An old snapshot shows a group of friends lounging in the sunshine, on a weekend in the country at the invitation of bearded, satyric Claude and his wife Julia. The girl in the centre is dreamy Lily, whose latest failed love affair forms the purpose of the weekend, as Lily's friends set out to help her ensnare an unwitting father for her unborn child. Next to her is Norman, a Marxist romantic hell-bent on seducing his milk-white hostess; behind them is old, persecuted Shebah; and slightly apart, the young man on whom all hopes are pinned: quiet, pleasant Edward.
Told through the fractured narratives of Claude, Lily, Shebah and Norman, in Beryl Bainbridge's first published novel a darkly comic weekend of friendship and failure unravels.
Release date:
December 6, 2012
Publisher:
Little, Brown Book Group
Print pages:
160
* BingeBooks earns revenue from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate as well as from other retail partners.
I first met Beryl Bainbridge not at a literary party but in a minibus en route to Essex in 2002. Also present were her great friend Bernice Rubens, the biographer Michael Holroyd and our publisher Richard Beswick. We were driving to a day for library members to meet authors. At lunch, Beryl ate a few salad leaves and drank a third of a bottle of Scotch, which did not appear to impair her in any way. I was perfectly well aware that I was in the presence of greatness. She was a novelist of a generation before mine, whom I had been reading since my early twenties. She had burst out of some territory where the English middle classes seldom went, and her books had nothing to do with sociology. There was a black heart to them, in a comic chest.
On our return, as we sat in the minibus in the car park waiting for the engine to start, Bernice announced that she was looking forward to getting home and having a cup of tea, which Beryl responded to by shouting, ‘What a boring thing to say.’ Beryl then turned to Michael and asked, ‘Any nice soaps on tonight?’ Anxious to make a contribution and a good impression, I pointed out that it was Saturday so it was Brookside day. Everyone brightened. The conversation turned to EastEnders, Kat Moon and sexual abuse; Michael confessed he had shed a tear the previous week. We all agreed that we liked soaps. We drove back into London; Beryl had no idea where she was but seemed delighted by all of it. ‘Look at the lovely fruit and vegetables,’ she cried as we drove down Turnpike Lane.
Beryl and I both grew up in Liverpool, both of us were subject to the then-fashionable elocution lessons intended to free us from what were seen as the career limitations of our accents. But her Liverpool was specific to her imagination: she remade it in her own image. Bainbridge fans divide into those who prefer the later historical novels and the ones who, like me, believe the earlier books were where she revealed her genius. I was sorry when she turned to real people, but she said herself in later life that she had run out of her own experience to write about.
The chronology of her early work is a little confusing. Harriet Said … was the first novel she wrote and submitted for publication, but it was rejected and did not appear until 1972. Her first published novel, A Weekend with Claude, which appeared in 1967, was later substantially revised and reissued in 1981, so this new edition is not the one which its first readers saw. Neither of these are apprentice works, there was nothing for her to be embarrassed about; she was a fully formed writer from the start.
Harriet Said … is set just after the war in a Liverpool suburb near the Formby sand dunes where Bainbridge grew up – an unknown part of England, rarely visited, on the outskirts of the port city. Two girls of around thirteen years old make their way to the beach during the school holidays where they become friends with a group of lonely, disappointed middle-aged men. The degree of freedom the two girls are allowed is unimaginable today, but reflects the day-to-day life of the war when enemies were not strangers but aerial bombers, parents were focused on the war effort on the home front and children were expected to be self-reliant.
From the first chapter, we understand that there has been ‘an incident’. The territory of sexual abuse of children has been worked so hard in fiction and memoir for the past decade or so that it is startling to see such an early novel which undermines what has come to seem a genre. The story turns out to be considerably more complicated than the usual kiddy fiddlers in the guise of uncles scenario. The unnamed narrator’s friend is a girl who is knowing, clever and manipulative and with the chilling disdain and ignorance of youth for the complexities of adult life. The men are targeted, even groomed by the girls: ‘We took to going for long walks over the shore, looking for people who by their chosen solitariness must have something to hide.’
Bainbridge understood the minds of young girls in the confusion of puberty, but she also understood, through acute observation, the men whose marriages, jobs, homes have led them to the beach, to look out to sea with hope, longing and despair, their backs against the land. Part of what they have lost is their own youth, life has slipped past under bowler hats and heads rested against antimacassars. They are lost and lonely, the girls encourage conversation. Harriet’s friend wants to be admired by Mr Biggs, whom they call the Tsar.
The girls have a hunch that there is something in it for them, but they are not sure what it is. Perhaps it is just a desire for transgression; they are flirtatious and innocent at the same time. Harriet’s friend is the weaker party, she appears merely to obey Harriet’s instructions, but she leads one of the men on to destruction. When the novel was first offered for publication one editor found the characters too repulsive for fiction. Nearly half a century later, they still shock because of their subversion.
On the last page of A Weekend with Claude, a photograph is described in which a group of people are posed, two on the ground, a third scowling on a wrought-iron bench and a fourth, ‘isolated, hunched … not looking into the camera. The sun had gone behind a cloud. The three friends posed on, marooned in a summer garden.’ Photographs like this, of strangers, incite tremendous curiosity. They freeze time in the moment before or just after a row, or a failed pass, or an opened letter imparting news. Even if we are in the pictures ourselves, we examine them and can no longer remember why one person is not smiling, or looking away, the faces seen only by the eye behind the camera.
Two people have come to buy a desk from Claude, an antiques dealer. They notice a photograph and a letter pushed into the back of a drawer, which Claude reclaims. He tells them a brief version of the story of the people in the picture, which is intercut with first-person accounts of the same events by Lily, Victorian Norman and Shebah. These very disparate characters in both age and background have come together for the weekend. Lily, who thinks she is pregnant by a boyfriend who has abandoned her, is determined to sleep with Edward and fool him into thinking he is the father of her baby.
Victorian Norman, so nicknamed because of the high collars he affects, is a working-class autodidact Communist. Lily has inherited a run-down house in Liverpool in which several of the characters seem to have lodged. She has, according to Victorian Norman, ‘left home very early, in a stampede of open revolt, splintering in the process the whole framework of her background, so that now she is sad to find there is nothing to return to but ruins’.
Shebah is a sixty-year-old former actress, tiny, Jewish, resentful and paranoid, filled with fantasies of her own persecution, in exile from her community: ‘one of those people who once seen are never forgotten. She wears bright red lipstick and her upper lip is quite hairy. Most people refuse to walk down the street with her.’
Apart from Claude, the characters move in a tight orbit around each other, intent on their own minute sensations, grievances and plots for their advancement. It is a claustrophobic novel set in a year, 1960, when the Sixties was still a date, not an era half-buried under social commentary. The poverty of the post-war years, of unfit houses filled with Victorian furniture, bathrooms before showers, sex before contraception, is a bleak dream-like glimpse into life on the undocumented margins.
On the novel’s republication, the Sunday Times described Bainbridge’s genius as lying in ‘the comic evocation of the flat and mundane life in which her characters are in perpetual and ineffectual revolt’. The weekenders at Claude’s might end up as the hopeless cases on the Formby shore thirty years later, tormented by juvenile girls in Spice Girls T-shirts. Beryl Bainbridge was original in detecting what was unusual in the ordinary and overlooked. She did not think like anyone else; perhaps her early years as an actress gave her a heightened sense of the dramatic, but she kept it under control by writing within a limited dimension. There was always comedy in those margins.
The last time I saw her was at the Booker Prize dinner in 2009. I did not know she was ill. She would struggle to complete her final novel, The Girl in the Polka-dot Dress, and she died a year later. Rereading these early novels, I realise that she was a great writer from the very start, often overlooked by prize judges, and part of neither a circle nor a movement. She was sui generis, one of the greatest.
Linda Grant
2012
Two people had come to buy a desk.
Claude had told them the date (it wasn’t very old), stated the price (no, he couldn’t go below that figure) and agreed with them (yes, it was a lovely desk). Then he walked away down the barn towards the open doors. There were two kinds of customers: the dealers who came to bargain and weren’t open to influence anyway, and the home lovers, mad for possession, who needed little encouragement.
He stood looking out at his dying garden, at the stalks of his roses and the ragged trees that had almost lost their leaves, at the few last clumps of marigolds in tubs by the wall.
He had bought the house and barn for his wife, Sarah, and their four children six years before. The children had put their toys in the rooms and their bicycles in the yard, Claude had acquired a dog and a cat, and in the end people came not so much to buy his antiques as to see his family and to envy him. Next door to the house was a pub and he made a great show of playing darts and buying people drinks. They all stood round him in a circle laughing at his jokes. Behind the laughter they were afraid of him, as well as envious.
On the other side of the house was the girls’ boarding school where Lily, his friend, had gone as a child, long before he had met her. He had bought the house and moved in before he realised that she had gone to school there. Sometimes at night he would lie awake and think how strange it was that Lily had walked in crocodile in the Elizabethan gardens beyond his barn. When Sarah had left him he had telephoned Lily every night and sometimes two or three times during the day just to talk to someone, just so as not to be so alone in the house with the rooms strewn with toys and the cradle empty in the bedroom. He wanted Lily to come and visit him, but she lived up north and she had her own problems; all she could do was hold the telephone two hundred miles away and listen to him talking. She kept telling him that it would be all right, that in time it would stop hurting, that from somewhere someone was coming to him, just like one of those songs she was always humming, ‘Some Day my Prince will Come’, though God knows it was Lily who needed to believe that, not he. He kept telling her that it wasn’t love he wanted – not that ever again – but amnesia. Then Julia had come and tidied away the toys and put the cradle in the loft, hidden his cigarettes and nursed him back to health. Without Julia there would be no house, no barn and no business.
Claude looked across the stone courtyard to the open door of the house and saw Julia pass quickly in red slippers, going into the kitchen to prepare lunch. Against the wall, pressed close to the dried stem of the wistaria, was his youngest son’s pram. It was a big pram, an expensive pram, with the edge of a white pillow showing at the hood. He remembered that his other sons had slept out their milky days in a second-hand pram bought for seven-and-six in Camden Town. A thrifty woman, Sarah, in many ways. Bending her golden head, heavy under its weight of hair, she had laid their children one by one in the cheap carriage on the soiled pillow and gone, melon-hipped and honey-mouthed, away from him into their house. Always away from him.
Behind, in the barn, the woman was whispering, and Claude heard the man say, ‘Yes, but it’s just what we visualised’, and he moved his head, because he didn’t care at that moment to know what it was other people visualised. He slid his hand into the opening of his check shirt and caressed his breast, massaging the skin for comfort and from habit. He didn’t turn round or withdraw his hand when the man said, just behind him, ‘My wife and I have decided to take the desk.’
The wife was opening drawers and rummaging inside them. Her fingers searched in the narrow darkness and found something. ‘Oh look!’ she cried, feeling the evidence first and then seeing it. ‘A photograph and a letter.’ She held them up in her greedy fingers and waved them about in the air.
‘Ah,’ said Claude, ‘yes, I’m afraid I put them there and forgot, only a few weeks ago.’ He moved regretfully towards her. Her scarlet mouth was open in disappointment, her face misted with powder. ‘So sorry, my dear,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing more historical than a letter written to me by a friend. It’s not much of a find. If you’ll look at the date you’ll see it was written in 196. . .
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
