Sweet William

Book 39: Virago Modern Classics

by Beryl Bainbridge

Genres: General Fiction; Classics; Romance; Romantic Suspense; Thrillers

Synopsis

'Cunningly clever, wry, dry, sharply pointed' EVENING STANDARD

'Alarming humour and a powerful talent' DAILY TELEGRAPH

'Bainbridge is brilliant at combining established fact and compelling fiction' DAILY MAIL

'People came in and out, chairs were moved, dishes gathered up on trays, but it was happening at a great distance; she concentrated entirely on his pink face crowned with foppish curls.'

Genteel, passive Ann works for the BBC in London and is engaged to a successful academic, fulfilling her snobbish mother's ambitions - more or less - while the Swinging Sixties happen elsewhere, to other people. Then she meets William: snub-nosed and generous, cunning and protean. She is first seduced, then transfixed, as William's past, present and future swirl around her overwhelmingly and Ann is herself irrevocably and irreparably changed.

Release date: November 13, 1986

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 160

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 that 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 

In the main entrance of the air terminal a young man stood beside a cigarette machine, searching in the breast pocket of his blue suit for his passport. A girl, slouching in a grey coat, as if she thought she was too tall, passively watched him.

‘It’s safe,’ he said, patting his jacket with relief.

Suddenly the girl’s face, reflected in the chrome surface of the tobacco machine, changed expression. Clownishly her mouth turned down at the corners.

‘You should have taken me with you,’ she said. ‘You should have done.’

He knew she was right, and yet how could he arrive in the States with someone who was not his wife? It wasn’t like London. The University would never stand for him living with a woman, not in quarters provided and paid for by the faculty.

‘I’ll send for you,’ he told her. ‘I’ll send for you very soon.’

She thought how handsome he was, with his dark hair cut short to impress his transatlantic colleagues, his chelsea boots. There hadn’t been time for him to put on a tie, and his shirt was unbuttoned at the neck. It occurred to her how masculine he was and how unfair that she should realise it only when saying goodbye.

‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘Look at the clock. I’ll have to move, Ann.’

‘Wait,’ she pleaded. And he looked desperately at the queue forming outside the door leading to the coach park. ‘All right,’ she said bitterly. ‘Go.’

He bent to pick up his suitcase and his white raincoat. She stood turned away from him with a bright deliberate smile on her face. He put down his case and touched her arm.

He said uneasily, ‘I’ll miss the plane.’

She relented and allowed him to embrace her. When they kissed, she felt her stomach turn over, it was probably the excitement of losing him. When they had been together she always stood outside, observing them both.

He didn’t turn round to wave as he went through the departure door, nor did she follow to watch him boarding the coach. Acting out the fantasy that she had been betrayed, she stumbled with bowed head towards the exit. She was already feeling a little frightened at the thought of facing her mother. Maybe if she bought some fresh rolls on the Finchley Road and a bunch of flowers for her breakfast tray, Mrs Walton would be less condemning. She might even be sympathetic; after all, it had been her idea that Ann get engaged. Ann hadn’t thought she knew Gerald well enough – they had only known each other for a few weeks when he was offered the University post – but Mrs Walton said she would be a fool to think it over, particularly as Gerald was flying off to America and with such splendid prospects. She hadn’t met Gerald then, but her friend Mrs Munro, with whom she played bridge, had a daughter married to an American, and Mrs Munro had made three trips to the States in four years.

When the No. 13 bus came, Ann sat on the top deck at the front holding tightly to the chrome rail as the vehicle tore between the parked cars and the tattered trees. She closed her eyes and re-lived Gerald kissing her goodbye. The excitement was still there – the sensation in the pit of her stomach – though she couldn’t be sure it wasn’t panic at the thought of the scene to come. Mrs Walton had insisted on travelling up from Brighton to be introduced to Gerald before he departed. It was natural enough that she should want to meet him, though she could have chosen a more convenient time. She’d brought a large suitcase too, as if it was going to be a lengthy visit, although she knew Pamela was arriving the day after tomorrow and there wasn’t room for them all; there weren’t enough sheets or blankets. Ann had asked her mother to come ten days ago but Mrs Walton said she hadn’t a spare moment. She had a busy agenda; there was a bridge evening arranged. The night before, Gerald’s friends had given him a farewell party to which Mrs Walton wasn’t invited. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ snapped Gerald when Ann hinted that perhaps they should take Mrs Walton. ‘You can’t take your mother with you.’ Mrs Walton’s mouth trembled the way it always did when she was put out about something. ‘I had thought,’ she said, ‘that we’d stay in and perhaps have a nice round of cards.’ And Gerald said ‘Tough’ under his breath. But she heard. Ann worried all evening about her mother being upset, and Gerald drank too much. When he brought her home he pushed his way into the flat and tried to make her take her clothes off. She wouldn’t remove all of them, in case her mother came out of the bedroom. He bent her over the sofa and made love to her standing up. It didn’t work very well because he was too drunk; every time he lunged forward she was pressed against the upholstered arm, and dust filled her nose. They couldn’t lie down because the floor creaked. Gerald became terribly irritated by her lack of co-operation, but there was nothing she could do. Mrs Walton started moving about in the other room and coughing and calling out fo. . .