‘A Quiet Life’ convinced me to take Beryl Bainbridge’ out of the box marked ‘undoubtedly an excellent author, but probably not for me.’ We got along rather well.

And now I have read ‘Sweet William’ we are getting along even better.

I could describe  ‘Sweet William’ in many ways. Romantic comedy. Social satire. Black comedy. But, for now, let’s just say that it’s a very good book.

Ann’s life seemed to be sailing along rather nicely. She had a good job, as a secretary at the BBC. And she had a fiancé, Gerald, a sensible, successful academic. Gerald had a new job in the USA, and plans were afoot for Ann to join him there once he had settled in.

Her mother doesn’t approve of her lifestyle. Though, as the sixties become the seventies, Ann is less modern than many,  her mother is the product of a very different era. That helps to place the story, and its a nice counterbalance to the main storyline.

Gerald has barely left when Ann meets William; a tall, blond, charming playwright. He sweeps her off her feet, and straight into bed. Ann is besotted and she readily agrees to write to Gerald to break off their relationship, to share her home with Willliam, and to giving up her job to look after their relationship, their home, his career.

Warning bells would be ringing for some, but not for Ann.

After all, William had been wonderful when her cousin Pamela came to stay, pregnant and wanting an abortion. Something that was still illegal at the time. He went out of his way to be helpful and supportive.

But then William started to disappear at odd times, and any number of women were making the telephone and the doorbell ring, looking for the elusive William.

It seemed that he charmed every woman he met.

Ann was slow to realise that William was a philanderer, sliding through life on charm, weaving a web of lies and deceit to protect him from the consequences of his actions.

I hoped that Ann would catch on and move on. And I hoped that William would get his just desserts.

This is very much of a story of its time, but it still works because the characters are timeless. There are still Anns and Williams in this world, and I have no doubt at all that similar relationships are being played out.

It’s a simple story, but its eventful, and it carried me along at just the right pace. I had no doubt that the author understood, and she told her tale so well.

There’s intelligence. There’s satire. There’s wit. There’s emotion. And it all works together beautifully.

What I appreciated most was being able to understand Ann’s emotions as she was first besotted and then sadly disappointed.

I’m only disappointed that I’ve read two books by Beryl Bainbridge and neither will fit into my Century of Books. I’ve spotted two books that would fit.  I could go back in time to ‘A Weekend With Claude’ or forward in time to’ The Dressmaker’. They’re both in the library, and I’d be quite happy to have another encounter with Beryl …

I’ve had mixed results with Beryl Bainbridge’s books in the past, and so I have left for a long time in the box marked ‘undoubtedly an excellent author, but probably not for me.’

But there have been a number of things, over time, that have made me wonder whether Beryl should come out of the box.

I realised when I read her obituaries a few years ago that I had come in part way through her writing career. That planted a seed. Maybe I should go back to her early books, and move forward to follow her on life’s journey.

I had planned to make a start during Annabel’s Beryl Bainbridge Reading Week Last Year, but the timing was wrong. The idea went on to the back burner.

But then Beryl’s early, slightly lesser known, novels began to appear on the Virago Modern Classics List, with lovely eye-catching covers. It was a sign. We were meant to meet again.

I’ve read two of those novels now, a few weeks apart, and I was very taken with both of them.

‘A Quiet Life’ was one of the slim volumes I threw into my bag before setting off on a long train journey a couple of weeks ago. I wasn’t sure I was going to like it, but I thought I owed it a fair chance, a time when I could concentrate with minimal distractions. And that seemed to pay off.

It began with a brother and sister meeting for the first time in years, in a café to tackle the question of who would take what of their late mother’s personal affects.

Alan had taken a conventional path through life, and Madge had done the opposite. She told him that he had always been the favoured child, that he had been shielded from life’s harsher realities, but he remembered it rather differently.

He remembered an unhappy, dysfunctional family. A father who had a difficult war and bitterly resented that he had not come home to a land fit for heroes. A mother obsessed with the appearance of her home and her family. And Madge, who spent every moment she could with a German former POW.

Four lives pulled together in a small shabby, over-furnished terraced house. It’s wonderfully vividly painted, crammed full of period detail, and those details so perfectly chosen that I wondered how she knew, how she managed to pick out exactly the right things to illuminate the time, the place, the lives being lived.

Because period details are lovely, but a story needs characters to make it sing. And this story had them. It was Alan’s story and I felt for him, I really did, but I was also fascinated by Madge and fearful for their parents’ troubled relationship. Economic necessity and the  fear of defying convention held them together, but it wouldn’t have taken much to blow them apart.

There was too much life, there were too many emotions, in that little terraced house. And when Alan found a girlfriend maybe he took his eye off the ball, or maybe it would have happened anyway. It had to one day.

What? Now that would be telling!

Beryl Bainbridge pulled me into a real family, real lives, real relationships. She showed me the pathos and the dark humour in all of that. She showed me that nothing is simple, that all things will pass, and that by and large we do always hang on to hope.

This isn’t my favourite kind of book but it’s a very good book of its kind, and that has to be a good thing.

I was going to write about ‘Sweet William’ too, but the more I think about it the more I realise that it deserves a post of its own.

Another book for another day.