town, Bainbridge would cite her upbringing not merely as the source of raw material, but as a reason to put pen to paper in the first place. ‘I only wrote to get out this business about my mum and dad,’ she told Lynn Barber. ‘Once I’d written it down, all those neuroses were gone – it was marvellous therapy.’ Talking to the Paris Review about The Dressmaker, the fourth of her novels to be published and the first (of five) to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize, she remarked that its ‘sole purpose’ was to chronicle her family. ‘Otherwise I wouldn’t want to have written it.’

Bainbridge’s later work – she wrote eighteen novels in all, as well as short stories, plays and journalism; and she was no mean painter – has a noticeable thread running through it. The books are wildly diverse in their settings, ranging from Antarctica to the Crimea to Streatham, from an ocean liner to a tent to a camper van, and from the late 1700s to the 1960s. But in each of them, Bainbridge set herself the task of animating, with her trademark off-kilter, almost unfeasibly compressed prose, an event or a personality that forms part of our history: Doctor Johnson, Scott of the Antarctic, the sinking of the Titanic, the assassination of Robert Kennedy. She could hardly be described as a historical novelist in any conventional sense of the term. Rather, it is as though she wanted to explore whether the talents that were evident in her smaller-scale fiction – the eye for the macabre detail and the ear for social nuance; the ability to convey confrontation and dysfunction between people; the dramatic intensity – would translate to situations and characters with which we believe ourselves to be familiar. Readers and critics agreed that the shift in focus worked; and when, in 2011, the Man Booker foundation announced the winner of its ‘Best of Beryl’ prize, a posthumous award for the much-loved ‘Booker bridesmaid’, it was Master Georgie, Bainbridge’s Crimean War adventure published in 1998, that emerged triumphant.

 

There is still, however, a great deal of affection and admiration for the novels of the 1970s and 1980s; and, looked at as a body of work, they reveal an extraordinarily impressive diversity, far more so than her declaration than they were written simply to expiate the memories of a troubled childhood would suggest. Although she had written Harriet Said… towards the end of the 1950s, the first two novels to see the light of day were A Weekend with Claude (1967) and Another Part of the Wood (1968). Both were published by Hutchinson; neither earned Bainbridge – by this time a single mother of three – much in the way of either income or publicity. It was at this point, via one of her small son’s playmates, that she was to make the acquaintance of Anna Haycraft, who was married to Colin Haycraft; together, the pair presided over the publishing house Duckworth. Anna Haycraft, who went on to write novels under the name Alice Thomas Ellis, took Bainbridge on, bringing out Harriet Said… in 1972 and, subsequently, novels including The Dressmaker, The Bottle Factory Outing, Sweet William and A Quiet Life. Despite the fact that their author didn’t make a great deal of money with Duckworth either, she became increasingly known and widely respected; she was to remain with the firm until Colin Haycraft’s death in 1994.

The background – not only familial, but also social and historical – that she mined in those years was certainly fruitful. ‘I always thought that what happened before I was sixteen was much more important than what happened afterwards,’ she explained, referring to the impact that the Second World War had had on British life. As a schoolgirl she had seen footage from the Belsen concentration camp; ‘What happened to the Jews changed me for ever,’ she said. She also had a youthful love affair with a German prisoner of war, Harry Arno Franz, and continued a correspondence with him for six years after his repatriation; it is sketched, with an edge of passionate danger, in the wayward Madge’s clandestine relationship in A Quiet Life, published in 1976.

Of all her novels, A Quiet Life draws most clearly on the tensions of Bainbridge’s domestic circumstances as she grew up. There was a class difference between her parents: her mother had attended a finishing school, while her father had gone out to work at the age of ten. Despite his lack of a formal education, he became a successful entrepreneur, but was later bankrupted in the aftermath of the Depression. The Bainbridges and their two children, Beryl and her brother Ian, lived in an atmosphere of straitened gentility in Formby, on the coast not far from Liverpool. Much of the detail of their day-to-day lives – furious arguments followed by lengthy silences; the fact that much of the time father shared a bedroom with son and mother with daughter – makes the leap from reality to fiction. Interestingly, however, Bainbridge’s focus is not Madge, who flits across the novel obliquely, flouting the rules of polite society, frequently barefoot, destined for trouble. Rather, it is her brother Alan, ostensibly a far steadier character, who claims our attention as he negotiates – not always very successfully – the competing claims of propriety and individuality. Early in the novel, he imagines how his life will turn out if he ends up marrying a girl whom, as yet, he barely knows:

 

He knew, somewhere at the back of his mind, that he could only hope to be an extension of his parents – he’d step a few paces further on, but not far. His progression was limited, as theirs had been… He’d always be polite and watch his manners. Most likely he’d vote Conservative, in rebellion against his father. He would want the house to be decorated nicely. If possible, there’d be a willow tree in the garden.

Madge is never in much danger of conforming; in the brief prologue to the novel, in which Alan and she meet in a tea-room in middle age, her escape from orthodoxy, while not made explicit, is hinted at by the ‘distasteful letter written on thin toilet paper, from some town in France’ that she sends her brother after their mother’s death. During their meeting, she rejects offers of her mother’s jewellery and other booty (‘don’t want the wardrobe… don’t want the china… don’t want the sofa’), save for an ornament that exemplifies their mother’s aspirational taste.

Madge would not be entirely out of place in the pages of Sweet William, the novel that immediately preceded A Quiet Life. In that Paris Review interview, Bainbridge had, with typical candour, described the kind of fiction she didn’t want to produce: ‘When I started writing in the 1960s,’ she said, ‘wasn’t it the time when women were beginning to write about girls having abortions and single mothers living in Hampstead and having a dreadful time? Well, I thought, I’m not going to do that; I’m not bothering with all that rubbish.’

She did bother with ‘all that rubbish’, but only sort of: Sweet William’s Ann, who has fled the claustrophobic family home in Brighton to begin a career at the BBC, does live in Hampstead; her cousin, Pamela, does have an abortion; Ann herself does become a single mother. She also has some undeniably dreadful times at the hands of William, who, to sensible eyes, is anything but sweet: a narcissistic philanderer, he is a man who compulsively plays one woman off against another, appearing and disappearing randomly, requiring utter dependence but supplying zero stability. And yet it is strongly implied that the bohemian, romantic, sexual and creative life that he represents is preferable to the crowded dining room at Ann’s parents’ house, in which ‘the flex for the electric carving knife stretched like a trip wire across the hearth’.

Everything that one knows of Bainbridge’s life and her exceptional, original, near-unclassifiable writing career persuades one that she, too, wriggled free of the electric carving knife waiting to trip her up. Her early fiction frequently dramatises that liberation, reflecting both its bleak comedy and its labour pains. It’s an escape for which her many readers must be all too grateful.

 

Alex Clark 

2013 

Alan was waiting in the Lyceum café for his sister Madge. He hadn’t seen her for fifteen years and she was already three-quarters of an hour late. The waitress had asked him twice if he cared to order anything. He said he would just hold on if it was all the same to her.

He felt in the pocket of his black overcoat, to make sure that the envelope containing Mother’s engagement ring was still safe. Madge had never liked jewellery. His wife Joan had told him he must ask Madge to foot the bill for having it insured all these months. It was only fair. He’d paid for the flowers and the notice in the newspaper. Madge hadn’t even bothered to turn up at the funeral. Instead she had sent that distasteful letter written on thin toilet paper, from some town in France, suggesting that if they were going to put Mother in the same grave as Father it might be a waste of time to carve ‘Rest in Peace’ on the tombstone.

He was about to order a pot of tea when Madge came into the café, carrying a bunch of flowers. She had an old cloche hat pulled down over her hair. He thought, how changed she is, how old she has become. She’s forty and she’s wearing a school raincoat.

‘This isn’t the Lyceum,’ Madge said. ‘It’s the Wedgwood.’

Then he thought, how little she has changed. She handed him the flowers. He found it difficult to catch his breath; in middle age he’d developed high blood pressure, and the walk through the town had tired him.

‘What do I want with flowers?’ he asked sheepishly, laying them on the empty seat beside him.

‘Silly old Alan,’ Madge said, and immediately he felt disturbed. He hated reviving the past, the small details of time long since spent. Seeing her, he was powerless to push back the memories that came crowding into his mind. It was the way she sat hunched on her chair, elbows on the white tablecloth, looking at him. She didn’t rearrange her face the way Joan had managed to do over the years, the way he had. She stared at him. It was this intensity of expression that struck him as child-like, awakening in him that fixation of love he had entirely forgotten. There she sat, after twenty-two years of terrors and triumphs that he knew nothing about, staring at him. When she removed her hat, he had to turn his head. He couldn’t bear to see those threads of grey.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘It’s been a long time.’

‘Yes,’ she said. She was studying the menu.

‘You look well.’ She didn’t have a handbag or gloves. It was obvious she did not see herself as others saw her. He took the envelope out of his pocket and laid it on the table. ‘It’s Mother’s engagement ring,’ he said.

She didn’t pick it up.

‘I don’t want it. I don’t like rings.’

‘It’s yours,’ he said. ‘You’re entitled to it.’

‘Can I have scones and jam, as well as cakes?’ she asked greedily.

He beckoned the waitress and gave their order. He took from his briefcase the list of Mother’s effects and told Madge to read it.

‘Just say what you want,’ he said. ‘Anything you like. The rest Joan and I will take. Anything over we’ll send to the sale room and you can have half of whatever it fetches.’

‘I don’t want half,’ she said. ‘I don’t want anything.’

‘What was the point of your coming?’ he snapped, stung by her attitude.

‘I wanted to see you,’ she said.

The waitress brought the scones. The way Madge ate, he thought she’d come for the food, not him. She got butter all over her chin.

‘Listen,’ he said patiently. ‘It’s only fair you should have what’s due to you. There’s no money. She’d only her week’s pension when she died. Nothing in the bank.’

‘Those hats,’ Madge said. ‘Those cotton frocks.’

‘We can’t sell the house until the furniture’s shifted.’

‘Who went to the funeral?’ she asked.

‘Me and Joan and the children. And Mrs Cartwright from the fish shop sent flowers.’

‘Nobody else?’

‘Read the list,’ he persisted.

She managed to smear jam on to the edge of the typewritten sheet. She kept on shaking her head. ‘Don’t want the wardrobe… don’t want the china… don’t want the sofa…’

He began to feel anxious. He’d promised Joan he would sort it out. It had taken him a good six months to track Madge down and arrange for them to meet.

‘Just t. . .