Winter Garden Read online

  CONTENTS

  Winter Garden

  About the Author

  Also by Beryl Bainbridge

  Winter Garden

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  About the Author

  Beryl Bainbridge is the author of seventeen novels, two travel books and five plays for stage and television. The Dressmaker, The Bottle Factory Outing, An Awfully Big Adventure, Every Man for Himself and Master Georgie (which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize) were all shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Every Man for Himself was awarded the Whitbread Novel of the Year Prize. She won the Guardian Fiction Prize with The Dressmaker and the Whitbread Prize with Injury Time. The Bottle Factory Outing, Sweet William and The Dressmaker have been adapted for film, as was An Awfully Big Adventure, which starred Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman. Beryl Bainbridge died in July 2010.

  Also by Beryl Bainbridge

  Fiction

  An Awfully Big Adventure

  Another Part of the Wood

  The Birthday Boys

  The Bottle Factory Outing

  Collected Stories

  The Dressmaker

  Every Man for Himself

  Filthy Lucre

  Harriet Said

  Injury Time

  Master Georgie

  Mum and Mr Armitage

  Northern Stories (ed. with David Pownall)

  A Quiet Life

  Sweet William

  Watson’s Apology

  A Weekend with Claude

  Young Adolf

  According to Queeney

  Non-fiction

  English Journey, or the Road to Milton Keynes

  Forever England: North and South

  Something Happened Yesterday

  WINTER GARDEN

  Beryl Bainbridge

  Hachette Digital

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  Published by Hachette Digital 2010

  First published in Great Britain by Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd in 1980

  Published by Penguin Books in 1991

  Copyright © Beryl Bainbridge 1980

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All characters in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  eBook ISBN 978 0 74812 529 6

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire

  Hachette Digital

  An imprint of

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DY

  An Hachette Livre UK Company

  www.hachettelivre.co.uk

  For Brian McGuinness

  1

  One morning early in October, a man called Ashburner, tightly buttoned into a black overcoat and holding a suitcase, tried to leave his bedroom on the second floor of a house in Beaufort Street. It was still dark outside and he had switched on the light. Hovering there, unable to take that foolhardy step on to the landing, he heard the whine of the filament; any moment the bulb would give out. Thinking of the blackness to come, he said, ‘Are you sure you’ll be able to manage?’

  His wife, propped on pillows in the bed, struggled to keep her eyes open. She asked him, in a voice querulous with fatigue, what on earth he meant.

  Though poorly phrased, Ashburner had thought it a reasonable question. Throughout twenty-six years of married life, between midnight and dawn, with the exception of his wife’s two confinements, a funeral in Norwich which had obliged her to stop overnight and a three-day business trip he himself had made to Santander, they had never been separated. Inadequately he mentioned the coal that had to be brought up in a bucket from the cellar and the dinner he usually prepared for the dog at seven o’clock. ‘There’s also the possibility’, he said, ‘that the television set may break down.’

  ‘It’s only you that bothers with the fire in the drawing room,’ his wife reminded him. ‘And I’d be delighted if the television broke. You know it gives me a headache.’ She closed her eyes. She was generally tired in the morning and always exhausted of an evening. ‘You’d better hurry,’ she urged. ‘You don’t want to miss your train.’

  Ashburner began to have difficulty breathing. He remembered Nina’s telling him that people with murmurs of the heart, not yet diagnosed, often adopted a crouching position. Cautiously he lowered himself on to his haunches and almost immediately pitched forward on to his knees.

  ‘Have you gone?’ his wife called.

  ‘I’m tying on labels,’ Ashburner said, and he reached up and clung to the brass rail at the foot of the bed as though to stop himself sliding into an abyss.

  His wife’s reaction to his sudden and peculiar need for a complete rest, arising so soon after their summer holiday in Venice, had been both sporting and unnerving. Ashburner hadn’t wanted to be prevented from going, but he had anticipated a fair amount of resistance. Indeed, if his wife had played her cards right – expressed her opposition in some female manner, like bursting into tears – he would have abandoned his plans entirely; only a rotter would rush thoughtlessly off, blind to a woman’s distress. But she hadn’t objected. On the contrary, she had sent his old tweed trousers to be cleaned and fetched down his waders from the attic. Last Wednesday she had bought him a map of the Highlands. It had been her idea that he should leave the car at home and travel by rail. ‘After all,’ she told him, ‘we both know how het-up you become when overtaken.’

  ‘I can’t deny it,’ he said.

  ‘And if you can’t find a decent loch straightaway, or a suitable hotel, you can always hire transport.’

  ‘That’s sensible,’ he agreed. ‘I expect I shall be moving about quite a bit.’

  ‘Two weeks in the open air,’ said his wife, ‘drifting in a rowing boat, will undoubtedly set you up for the winter.’ It was true that severe blizzards were reported to be raging in the north of Scotland, but then he had never been a man to feel the cold.

  If she had uttered one single word of reproach, Ashburner might have made a clean breast of things. Even now, when it was obviously too late, he longed to experience that same heady sensation of martyrdom which had prompted him as a schoolboy, accused of some group misdemeanour, secretly to approach his housemaster and claim sole responsibility for a breach in the rules.

  ‘I may not be able to telephone you,’ he said, hauling himself upright. ‘There may not be a telephone.’ His wife had slumped further down the bed and lay with both arms raised above her head, palms together in a diving position. ‘On the other hand,’ he said, ‘you may be out.’ According to Nina, his wife’s posture, seeing that she wasn’t on the edge of a swimming pool, was evidence of back t
rouble. ‘And I’m not sure that I’ll ring the office. They’re bound to start pestering me. You’d better just tell them I can’t be reached.’ He thought he sounded insane.

  His wife grunted. Ashburner knew she wasn’t likely to dramatise his absence. Later in the week, when she met her friend Caroline for lunch, she wouldn’t give the impression that her husband was in the first stages of a terminal illness or that he was heading for a nervous breakdown. She would simply say he had gone fishing.

  ‘Well, I’ll be off then,’ said Ashburner loudly. He picked up his suitcase. It would be unwise to kiss her again. When he had done so earlier she had ticked him off for digging his elbow into her shoulder.

  His wife remained inert. The covers had been partially pushed back as though she had intended to leap out of bed and perhaps make his breakfast. There were two roses appliquéd at the front of her nightgown, one on each breast. Ashburner was uncomfortably reminded of several things Nina had said to him less than a week before. She had remarked that it was clear, from certain observations he himself had made, that his wife lacked any deep awareness of birds, of flowers; that she was innocent of theophanies, of mystical experiences, and those desired flashes of consciousness so essential to development. In short, she was a woman with no vocation for living. Since Ashburner had, to his way of thinking, been painting a fairly exciting picture of his wife, sketching in her sense of fun, her ability to spot an antique a mile off, her qualities as a mother, illustrated by the optimistic manner in which, during numerous rain-filled holidays on the beach at Nevin, she had sung The sun has put his hat on, he had been caught off balance. He could have kicked himself afterwards for not mentioning the extraordinary occasion when his wife saw her Uncle Robert, dead for five years, materialise in a bus queue at Hendon. Nor had he cared to mention the winter garden, a name his wife gave to the sunken yard behind the house, a paved area devoid of earth and so called because even in summer it lay as dark as the grave. Though his wife might have scored, poetically speaking, from the coining of such a phrase, he had known that Nina would immediately pounce on her choice of words and ludicrously interpret them as yet further proof of an abhorrence of sex. For different reasons he had kept quiet about his wife’s habit, indulged in throughout the warmer nights of June and July, of stepping down into the winter garden with a skipping rope. To have hinted that his wife was trying to improve her figure, springing up and down in the moonlight, would have inflamed Nina. She was never consistent. She would doubtless have told him that his wife was shaping up to throw herself at anything in trousers. Of course Nina enjoyed needling him, and on this particular evening she had drunk almost two bottles of champagne; but in pointing out his wife’s supposed failings, she had only exposed his own: he had never had any flashes, desired or otherwise, and his awareness of flowers was admittedly poor. In his view, as he told Nina, the things either poked up out of the ground or lolled in vases. Stung, Nina had gone further. She had suggested that his wife was frivolous – all that laughing she apparently went in for at dinner parties and on the telephone.

  At the time Ashburner had dismissed Nina’s remarks as absurd, but at this moment, gazing down on his slumbering wife, bulky in her pink nightgown, he felt distressed. He wondered whether the night before, when he had made love to her, those slight tremors of her body had been due to stifled hilarity. He rammed his suitcase against the side of the bed. His wife fluttered one hand, encased in a blue cotton glove, in a queenly gesture of farewell.

  Ashburner descended the stairs so forcefully that a shallow wardrobe, standing with its back to the skirting board in the hall, rocked violently. Its door, in which was set an oval mirror, swung outwards. He was confronted with an image of a face similar to his own, wobbling, as though reflected in water.

  He went up the hall and into the kitchen to say goodbye to the dog. The dog, lying on its horse-blanket beneath the radiator, ignored him. Ashburner looked inside the knife-drawer for a pencil, thinking it would be a nice idea to scribble a note to his sons, and then remembered they no longer lived at home. Entering the hall once more he side-stepped the wardrobe and pausing only to shoulder his fishing rod left the house.

  2

  Enid had hoped to arrive at the airport before the others. She’d planned to be sitting down when Bernard appeared. She wanted to be the one who would wave, call out, draw attention to herself. She was therefore flustered, having gone through passport control, to see Bernard almost immediately, sprawled on a plastic couch in the middle of the departure lounge, drinking out of a paper cup. Spread out on the floor in front of him was a collection of carrier bags. Nina stood behind the couch, leaning against a balding man who was clutching a fur hat to his chest.

  ‘Got your bath plug, love?’ asked Bernard, as Enid approached. He didn’t bother to get up. He was wearing his old mackintosh and a pair of adventure boots threaded with bright yellow laces.

  ‘Say hallo to Douglas Ashburner,’ ordered Nina, as though Enid was a child at a tea-party.

  ‘Hallo Douglas Ashburner,’ said Enid, and she shook hands with the balding man.

  Enid didn’t know Nina all that well. Over the years they’d met at various dinners and at exhibition openings but hadn’t ever been close. She knew Bernard very well. She wasn’t sure how well Bernard knew Nina. Neither Bernard nor Enid had met Douglas Ashburner before.

  As guests of the Soviet Artists’ Union they had each been told they could bring a friend, at their own expense, or husbands and wives if they wished. Nina’s husband, the brain specialist, renowned for his remark that he’d never seen a painting yet that wasn’t improved by a decent frame, was far too busy and successful to travel, and Bernard never took his wife anywhere. Enid wasn’t married.

  ‘I feel rotten,’ said Nina suddenly. She swayed on her feet to prove it. Ashburner escorted her round the couch and sat her down beside Bernard. ‘She doesn’t look rotten, does she?’ he asked, appealing to Enid.

  ‘Not very,’ said Enid. But she was aware that Nina, who normally carried herself like Joan of Arc at the stake, chin tilted as though she smelled the straw beginning to burn, was now slumped against Bernard, her head resting on his shoulder. Nina was famed for her beauty. Enid couldn’t see it herself, but everyone else saw it at a glance. Nina had bold blue eyes, black hair that she sometimes plaited and legs like a principal boy. She had never been known to lose an argument.

  After a few moments Ashburner went off to fetch a glass of water. There was no room for Enid on the couch, so she stood there looking anxious. ‘Is it her head or her stomach?’ she asked, speaking to Bernard as if Nina was already in a coma. Bernard didn’t reply. He sat there, pushed sideways by the weight of Nina, staring gloomily at the floor. He detested illness.

  ‘Should anything go wrong,’ said Nina faintly, ‘please be kind to Douglas. He’s a good man.’

  ‘Of course,’ whispered Enid, and gritted her teeth in case she laughed. Twenty years ago she and Nina had been at the same boarding school in Norfolk. It didn’t mean anything. Enid had been fifteen at the time, and Nina was two years younger. They had never been in the same class. Even in those days the thickness of Nina’s hair had distinguished her from others. In summer the mildest of breezes sent her panama hat sailing from the top of her head to bowl across the grass.

  Ashburner returned with a cardboard cup full of water. Nina sipped and sighed. No one could make up their minds whether it was a good idea or not to send for the St John’s Ambulance Brigade.

  ‘Probably not,’ decided Bernard. ‘We might miss the bloody plane. Think of the arrangements at the other end.’

  The thought was sufficient to revive Nina, who privately regarded herself as leader of their little group. After all, she had been to Russia twice before: once to Leningrad with a party of students from the Slade, and again when she had visited Moscow for three days in her capacity as wife of the brain specialist. When their flight was accounced she rose pluckily, though she clung to Bernard for support.
r />   Ashburner, who had no hand luggage, was obliged to carry Bernard’s paper bags. He consoled himself with the knowledge that he would have looked dreadfully conspicuous supporting Nina. As it was, if he was spotted by anyone it might just appear he was alone. The fact that this was Heathrow, not Euston Station, could, if the unthinkable happened, be put down to amnesia.

  From the moment of arrival at the airport he had found himself in a state of increasing nervousness. He had greeted Nina too coldly; he had uttered the words ‘Oh it’s you’, instead of clasping her in his arms. She hadn’t understood his predicament, his inability to collect his feelings in the midst of such activity and bustle. Inside he had felt anything but cold towards her, though he had been taken aback by the clothes she was wearing. Nina had punished him by going on for at least ten minutes about some friend she was dying to see again in Moscow, a regular humdinger of a man called Boris Aleksyeevich Shabelsky. Ashburner had been stunned by the fellow’s unpronounceable name and the realisation that she was dying to see anyone other than himself. Moreover she had bullied him into opening his suitcase. Several packets of nylon stockings slithered to the floor; he could have been mistaken for a commercial traveller. And now she was ill.

  ‘I don’t mind telling you,’ he confessed to Enid, ‘how worried I am. She’s not talking off the top of her hat, you know. She’s a very strong grasp of medical matters.’

  ‘Has she?’ said Enid. She had to stop herself from breaking into a run to catch up with Bernard, who was now striding through the hurrying crowds, one hand grasping Nina’s waist as he propelled her forward in the direction of the flight gate.

  ‘And she mentioned it earlier,’ Ashburner said. ‘At the luggage counter. She gave me some pills to put in my suitcase.’

  ‘What did she mention?’ asked Enid.

  ‘About being under the weather,’ explained Ashburner. ‘She hoped I wouldn’t catch it.’

  ‘That was kind,’ Enid said. Glancing at him she was momentarily shocked to discover that he seemed to have sprouted a quantity of glossy black hair.