CONTENTS
WINTER GARDEN
Beryl Bainbridge
Hachette Digital
www.littlebrown.co.uk
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
Watsons 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
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.
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.
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For Brian McGuinness
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 youll 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 wifes 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 oclock. Theres also the possibility, he said, that the television set may break down.
Its only you that bothers with the fire in the drawing room, his wife reminded him. And Id 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. Youd better hurry, she urged. You dont want to miss your train.
Ashburner began to have difficulty breathing. He remembered Ninas 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.
Im 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 wifes 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 hadnt 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 womans distress. But she hadnt 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 cant deny it, he said.
And if you cant find a decent loch straightaway, or a suitable hotel, you can always hire transport.
Thats 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 wifes posture, seeing that she wasnt on the edge of a swimming pool, was evidence of back trouble. And Im not sure that Ill ring the office. Theyre bound to start pestering me. Youd better just tell them I cant be reached. He thought he sounded insane.
His wife grunted. Ashburner knew she wasnt likely to dramatise his absence. Later in the week, when she met her friend Caroline for lunch, she wouldnt 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, Ill 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.
